Why Every Blues Legend Copied This Forgotten Guitar Style

So many great guitar players of the past have mentioned this sometimes forgotten legend legend as being an inspiration. B.B. King once said: "When I heard T-Bone Walker play the electric guitar, I had to have one." Chuck Berry said: "All the things people see me do on stage, I got from T-Bone Walker." And Jimi Hendrix watched this man play guitar behind his head one night and thought: I can do that.

T-Bone Walker: The Blues Guitar Style Everyone Copied

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q82GOroegFQ

His style of guitar playing and his on-stage performance techniques radically changed the history of guitar music. So today I want to dig into exactly how he did it — specifically, how he took the standard minor pentatonic scale and altered it, note by note, to create something that was uniquely, unmistakably his.

I'm not going to teach you to play behind your head. But by the end of this, you'll understand why everyone was so obsessed with this man.

Start With the Most Classic Blues Lick of All Time

Let's start at the foundation — a lick so common you may already know it. And I'll be honest: I've often said stop playing this lick because it shows up everywhere. But here's the thing. If we're talking about classic blues, we have to use it. T-Bone Walker used it. Jimmy Page used it. Everybody used it. It's a classic for a reason.

The lick goes up the minor pentatonic scale and back down again, skipping a note. It's easy to play and it sounds great, which is also why we love it.

Sometimes T-Bone played it with a bend, and sometimes without. Without the bend it can be played real quick. Add the bend and it gets that grittier, more emotionally charged and of course, more "bluesy."

Once you start playing these licks, you'll hear them everywhere — from Eric Clapton to Buddy Guy to John Mayer. They were all listening to T-Bone Walker.

T-Bone's Favourite Bend

Here's the first thing that starts to separate T-Bone Walker from the average blues guitarist.

He had one particular bend that he was completely obsessed with. It's that very bend you'll see in the second phrase in the tabs above. And in his song Stormy Monday — which is where a lot of these licks come from — he barely plays any other bend.

Sometimes he just hits this bend two or three times in a row. He milks it for dramatic effect, but it works! That willingness to play and bend same note repeatedly is a big part of why his phrasing felt so intentional and so cool.

The Secret Weapon: The Ninth

Minor Pentatonic Scale with the 9th degree added

Now we start getting into what truly made his style unique. T-Bone Walker loved to add the ninth to his minor pentatonic lines. Here's how to think about it: once you go up to the root of the scale, the note directly above it — one step higher — is the ninth.

Confusingly, it's also sometimes called the two. But think about it this way: If the root is one, then the root plus one is a two.

G  A  B  C  D  E  F#  G  A
1  2  3  4  5  6  7   8  9

The lick he built around this note is something he does constantly in Stormy Monday. He goes up the minor pentatonic the way we so often do, then hits that nine, comes back to the root, and resolves to the fifth.

Once you hear it a few times, you'll start recognizing it everywhere — especially in Eric Clapton's playing, which makes perfect sense. Clapton was clearly listening to these records very closely.

Now, why does the ninth work over a blues chord progression? Technically it's borrowing a note from the major pentatonic scale. The chords underneath a standard blues are dominant seventh chords — G7, C7 — so there's room for major pentatonic thinking even while your scale shape is minor pentatonic. T-Bone Walker may not have been thinking about all this theory, but his ear knew exactly where to go.

(By the way, we do a lot of this kind of interval targeting in my book Six Steps to Pentatonic Mastery — just out on Amazon.)

The Staccato Surprise

Another thing T-Bone Walker does that I find really clever: he'll occasionally stop a lick dead in its tracks — right after playing that 9th — cutting it off short before any clean resolution.

It's what we call "staccato." The note is short and clipped rather than smooth and connected. And because he stops before giving you a satisfying landing, the phrase just hangs there for a moment. It's a little disorienting in the best possible way, and it keeps your ear chasing what comes next. Pair it with a phrase that does descend cleanly to the fifth, and the contrast becomes the whole point.

Bending the Minor Third

Here's where things get really bluesy. The minor pentatonic scale has a minor third. But the chords underneath a blues — your G7, your C7 — have a major third. So there's actually a harmonic conflict built into the blues: you're playing a minor scale over a major chord. And that tension is what makes it sound like the blues.

