I know this site is focussed on learning to play blues on the guitar but I wanted to touch on the bass guitar today. Beginners don’t recognize how important the bass guitar is at tying together the drums and guitar in a blues song unless you take the bass away and just have drums and guitar.
You see if you’re playing chords on the guitar and the drums are playing a straight beat then there’s a disconnect there. The guitar isn’t really following closely the beat from the drums and the drums of course don’t play chords or notes just beats.
Bring in the bas guitar and you’ll see that the groove of a tune can often be found in the drum and bass mix. The bass will follow along with the chord changes on a guitar by playing the root notes and also follows the beat from the bass drum on the drums. This fills a gap that isn’t covered by the guitar in most blues tunes.
The bass also usually plays runs in blues music. These runs follow the I IV V 12 bar blues progression the same as the guitar and makes it easy for a blues guitarist to play some lead over top of the bass and drum track on its own without needing another rhythm instrument such as the piano or another guitar.
If you have some interest in learning the blues on the bass there are a lot of online resources to get you started. I’ve seen some awesome DVD bass guitar lessons for beginner and intermediate players. Also I’ve found that there are some basic blues bass lessons on sites like YouTube which you can get started on for free.