There are two kinds of guitarists: the ones who know exactly how to start a solo, and the rest of us, who stand there for four bars pretending the first note is a "musical choice" rather than pure panic. This little blues lick in C is for the second group, which is to say, all of us.
It's Blues Lick Number Two: a short, compact phrase in the key of C that you can bolt onto the front of a solo as a confident opener, or park at the very end as a tidy full stop. Same notes, two jobs, zero commitment issues. Handy for anyone quietly building a stash of reliable, ready-to-use blues licks.
How this blues lick in C works
Underneath the swagger, this line lives inside the C blues scale, which is just the C minor pentatonic (C, E♭, F, G, B♭) with one extra troublemaker: the flat five, G♭. That single blue note is the whole personality of the blues, that slightly-wrong, squinting-into-the-sun sound. The lick leans on it, resolves toward C, and lands somewhere your ear reads as "yep, that was blues." Because it starts and ends on strong chord tones, it works equally well as an entrance or an exit, which is why it survives being pasted onto the top or the bottom of almost any twelve-bar solo. If you want the ground it's standing on, park it over an easy twelve bar blues and it clicks instantly.
The useful takeaway: don't just memorise the shape, memorise the gesture. Learn where the blue note falls and how the line curls back to the root, then you can shorten it, stretch it, or move the whole thing to a new key when the singer inevitably says "actually, can we do it in A?" One good lick understood beats ten licks parroted, and if that idea grabs you, my whole guide to lick creation goes deeper.
Play it once as an opener, once as a closer, and congratulations, you now know two solos. Grab the tab and Guitar Pro file on my Patreon and go be suspiciously confident in the key of C.