Lesson Plan

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Lesson notes

This blues classic dates to the 1920s, had a resurgence in the 1960s folk/blues revival, and surfaced again with Eric Clapton’s Unplugged album in the 1990s.

Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out is more of ragtime or country blues tune as it uses a 16-measure format with a few secondary dominant chords rather than the 12-bar format using I, IV and V.

This lesson assumes the student is already familiar with the right hand accompaniment style, similar to Big Bill Broonzy’s Hey Hey.

The lesson looks mostly at the progression and ideas about playing lead over it in a style like Clapton’s. This ends up being a combination of pentatonic scales and triad shapes, along with some stock blues licks.