Update 3 days later: see Corrections for a version of the notation which ordinary mortals can read.

I put some time this morning into figuring out the guitar riffs on a tune called “Relax Your Mind” by Leadbelly, aka Huddie Ledbetter. It took some sweat so I figured I’d share the result for other people to use.

Here’s an MP3 of the riff: MP3 of the riff.

This is how to play the part:

Notice that the part is in the very unusual key of C#. I think Leadbelly tuned the guitar down a minor third, so that the E string was C#, the A string was F#, etc. Since I don’t tune like that I modified the lowest note in the piece from low C# to C# an octave above that, on the 4th fret of the A string. If you feel like tuning down, the note I changed is the first one in bar 4.

The chords for the song are the same throughout: C#, C#7, F#, C#, C#, G#7, C#. It’s an eight-bar pattern rather a 12-bar pattern like bar bands usually do.

If you want to tweak the sheet music and have Sibelius (the software I use for notation), here is the source Sibelius file: Sibelius source file.

If you use a digital instrument instead of the analog kind, here’s a MIDI version of my transcription: MIDI version of my transcription.

A cool thing about this song is that it’s about road rage, even though it was written way back in the 1930s. He’s saying that when you’re getting pissed off about driving you need to take a deep breath. Given that he was a full bore murderer, I think he knew about road rage.

His musical ideas here are strongly influenced by ragtime and early jazz. He leans on chromatic runs that are close cousins of boogie woogie. The phrasing is so intricate that in one cadence he touches almost every pitch in an octave without doing more than three adjacent semitones.

I probably muffed a couple notes in my transcription, so please share any corrections you come up with.

I found the original recording on MOG and on YouTube.