This is a book of slide techniques, solos, and a CD of backing trax. with this book you will be well on the way to mastering the art of slide playing. The book contains the basic slide techniques needed to start playing. Playing Slide guitar is actually easier than playing normal tuned guitar as the open tunings have the chords already in place.  Slide Guitar, or Bottleneck Guitar, as it is commonly known, has always been the mainstay of the blues.  Nobody knows who started playing slide guitar, but African musicians – captured and brought to the Americas as slaves – would have brought their musical heritage with them.An African stringed instrument, played by dragging a piece of metal up and down the strings, could have been the forerunner of the slide guitar.  With the influence of the Spanish in the Americas, guitars would have been used by resourceful slaves and quickly put to good use for entertainment after the backbreaking work in the cotton fields.  The jump from the African instrument to the guitar would have therefore been inevitable.The term ‘the blues’ originated from the beatings inflicted upon the slaves by the plantation owners.  The bruises from the beatings gave rise to the saying ‘beaten black and blue’ – hence, someone saying ‘I’ve got the blues’ in the late 1700s would have been someone who had just received a beating.  Slaves who were musicians and singers would have put the experience into song, and so ‘the blues’ were born. After the Civil War and the break-up of the plantations, many slaves anxious to leave the South headed for the big industrial cities in the North, and with them went ‘the blues’ and the traditions from the South.  For the first time the freed slaves had access to paid employment and the money to buy good quality musical instruments.Early slide guitar players used knives, broke the necks off bottles, or simply cut a piece of pipe to finger length to produce the slide sound.  Out of these times in the early 1900s came the modern blues players: Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Bukka White, to name just a few, and they started to make phonograph records.  The blues were at last taken out of the plantations and the South, and ‘race music’ became popular with Americans.Right across America the blues was spread through radio shows, phonograph records and street musicians.  It was only then that white guitarists, watching these black musicians playing slide, integrated it into white rock music.  Musicians such as Duane Allman, Keith Richards, Bonnie Rait, George Thorogood and Eric Clapton have taken the blues even further – the sound produced by amplification is different again, and so slide guitar has made it into the twentieth century!. I am in the process of filming a DVD which will be available also.