Acoustic Guitar 279.pdf

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CONTENTS

L—R Bob Carpenter, Jeff Hanna, Emmylou Harris, Jimmie Fadden (background), Jimmy Ibbotson

‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken did not come about by magic. It took a lot of hard work, lucky breaks, and a great career risk for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.’ p. 24

Features 18 Fresh Americana Quiles & Cloud blend old and new in acoustic collaboration By Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

Special Focus Texas Bluegrass 40 Happy Trails Robert Earl Keen takes a detour into bluegrass

Miscellany 10 The Front Porch 96 Marketplace 97 Ad Index

By Mark Kemp

20 Bluegrass Band of Brothers How the Gibson Brothers got their groove By Pat Moran

46 Their Roots Are Showing 5 Texans who are helping the spirit of bluegrass evolve

24 The ‘Circle’ Unbroken Celebrating the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s enduring classic

48 Lucky 7 Don’t miss these Texas bluegrass events

By Mark Kemp

32 Welcome to the Jungle Instrument makers and players— including Slash—are mesmerized by the Tree By Mark Kemp

March 2016 Volume 26, No. 9, Issue 279 On the Cover Robert Earl Keen Photographer Darren Carroll

AcousticGuitar.com 5

CONTENTS

Martin 00-15E, p. 84

NEWS 13 The Beat The Spirit of John Fahey tour; Chris Isaak goes Nashville 16 Five Minutes With . . . Eclectic flatpicker Jon Stickley PLAY 51 Songcraft Peggy Seeger reflects on her Child Ballads collection 54 The Basics Unlocking I-IV-V progressions 58 Weekly Workout How to be a better accompanist 62 Woodshed Rag pickin’ lesson, Pt. 2 Songs to Play 66 Ruby’s Eyes Tommy Emmanuel’s fingerstyle ballad 70 Will the Circle Be Unbroken The sad but uplifting perennial 72 O the Wind and Rain A Child Ballad murder tale AG TRADE 77 Shoptalk Staten Island’s Mandolin Brothers up for sale 6 March 2016

78 Makers & Shakers Custom builder Linda Manzer 82 Guitar Guru The glue quandary 84 Review: Martin 00-15E Vintage look, modern electronics 86 Review: Taylor 326e Baritone packs a wallop 88 Review: Blueridge BG-1500E A super jumbo with a modern twist 90 Review: L.R. Baggs Session Acoustic DI Impressive direct input box and comp/EQ pedal 98 Great Acoustics Milk Carton Kids: In perfect harmony MIXED MEDIA 93 Playlist The Allman Brothers’ Idlewild South gets a deluxe reissue; also, Eric Bibb and J.J. Milteau’s Lead Belly’s Gold, Punch Brothers’ The Wireless EP, and Nouveaux Honkies’ Blues for Country

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Shawn Colvin In the Studio

Enjoy a recent Acoustic Guitar Session with singer and guitarist Shawn Colvin. Visit acousticguitar.com/sessions to check out AG’s interview/ performance series featuring Richard Thompson, Ani DiFranco, Seth Avett, Peter Rowan, Della Mae, Bruce Cockburn, Valerie June, Julian Lage, Eliza Gilkyson, Preston Reed, Laurie Lewis, and many others. GET ‘ACOUSTIC GUITAR’ IN YOUR INBOX Your daily dose of Acoustic Guitar is waiting. Enjoy reviews and demos of the latest guitars and gear, instructional videos, guitar technique tips, acoustic guitar news, special offers, and so much more. Sign up for Acoustic Guitar Notes and we’ll email you articles and videos that will help you improve your playing as well as keeping you connected to the acoustic guitar world. Acousticguitar.com/acoustic-guitar-notes

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THE FRONT PORCH AcousticGuitar.com • AcousticGuitarU.com

