"As a guitar player, you can gravitate to the blues because you can play it easily. It's not a style that's difficult to pick up. It's purely emotive and dead easy to get a start with"
About this Quote
Boz Scaggs is poking at a romance the blues often gets wrapped in: the idea that it must be musically forbidding because it feels so heavy. He flips that. On guitar, blues is a set of friendly handholds - pentatonic shapes, call-and-response licks, a chord cycle you can learn in an afternoon. His point isn’t that the blues is simplistic; it’s that the on-ramp is unusually wide. You can enter quickly, sound convincing fast, and that’s exactly why generations of players get pulled in.
The subtext is a quiet warning against confusing accessibility with shallowness, or mistaking “I can play the notes” for “I’m saying something.” Blues invites beginners because it translates emotion into an efficient musical grammar: bends that mimic a human voice, micro-timing that reads as attitude, a little grit standing in for biography. “Purely emotive” here isn’t mystical - it’s practical. The form is engineered to carry feeling even when technique is basic.
Context matters: Scaggs came up in an era when white rock musicians routinely learned the blues as a gateway language, sometimes treating it like a starter kit for authenticity. His phrasing acknowledges that gravitational pull while exposing the mechanism: the blues is easy to start, hard to inhabit. The deepest part isn’t the difficulty curve; it’s the truth curve.
The subtext is a quiet warning against confusing accessibility with shallowness, or mistaking “I can play the notes” for “I’m saying something.” Blues invites beginners because it translates emotion into an efficient musical grammar: bends that mimic a human voice, micro-timing that reads as attitude, a little grit standing in for biography. “Purely emotive” here isn’t mystical - it’s practical. The form is engineered to carry feeling even when technique is basic.
Context matters: Scaggs came up in an era when white rock musicians routinely learned the blues as a gateway language, sometimes treating it like a starter kit for authenticity. His phrasing acknowledges that gravitational pull while exposing the mechanism: the blues is easy to start, hard to inhabit. The deepest part isn’t the difficulty curve; it’s the truth curve.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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