Reverend Gary Davis
The Reverend Gary Davis, born April 30, 1896, was one of the greats of the early bluesmen, a master of the Piedmont style with a hauntingly powerful voice. His early life reads like a blueprint for blues men of the era: partially blind from birth; fully blind by 20; the only child of 8 to survive infancy; his father was shot and killed by a Sheriff in Birmingham, Alabama when Gary was just 10.
Born in the middle of the Piedmont region, in Laurens, South Carolina, Gary grew up on a farm. His mother played marching band records by John Phillips Sousa and took him to church sing alongs and country dances. He fell in love with the guitar the first time he heard one: “The first time I ever heard a guitar, I thought it was a brass band coming through. I was a small kid and I asked my mother what it was and she said that was a guitar.”
Gary first started on the guitar at age 6 and he started singing for the Centre Raven Baptist Church in Gray Court, South Carolina. As a teen, he slipped on ice and badly broke his left arm. It was set in plaster at an unusual angle, and he continued to play. This cocked wrist position aided him in producing unusual chord voicings. At the age of 15 his family moved to the city of Greenville, South Carolina which was home to a burgeoning blues scene. The great Willie Walker, said to be the best guitarist of his generation, was at the centre of a group of young bluesmen including Sam Brooks. Josh White would later describe Walker as the best he’d ever seen. Walker took Davis under his wing, they performed in a string band together, and the young Gary adopted Walker’s highly complex finger picking style.
After a few years living and performing in Asheville, North Carolina, Gary Davis moved to Durham, N.C. in 1926 where he was performing as a full time street musician. Durham had a thriving blues scene, and Gary was teaching and performing with the likes of Blind Boy Fuller and Bull City Red. He met and married his first wife in Durham, but it turned into a short marriage when he discovered she was unfaithful. This led him to briefly live in Washington N.C and to seek solace in his religion – he was ordained as a Baptist Minister in 1933 and began performing more spiritual and gospel tunes in his repertoire.
In 1935 a local record store owner and talent scout, J. B Long, invited Gary, Bull City Red and Fuller to record for the American Recording Company. Travelling to New York, Gary recorded 15 tracks, including “I Saw the Light,” “I Am the Light of the World,” and “You Got to Go Down.” Disagreements over payment for these sessions led to Gary becoming disillusioned with the idea of being a recording artist, and for 19 years he resisted further attempts to record him. He went back to being a full time street musician.
Two years later, in 1937, Davis married his second wife Annie and moved to Mamaroneck, New York. There Davis found a thriving music and arts scene, with a lot more diversity than the blues scene in Durham. In addition to the blues, New York hosted a massive folk movement where artists like Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Dave van Ronk and Woodie Guthrie played in coffee houses. Gary quickly came to love this scene, playing in bars and coffee houses by night and on the street during the day. His highly sophisticated Piedmont style of finger picking found a welcoming audience, and he became very popular.
In 1940 he moved to Harlem, becoming a minister at the Missionary Baptist Connection Church and taught his style to a host of up and coming guitarists. In the late 40s and early 50s, the folk movement was gaining national attention and this was the catalyst for the blues revival of the early 1960s. In 1954, Gary Davis returned to the studio for the first time in 19 years and cut a fully length album with Sonny Terry on harmonica titled “Blind Gary Davis – The Singing Reverend”. An appearance at Carnegie Hall as part of a folk line up followed in 1958 and established Gary as the pre-eminent acoustic finger picking blues guitarist of his generation.
A steady stream of new records flowed during the 60s, either studio albums or live recordings from his many folk festival appearances. Commercial acts like Peter, Paul and Mary covered some of his tunes and his influence over folk and blues quickly became well known. In the late 60s a new form of folk with artists like Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead continued to be inspired by Davis’ guitar style and song craft.
The Reverend Gary Davis died of a heart attack on May 5, 1972 in Hammonton, New Jersey.
Born in the middle of the Piedmont region, in Laurens, South Carolina, Gary grew up on a farm. His mother played marching band records by John Phillips Sousa and took him to church sing alongs and country dances. He fell in love with the guitar the first time he heard one: “The first time I ever heard a guitar, I thought it was a brass band coming through. I was a small kid and I asked my mother what it was and she said that was a guitar.”
Gary first started on the guitar at age 6 and he started singing for the Centre Raven Baptist Church in Gray Court, South Carolina. As a teen, he slipped on ice and badly broke his left arm. It was set in plaster at an unusual angle, and he continued to play. This cocked wrist position aided him in producing unusual chord voicings. At the age of 15 his family moved to the city of Greenville, South Carolina which was home to a burgeoning blues scene. The great Willie Walker, said to be the best guitarist of his generation, was at the centre of a group of young bluesmen including Sam Brooks. Josh White would later describe Walker as the best he’d ever seen. Walker took Davis under his wing, they performed in a string band together, and the young Gary adopted Walker’s highly complex finger picking style.
