Learning the Blues

Absolutely you need to learn songs you like - it's really the tried-and-true way.  Books wont' give you the nuace and feel required for blues.  Like you said, it's a lot more than the notes.  Once you've already got that, books can give you a lot of ideas to build on, but not the core.  Your ears give you that.  When I hear metal guys play blues, the #1 thing missing is rhythm - the notes are right, but it's played too straight on the beat.  When you learn tunes from the albums, you can learn to copy that placement of notes in time which makes blues sound like blues.  A song like BB King's "Lucille" is basically a textbook.

You got it there. Joe says there is more in one note than a thousand. It's the spaces between them that counts. Have fun listening and learning. Welcome to the forum.
Rick

Since you mentioned Robben Ford he has many video's that might help. He had a guitar dojo that he was doing on line. Basically lessons posted on his website. I don't know where you are from but Robben also has day long clinics in home town Ojai California that aren't too expensive. I happened to catch a clinic he put on here and although I am not a guitar player I learned more that I could ever imagine about his approach. Might be worth checking into. I have several friends that have gone and they rave about it.

I remember seeing a similar quote many years ago. I'm not sure who was being quoted but it could have been BB King. A great way to get the feel of the Blues is to select a favourite track to jam along to but you are allowed to use only 1 note. You can pick it as many times as you like, as fast or as slow as you like, but you can use only 1 note.