CONTENT DEVELOPMENT Editorial Director & Editor Greg Cahill Editor at Large Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers Managing Editor Blair Jackson Associate Editor Whitney Phaneuf Copy Editor Anna Pulley Production Manager Hugh O’Connor Contributing Editors Kenny Berkowitz, David Hamburger, Steve James, Orville Johnson, Richard Johnston, Mark Kemp, Pete Madsen, Sean McGowan, Jane Miller, Greg Olwell, Adam Perlmutter, Rick Turner, Doug Young

The roots of Texas bluegrass: The Mayfield Brothers

CREATIVE SERVICES Creative Director Joey Lusterman Senior Designer Brad Amorosino

INTERACTIVE SERVICES Interactive Services Director Lyzy Lusterman Copywriter Kelsey Holt Creative Content Coordinator Tricia Baxter Single Copy Sales Consultant Tom Ferruggia

MARKETING SERVICES Sales Director Cindi Kazarian Sales Managers Amy-lynn Fischer, Ref Sanchez, Greg Sutton Marketing Services Manager Tanya Gonzalez

he Lone State State isn’t the first place you think of when talk turns to bluegrass. But our Texas bluegrass special section, penned by contributing editor Mark Kemp, shows that there’s plenty to consider, from such early pioneers as the Mayfield Brothers to the bluegrass roots of the Dixie Chicks to Robert Earl Keen, a singer-songwriter with his boots planted firmly on the front porch. Keen recorded an excellent bluegrass album last year, Happy Prisoner: The Bluegrass Sessions (woefully absent when the Grammy Award nominations were announced in the fall). He sat down in the AG offices recently to shoot a Sessions video and share a few stories about his love for the genre, as well as the stumbling blocks he’d put in his own path as a bluegrass artist. “I was not comfortable with my voice singing bluegrass,” Keen told Kemp. “[But] I always had an affinity for bluegrass lyrics—the songs themselves, how cool the stories are. So, I eventually worked my way through the idea that I couldn’t do bluegrass, and I invited all these friends of mine to come in and pick with me.”

T

Those friends included former Blue Grass Boy Peter Rowan, longtime friend Lyle Lovett, fiddler Sara Watkins of Nickel Creek, and banjo player Danny Barnes of the Bad Livers. The special section also features a look at five Texas music acts steeped in bluegrass, though not typically associated with that music, and a roundup of seven Lone Star State festivals that feature bluegrass music by regional and national acts. Elsewhere, you’ll find a feature on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 50th anniversary, or to be more precise, the making of their landmark Will the Circle Be Unbroken album; and an article on the Tree, an ancient Honduran mahogany trunk that crashed to the jungle floor decades ago only to find its way into a custom guitar for the rocker Slash, among others. There also is a profile of guitar maker and innovator Linda Manzer, an interview with the legendary folk artist Peggy Seeger, a lesson on being a better accompanist, and much more. Play on. —Greg Cahill

DISTRIBUTED to the music trade by Hal Leonard Corporation (800-554-0626, [email protected]) GOT A QUESTION or comment for Acoustic Guitar’s editors? Send e-mail to [email protected]

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10 March 2016

Except where otherwise noted, all contents ©2016 Stringletter, David A. Lusterman, Publisher.

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14

15

The Beat Chris Isaak goes Nashville

16

NEWS

5 Minutes with . . . The modern bluegrass of Jon Stickley

COURTESY OF VANGUARD RECORDS

The Beat The League of Women Strummers

5 ESSENTIAL TAKOMA ALBUMS

Bukka White Mississippi Blues 1964

John Fahey The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death 1965

Robbie Basho, John Fahey, Max Ochs, Harry Taussig, Bukka White Contemporary Guitar: Spring ’67 1967

John Fahey

THE BEAT

Spirit of John Fahey Tour Members of the legendary Takoma 7 reunite for new tour BY KENNY BERKOWITZ

ack in 1959, guitarist John Fahey took money he’d saved as a gas-station attendant to start the Takoma record label, creating a home not only for his own American primitive recordings, but also for second-generation players. These players shared his love of country blues with a twist and together they reimagined the possibilities of fingerstyle guitar. Now, three of his earliest signings— Toulouse Engelhardt, Peter Lang, and Rick Ruskin—are hitting the road for the Takoma Records Guitar Masters Tour, making stops this spring in Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington. “Fahey was a very strange cat, and you never knew what to expect,” says Engelhardt, who has kept early letters Fahey wrote him.

