![]() After the show Bruce put his arms around Gaspard and said, “Hey Mister Cool! You looked like you do that every night.” And I was thinking about all the nights and days that had led me to this amazing point in my life, up there on stage with Bruce, my son and (what seemed like) half of Paris, my adopted hometown, in front of me. Bruce and I had been friends for over 35 years and this was the greatest gift he could ever give me. Gaspard and Bruce were shoulder to shoulder and in the many photos that fans have sent me since you can see me with this ear-to-ear grin like the proud father I was that evening. There were about 60,000 people in front of me but I was hardly seeing any of them because I was only looking at my 18-year-old son Gaspard Murphy who was standing next to Bruce playing power chords on the Fender Strat that Little Steven had given him. OK let’s get to work and learn how to play a Chicago Shuffle in E.This past June on a beautiful spring night I was standing on stage with Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band at the Parc Des Prince stadium in Paris playing Born to Run. Once you get it down in E you can then tackle the more advanced keys to play the groove in.Īnd if you want to cheat a little you can always use a capo. But E and A are by far the easiest keys to learn in. But it can be played in any key easily including A or D. In this video we play in the key that is most common for this type of shuffle, the key of E. And that takes time and practice to do well. Knowing how to mute or dampen the strings not being played is what makes the difference between playing this groove well or sloppy. To play a simple part cleanly it takes some practice and the ability to control the strings of your guitar. And it’s actually one of the simplest of all guitar parts to play.īut just because it’s simple doesn’t make it easy to play. If you want to play blues or rock guitar it needs to be in your repertoire. And I’m sure that there would have been other influences in work songs or other popular songs of his day.īut whoever invented the rhythm it’s become one of the most common feels in all of blues or rock and roll. If you dig into their music you’ll hear very similar grooves. Guitarists who came before, like Charley Patton or Son House, could easily have taught it to him. Robert Johnson is often claimed to be the inventor of this groove but I doubt it. It almost has a bouncing feel to it and if you’ve listened to any blues or rock and roll you’ve heard this beat many times. Technically the rhythm is an eighth note shuffle feel, often called a double shuffle because you are doubling the beats with a da-da, da-da feel. ![]() It’s really the most ubiquitous of all blues or rock shuffle grooves. ![]() ![]() The groove is even the basis for many rock tunes by Chuck Berry including No Particular Place to Go or Johnny B. More recently, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Pride and Joy is a high energy, sophisticated version of the same groove. This groove is found in many blues songs including Sweet Home Chicago and Dust My Broom by Robert Johnson and Baby What You Want Me To Do and Bright Lights Big City by Jimmy Reed. The Chicago Shuffle, as it is known, is one of the most common and popular types of blues rhythms.
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