Mighty Mighty (Spade and Whitey): Authentic Guitar TAB

This collection captures 18 Curtis Mayfield classics with complete lyrics and TAB, making his iconic guitar voice available to players who want to understand how soul music sits on the fretboard. Mayfield's fingerpicking approach rewards careful listening and finger independence, while his melodies are memorable enough to motivate practice. The mix spans sacred-influenced material, funk grooves, and intimate ballads, giving guitarists a real education in soul guitar across multiple contexts.

Warm, thoughtful, and grounded. These songs move with confidence but never rush, building grooves that feel effortless even when the fingerwork is intricate. There's a quiet intelligence to the playing—no showboating, just a guitarist solving musical problems with taste and precision.

Intermediate to advanced guitarists seeking to expand beyond standard strumming patterns and explore fingerpicking across soul, funk, and R&B styles. This book works equally well for self-study and ensemble contexts where guitarists need to understand the harmonic and melodic architecture that made these songs memorable.

• Focus on the relationships between bass notes and melody notes in the fingerpicking patterns; Mayfield often moves the bass around the chord to create harmonic interest that the TAB will make explicit.
• Use the lyrical content to shape phrasing and dynamics; these aren't instrumental exercises but songs with words, and the guitar should support the emotional arc of each song.
• Pay attention to the spaces and silence in Mayfield's guitar arrangements; he doesn't fill every moment, and that restraint is part of the style.
• Study how Mayfield varies the voicings of chords across different songs; the same chord can sound entirely different depending on which strings he uses and how he voices the notes.

Program select pieces into a soul music unit or concert celebrating American popular songwriting, pairing them with vocal performers or horn sections to recreate the original arrangements. Use individual songs as solo guitar interludes in concerts or as study material in electives focused on guitar technique across genres.

• fingerpicking patterns and finger independence
• reading guitar TAB in coordination with standard notation
• recognizing and executing jazz-influenced chord voicings
• understanding bass movement and harmonic function within fingerstyle arrangements
• interpreting rhythm and phrasing through a soul music lens