The lessons, after a certain point, were always the same. I’d hand over a CD, tell Simon which track, and wait for him to piece the thing together. He’d mumble, slide the capo around, find the right key easy enough, and eventually get the gist without too much hassle. His fingernails were shaped like guitar picks, thick and nicotine-brown. His arms were so hairy it sometimes seemed impossible. I never knew when I walked into the cramped listening booth of a back room who I’d get: Simon the Patient, Simon the Furious, or, most likely, someone halfway between.

But I really wanted to learn these songs. I was in ninth grade and on day one he’d taught me the twelve-bar blues, so what else was there left for me to care about?

Well, chords. And chords were hard, but I managed. Stuck it out. Learned a Beat Happening song or two and had the shrugging realization: Oh cool. Chords. But barre chords: nothing was more difficult. Even now, with taxes and twelve-hour days teaching high schoolers and planning a wedding and forgetting to ever call home, nothing is more difficult than barre chords. To say that Simon quickly learned my limits is inaccurate. As a teacher myself, I know now that he created my limits by allowing me to give simply zero fucking shits. But as a ninth grader, it was pretty cool to get to learn “I’ll Fly Away” and “I’m Waiting for the Man.” The buck stopped there, and the buck was my interest in learning to play guitar.

But I did really want to learn these songs. Like every boy bumbling through suburbia in the Western world, it all started with the blues. Oddly enough, for me, the spark wasn’t my parents’ Stones or Zeppelin records (my dad was all John Denver, Linda Ronstadt, my mom all Cat Stevens and Chicago), but Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World, adapted from Daniel Clowes’s comic about an apathetic teen falling in love with Depression-era country blues records. There’s a scene in the movie where Thora Birch stays up all night listening to Skip James sing “Devil Got My Woman” on repeat and the next day Steve Buscemi uses its weird mystical power to try and sleep with her. But that last part’s a little irrelevant. The point is that hearing Skip sing in that movie changed everything for me. I went from digging the White Stripes to discovering Son House and Robert Johnson and realizing, of course, that these were just White Stripes songs, but better. And they were better because they were real. And they were real because they were emotional. And I knew they were emotional because….well, I wasn’t sure why because no one is sure why. It’s what blues theorists and obsessives have been trying to pinpoint for almost a hundred years. What I did know was that I wanted to learn these songs.

Simon taught me a twelve-bar blues run in our first lesson and for awhile it was all I really knew how to do. And I wasn’t even any good at it. The strings hurt my fingers, which cramped quickly and led to spectacularly short practice sessions. When I did practice, though, I played nothing but that blues run so fervidly that one Saturday morning, I showed up for my guitar lesson and couldn’t play a lick of anything Simon had asked me to study that week from the method book. I could strangle you right now, he shouted, his face quickly reddening. Even the little of his skin you could make out through his thick weedy arm hair seemed to get beety. That’s how frustrated, how angry.

But after that day, he gave up. I started bringing CDs, telling him a track number, and watching him learn the framework and jot it down for me in my little music-staffed spiral. I taught myself how to read tablature. He taught me basic major and minor chords, and how the capo should hug the fret just so. I quit showing up after a couple months, which was just enough time to build calluses and understand how rhythm works. For the blues, it was plenty.

Because the blues is, at the end of the day, unbelievably simple music. Even punk rock, with its two-maybe-three-at-most-chord structure, is more difficult: the shit’s all barre chords. With the blues, you go C7-F7-G7. Or, if you’re lazy, you can still sound good enough with a solid C-F-G. Or don’t play the thing at all: mute the chords, bang on the body, and moan. Not only is this good enough—in many ways, it’s preferred. People rag on gussied-up blues. Even in Ghost World, the butt of a very funny joke is a bar band called Blueshammer, made up of white bros with frosted tips playing a hyper-amped electric blues song called “Pickin’ Cotton Blues.” It is what it sounds like. And the patrons at the bar absolutely love it, dancing and cheering and knocking poor 78-collecting Steve Buscemi’s beer onto his lap. It’s a scene that’s part insider-satire and part universal: everyone knows the blues is best at its simplest.

And by everyone knows I mostly mean everyone has agreed. Because there is no grand truth about the blues. We glorify its origins in old rare recordings by Skip James and Robert Johnson and a hundred others because we recognize that they inspired the people we really think are dandy: four-piece rock bands bastardizing the “good” stuff in all the right ways. There’s something in simplicity that we’ll always keep mooning over. The way a couple guitar chords and a light boot-stomp can’t possibly mask that mysterious emotion stuff that pulls us right out of our skin, maybe. Or maybe the way anyone can take a week, learn two or three chord changes, and call themselves a musician. There’s definitely that pesky specter of appropriation in the mix, too, the same one that hovers over every single genre of Western music, and the same one that everyone wants someone else to bring up first.

For me, I’m guilty of it all. But I really wanted to learn those songs, and sometimes I even tune my crappy Craigslist guitar and learn a couple new ones. And in this way, this small, stupid way that means nothing to anyone, I guess I’m making music. Unfortunately, there’s just no better way to describe it.

—Brad Efford