The Guitar: The History, the Music, the Players 0688019722, 9780688019723

Table of contents :
Legal Page
Contents
About the Authors / Photo Credits
Foreword by David Lindley
The Classical Guitar by Allan Kozinn
Discography: Classical Guitar
The Birth of the Blues by Pete Welding
Discography: Blues Guitar
Jazz: Guitar like a Horn by Pete Welding
Discography: Jazz Guitar
Country Pickin' by Dan Forte
Discography: Country Guitar
Rock: Kick Out the Jams by Gene Santoro
Discography: Rock Guitar
Mail Order Sources
Index

Citation preview

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Tennessee. The music undoubtedly developed in response to the radically altered cultural conditions of the post-Emancipation South, which found many newly-freed blacks suddenly cut off from the famil­ iar, comforting moorings of traditional Southern life and folkways. The blues carne into being as a means of defíning a new black cultural identity and helping the individual to intégrate himself into this new perception. It is for these reasons that the lyrics of blues differ radically from those of earlier black folksong - the worksongs, spirituals, play-party songs, dance, and other social music of the pre-Civil War period - all of which were communal rather than solo musics, designed to provide for the maintenance of the larger community of interests represented by black culture in general. The blues, on the other hand, was almost exclusively a solo music, one that permitted, if it did not encourage, the individual singer-performer to

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express the singularity of his own experiences, perceptions, valúes, and aspirations. It is this, along with the characteristic blues song form, that set the blues apart from other traditional black folksong, for many of the expressive techniques it employed in vocal phrasing and in accompaniment had been used in earlier black folksong practice: tonal ambiguity (the so-called ‘‘blue notes’"); a high degree of interaction between vocal and accompaniment; a supple, syncopated handling of rhythm; a frequent use of mixed meters, most generally an alternation be­ tween duple and treble meters; a similar frequency in the use of modal and scalar patterns in place of conventional harmony, and the like.

Forms The most general form of the blues consists of a three-line verse set to twelve bars of music, each line consisting of four bars, organized by the follow­ ing harmonio scheme: the first four bars are based

BLUES on the tonic (I) chord; the second four are divided in­ to two two-bar segments, the first on the subdominant (IV) chord, the second returning to the tonic; the final four bars are again divided, the first two bars on the dominant-seventh (V) chord, the third on the subdominant, returning to the tonic on the final bar of the verse. The most usual rhyme scheme, AAB, has the first line repeated with no or with very slight variation, while the third line offers either a complementary or contrasting thought that sets off the initial one. The sung portion generally takes up a little bit more than half of each four-bar line, the remainder completed by instrumental commentary in call-and-response fashion (possibly of Af­ rican origin). Simple, succinct, flexible, the blues form has been capable of supporting a wide variety and complexity of thought, and has been varied in any number of ways to accommodate whatever could not be conveniently expressed in the basic twelve-bar, I-IV-V format. It has served, with perfect utility and adaptability, for well more than a century and shows no sign of having outlived its usefulness. There is every indication that a lively tradition of accompanied and unaccompanied lyric song and in­ strumental music very different from those of the older plantation culture of the Eastern Seaboard flourished over broad areas of the Deep South by the early years of the present century. From both the advanced level of its development and its wide geographic distribution there may be inferred an indeterminate period during which the blues was formed, developed, and disseminated. The mobility of large numbers of itinerant blacks, pursuing a variety of occupations (including that of performing music) in the rural South, as well as broad population shifts that took place among blacks in the postEmancipation years, may possibly account for the distribution of the new musical genre over large areas of the South and into the North in a relatively short period of time.

The Guitar Emerges With the genre went the guitar as well, the favored instrument of the blues. Until this period the guitar had been used largely as a parlor instrument for the accompaniment of sentimental and popular songs, but with the appearance of the blues it assumed a far more active and important role in black American folksong practice, eventually completely supplanting the banjo and, to a lesser degree, the fiddle, the two instruments that had dominated black folk mu­

sic until the blues emerged. (The fiddle in time was almost completely eclipsed by the smaller and less expensive harmónica, which took over many of the instrumental functions formerly assigned the fiddle in string bands and other small blues ensembles.)

Commercialization The commercialization of the blues began in 1912 with W.C. Handy^s publication of “Memphis Blues,” an adaptation of a piece he had composed earlier for a Memphis mayoral campaign. It received further Ímpetus through his publication of, among other works, “St. Louis Blues” and “Yellow Dog Rag” in 1914, “Joe Turner Blues” and “Hesitating Blues” in 1915, and “Beale Street Blues” in 1917. When the new genre was allied with the newly emergen! instru­ mental jazz idiom - the vogue for which was initiated in 1917 with the first recordings of this music by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band - coupled with the phenomenal success of singer Mamie Smith’s 1920 recording of “Crazy Blues” and the subsequent launching of what might be described as a blues re­ cording industry, the genre’s dominance was virtually assured. By the 1940s the blues had almost completely eradicated the older forms of black folk­ song in all but the most isolated of black communities.

Picking and Singing The dominance of the genre inevitably led to the dominance of the guitar as well. The practice of using guitar for blues accompaniment seems to have been carried forward with the dissemination of the blues itself, and this pattern was picked up and given additional Ímpetus by the recording of large num­ bers of country blues performers beginning in the mid-1920s. The impact of this development undoubtedly had the effect of intensifying an already strong tendency toward the use of the guitar and away from the older banjo and fiddle and the musi­ cal idioms they traditionally had been associated with, which were shouldered aside by the brash arrival of the blues and its running mate, the guitar. While it is true that the focus of this survey centers on the role of the guitar in blues, it cannot be emphasized too strongly that the blues is first and foremost a vocal music. For the blues listener, songs and their interpretation by emotionally persuasivo vocalists are far more important than the instru­ mental settings accompanying them. This has held true for the music’s entire history. Then too, its themes invariably have dealt with the subject of greatest concern to its listeners: the pleasures and

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