B

CONT. ON PG. 14

Leo Kottke 6- and 12-String Guitar aka The Armadillo Album 1969

Leo Kottke, Peter Lang & John Fahey Leo Kottke, Peter Lang & John Fahey 1974

AcousticGuitar.com 13

THE BEAT

‘This tour is about John’s dedication to steel-string fingerstyle guitar and the enduring legacy he left behind.’ TOULOUSE ENGELHARDT

“His criticism of my work was brutal, especially for a young, 20-something guitar dreamer. One day, he would say he thought my music was a bunch of crap. Then the next day, he would write again, and say my solos were some of the prettiest stuff he had ever heard. I remember him saying to me, in his funny highpitched vibrato, ‘You’re the next guy, the next gunslinger who will enter the O.K. Corral. You need to keep developing your own style.’”

INTRODUCING THE NEWEST MEMBER OF THE KYSER® QUICK-CHANGE® FAMILY

So Engelhardt did, mixing pop, psychedelia, and the sounds of SoCal beach culture to become “The Segovia of Surf,” while also teaching community-college biology. Lang’s path was equally indirect, recording a ground-breaking album with Fahey and Leo Kottke in 1974 before switching to a career in film animation, struggling with his health, and only recently returning to performance. Only Ruskin has remained in music the entire time, self-releasing albums of gospel and blues, including the new Whatever Happened to Blind Matzoh Leftkowitz?, and running a recording studio in Seattle. “I think [Ruskin] sums it up best for all of us when he says we don’t think like other guitarists,” says Engelhardt, who followed Fahey’s advice to add more tunings, minor keys, and atonality to his music. “As the years went on, I began to realize that John was trying to help me reach my potential. In the end, he was right, and I appreciated him as my mentor. In essence, this tour is about his dedication to steel-string fingerstyle guitar and the enduring legacy he left behind.”

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Patty Griffin, Sara Watkins, and Anaïs Mitchell will hit the road this spring to urge Americans to get out and vote. Teamed up with the nonpartisan organization League of Women Voters, the trio will hit 38 cities throughout the southern and northeastern United States to help fans obtain election and voting information. The Use Your Voice Tour kicks off February 12 in St. Petersburg, Florida, and runs through April 2, ending in Northridge, California. For details, visit lwv.org. —Whitney Phaneuf

SHERYL LOUIS

Chris Isaak

CHRIS ISAAK GOES NASHVILLE For his first album of new songs since 2009, Chris Isaak followed the advice of his friend Stevie Nicks and recorded in Nashville. He’s glad he did, because he got to have breakfast with Robert Plant, work with A-list producers Dave Cobb and Paul Worley, and co-write with Music City hitmakers Michelle Branch, Natalie Hemby, Caitlyn Smith, Gordie Sampson, and James Slater. The album, First Comes the Night, was released on Vanguard in late 2015. “I hardly ever co-write, and I was worried they were going to try to make it country,” says Isaak, talking between episodes of X Factor Australia. “Usually, I’ll just write by myself, because that’s who I’m with. But somebody said, ‘Well, why don’t you try?’ So I did, and had a great experience. I went in with some songwriting ideas and just had fun. Fun writing. Fun recording.” You can hear it, too. In the hell-bent, post-rockabilly “Down in Flames,” Isaak opens with, “Kennedy got it in a Lincoln, Caesar got it in the back/ Somebody told me Hank Williams died in his Cadillac,” a line the singer-songwriter has been carrying around for years. Others are more serious. “The Way Things Really Are” inventories lost love in the line “this broken heart, some photographs/a cancelled check, a couple laughs.”

