I’ve been a fan of Freddie King for a long time, but I didn’t take the deep dive until I had to learn the "The Stumble" when I joined a band called The Fountain of Blues. One thing led to another and soon I was ripping the Texas Cannonball’s riffs, chord changes and hopefully, his incredible joie de vivre right and left. It was only natural that one day I would learn the funky and fabulous, “San Ho-Zay.”
The first thing I did was transcribe it. When I’m learning a solo of any length, I always write it down in tab, using a pencil. I don’t notate the rhythm. Writing it down serves several purposes. It helps you to memorize the piece, and it serves as a reference for practice. Also, I can then share it with my students. You can see my original tab below. I started out practicing it in short bursts, just twenty minutes a day. But I realized I had to dig in if I was going to master it, so one day I spent a couple of hours on it and the basics fell into place. I could now attempt to play along to the record. Eventually, I recorded a version of “San Ho-Zay” with my band, Saints and Sinners. You can hear the entire album here.
The tune is based on a simple double-stop riff. You have to listen really closely to catch all of Freddie’s nuances when he plays the lick. The analog recording has that delicious warmth that everybody loves but in this case, it makes the little notes at the beginnings and endings of phrases a little hard to hear. I’m still discovering things in there. One thing that I found is that there’s a fragment that matches up quite nicely with the beginning of the main “Black Dog” riff by Led Zeppelin – I wonder what John Paul Jones would say to that!
An interesting element of the piece is the form. The intro and the solos are twelve bar blues, but the second, third and final (fifth) choruses are all sixteen bar forms, with the first I chord section lasting eight bars. You really have to know the melody/riff to play along, and it can be difficult to teach the song to someone who’s not too familiar with the blues. I like my version of the turnaround lick, but I’m not sure if it’s exactly like Freddie. Do it your way!
The solos are of course a challenge. If you’ve spent time learning some complex B.B. King or Clapton licks, you shouldn’t have a problem, but you will definitely have to make some decisions on what fingers to use. It goes pretty fast, too. I recorded a video of myself recently playing along to the backing track that we recorded with the band (above). We skipped part of the tune for some reason and left out a couple of stops – crazy, I know. But I played all of Freddie’s solos so you can see how I did it.
An interesting aspect of the tune is the key, C. I love playing in C. But it can be a little difficult to wail in the upper register. Even though I’ve spent a lot of time practicing Mick Taylor’s incredible solo on The Rolling Stones’ “Sway,” and of course, "The Stumble," you can still get a little tongue tied playing a minor third above the upper register for A. Part of it is that Freddie and B.B. et all rarely go up there. You might even be wondering, should I do it? I can’t resist so, I’ve just got to work at it more. Just do a Louis Armstrong on the MF.
OK, so what are some other things that I copped from Freddie, my favorite of The Three Kings? On the record that I mentioned above, the changes to “World Gone Mad,” a funk tune with a little Curtis Mayfield flavor, were inspired by the double plagal cadence in Freddie’s “Get Out Of My Life Woman,” off of his album, Freddie King is a Blues Master. I definitely added something to it, one of the few times that important formula has worked for me. It also turns out the opening tune, “Goodtime Girl,” owes a major debt to “Boogie Funk,” Freddie's killer instrumental. It took me years to realize that! But whatever I'm playing, I always try to get the emotional directness that Freddie lives and breathes into the music.