Blues – Cat's Ukulele Songs

Is this a drinking song??

A few years ago (2009), I traveled with members of the Dover Uke Heads – aka DUH! to the Liverpool Ukulele Festival being held – at the time – at the White Point Resort in Liverpool, Nova Scotia (this was before the fire). We were greatly excited about many of the workshops we were signed up for, but the one we were REALLY looking forward to the most was Irish Drinking Songs with Lenny.

Fast forward to 2015 and Chris Stappleton comes out with this arrangement of Tennessee Whiskey which becomes an instant hit. As I am not really a Country music fan who listens to the Country music radio or TV stations, I thought, “Oh yay, another drinking song, like Red Solo Cup or something”…. ha ha ha, I could not have been more wrong!

This song is set around the traditional blues chord progression and is played, as many blues songs are, very slowly. So you’ll have to develop a method of slow strumming that is pleasing to your ear as you go through this song. ALSO, he arranged it in 3/4 timing, so it’s also a waltz. It’s a blues waltz! LOL

I found this arrangement on the Bytown Ukulele Group website – they go by BUGs! – and I added a E7, because it’s in the key and I felt after listening to Stappleton’s official video a few times, that there is some kind of a chord change there, so I put that in. Also, I took out the slash after the D chord. After “strawberry wine” they had [A] [D] / [A] and I don’t see the need to play it that way. I don’t even really understand the need for the slash because my leader taught us that means 1 strum only, so you don’t complete the strumming pattern as indicated in the beginning of the song. IF you are even given a strumming pattern at the start. All depends where you get the song sheet from.

Lastly, I don’t play Bm the traditional way. Confession time: I drop the position on the 4th fret, and just play it as a barred chord, which I think is a Bm7??? Anyway, that’s what I do, sounds fine to me, Yes I make sure my uke is tuned before I play it this way LOL.

tennessee-whiskey Download

Image result for pride and joy

Hello again. I have taken a bit of time off, trying to decide if it’s worth it to continue on this website, and after finding that I do come up in Google searches – on pages 3, 4, sometimes 5 – I will be continuing on.

Cheryl and I just started our third year running the Tillsonburg Uke Society together. As much as we feel like we know what we’re doing now, we still have moments when something we planned falls apart and we feel like, dang! we don’t know what we’re doing!!! One thing we have learned is not to pay for a website. Our Facebook page and submitting info to the Community Events column in the local newspapers has done plenty for us, so we have let that Meet-Up website go.

We also learned to relax and take it easy, and we also decided to shorten the lesson and have the play-along portion of the evening run longer. This comes from the “knowing what we’re doing” side of things. Another new thing we are trying is an alternate location at a local church to keep the continuity flowing for lessons. The Red Station Room is not available to us on the first Tuesday of every month, so we used to take that night off and not have lessons. But, despite our best efforts, many times players have showed up to an already occupied room, realizing too late that it was first of the month.

Of course, with the changing seasons and holidays coming and going, we both like to rummage around our numerous binders for songs and also on various internet sites. Just going to the BUGs website is a goldmine of songs and song books.

Just found this one, never seen it before, full of comprehensive instructions about Blues for the ukulele, including numerous great Blues songs to use their various theories with, which include not only chords and strumming ideas, but also picking and solo-ing instructions. I LOVE it when it’s actually laid out for me, notably using the Key of A for an example, which just happens to be my favourite Key.

Markelele’s Ukulele Songbook I don’t know why it’s called this, even the title page does not really give away the fact that the subject is Blues. However, once I got started I was stuck on Pride and Joy which I heard a singer perform at karaoke at the Norfolk on Thursday night.

From the about songbook, I was immediately hooked in to the way you can play back and forth between the A and A7, the D major and D7 chords, and then you off-play those with the E7 chord, back to A and then he explains what a turn-around is, and he also has a page with the turn-around chord for every Key, and then another page with the blues chords for every K. Plus lots of tips, playing instructions, diagrams, etc. I will be trying out a number of songs this week, but to start us off, here is Pride and Joy, in A.

PRIDE AND JOY