Episode 1 - Slide Guitar: The Crying Voice

There's a sound in the blues that doesn't play notes so much as it cries them. That's slide guitar — the instrument that sounds most like a human voice weeping and singing at once. We start the series here.

• Why slide sounds like a voice: gliding between pitches, no frets, the notes between the notes
• Delta roots: W.C. Handy's Tutwiler train-station encounter, the diddley bow, Hawaiian steel, resonator guitars, gospel slide
• Open tunings (open G/D/E) — how one bar of glass plays the whole 12-bar
• The players: Son House, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Tampa Red, Blind Willie McTell → Muddy Waters & Robert Nighthawk electrify it in Chicago → Elmore James turns it into a rock riff ("Dust My Broom") → Duane Allman makes it soar (At Fillmore East, "Statesboro Blues," "Layla") → Derek Trucks, Warren Haynes, Bonnie Raitt carry it on
• Tone Recipe: glass vs metal slide, open tunings, light touch + heavy muting + vibrato, tube-amp sustain
• Progression Spotlight: the 12-bar blues, I–IV–V, turnarounds, minor-key variation, blue notes