• • • HOW TO PLAY THIS MONTH’S SONGS• • •

“PREACHIN’ BLUES”

Larkin Poe

CO-GUITAR-ISTS AND SISTERS Rebecca and Megan Lovell turn in a refreshingly raw and soulful performance with this popular 2017 cover of an old Son House blues classic. The song is in the key of D, for which Rebecca’s drop-D-tuned electric guitar (low to high: D, A, D, G, B, E) provides the foundational low-string riffing, fulfilling the role of a bass line with added, swampy grit. Megan performs her featured melodic lead parts on a lap steel in Dobro-, or “high-bass”-style open G tuning (low to high: G, B, D, G, B, D), which puts her “home-key” position at the 7th fret, rather than the 12th fret and/or the open strings, as is more common with blues slide guitar. (This is comparable to the way Duane Allman used open E tuning for slide on “One Way Out” with the Allman Brothers Band, which is also in a different key than the tuning, in this case, the key of A, which based his slide hand at the 5th and 17th frets.)