World of Slide Guitar - Stefan Grossman`s Guitar Workshop

World of
Slide Guitar
featuring
featuring
John Fahey,
Fahey,
John
Bob Brozman.
Brozman.
Bob
Mike Auldridge
Auldridge
Mike
Martin Simpson
Simpson
Martin
Debashish Bhattacharya
Bhattacharya
Debashish
WORLD
OF
SLIDE GUITAR
by Mark Humphrey
Photo by Mark Humphrey
On a cool May evening in 1996, I saw a legendary old
Tennessee hillbilly entertain the parents and children of a
largely Hispanic California school with Hawaiian tunes recalled from his youth. A multicultural experience? Yes,
though unselfconsciously so. Pete Kirby had spent over
half a century as ‘Bashful Brother Oswald,’ rube comic,
high harmony singer and Dobro player in Roy Acuff’s
Smoky Mountain Boys. At age 84, he had been summoned
to California by a lifelong Acuff fan, Wayne Brandon, principal of Palmer Way Elementary School in National City, a
few miles north of the Mexican border. Brandon’s elementary school students had spent the previous month studying the history of Dobros, and the company had sent a
representative to honor ‘Os’ for his lifelong contribution to
the instrument. This unassuming and genuinely country
sideman got a star treatment in National City (the mayor
offered the key to the city) rarely afforded him in Nashville: though an Opry regular for 57 years, official ‘membership’ in country’s ‘Mother Church’ was only granted him
in 1995. Under palm trees and a bright moon in an outdoor amphitheater, Oswald, old enough to recall when hillbillies and Hawaiians first made music together, played
his 1935 Dobro as a girl danced a hula to “The Island
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March,” a tune he learned in the early 1930s in Flint, Michigan from a Hawaiian known as Rudy Waikiki. The students
then did traditional Mexican dances to honor their guest
(one featured the balancing of water glasses atop heads).
The juxtaposition of the venerable Tennessean and his Hawaii-drenched slide guitar music with Hispanic California
seemed both sweetly surreal and metaphorically perfect,
a homecoming for a sound washed ashore short of a century ago in California and which went thence to transfix
the world.
While we can’t date its landfall precisely, one event
was pivotal. On February 20th, 1915, the Panama-Pacific
International Exposition opened in San Francisco for a
seven-month run. Ostensibly a celebration of the completion of the Panama Canal, it featured exhibits from across
the U.S. and the world, including the Territory of Hawaii.
The Hawaii Pavilion became the ‘hit’ of the Exposition, offering shows featuring hulas dancers and the music of the
Royal Hawaiian Quartette, a group led by Hawaiian guitarist Keoki Awai. Several other notable Hawaiian guitarists performed at the Exposition, including the vaunted (if
oft-disputed) father of Hawaiian-style guitar, Joseph
Kekuku. Over 13 million visitors came to the Exposition,
and while it wasn’t the first exposure of mainlanders to
Hawaiian music (the Royal Hawaiian Band had been at
the 1895 Chicago Fair), it is considered the watershed
event for the so-called ‘Hawaiian music craze’ (arguably
the first media-driven ‘world music’) of the following 20
years. A torrent of Hawaiian recordings appeared in 1916,
and some estimates suggest more Hawaiian records were
sold on the mainland that year than recordings in any other
genre. By 1917, Hawaiian-style guitars were being offered
by such mail-order catalogs as Sears; the first Hawaiian
guitar method book (written by Keoki Awai) was published in 1916.
The popularity of the Hawaiian guitar style quickly
spread worldwide via record, radio, and touring troupes.
For every Frank Ferera, the Hawaiian-born Portuguese
cowboy who made literally hundreds of records, there were
unrecorded obscurities like Rudy Waikiki who were nonetheless important for inspiring men like Oswald, disseminators of Hawaiian guitar styles into other genres.
3
From The Mark Humphrey Collection
The melding of Hawaiian music with what we now call
country music was widely evident in the 1920s, and Hawaiian guitar sounds were popular and much-emulated
far beyond the American South. Widely-traveled Hawaiian
troupes took it across Europe, Asia, Latin America, and
Australia: recordings of regionally popular music with Hawaiian guitar are everywhere from at least the 1930s (Hawaiian guitars seem to have been particularly popular in
Indonesia).
The relation of the Hawaiian-style guitar to AfricanAmerican blues is more problematic. It is often stated that
4
the bottleneck style is an adaptation of Hawaiian-style
guitar, but this is, at best, a half truth. W.C. Handy heard
the bottleneck style in 1903 at the Tutwiler, Mississippi
train station: “a lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced
plunking a guitar beside me while I slept,” Handy wrote in
his 1941 autobiography, FATHER OF THE BLUES. ”His
clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His
face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he
played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in
the manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used
steel bars. The effect was unforgettable...the weirdest music
I had ever heard.” Handy’s encounter with Delta style slide
guitar predates the earliest known Hawaiian guitar recordings (1909 Edison cylinders by Joseph Kekuku), and surely
no touring Hawaiian troupes had made it to Mississippi by
1903. While some slide-style blues guitarists were indeed
influenced by Hawaiians (Casey Bill Weldon was dubbed
‘the Hawaiian Guitar Wizard’), there’s good reason to believe the blues slide style is essentially African in origin.
