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, he the only child of 8 to survive infancy and when he was just 10 his father was shot and killed by a Sheriff in Birmingham, Alabama.
Davis grew up in Laurens, South Carolina, in the Piedmont plateau region that sits to the east of the Appalachians and runs parallel to the east coast of the US, from New Jersey down to Alabama. He started on the guitar at age 6, teaching himself gospel, rag time and blues tunes using the Piedmont style of alternating thumb and index finger with a syncopated melody on the high strings. He moved to Durham, North Carolina in his twenties, already regarding as having one of the best techniques in the country, where he taught legends such as Blind Boy Fuller and recorded his first records in the late ’30s.
He became a reverend in 1937 and increasingly used gospel styling in his singing. He moved on to New York, performing as a street corner busker and didn’t record again until the late ’50s. Already a legend to other bluesmen, he found greater fame later in life, with the folk explosion in the 60s. His influence was huge, acts such as Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane all recorded covers of his songs, and his strong melodic leads between bass oriented chords has became the stable for modern blues.
Davis died of a heart attack in Hammonton, New Jersey on May 5, 1972.
The Song
Death Don’t have no Mercy was recorded in 1960 and released on Davis’ album ‘Harlem Street Singer’. It’s a traditional spiritual, the lyrics deal with the personification of death, coming into people’s houses to snatch away the living – fairly appropriate for a guy who lost a father and all seven of his siblings. Davis never played the same version twice, improvising melody lines over the chord procession. The version I’ve used is the original 1960 recording.
The song is a 16 bar blues, with a short intro and a full 16 bar solo, played in E minor. The recorded version has 6 verses, plus the solo, but they all follow the same 16 bar progression. He improvises licks especially in the Em chords, and utilises short walking baselines in some of the chord changes.
The trick to this song is not to rush it – it’s a slow, haunting piece. Let the notes ring out, and use the guitar leads as a counter melody to the voice.
The Lyrics
Em Am B7 Em
Death don't have no mercy in this land
Em7 A7 D7 G B7
Death don't have no mercy in this land
Em Em7
He'll come to your house and he won't stay long
Am C
You'll look in the bed and somebody will be gone
Em C Em B7 Em
Death don't have no mercy in this land
Well Death will go in any family in this land
Well Death will go in every family in this land
Well he'll come to your house and he won't stay long
Well you'll look in the bed and one of your family will be gone
Death will go in any family in this land
Well he never takes a vacation in this land
Well old Death never takes a vacation in this land
Well he'll come to your house and he won't stay long
Well you'll look in the bed and your mother will be gone
Death never takes a vacation in this land
Well he'll leave you standin' and cryin' in this land
Well Death will leave you standin' and cryin' in this land
Well he'll come to your house and he won't stay long
You'll look in the bed and somebody will be gone
Death will leave you standin' and cryin' in this land
Old Death always in a hurry in this land
Old Death always in a hurry in this land
Well he'll come to your house and he won't stay long
You'll look in the bed and your mother will be gone
Death always in a hurry in this land
Well he won't give you time to get ready in this land
Well he won't give you time to get ready in this land
Well he'll come to your house and he won't stay long
Well you'll look in the bed and somebody will be gone
Death won't give you time to get ready in this land
The Intro
The intro is short and sweet, riffs over Em and a B7 at the end. There are a couple of open strings played with melody notes, try to keep these relatively quiet so they don’t drown out the melody line.
Davis has a constant progression where he plays the bass note on the 1st and 3rd beats, with the treble notes of the chord on 2nd and 4th, either strummed or picked with three fingers. He fills it out with improvised riffs. Try to get the basic chords down first, then jazz it up with some riffs of your own. The voicings in the chord diagrams aren’t 100% accurate – check the tabs for the proper voicings.
Here’s what he does in the first verse:
The solo is really, really nice and features some really precise playing over the Em chords, and some tricky barre chord based riffs where the thumb comes into play hitting the bass. The open high E string in bar six can be really hard to hit correctly to make it ring. It seems a bit unnatural to hit an open string when you are essentially playing a 7th fret Em, but that’s what the good Reverend does! I tend to rush through the second half – keep your foot tapping the beat, and take it slow.
The outro is a different version of the solo, with a slightly trickier barre chord section. Try to mute the thumbed strings in this section. In both the outro and the solo, Davis was very deliberate in the choice and execution of each note. He would hit all of them with a purpose to set up the next line.
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.
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.
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.
,
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?
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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!!!
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!
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!
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!
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?
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!
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,
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?
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
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