Play the Blues Like… is an essential guide for playing fingerstyle blues in open tunings, with and without a bottleneck slide. Acoustic blues and slide guitar specialist and Acoustic Guitar contributing writer Pete Madsen shares the secrets behind the styles of 12 all-time great pre- and postwar guitarists, from Elizabeth Cotten to Charley Patton to Alvin Youngblood Hart. Borrow from these masters to add authenticity to your own music.

Blues, like folk music, is all about making it your own. The ultimate goal is to study the greats and piece together what you have learned in a unique way. The more sources you borrow from, the less you sound like, say, a Robert Johnson clone, and the more you sound like a player who is steeped in the blues. On the surface blues is fairly simplistic: three chords, 12 bars—and some attitude. But, as the saying goes, “It’s not what you play, but how you play it.”

So learn to play it like the greats with Play the Blues Like… As you study the players represented, you will find that they mainly stick to the same sonic palette, but that the phrases have an individual personality that registers as each player’s trademark sound.