“I don’t know what exactly that picture is,” says Isaak, “but it’s a dark picture.” First Comes the Night—which peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Top Rock Album chart—is livelier than Isaak’s previous album, Beyond the Sun, his 2011 set of cover songs associated with Memphis and recorded at the city’s famed Sun Studios. More importantly, the new album is a great reminder of everything to love about Isaak. There’s heartache, there’s crooning, and, yes, he’s still aiming for a happy Elvis song. Even though it was recorded in Nashville, the album packs loads of retro style, with all the songs written and recorded on Isaak’s iconic Gibson J-200, a ’90s model with his name written across the top in mother-of-toilet-seat (aka pearloid). “Most of my playing is rhythm, with a few little runs in between when I’m singing,” Isaak says. “I hate it when a band feels like it has two lead guitar players battling each other—I want the rhythm guitar to be closer to the snare drum and the conga than to the lead guitar. “It helps when a singer can accompany himself, because he can punctuate his rhythm in a way that it’s really hard for another person to do. I’m pretty good at getting the rhythm I want, but when it comes to making Metallicathrashing leads, forget it. I’m a terrible leadguitar player, I could never play lead in somebody’s band,” Isaak adds. “But I wish someone would ask me.” —K.B. AcousticGuitar.com 15

Jon Stickley Trio Lost at Last Self-released

AUSTIN STEINSICK AT PHISHBONE

5 MINUTES WITH...

What do you love about Tony Rice? His music is full of style and personality. There are so many great flatpickers out there, and some even have better tone than Tony had in his prime. But there’s something about Tony’s combination of attitude and technical prowess that’s cool and rocking and hardcore and still really beautiful at the same time. He has this beautiful tone, played hard.

Bluegrass on His Mind Jon Stickley is steeped in Tony Rice and a modern sound BY KENNY BERKOWITZ

After surviving teenage obsessions with grunge, shred, and math rock, guitarist Jon Stickley found his way to bluegrass, switching from electric guitar to mandolin as a student at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. From there, he started digging into the music of the David Grisman Quintet, where he discovered newgrass flatpicking and the band’s original guitarist, Tony Rice. So Stickley shifted again, picking up a 1956 16 March 2016

Martin D-18, which he’s been playing ever since. Rice—along with Doc Watson, who came before, and Bryan Sutton, who came after—is a major influence on the Jon Stickley Trio’s Lost at Last, in which the guitarist joins with Lyndsay Pruett (fiddle) and Patrick Armitage (drums) to create an exhilarating, all-acoustic swirl of newgrass, rock, dubstep, Gypsy jazz, hip-hop, and jam that somehow manages to stay close to tradition.

After discovering traditional bluegrass, why didn’t you stay with it? I started to think of ways to make the music more me. I have these techniques I’ve come up with over the course of my bluegrass study and I decided to write some songs around them, and that became the basis of the original trio sound. To me, our first album sounds a little more like bluegrass picking over different drum beats. It’s like a five-piece bluegrass lineup: A roll on the snare is like the banjo, the kick drum is where the upright bass would be, and the hi-hat is the mandolin chop. Plus, fiddle and guitar. But then we were like, “Man, it would be really cool if we had a bass, too.” So Lyndsay and I discovered these octave pedals, and we both use them to play bass. We’ve given our instruments the capability to reach down to the drum sonic range, and it’s made the trio sound a lot more cohesive. And it’s not studio trickery. We’re still playing our acoustic instruments, and what you hear on the album is exactly what you hear when we play live. What does this new album say about who you are? When I think about it, I would say it’s a kid who has grown up listening to all sorts of music, but was heavily influenced by punk and grunge, and then became obsessed with bluegrass picking. And it’s that kid, grown up and taking a look back at what shaped his musical taste and compositional leaning, and it’s just trying to figure out what song to write next. Do you still practice along with Tony Rice records? Definitely. Whenever I’m trying to work on chops or work on a feel, that’s what I do. Can you keep up? I’m working on it.