One-string bow instruments are common in Africa, especially the west coast and Congo regions from which slaves
were taken. The musical bow is essentially a hunting bow;
its pitch is varied in a number of ways, including sliding a
hard object (such as a stick or a knife) along its length.
According to Dr. Dave Evans’ “Afro-American OneStringed Instruments,” (WESTERN FOLKLORE, 1971),
“There is even one report of a genuine ‘bottleneck’ technique: a member of the Mtende tribe of Kenya used a gourd
resonator attached to his bow and the broken-off neck of
this gourd as a slider worn on the middle finger of his left
hand.”
In Hawaii, however, there is no parallel tradition to explain the origin of Hawaiian guitar. Chordophones were
entirely imports to the islands; guitars probably appeared
with the vaqueros brought from Mexico to thin out cattle
herds in the 1830s. Portugese laborers may have introduced steel-string guitars in the 1860s. Hawaii’s ‘slack key’
style is believed to have emerged in the 1880s, and ‘slack
key’ elements (not the least of them chordal ‘open’ tunings)
contributed much to the evolution of Hawaiian guitar. A
provocative article by South African steel guitarist Kealoha
Life, “Dawn of the Steel Guitar” (GUITAR PLAYER, April
5
1972), suggests Swedish and Norse seamen entertained
themselves and Hawaiian natives with dulcimers fretted
with quills. Playing guitar lap style and fretting with a hard
object may have been a native attempt to emulate the
dulcimer’s sound. Life further suggests contact with Middle
and Northern European sailors and such instruments as
the zither may have influenced the Hawaiian guitar’s tuning and fingerstyle approach while the dulcimer surely influenced the later construction of ‘hollow-box neck’ guitars such as the Weissenborn.
If we believe the legends concerning the Hawaiian
guitar’s origins attached to Joseph Kekuku, the whole thing
was an accident. In one account, Kekuku drops his comb
on his guitar, is intrigued by the sound, and begins (around
1894) fretting with the back of his comb. (A variant of the
comb story also brings a Honolulu barber, William Bradley, to claim inventing Hawaiian guitar.) In another account, a pocket knife falls on Kekuku’s strings, and in yet
another, Kekuku drops his guitar on railroad tracks and is
smitten by the steel-on-steel slide wail; picturesque tales
of clumsiness transformed into serendipitous discovery.
There is good reason to doubt Kekuku was the first guitarist in the Hawaiian style (for one thing, it’s believed to have
been played at King Kalahau’s 1886 Jubilee Celebration
by one Gabriel Davion, of whom more later), but another
chapter of Kekuku’s legend (one which shows him as more
willful than accident prone) bears repeating: in this account, he often played with a violinist cousin and was envious of the sliding glissandos possible on a fretless instrument. This led him to experiment with sundr y ways of
getting a violin-like tone on guitar by fretting with a comb,
a glass, and eventually the steel bar he made in the school
shop of the Kamehameha School for Boys.
Kekuku’s triumph over the tonal limitations of the fretted guitar illustrates a thread common to the many approaches to slide guitar evident in this video. The slide
style allows a guitarist to approximate the fluid tone of the
violin and, even more importantly, the human voice. The
vocal quality of slide guitar is everywhere evident in its
many variants: in the Hawaiian approach and its country
derivatives; in the African-American bottleneck blues style
and its gospel relative where slide guitar often acts anti6
phonally as a second voice; certainly in the Indian classical style in which the instrumental approximation of vocal
nuances (called gayaki ang) is developed to a fine art. So
for all the evident contrast in the performances on this
video, each of these artists has variously honed a unique
voice with which to sing through his guitar.
Bob Brozman
The Hawaiian guitarists who came to ‘jazz age’ America
quickly adapted their style to perform popular mainland
music as well as more traditional sounds. Vaudeville was
still going strong, and instrumentalists who were showmen
with broad repertoires were much in demand. Bob Brozman
is a contemporary vaudevillian who balances an archivist’s
reverence for the past with a showman’s knack for wowing an audience.
Brozman, 42, came to Hawaiian music by way of the
blues and his fascination with National guitars. “Saw one
when I was 13 and that was it,” Brozman says of Nationals. He got his first a year later (a 1933 Style O which he
still plays) and sought out any albums with Nationals
prominent on the covers. “I just basically followed the music
that was played on Nationals and kept going deeper and
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wider,” says Brozman, who took a left turn from Son House
and Bukka White when he discovered Sol Hoopii and similar Hawaiian guitar wizards.
