“TRAIN, TRAIN”

Blackfoot

CURRENT LYNYRD SKYNYRD guitaristvocalist Rickey Medlocke is also distinguished and celebrated by fellow six-stringers and Southern rock alike fans for being the longtime frontman of the hard-riffing outfit Blackfoot, who had this rousing rock radio hit back in 1979 that sounds just as exciting today. Featuring Medlocke on slide guitar in open E tuning

G#,

(low to high: E, B, E, B, E) and co-guitarist Charlie Hagrett playing in standard tuning, the two axmen join forces in lock-step rhythmic fashion for the song’s driving main riff that kicks off the arrangement after the harmonica solo intro, adapting the fingering of the notes and chords to best suit each guitarist’s respective tuning. Medlocke frets the notes without slide for the E riff, and later uses it on the D, A and B chords as the verse unfolds.

For his first slide solo, starting with the lead-up to section C (see Gtr. 3 part, beginning at bar 17), Medlocke employs the straightforward but highly-effective approach of playing off a single-fret chord shape across the strings, whatever fret it may be located at, and dipping two frets below it to craft bluesy melodies based on a Mixolydian-hexatonic scale pattern. For example, Over the A chord in bars 18, 19, 22 and 23, the guitarist bases his licks at the 17th fret and slides down to the 15th fret and back. He takes the same approach over the E chord in bars 20, 21, 24 and 25, using the 12th fret as his home base and making brief excursions down to the 10th fret. This shape visualization approach is ideal for slide playing in an open tuning. The legendary Duane Allman used it to great effect with the Allman Brothers Band on such songs as “One Way Out,” “Statesboro Blues” and “Done Somebody Wrong,” although Duane was more inclined to stay in the “I (one)-chord” zone over the IV and V chords in a blues progression.

Rickey continues with this solid slidemelody-playing approach for his second solo, beginning at section E in our transcription. But he also goes out on a limb in a couple of spots here, namely bars 36 and 43, where he breaks away from the comforting familiarity of the chord shape and ventures laterally up or down a single string to play a more technically daring single-note line, which can be tricky to do well.