After a few years living and performing in Asheville, North Carolina, Gary Davis moved to Durham, N.C. in 1926 where he was performing as a full time street musician. Durham had a thriving blues scene, and Gary was teaching and performing with the likes of Blind Boy Fuller and Bull City Red. He met and married his first wife in Durham, but it turned into a short marriage when he discovered she was unfaithful. This led him to briefly live in Washington N.C and to seek solace in his religion – he was ordained as a Baptist Minister in 1933 and began performing more spiritual and gospel tunes in his repertoire.
In 1935 a local record store owner and talent scout, J. B Long, invited Gary, Bull City Red and Fuller to record for the American Recording Company. Travelling to New York, Gary recorded 15 tracks, including “I Saw the Light,” “I Am the Light of the World,” and “You Got to Go Down.” Disagreements over payment for these sessions led to Gary becoming disillusioned with the idea of being a recording artist, and for 19 years he resisted further attempts to record him. He went back to being a full time street musician.
Two years later, in 1937, Davis married his second wife Annie and moved to Mamaroneck, New York. There Davis found a thriving music and arts scene, with a lot more diversity than the blues scene in Durham. In addition to the blues, New York hosted a massive folk movement where artists like Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Dave van Ronk and Woodie Guthrie played in coffee houses. Gary quickly came to love this scene, playing in bars and coffee houses by night and on the street during the day. His highly sophisticated Piedmont style of finger picking found a welcoming audience, and he became very popular.
In 1940 he moved to Harlem, becoming a minister at the Missionary Baptist Connection Church and taught his style to a host of up and coming guitarists. In the late 40s and early 50s, the folk movement was gaining national attention and this was the catalyst for the blues revival of the early 1960s. In 1954, Gary Davis returned to the studio for the first time in 19 years and cut a fully length album with Sonny Terry on harmonica titled “Blind Gary Davis – The Singing Reverend”. An appearance at Carnegie Hall as part of a folk line up followed in 1958 and established Gary as the pre-eminent acoustic finger picking blues guitarist of his generation.
A steady stream of new records flowed during the 60s, either studio albums or live recordings from his many folk festival appearances. Commercial acts like Peter, Paul and Mary covered some of his tunes and his influence over folk and blues quickly became well known. In the late 60s a new form of folk with artists like Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead continued to be inspired by Davis’ guitar style and song craft.
The Reverend Gary Davis died of a heart attack on May 5, 1972 in Hammonton, New Jersey.
I’m not sure if this matters to you or not, but the tabs are completely unreadable on an iPad. Neither chrome nor safari can display the page.
Yeah, it’s a pain in the butt. The plug in I use to generate tabs is very problematic on mobile devices. It works on my Android phone, but it renders after the page has loaded, so it messes up the layout. I’ve contacted the author of the plug in about the issues, and hopefully he can come up with a solution. It’s a real problem. Thanks!
Is there a video tutorial as well? I´m a complete novice and struggle with proper technique. Do you hold the chords? What would you suggest to practice as a pre-requisite to your site. By the way – it’s absolutely fantastic and thank you for sharing.
Hi Dejan,
Thanks, I’m glad you are finding the site useful!
Sorry, no video tutorials yet. I suggest playing along to the song by strumming the chords to get the timing right first. Timing is the most important thing, it doesn’t matter how good you are at soloing -if your timing is off it’s just not going to sound good. If you get the timing right, even just playing around with the strumming can make a song sound really good. For “Death Don’t Have no Mercy” try hitting just the bass note of the chord on beat one, then strumming the full chord on the next beat – it’ll sound pretty good.
Once you have the timing down, then start looking at the tabs and working on some of the melody lines. As long as you know the basic chords you should be okay. Most of the songs use chords in the open positions, but some of them do use barre chords.
Good Luck!
Solid advice rpc. Thank you, kind sir.
Works fine on Andriod, you might want to to consider an upgrade.
Great site by the way, thanks for putting these tabs together.
theres a good book called beginning figurestyle blues guitar by arnie berle and frank galbo. that is a good book to start with
great stuff
I’m curious to ask: can anyone make this sound good with just bare fingers? I’m adverse to using thumb picks but I find it’s really hard to get those bass runs to stand out and be fast and smooth with a bare thumb.
,
Hi joe, I usually use my fingers to do a lot of the bass runs, I’m way quicker with the fingers!
I join my voice to everyone by saying what a great site!