In the early seventies, the New York native studied
music at Washington University in St. Louis while working
in a trio called String Bean, Jelly Roll and Trash Can.
Brozman’s honed his chops playing vintage blues, hokum
and ragtime while traveling the country as a street musician. His scholarly side found him writing a senior thesis
about the musical connection between pioneering Delta
bluesmen Charley Patton and Tommy Johnson. All the
while, he sought out National guitars and vintage blues,
ragtime, jazz and Hawaiian recordings. His labor as researcher and collector would eventually yield rich fruit: five
reissue albums of Hawaiian guitar classics recorded between 1915 and 1935 produced by Brozman for the
Rounder and Folklyric labels and the 300-page book, THE
HISTORY AND ARTISTRY OF NATIONAL RESONATOR INSTRUMENTS (Centerstream – dist.Hal Leonard International). Additionally, the 1989 album, THE TAU MOE FAMILY; REMEMBERING THE SONGS OF OUR YOUTH (Rounder
6028) found Brozman working with survivors of Hawaiian
guitar’s classic era in a recreation of their 1929 recording
session. The collaboration was prompted, improbably
enough, when Tau Moe himself contacted Brozman to request one of his albums!
Brozman moved to California in the mid-Seventies and
performed in situations as varied as accompanying countr y singer Lacy J.Dalton and per forming as par t of
R.Crumb’s Cheap Suit Serenaders. Dubbed “the thinking
man’s slide guitarist” by France’s GUITAR & BASS MAGAZINE, Brozman has since continued his authoritative explorations of vintage slide styles while venturing boldly into
virgin terrain: he recently completed the score of a French
film, IMUHAR, with North African musicians and describes
the soundtrack (to be released by Sony) as “mixed-up
Middle Eastern, Algerian pop and bluesy slide guitar stuff.”
Articulate and opinionated, Brozman offers provocative observations on what drives him musically: “The
confluence of the first and third worlds is where all the
great music happened,” he says. “When people say, ‘Why
are you playing all these different kinds of music?’
8
I explain the connection is one of colonial exploitation, political oppression, and how the oppressed rise above all
that through music. Not that I’m at all political in my music, I just think it’s interesting how colonization created
music. I don’t do the ‘I’m sorry I’m a white guy’ routine. I
am what I am. In America, being Jewish isn’t exactly like
being invited to white country club, either.”
Brozman opens our dvd with a sprightly showpiece,
“Hawaiian Melodies,” which happens to be among the earliest recorded ‘stops out’ Hawaiian guitar instrumentals.
In 1913, the Hawaiian Quintette’s Walter Kolomoku waxed
a version of it for the Victor Talking Machine Company.
Brozman performs it on a 1931 Style 3 National Tricone in
open G tuning (from bottom to top, D-G-D-G-B-D). He
describes the piece as “in the late 1920s style of playing,
sort of just before the Sol Hoopi style.”
“Twilight Echoes” is a dreamy piece learned from pioneering multi-instrumentalist Roy Smeck. Brozman performs it on a 1920s Weissenborn Hawaiian guitar in
Smeck’s E7th tuning: G#-B-D-G#-B-E. “The 4th string D
is higher than the third and second strings,” says Brozman.
“I used it in a soundtrack for an Australian documentar y
by Dennis O’Rourke called ‘Half Life.’ It’s a documentary
about American nuclear testing in the Bikini Islands and
how it really screwed over the people there.”
Brozman’s final exposition of vintage Hawaiian styles
is a standard of the genre, “Moana Chimes.” Brozman calls
it “the quintessential ethnic Hawaiian tune. If you can understand that tune, you understand Hawaiian music, because of the odd measures and some of the bar techniques.
It’s a real antiquated style of playing. I don’t want to sound
obnoxious, but I’m basically the last living practitioner of
that style.” Here Brozman plays a 1929 Style 4 National
Tricone in open G tuning.
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Debashish Bhattacharya
Photo by Mark Humphrey
In the 19th century, the guitar arrived in Hawaii and
new approaches to the instrument – slack key and Hawaiian slide style guitar – were innovated by indigenous musicians. More recently, something similar has happened to
the guitar in India. For a half century or better, Hawaiian
style guitar has been popular in film soundtracks (‘filmi
music’) and related popular and light classical music.
Nearly 40 years ago, Pandit Brij Bhushan Kabra began
experimenting with North India’s classical music on an
archtop guitar modified for slide playing. Kabra’s example
inspired others, and today a guitar adapted to the subtleties of Hindustani music joins the sitar and sarod as an
accepted and highly expressive medium for one of the
world’s great art musics.
