polly want a cracker

Last night The Mighty Sam gave me chords to:

• Man of Constant Sorrow
  
• Well All Right
  
• Gloria
  
• Lola (at least the beginning part)
  
• Polly

For "Well All Right" and "Man of Constant Sorrow" he introduced me to the capo. I actually knew what a capo was before but this was the first time I've ever played with one. It's rather odd. When you get way up the neck the frets get a lot closer together.

But there's a way to play "Man of Constant Sorrow" without a capo - you just slide the F chord up six frets, then up two more, then back to F. That's the whole song.

I'm quite pleased with being able to play "Polly." Now I need to learn all the words.

I also figured out the chords to "Laid" over the weekend. When I revealed this to The Mighty Sam, he got mighty angry. He thinks I'm weird for liking that song so much.

Spent most of tonight working on a brief for our civil division, but I still took half an hour to play through the additions to my repertoire. There's a beautiful mindfulness that happens while playing the guitar. It's very Zen.

like that episode of TNG

I was practicing.

The Mighty Sam said, "What are you playing?"

"A song by Phil Ochs," I said. "'The Bells.' It has a Bm and F#m in it, so I fake them."

"Nah, don't do that. You may as well learn the barre chords now. Screw those fakes."

He taught me Bm and F#m. Pretty cool, especially since they actually sounded ok when I played them. I've NEVER been able to make a barre chord sound right. So that was VERY exciting. He also showed me a different way to play A7.

Sam went off to do some Sam-things, and I practiced those for a while.

Soon, The Mighty Sam emerged from the hallway with a paper in his hand. "Let me show you this song," he said. It was "Reeling in the Years" by Steely Dan.

It has a lot of werid stuff in it. Sam taught me the Bm7 (barre chord) and Gmaj7 (easy) and F#m7 (barre chord), and then there's this very weird chord in there - a Bbdim7. Sam worked out a way to transition between the A7 and the weird Bbdim7, and he said, "That's pretty advanced." It seemed straightforward to me though: Play the A7 the old way, with index and middle fingers on the B and D strings, then slide them up one fret and put pinky and ring fingers on the E and G strings.

I practiced that for a little bit, then the whole song.

"That Steely Dan song is kind of advanced," Sam said.

I said, "Yeah, but it's good to start working on this. I'm going to have to learn it eventually."

The Mighty Sam said, "It's kind of like that episode on TNG when Q flings the Enterprise way out into deep space, when they first encounter the Borg, and they barely get out of it alive."

I am very happy to be learning barre chords already. And even happier that I can make them sound more or less ok!