My question: how do you pick notes with 3, 4 or 5 chords? do you strum? do you pick with multiple fingers?
Thanks!
Thanks, Alan!
It depends on the chord, usually it’s a strum with the thumb but for Death Don’t have no Mercy I personally play the chords with my fingers picking the high 3 strings and the thumb strumming the bass strings – for a C7 chord as an example my thumb will strum the A and D strings, then the fingers plucking the high string. Each string is played a micro second later than the preceding string, so you get a fuller, raking kind of sound. It really is personal preference – Gary Davis only used his thumb and index finger to fingerpick, so he would strum a full chord with his thumb. Whatever way feels the most comfortable to you is the way to go.
Hi rpc,
I don’t see your name anywhere on this site so I’m using rpc. Can you repost Death Don’t Have No Mercy…It looks like its been hacked. Thanks for such a great/awesome free website I really appreciate it. Jeff
Hi Jeff – unfortunately the plugin I use to generate the tabs desnöt work well with some iOS devices. If it lokos like a bunch of dollar signs and numbers it’s a browser issue that so far I have’t been able to solve.
You are my New Year’s resolution. Not sure I can keep the pace of one a week, but what an amazing program you have laid out.
Thank you.
The tab is a little idiosyncratic. What do all the diagonals mean? Is there a legend?
outthink you so very much.
Thanks for taking a look at the site George, and good luck trying to learn the songs! I must admit a week wasn’t long enough to get most of them perfect, but towards the end I could comfortably jam along with most after a few days. The main thing is just having the guitar in your hands every day.
Happy new year to you, too!
Just discovering the site, and what a great resource! Thanks!
Are these arranged in any order? Or if not, is there a separate listing of these in order of difficulty?
Hi Josh,
Thanks for taking a look at the site. There’s no real organization – I would just find a song I wanted to play and would try to work it out in any given week. I’ve been thinking of going back through them and classifying each song with some kind of difficulty scale, but not sure how accurate it would be. For example, I find Robert Johnson easier than I find John Hurt, who I find easier than Gary Davis, but there’s no way you could put RJ in the ‘easy’ category. His songs are easier to find finger positions for, but you really have to put life into each and every note with the right hand. John Hurt’s songs are way harder to finger and his right hand technique is more complex, but you don’t have to concentrate on how to play each note as much as you do with Johnson.
I’ve never really had any ideas that would help with classifying them. If you have any thoughts, please share them!
I just bought a new Seagull Wild Cherry and cannot wait to get started o these lessons 🙂
Thank you a ton for taking the time to lay these greats out for us!
I am really impressed with your site. Thanks for posting it.
Hi there,
The tabs used to work for me, but it looks like they aren’t working anymore! Such a great website and resource – would it please be possible to fix it?
Hi T,
Should be fixed now.
Hi guys, I’m yours fan, I write from Italy, and I would want one day share with you my work on yours tabs. I am grateful! The problem is that I don’t succeed in visualizing the tabs anymore. I have removed all the blocks and tried different browsers, but nothing..
Can you help me, please? I am desperate!
I visualize this:
$3.9.$2.8.$1.7 7 10^ | 10 7 10 12 10 7 | $2.10 8 $3.9 $2.8 $4.7 $1.5 5 $2.8 |
$1 5 7 $4.7 $1.5 $2.8
Thanks you so much!
Ruben
It seems that the problem is that when you load the website in https (the default), it’s impossible to load the plugins for tabs (jtab). You can ask Google Chrome to allow insecure content in this website and it will work. For the person that made the website, I think you just need to put https links in your WordPress for the plugin in order to not have Mixed content errors.
Best regards guys.
Hi Gustavo,
You hit the nail on the head! An outdated php function was returning http, causing the issue.
Should be fixed now,
rpc
Hi guys!
I’m desperate! I visualize this:
$6 0 $5 2 $4 2 $3 0 $2 0 $1 0 $2./5.$1.0 | $1 /7 7 7 10 7 $2.10 8
In all songs,
why?
can you helpè me, please?
tanks!
Should be fixed now. Thanks for looking at the site!
Tanks guys!
You’re the best!
What is this oasis of the most impressive tab collection i finally discovered??? 😛
Glad you like it!
Hi!!!
This is 2nd to finding a grand master to teach me the blues in person. Unfortunately, I don’t play the guitar.
I’m a beginner Uke player and have always loved the blues, since childhood. I’ve been looking for a site like this for ukulele players forever and still haven’t found one. So, for the guitar chords, can I just transpose and play on the ukulele? Any other recommendations?