The background for this movement again leads us to
the worldwide ‘Hawaiian music craze’ which followed World
War I. The popularity of Hawaiian recordings didn’t bypass India; nor did touring Hawaiian troupes (Brozman’s
friend Tau Moe was there in the mid-1930s and returned
during World War II). Local performers of Hawaiian music
followed; a Calcutta-based group called the Aloha Boys
was formed in 1938 and quickly became popular recording artists and performers on All-India Radio.
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The eventual absorption of elements of Hawaiian music
and the adaptation of Hawaiian-guitar style was inevitable
in a culture which had already made uniquely Indian use
of such European instruments as the violin and harmonium.
While the recent history of slide guitar in India can be
clearly traced to Hawaiian influence, there are those who
believe it was really a return voyage for a style which emanated from India. The following statement from Kealoha
Life’s 1972 GUITAR PLAYER article, “Dawn of the Steel
Guitar,” offers much for etymologists, ethnologists and
ethnomusicologists to dispute, but is nonetheless noteworthy: “Four thousand years ago in India there existed an
instrument called the swarabat sitar, literally ‘plectrum
guitar,’ since it was plucked with a quill,” Life writes. “Like
its Japanese counterpart, the bugako biwa, it was played
with a hardwood roller bar...The Bihari race of Eastern
Bengal, a Polynesian-speaking people, migrated to the
Pacific via Java...Though they brought no musical instruments with them, their folk-memory may have subconsciously precipitated the invention of the steel guitar.”
Whether or not there is anything in this, we know that
an instrument played with a bamboo slide, the ekatantri
(‘one string’), was popular in medieval India, and folk variants of it have persisted into this century. The slide style is
also applied to two rare but, in this context, significant
Indian concert instruments, North India’s vichitra vina and
South India’s gottuvadyam (or chitraveena). A slide approach to plucked chordophones was long established in
India before the Hawaiians arrived, and in fact an Indian is
among the claimants for primacy among Hawaiian style
guitarists. Gabriel Davion is said to have been kidnapped
from India by a sea captain and subsequently jumped ship
in Honolulu. He is reported to have been heard playing
guitar with a pocketknife on a single string (shades of the
ekatantri) as early as 1884, and is believed to have popularized the style by his performance at King Kalahaua’s
Jubilee Celebration in November 1886.
Seventy–two years later, Brij Bhushan Kabra spotted
a guitar in a shop in Ahmedabad. The shopkeeper wanted
300 rupees for it, 50 rupees more than Kabra had. He
turned to walk away, saying, “Money saved.” The shopkeeper shouted, “Wait! You come back.” A bargain was
11
struck and Kabra, son of a patron of classical music and
brother of Damodar Lal, Ali Akbar Khan’s first disciple,
bought himself both an instrument and a dilemma. Given
his family background, if he were to play music surely it
must be India’s classical music. Was this even possible on
guitar?
Encouraged by Ali Akbar Khan, he learned that it indeed was. The influence of the fretless sarod was echoed
in Kabra’s voicing of Indian classical music on slide-style
guitar. (Khansahib’s training links Kabra and his disciples,
Debashish Bhattacharya among them, with India’s most
esteemed musical lineage, or gharana, the Senia Maihar
Gharana.) Kabra’s 1958 impulse buy was an archtop Hofner, a German copy of Lloyd Loar’s violin-inspired guitar
design, first seen in Gibson’s 1922 L-5. It may be argued
that the archtop f-hole guitar, with its dual capacities for
projection and mellowness, is well-suited to Indian music.
Like Kekuku’s supposed dropped comb discovery of Hawaiian slide style, this marriage of instrument and music
seems to have been a happy accident: such a guitar was
available when the Segovia of this school was seeking an
instrument, so today such guitars are the standard among
Hindustani slide guitarists.
Debashish Bhattacharya, 33, began playing a roundhole six string guitar. A child prodigy, he was performing
on All-India Radio by age seven. Bhattacharya studied
Western music at an early age before immersing himself
wholeheartedly in Hindustani music via studies with some
of Calcutta’s most prominent sitarists, among them Pandit
Manilal Nag. He adroitly applied their lessons to guitar and
in 1984 became the first guitarist to receive the President’s
Award of India.
In 1986, Bhattacharya began intensive studies with
Kabra. It was during this time that Kabra gave him the
modified Hofner guitar seen in this video. Bhattacharya
modified it further: Kabra’s three primary playing strings
(tuned D-A-D) became five (usually tuned A-D-F#-A-D).
Inspired by sarod design, Bhattacharya added three ‘supporting strings’ (strings strummed for emphasis) to the left
of the primary strings and two chikaris (tonic drone strings
used rhythmically in a manner similar to a banjo’s fifth
string) to their right (chikaris traditionally are on the left
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of the playing strings on Indian instruments). Finally, he
added the dozen sympathetic strings which provide the
echoic overtones common to many Indian stringed instruments. “It is impor tant to Indianize the guitar,” says
Bhattacharya, and working from his 1985 sketches with
Calcutta luthier Bhabasindhu Biswas, he did that dramatically. Kabra dubbed his disciple’s creation Dev Veena, “the
veena (stringed instrument) which has been sent to us by
God (Dev).”
