Language of the Blues - Edmonton Blues Society

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C R OSS N O T E
Tuning the guitar to an open minor chord is called cross note, or Bentonia, tuning. The
great country-
He learned it from his mentor, Henry Stuckey of Bentonia, Mississippi. Stuckey
had picked it up from black soldiers, most likely from the Bahamas or Jamaica, whom he
met while stationed in France during World War II.
A guitar tuned to E minor (E B E G B E) for example, will produce the E-minor chord
when strummed without fretting any notes. This is cross note in E minor. Some guitarists
also play cross note in D minor by tuning the guitar to D A D F A D.
Cross-note tunings really lend themselves to slide playing because they make it easy to
produce haunting minor chords simply by fretting straight across the neck with the slide.
Bentonia lies outside the Mississippi Delta region and is considered to have its own style
of country blues. Blues musicologist Gayle Dean Wardlow tracked Henry Stuckey down
in 1965, living in a poor little shack just outside of Bentonia with no screens on the
windows or door.
Skip James during the Newport Folk Festival, summer of 1964
photo by Jim M arshall; courtesy photo archives, Delta Haze Corporation, licensed under agreement with
photographer
-minor-
during World War II]. He said it came from somewhere down in the Caribbean
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