Thanks,
Jo
Funny thing. I started to rabbidly study blues guitar some 6 years ago (at 62!). On the way, I came upon your site, found the stuff too challenging and, luckyly, stashed it in a “Blues” file. Just came upon it lately and, man, is it chock full of blue goodness! Death Don’t Have No Mercy is exactly what I’d been looking for as an extra solo piece of my humble but worthy repertoire. Will dive into more of your outstanding selections. Thanks for the help.
Hi Pierre, if you still have the file saved, can you share with me by email? It would be very, very appreciated 🙂
RPC
I thought the website was down for good and felt really bad. Very grateful for it being up again. Thank you for your efforts. Some of the best transcriptions on the web. Check out my version of Death Don’t have no Mercy. I learned the majority of the material from this page.
Thank you!!!
Hi Camilo,
Holy shit!
That was amazing!The Reverend himself would be proud of that rendition!!
I’m incredibly touched that I could have helped you with this – as you can tell by the lateness of my reply I really don’t check the site as much as I should nowdays, but I have to say your video has really inspired me to get back into it. Im overwhelmed that I could have played a small part in that awesome video you’ve made!
Thanks for sharing, and apologies it took me so long to read the comment!
rpc
Is there a workaround for the tab info?
I don’t recall that it was always like that.
Any ideas.
Hi Charlie,
Sorry for the late reply – all should be fixed now.
Regards,
rpc
Hey, I know this hasn’t been updated in awhile, but I just wanted to thank you for posting all of this content. Ive been trying to get back to my blues roots lately, and this is the only proper tab anywhere of this, one of my favorite blues songs. I have had issues reading the tabs since the last Android update, though. Have you considered putting these tabs on Songsterr? It’s a great app for learning guitar, and it would be great to be able to play this there. Thanks again!
Hi James,
Thanks for looking at the site!
Tabs should be fixed now, and due to the plugin I use to generate the tabs, to add them to another site such as Songster would mean essentially rewriting them all in a new format. Unfortunately I’d rather spend the time playing guitar!
Thanks again,
rpc
Hi rpc,
I have tried several browsers but just get the mass of dollar signs and numbers that previous people have mentioned.
Is there a simple remedy to this by any chance please? I’m just getting into blues and this site looks amazing.
Which plugin do you use to generate the tabs?
Cheers
Gareth
Hi Gareth,
Thanks for the message.
Im using an old – last updated in 2014 – plugin called Guitar Chords and Tabs. The issue was caused by an old function returning http instead of https. An. pretty simple fix, but Im slack nowdays and don’t maintain the site like I should.
Everything should be running smoothly now, please take a look and thanks for having a look at the site!
Regards,
rpc
What is this?!
$2./5 $1.0 3 5^ 3 | $2.5/3 0 $5.2 $4.1.$3.2 | $6.0 $3./4.$2.0 $3.4.$2.0 $3.4.$2.0 $3./4.$2.0 $3.4.$2.0 $3.4.$2.0 $3 2 0 $4.2 |
$3.0 2 0 $4.2 $6.0 $4.2.$3.0.$2.0.$1.0 | $3./9.$1./7 7 $3.9.$1.7 10 7 10 7 | $2.10^ 0 $4.0 $3.7 $4.9 |
$4.5 $3.7.$2.8.$1.7 $3.7.$2.8.$1.7
No clearer on chrome, Edge, or mobile device.
Hi Nicolas,
Thats broken javascript!
Should be fixed now,
rpc
Are you going to be able to fix the tabs on this wonderful website?
Done!
Thanks for the message.
52 weeks of blues is a GREAT site. But I don’t know what happened to the tabs. All the dollar signs and crap. When I first found the site it was the same but after a few seconds the crap turned to super tabs. Whathappened?
Hi Pat,
Thanks for the comment. What happened was a combination of an outdated function in the code, and a slack webmaster!
Should be fixed now,
rpc
Hi,
I love your site and have been visiting for years. However, I’m now experiencing the same issue as folks have described above.
$4./5.$2./5 $1.0 3 5 3 | $2.5/3 0 $5.2.$4.1 $4.1.$3.2 | $6.0 $3./4
I’m on a laptop using the Chrome browser.
Is there any way to fix this?
Thanks for all your hard work!
Hi Clay,
Thanks for the message! I dug into the code base and fixed the issue. Please let me know if it’s still broken for you.
Regards,
Rpc
Hello.
This looks like an amazing resource, but i cant see the tabs. They look weird:
$6 0 $5 2 $4 2 $3 0 $2 0 $1 0 $2./5.$1.0 | $1 /7 7 7 10 7 $2.10 8
Hi Thiago,
Ive been really slack at maintaining the site, but its fixed now,
Thanks for having a look!
Rpc