Bhattacharya is accompanied in this video by tabla
master Kumar Bose and Sutapa Bhattacharya, his sister,
on tambura. He begins with a folk tune from Assam, “Song
of Life.” Widely popular, it is associated with Assamese
tea growers, who dance to it. “The tune is so lively!” says
Bhattacharya. “When I first went to Gauhati, Assam, I
played for a group of schoolchildren. They didn’t know me
and I didn’t know them. So how to communicate? How to
get their heart? Somebody told me, ‘Play something that
can make them happy.’ So I started ‘Song of Life,’ and
you can feel 2,000 boys in a big hall, all clapping. It was
great! The lyric is fantastic. Life is like a man. He is the
symbol of life. He is asking people, ‘Come! Come dancing. Come running. I came here to see your glorious face,
your smile.’ This is the real song of life.”
The second performance is a Dhun set to Raga Kirwani.
Dhun is a type of light air or melody with a repeated theme
and improvised variations. It may be based on a folk tune
or a popularization of a classic raga. Kirwani is a South
Indian (Carnatic) raga which has been integrated into
Hindustani music by such influential instrumentalists as
Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan. Its basic scale, with a
flat third and flat sixth, you may recognize as our Harmonic minor scale. Bhattacharya’s five primary strings are
tuned to D minor for Kirwani: A-D-F-A-D. His extensive
use of harmonics is beautifully guitaristic, while the singing quality of his bar work recalls the emotional and highly
ornamented Thumri vocal style. Bhattachar ya is the son
of classical vocalists, and he continues to study with one
of India’s finest, Ajoy Chakraborty.
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Mike Auldridge
Never underestimate
the power of bloodlines.
In Febr uar y 1928,
Ellswor th T. Cozzens
became the first Hawaiian guitarist to accompany the vaunted ‘father of country music,’
Jimmie Rodgers, on
record. Cozzens played
several instr uments
(standard and Hawaiian
guitars, mandolin and
banjo) and wrote songs
besides. Rodgers waxed
two of his songs, including one destined to
become a sentimental
countr y
standard,
“Treasures Untold.” Ten
years after Cozzens’
session with Rodgers, his nephew, Mike Auldridge, was
born. As a child, Auldridge heard his uncle play at family
gatherings and was rather unimpressed by the old man’s
music. In time, of course, that changed, and this brilliant
Dobroist would eventually title one of his albums TREASURES UNTOLD.
Uncle Ellsworth’s were the first of many recordings
Rodgers would make with Hawaiian style guitarists; the
mildly risque “Everybody Does It in Hawaii” is said to have
been quite popular in India! Rodgers’ familiarity with Hawaiian music predates his recording career: a 1925 photo
shows the future ‘Blue Yodeler’ as part of a ‘Hawaiian Show
& Carnival’ (complete with Hawaiian style guitarist) which
toured the Midwest in 1925. His recordings with Hawaiian
guitar accompanists helped ingrain their sound into the
music we now call country. It would be hard to imagine it
without the presence of some sort of slide guitar, be it
acoustic or a pedal steel.
The Dobro is a kind of ‘missing link’ between the two.
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Like the National, it is a resonator guitar invented by the
Dopyera Brothers in Los Angeles. The Dobro appeared late
in 1928, selling for $27.50. Cheaper than Nationals, Dobros
quickly became widely popular, and by 1937 the company
was making as many as 55 guitars a day. The rise of electric lap steels and the advent of metal shortages as America
tooled up for World War II ended Dobro production little
over a decade after it began. The ‘missing link’ instrument
might have been largely forgotten if it weren’t for its signature presence in Roy Acuff’s Smoky Mountain Boys;
Bashful Brother Oswald’s crying Dobro lines were prominently featured on record and radio by Acuff, who was at
the height of his popularity during World War II. Oswald
kept the Dobro sound alive in traditional country music
and influenced its subsequent use in bluegrass.
Growing up in the Washington, D.C. area, Mike
Auldridge heard lots of traditional country and bluegrass
in the 1950s. He was enthralled by the Dobro playing of
Josh Graves, best known for his work in Flatt & Scruggs
Foggy Mountain Boys but working with Wilma Lee and
Stoney Cooper on Richmond, Virginia radio station WRVA
when Auldridge first heard him. Auldridge had been playing guitar since age 13, but finding a Dobro was another
matter: when he began searching for one at age 16, they
were nearly 20 years out of production. Auldridge’s first
resonator instrument was an old National, but he preferred
the sound of a Gibson J-45 which he played Hawaiian style
with a raised nut. Finally, a letter to Graves led him to buy
a Dobro from his idol in 1961.
