40 Blues Intros & Outros

What do Chuck Berry, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Gary Moore, Albert King, Jimi Hendrix and countless others have in common? No, there isn’t a punchline: the answer is a knowledge of the basic blues format and the ability to blend it into their own contemporary styles.

The first thing you often hear on any blues record is a ‘taster’ of what is to come, courtesy of some fancy or soulful licks. Sometimes this is called a ‘turnaround’ – the bit at the end of a 12-bar progression when everything is gearing up to go round to the start of the sequence again. You could say it’s like starting with an ending.

“ROBERT JOHNSON’S FINGERSTYLE ACOUSTIC BLUES EMPLOYED UNUSUAL DIMINISHED VOICINGS AND CHROMATIC MOVEMENTS TO LEAD FROM ONE PLACE TO ANOTHER”

Check out some of our intros and compare them with their outro counterparts. Often the only major difference is that the outro finishes with a very final I (‘home’) chord, as opposed to the intro, which usually features the V chord (for example, B7 in the key of E), setting our ears up to believe – correctly -that there is more to come. There’s something compositionally elegant, too, about ‘book-ending’ a song in this way. It sounds more deliberate, rather than just bluffing through and coming up with whatever you fancy (that has its place too, but you know what I mean).

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule and some of these are featured in our extensive catalogue of examples. John Lee Hooker and Elmore James often ‘vamped’ on one chord or