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EARMARK Publishing Summary | About the Author | Contents | Excerpt | Ordering Information | Earmark Publishing |
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Gene Roebuck Secure Transaction Hard Cover | 128 pages | ISBN: 0-9764462-1-9 |
Finding Robert Johnson is the Official Guide to an unorthodox guitar playing method named CrossGuitar™ and an unprecedented tuning named secret devil tuning, both discovered by the author while listening to the recordings by the Mississippi Delta blues artist, Robert Johnson.
The Preface challenges the reader at the very beginning by placing him at a brand new crossroad with Little Robert and the Author himself and encourages the reader to ponder the meaning of legends.
Finding Robert Johnson will set a brand new precedence on how to play blues guitar, especially Delta blues and the music of Robert Johnson in particular. Although, beginning as just mere curiosity about a very different and mysterious sounding blues player of the 1930’s, this project turned into a labor of love that took over fifteen years to complete and finalize into tangible form. Even though Finding Robert Johnson is primarily a guitar teaching book devoting several chapters to guitar tuning, newly discovered chord shapes, and song pattern layouts delineated in a new and unorthodox format, also created by the author, it is also a non-fictional short story of sorts interjected into historical facts about Robert Johnson’s life. Thanks to the research and writings of Stephen C. LaVere that appear in the booklet accompanying Robert Johnson/The Complete Recordings (Columbia, 1990) and the Robert Johnson pages of the Delta Haze Corporation website at www.deltahaze.com/johnson, Chapter 2 is a biography about Robert Johnson written as a unique and original historical review.
Chapter 8 takes the reader into the recording studio of all five recording sessions made by Robert Johnson, first in San Antonio, Texas in 1936 and then in Dallas in 1937. Although written totally from speculation and imagination and based on the facts that constitute the secret devil tuning and the CrossGuitar™ playing method, the reader is convinced that seeing is believing as he is shown in a detailed sequential order how Robert Johnson tunes his guitar, what key he is playing in, where the capo is placed on the fretboard, and even what guitar playing pattern he is using. There are no stones left unturned.
The Afterword partly answers the legend question by taking the reader back to the birth of Robert Johnson’s legend, his best kept secret.
GENE ROEBUCK was the fifth child in a family of twelve children of Ralph Edward and Della Mae Roebuck. Gene had an ear for music even from early childhood learning harmonica at the age of ten from his maternal grandfather, Robert Gurganus, and the guitar at sixteen. He was influenced early on by Jimmy Reed, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Chet Atkins, and Andres Segovia. Gene’s musical interests included blues, rock-n-roll, country, and even classical. Through the years Gene continued to hone his craft from playing rhythm guitar in a late fifties rock band and playing solo guitar in restaurants and dinner clubs to playing classical guitar in a classical guitar orchestra. All this, while raising four boys with the help of his wife, Marylou of forty-three years, and earning his living designing homes, some of which have won State and National awards.
After hearing the music of Robert Johnson for the first time on the Robert Johnson/The Complete Recordings in 1990, Gene was drawn back to the blues with a deeper appreciation. Robert Johnson’s recordings changed Gene’s life musically and set him on a determined path in solving a mysterious guitar tuning and playing technique he was convinced Robert Johnson was using. After endlessly listening and deciphering the songs by Robert Johnson, Gene discovered an unprecedented guitar tuning he named devil tuning and spent many years creating and developing the CrossGuitar™ method before authoring Finding Robert Johnson.
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