Drafted that same year, Auldridge’s professional musical career didn’t begin in earnest until 1969, when he
joined Emerson and Waldron and began to find his own
distinct Dobro sound. “The only reason I have a style,”
Auldridge told Bobby Wolfe (“Mike Auldridge: Mr. Smooth
& Tasteful,” BLUEGRASS UNLIMITED, April 1992), “is that
until I joined a band in 1969, I had tried to play like Buck
Graves but I knew I wasn’t quite getting it. We were in the
studio cutting our first Emerson and Waldron album and I
had to come up with a break. I asked myself what Josh
would do and it dawned on me that I had no idea what
Josh would do. So, I then said, ‘What am I going to do?’
That was the beginning of my style. It just happened. If I
15
had to describe my style, I’d have to say that tone and
smoothness are the important things to me. Tone is everything.”
Auldridge’s signature tone was a cornerstone of the
Seldom Scene’s sound for more than 20 years (he joined
the band in 1971). In 1992, he formed Chesapeake, the
group he performs with in this video. Bassist T. Michael
Coleman, singer/guitarist Moondi Klein are also Seldom
Scene alumni; mandolinist Jimmy Gaudreau was long associated with the Tony Rice Unit. “In this band I never stop
thinking, and that’s why I love this band,” Auldridge told
Rick Henry ( “Chesapeake,” BLUEGRASS UNLIMITED,
December 1994). “The arrangements are so complex that
you can’t let your mind wander for a second or you’re lost.”
Auldridge and Chesapeake open their per formances
with a Western Swing standard, “Deep Water,” written by
Fred Rose and recorded by Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys in 1947. “It’s a song I’ve known for years and played
on pedal steel and I just put it over on the Dobro,” says
Auldridge. He performs on an eight-string Dobro made by
R.Q. Jones and uses a C6th tuning (bottom to top: A-C-EG-A-E-D). The medley, “House of the Rising Sun/Walk
Don’t Run,” is performed on a six string made by Ivan
Guernsey and is in standard Dobro G tuning: G-B-D-G-BD, called ‘high bass’ tuning in old Hawaiian method books.
“I’ve been doing that as a medley onstage for years,” says
Auldridge. “‘House of the Rising Sun’ is on my first album
in 1971. When I did that first album, (fiddler) Vassar
Clements and Josh Graves were on that album with me. I
think we were in the studio kicking around ideas, and that
came up: ‘Let’s do that.’ We were looking for that type of
song. ‘Walk Don’t Run’ I think was on my second album
on Takoma. It dawned on me one night that we could run
‘em together, and we’ve been doing it ever since. I don’t
know if I could play one without the other now. ‘Walk Don’t
Run’ I got from a jazz guitar player named Johnny Smith,
but it was really a hit for the Ventures. I had first heard it
by Johnny Smith before the Ventures did it, though I kind
of did it like the Ventures.”
If Auldridge’s eclectic forays afar of bluegrass leave
any doubts about his roots, he brings it home with “Spanish Grass,” an Auldridge original which has become a stan
16
dard among bluegrass Dobro players and which finds him
again picking the six string in open G. “‘Spanish Grass’
I’ve recorded a couple of times,” says Auldridge, “first when
I was with Emerson & Waldron in the late 1960s. It was
one of the first instrumentals I ever wrote or recorded, probably about 1969. That’s another one I’ve been playing ever
since, the kind of tune that fits the bluegrass field.” By
contrast, “Wave” (on the eight string in C6th tuning) washed
up from the bossa nova field. “‘Wave’ is a song that’s on
‘The Dobro Sessions’ album that was a Grammy winner
last year,” says Auldridge. “As far as I know that’s the only
recording on Dobro of that song, an Antonio Carlos Jobim
jazz standard from the 1960s.” The second half of
Chesapeake’s second medley, “Little Rock Getaway,” is a
swing era standard composed in 1933 by pianist Joe
Sullivan and popularized by the Bob Crosby Orchestra.
“I first heard it done by Jim and Jesse as a bluegrass instrumental,” says Auldridge, who performs it with his characteristic relaxed drive on his C6th eight-string.
Martin Simpson
“The great thing
about the slide is
that it emulates the
voice so well,” says
Mar tin Simpson.
“That’s what makes
it so appealing, as
far as I’m concerned. It was originally the blues,
that’s where I first
heard it. But its relationship to the human voice is what
has always drawn
me in and kept me
coming back to it.
Now, the mor e I
play slide the less
like anybody else
17
I sound and the more I do it the more I find in it. I’m still as
fascinated by the sound as I was when I first heard it.”
What were the first slide sounds Simpson heard?
