About Michel Lelong

Born in Tours, France in 1961, Michel Lelong picked up the guitar at the age of 13 and learned country blues by ear in the styles of Mississippi John Hurt, John Jackson, Big Bill Broonzy, Reverend Gary Davis and Doc Watson. He went on to master the “Travis style” note by note, building a command of fingerpicking, ragtime, bluegrass, folk, old-time and Celtic guitar that few players in Europe can match.

After recording his first album in the early 1980s, Michel was noticed by the American guitarist, musicologist and publisher Stefan Grossman — one of the world’s foremost acoustic blues teachers — for whose Guitar Workshop he produced transcription books on Merle Travis, Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed. In 1999 he wrote La guitare blues acoustique, widely regarded as one of the best country-blues guitar methods published in French.

Michel has taught and performed across France, England, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and the United States, sharing the stage with John Jackson, John Cephas & Phil Wiggins, Louisiana Red, Michael Roach, Jerry Ricks and many others. In 2011 he was invited to Augusta Blues Week in West Virginia, and in 2018 he returned to Blues Week at the University of Exeter as a pedagogical advisor in the country blues class.

For more than 40 years he has taught guitar — at his workshop in Tours, in workshops and masterclasses abroad, and through distance courses. As a transcriber he is a self-professed purist: he believes you should first learn a piece as closely as possible to the original recording, and only then find your own path through it.