Highway Blues - Roy Harper (cover + guitar tutorial)

Highway Blues, from Lifemask, is a heavyweight in Roy Harper's songbook and a live favourite.
This song uses DADGAD tuning. As for the key, that depends on which version you are listening to. Roy has kept this song as part of his live set throughout the years and performances are well documented on live albums and footage available on CZcams. So it is interesting to notice that the original Lifemask version has a capo on the 1st fret (that makes it in D#) but soon after Roy started downtuning. Through most of the 70's he had the guitar tuned to C# and nowadays Roy plays it in A# (!!!).
For the cover at the beginning of the video I chose the key that suits me better (CGCFGC) - that's just as far as my pipes can go. But for the guitar tutorial I kept it faithful to the original key with the capo on the 1st fret (D#A#D#G#A#D#).
The guitar work is quite simple, based on power-chords, so the interesting bit on this tutorial is the intro riff which I tried to break in as much detail as I could (see tutorial at 12:46).

[@spiralstairs9259]

awesome performance

[@BadSpeech]

Thanks

[@EllySpace]

You sing and play well . Good performance!

[@BadSpeech]

Thank you so much

[@TheMightyAvonJnr]

Fantastic.

[@BadSpeech]

Thanks

[@HermanPermentier]

Glad to hear from you again. Great!!

[@BadSpeech]

Thanks mate.

[@brianmcgill8030]

I find myself endlessly fascinated playing this song. Learned it by watching your previous tutorials and started experimenting from there, particularly the noodling with the solos at the end of the chorus. Great fun.
Instead of going to open strings from the 7th fret chord, as you do on this tutorial, I keep the 5th and 6th strings barred on the 7th fret and play the rest of the strings open. Sounds great to my ears. I also like starting the song on the chord from Lifemask before the solo: 4th string 2nd fret, rest open (mute 6th), then into the solo lick. Lovely.
Keep up the good work my man, I've learned so much from your tutorials.

[@BadSpeech]

Thank you so much. I like to start the song with strumming the harmonics on the 7th fret. It's something Roy used to do a lot in later versions.

[@ColinStachowski]

Glad to see you still on a mission! Great work figuring this out. People usually can't fathom how I am able to figure Clapton songs 'so easily' but I was listening to Roy's songs recently and was thinking that Clapton pentatonic stuff does not even come close to what you need to figure out - and you're doing a perfect job!

[@BadSpeech]

The mission will carry on as soon as our Roy releases a new album. It's been so long that I just end up updating old videos once in a while 😄 This was easy to figure out. There's plenty of footage available.

[@robertturner2189]

Where've you been man 😀Excellent work as always my friend, keep it going!

[@BadSpeech]

Thanks. I've been awol waiting for Roy's next album so that I can learn some new songs. 😄

[@nigelbond6837]

Only discovered your stuff in the last few months and want to thank you for the brilliant thing you've done with Roy's music. It's outstanding. I've been a Roy fan since the early 80s and have seen him live probably 30 times. How did you come across it in Portugal, I guess he's not exactly a household name?

[@BadSpeech]

Thank you so much. I came across Roy through This Mortal Coil's version of Another Day. The name Roy Harper rang a bell since I was already a fan of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Soon after that, Jugula came out and my brother bought it because it had Jimmy Page on the cover. The rest is history 😁

[@kenji1968x]

Beautiful performance 🎵🎵🎵
Thank you so much my friend and I hope you have a wonderful day 🙏❤️😊

[@BadSpeech]

Thank you. Have a good day you too.