Level: 2/3
Tuning: Standard

Bo Carter's real name was Armenter Chatmon, as he was a member of the Chatmon family who formed the Mississippi Sheiks and gave us many blues standards. Famous for his bawdy songs "(Let Me Roll Your Lemon," "Pin In Your Cushion," "Banana In Your Fruit Basket"), Carter recorded over a hundred songs in the 1930s as a solo musician. This arrangement of "My Pencil Won't Write No More" is a lesson in key-of-A blues, a key that offers the important open-string E, A and D bass notes. These bass notes allow you to play up-the-neck 3- or 4-string chords and still keep a monotone bass going (sometimes the thumb reverts to alternating bass as well). The song is 12-bars, but it's not in the usual 12-bar format, and it includes the odd F chord change and a series of circle-of-fifths changes common to raggy blues: F#, B7, E7, A.