“Probably Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson on Sam
Charters’s COUNTRY BLUES,” he says, “so the first two
slide tunes I ever heard were ‘You’re Gonna Need Somebody On Your Bond’ and ‘Preachin’ Blues,’ which is a fairly
heavy way to start. I was 12 or something.” Simpson was
first exposed to traditional music in Scunthorpe,
Lincolnshire, England: “When I was seven years old,” he
told interviewer Paul Hostetter, “we learned ‘Barbara Allen’
in a music class and I think at that point I was lost.”
Simpson’s passion for the British (and Anglo-American)
ballad tradition is still evident in his music, as is his equal
passion for American blues.
Simpson began playing guitar at 12 and was kicking
around the English folk pub circuit while still in his teens.
“There isn’t really anybody else of my generation that came
through as a guitar player the way I did,” the 43 year old
Simpson told Hostetter (“Traveling Man,” ACOUSTIC GUITAR, September/October 1994).” The previous generation,
in performing terms, is Nic Jones and Dick Gaughan and
Martin Carthy and those people. Then there’s a little space,
and then there’s me. I do feel somewhat like I’m holding a
torch for the English guitar.”
As the Young Turk of the English folk scene in the late
1970s, Simpson was much in demand as an accompanist,
and worked for nearly seven years with the superb singer
June Tabor. He also worked in the Albion Band with Ashley
Hutchings, the central figure in English folk-rock. “I love
accompanying,” says Simpson, “It’s an incredible art.” The
ace accompanist wed singer Jessica Ruby Simpson; the
couple moved to the U.S. in the late 1980s.
Since then, the Simpsons have been busy fronting their
Band of Angels while the venturesome guitarist of the family
has done everything from an album of airs (LEAVES OF
LIFE, Shanachie) to one of blues (SMOKE AND MIRRORS,
Thunderbird). “I’ve always been quite possibly too eclectic for my own good,” he admits, “although I think I’m managing to make more sense of all the different threads that
I have.” Following Martin’s metaphor, Michael Parrish
writes: “The thread that runs through all of Martin Simp18
son’s work is a passion to ferret out the emotional core
that makes traditional music so compelling—difficult to
intellectualize, but immediately recognizable on a visceral
level.” (“Martin Simpson: From Scunthorpe to Santa Cruz
in Search of One Really Good Note,” SING OUT!).
Simpson’s segment of this dvd opens with “Greenfields
of Canada,” which he describes as “one of those exquisite,
sinuous Irish tunes. It’s really a vocal tune. I’ve been playing it for 20 years. It’s in C minor tuning, which is C-G-CG-C-Eb. That’s played on a Bourgeois Blues made by Dana
Bourgoise. It’s a ladder-braced koa guitar.” Simpson uses
the same instrument to play “Great Change Since I’ve Been
Born.” He says, “That’s in open D major, D-A-D-F#-A-D.
It’s actually a tune that Gary Davis recorded in the 1930s
in absolutely typical Rev. Gary Davis style; standard tuning with a lot of chord changes. But it has that wonderful
gospel feel and melody to it. All I did was try to emulate
Blind Willie Johnson a little bit.”
Simpson calls his final entry, the Fred McDowell-influenced “Masco Blues,” “just an improvisation in G tuning, D-G-D-G-B-D.” The sole exponent here of the bottleneck slide style offers an anecdote about his slide which,
if not quite on a par with the Joseph Kekeku yarns, is at
least illustrative of an inventive Southern spirit.
“That particular one was made by a friend of a friend,
David Sheppard in Greensboro, North Carolina,” says
Simpson. “He and I were talking about slides one day, and
a guy sitting there listening to our conversation said, ‘Let
me see that; I could do that.’ This guy works on motorcycles and turns engine blocks. He went away and he
started to experiment with stainless steel slides. He sent
the first one and then another one. We started to refer to it
as ‘the slide of the month club.’ The one that I used on that
is one of my absolute favorites that the guy made. It has
parallel side on the outside, but on the inside it really fits
your finger beautifully. It’s heavier at the playing end than
at your hand end. Actually, I tried to get (slide makers)
Latch Lake to make some like it, but for them to tool up to
make something like it in stainless steel, the end result
would have cost something like a hundred bucks!” Leave
it to the shade tree mechanics, Martin.
19
John Fahey
Photo by Anna Grossman
The Washington, D.C. area nurtured both a traditional
country/bluegrass scene and a folk/blues scene in the
1950s. Mike Auldridge and John Fahey were both tuning
up for their appointed roles in ‘the world of slide guitar’ at
the same time and place: Fahey was born in the D.C. suburb of Takoma Park February 28, 1939; Auldridge December 30, 1938 in Washington, D.C. Though their paths were
wildly divergent, Auldridge’s first solo albums would appear on Fahey’s pioneering independent label, Takoma,
which also unleashed Leo Kottke on the world. “John kind
of invented the audience for solo steel-string guitar and
the industry behind it,” Kottke told Dale Miller. “Without
John it wouldn’t have happened.” Fahey’s influence was
pervasive not only among the so-called ‘American primitive guitarists’ he recorded for Takoma but among most
acoustic American guitar soloists who came of age in the
1960s and 1970s. “I was influenced by Fahey in learning
how to use open tunings,” Bob Brozman told Mark Hunter.