T-Bone Walker loved to bend the minor third just a tiny bit. Not a full bend — a quarter step, maybe a half step. It's not even that noticeable if you look at the tab. But against the chord, it does something special. You're nudging that minor third in the direction of the major third, and you get this wonderfully ambiguous note that sits right in the crack between major and minor.

And if you want to be extra intentional about it, this particular bend works beautifully on the four chord (the C7), because that slightly bent note sits right inside that chord. So you can use it as a way of playing over the changes — even subtly — rather than just running the scale across the whole progression.

Bringing the Major Third Back In

Taking it one step further: you can also just add the major third right into your minor pentatonic scale lick. This might sound a little strange to you the first time you play it because you're deliberately adding a note that technically conflicts with the minor pentatonic scale. But played against the G7 chord, you hear immediately that it fits because the major third is in that G7 chord.

The Major Third added to the Minor Pentatonic Scale

You can hammer onto it, bend up to it from the minor third, or just place it cleanly in a descending line. All three work.

What T-Bone Walker figured out — and what B.B. King, Eric Clapton, and everyone else learned from him — is that the blues isn't about staying inside a neat box. It's about knowing exactly which notes to step outside the box and when.

Start combining these ideas: the ninth, the major third, landing on the fifth. Your phrases will start to sound like something. They'll start to sound like T-Bone Walker.

The Trill on the Ninth

One more thing he loved to do with the ninth: sometimes instead of just hitting it cleanly, he'd play a rapid hammer-on and pull-off that from the Root to the 9th and back to the Root again.

I have noticed that Stevie Ray Vaughan. Vaughan used a similar idea, though he often hammered on to a flat nine — a more exotic, slightly eerie sound. I'll be honest: I've never totally loved the flat nine in that context. It's a little too exotic for the blues in my opinion, But T-Bone Walker's approach sounds just right to me.

The Sixth — And the Bonus Note Hidden Inside It

T-Bone Walker also added the major sixth to the Minor Pentatonic scale. Again, just counting from the root (in this case G) we find that the 6th is an E note:

G  A  B  C  D  E
1  2  3  4  5  6

Minor Pentatonic Scale with the Major 6th added

Since that note is not in G Minor Pentatonic, we can add it back in. Remember we can do this because the underlying chords are G7, C7 etc. Which means we can use notes from the Major Pentatonic scale and combine them with Minor Pentatonic.

Played straight, the sixth has a bright, almost jazzy sound against the blues chord.

But here's the really cool part: bend the sixth up a half step, and where do you land? Right on the minor seventh of a G7 chord. And if you picture one of those big, full G7 voicings — the kind where you extend your pinky — you'll see exactly where that note is. It fits perfectly over the one chord.

Sometimes T-Bone just descended the scale adding that major 6th into the Minor Pentatonic Scale, and sometimes he gave it that half-step bend. I will say, however, that it's best to use that bend when you're on a G7 chord (or the I chord in other keys). Otherwise you're not really bending to the minor 7 of whatever other chord you might be on at the moment.

It All Comes Together Over Stormy Monday

Put all of that together over a 12/8 shuffle in the style of Stormy Monday, and you'll hear absolute blues perfection! What started as a minor pentatonic scale — five notes in a box — has grown into something much bigger and more expressive. You've got the minor pentatonic foundation, the ninth borrowed from major pentatonic, the major third, the sixth that bends to the minor seven. You're landing on fifths for open-ended phrases, cutting lines staccato for surprise, and resolving cleanly when the moment calls for it.

That's the T-Bone Walker sound. And once you hear it, you hear it everywhere — in Clapton, in Buddy Guy, in John Mayer, in everyone who grew up on the blues.

We're digging into T-Bone Walker's ninth chord voicings — the actual chord shapes he used in Stormy Monday — in this week's Patreon lesson. First 7 days are free  if you want to check it out.

And if you want a deeper framework for understanding these kinds of scale extensions, my new book Six Steps to Pentatonic Mastery is out now on Amazon.