Eva Cassidy - San Francisco Bay Blues

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TGNeil
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Joined: Thu Feb 18, 2010 1:09 pm
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Fri Jan 14, 2022 1:03 pm

A recent lesson request sent me back down the Eva Cassidy path.I was not familiar with her take on Jesse Fuller's classic San Francisco Bay Blues, and at first listen wasn't sure it was the same song. Sure enough, she completely rewrote the music and really made it her own.

Eva Cassidy had a phenomenal ability to arrange and rearrange songs to suit her guitar playing, and of course her incredible voice. Her take on Jesse Fuller's San Francisco Bay Blues shows just how far she could take something and make it her own.
Almost everyone else who plays this does it with the upbeat ragtime approach that Jesse used in many of his songs, not wanting them to sound too sad. Eva turns his tune into a slow blues, wrenching and soulful. 
This lesson goes over 12/8 time and the chord families she used to put this arrangement together. There are 13th chords, 7#9, diminished, 7sus2, and of course the more common 7th and m7ths from the 'E' and 'A' families.
She did every verse a little differently and the included tab has a measure by measure breakdown of all three verses.