“What I like about Fahey’s stuff is that he really explores
harmonic movement in an open tuning – the idea of moving one note against a drone.”
Fahey’s legend is that of an enigmatic maverick and
20
survivor. He made his first self-produced album, BLIND
JOE DEATH, in 1958 for $300. Always the odd man out,
he performed his unique pastiches of blues, hillbilly and
neoclassical guitar to bemused folk audiences in the era
of protest singers. His syncopated rendition of the Episcopal hymn, “In Christ There Is No East or West,” became a
fingerpicker’s standard. He went South to ferret out preWar bluesmen Skip James and Bukka White; he wrote a
master’s thesis on bluesman Charley Patton; he studied
existential philosophy and made albums with titles like
DANCE OF DEATH AND OTHER PLANTATION FAVORITES.
To his great chagrin, this self-proclaimed ‘existential guitarist’ would be credited with inspiring the ‘new age’ guitar
school embodied by Will Ackerman, Alex de Grassi, and
Michael Hedges.
Today, Fahey is being called the ‘father of alternative
guitar’ in some circles, which suits him better. After a few
fallow years he’s back on the tour trail, often performing
with young ‘unplugged’ acts to audiences in their twenties
who regard Fahey as elder statesman. He’s recording
again, experimenting and pushing the envelope of acoustic guitar sounds.
Fahey’s performances here show the traditional roots
of his eclectic style. “Steel Guitar Rag,” he told Michael
Brooks in a 1972 GUITAR PLAYER interview, is the tune
that first started him playing slide style. “The first version
I heard sounded pretty easy, open D tuning (D-A-D-F#-AD),” said Fahey. It was recorded by Louisville, Kentucky’s
Sylvester Weaver for OKeh on November 2, 1923, making
it the earliest known ragtime-blues slide guitar recording.
The tune quickly entered the repertoire of ‘hillbilly’ guitarists: West Virginia’s Jess Johnston and Roy Harvey
waxed a version for Gennett in 1930, and electric steel
player Leon McAuliffe made it a Western Swing standard
when he recorded it will Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys in 1936.
The second piece Fahey performs is in open G tuning,
a tuning he learned from Elizabeth Cotten. This bluesy “Untitled” piece Fahey calls “Unfinished: most of it’s improvised.” His square neck guitar he describes simply as “a
$40 guitar handmade by some guy in Minneapolis.” Like
his fellow D.C. native, Mike Auldridge, Fahey uses the
Stevens steel bar, long a favorite with Dobro players.
21
Bob Brozman
Hawaiian Melodies
Twilight Echoes
Moana Chimes
Debashish Bhattacharya
Song Of Life
Dhun Set To Raga Kirwani
Mike Auldridge
Deep Water
Medley: House Of The Rising Sun
Walk Don't Run
John Fahey
Martin Simpson
Greenfields Of Canada
Great Change Since I've Been Born
Masco Blues
John Fahey
Steel Guitar Rag
Discarded
Mike Auldridge
Debashish Bhattacharya
Martin Simpson
Spanish Grass
Medley: Wave
Little Rock Getaway
This dvd reveals a world of sounds – American, Hawaiian, Indian, English – vibrant with
emotional nuances conjured from a cold piece
of steel. The sound of slide guitar evokes auditory landscapes: the drowsy expanses of Paris,
Texas or the heated intensity of the Mississippi
Delta. But as the 14 superb performances here
demonstrate, it can also paint India’s Assamese highlands, Hawaiian beaches
or the “Greenfields of Canada”.
Bob Brozman’s mastery of vintage acoustic
Hawaiian guitar styles offers a lively history lesson in sounds popularized after World War I and
influential for decades thereafter. Debashish
Bhattacharya showcases the relatively recent integration of slide guitar into Indian classical and
folk music. Mike Auldridge, accompanied by his
band, Chesapeake, drives his Dobro everywhere
from East Coast bluegrass to Western Swing. Martin Simpson demonstrates the style's blues roots
as well as its adaptability to Anglo-Celtic music.
And premier “American Primitive” guitarist John
Fahey shows the simple strength in slide-driven
blues and old-time country.
Vestapol 13061
Running Time: 58 minutes • Color
Photo by Anna Grossman
Nationally distributed by Rounder Records,
One Camp Street, Cambridge, MA 02140
Representation to Music Stores
by Mel Bay Publications
© 2004 Vestapol Productions
A division of Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop, Inc.
ISBN: 1-57940-990-3
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