EMILY SEVIN

L—R Cloud, Quiles, Westesson

FRESH AMERICANA Quiles and Cloud blend old and new in tight acoustic collaboration

O

n a courtyard stage at the FreshGrass festival in western Massachusetts, Quiles and Cloud gather around a single microphone. Maria Quiles (pronounced key-less) sways in her batik skirt, singing lead and playing fingerstyle rhythm on a cutaway Martin, while Rory Cloud, goateed with a long ponytail hanging over his sky-blue jacket, adds seamless vocal harmonies and silvery lead lines on a sunburst Guild. Across the stage, Oscar Westesson anchors the sound on upright bass, deepening the grooves with touches of string and wood percussion. Quiles and Cloud are a long way from their home in San Francisco, but this early-fall festival in the Berkshire Mountains is where, in 2014, they took a big step onto the national 18 March 2016

By Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

scene by winning the FreshGrass duo contest. Part of their prize was the opportunity to make an album produced by banjo master and Compass Records co-founder Alison Brown, and the result of those sessions is hot off the press at FreshGrass 2015. Quiles and Cloud’s new Beyond the Rain is a mix of originals (“Black Sky Lightning,” “Mississippi River”) and traditional tunes (“Deep Ellum Blues,” “Faded Flowers”) and a cover of Bob Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” The album, along with many months of grassroots touring around the U.S., introduces the duo as a compelling new voice on the Americana scene. Though clearly on the path blazed by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings—and trod by fellow travelers such as the Milk Carton Kids, Mandolin Orange,

and Pharis and Jason Romero—Quiles and Cloud’s sound is not particularly Appalachian or twangy. Their music leans more toward contemporary folk and blues, with a touch of soul. After their FreshGrass set, Quiles, Cloud, and Westesson sit in the backstage artist lounge to talk about how they came together. Quiles and Cloud met in 2011 at an open mic in a San Francisco cathedral, finding not only immediate musical chemistry but a shared sense that the time was right, in Quiles’ words, “to go balls-tothe-wall with music. “Rory was out in San Francisco playing all the time, sort of living out of his car, and I was living in my uncle’s basement,” she says. “So we found each other at a time when we were ready to commit.”

‘[WE WERE READY] TO GO BALLS-TO-THE-WALL WITH MUSIC.’ MARIA QUILES

Both grew up surrounded by music and art. Cloud’s mother fronted the folk-rock band Cheryl Cloud and Common Ground, performing around southern California through the ’80s and up until she passed away from cancer in 1995. Initially, Rory played mostly electric guitar in various rock, jazz, and hip-hop projects, but he eventually came back to his folk roots—and now exclusively plays his mother’s old Guild dreadnought. “I started getting back into writing songs, inspired by people like Nick Drake and songwriters that I got exposed to later,” he recalls, “and I started messing with alternate tunings on the acoustic guitar.” Meanwhile, up in San Francisco, Quiles’ parents were ballroom dance teachers and painters. As a kid she played classical violin, but then, she says, “The acoustic guitar came into my life. I love playing violin and I still do it, but for me, guitar is a great tool for writing. I’ve dabbled in other roles in electric music, but I really resonate with an acoustic guitar.” Quiles and Cloud made their first album, Long Time Coming, five months after they met, and soon afterward connected with Westesson, who joins them for California gigs and sometimes on tour elsewhere. At first the group’s repertoire mostly consisted of songs written individually, but the two quickly began developing their duo voice. “The sound that we have now has very much been developed through this project,” says Cloud. “We both sounded different when we got together and had different approaches to arranging.” Most of the duo’s songs originate with a lyrical or musical idea from Quiles. “She’ll bring a framework to me,” says Cloud. “It might be half written and she needs a second opinion or ear on lyrics, or structural things with the tune, so I’m the person who comes in and tweaks the arrangement a little bit or adds something to the chord progression. Then there’s the whole harmony process that we go through, where we sit for a while and figure out what the nice notes are to add color to the arrangement.” Quiles and Cloud tune into music beyond the folk world but feel most connected with artists such as Punch Brothers, Aoife O’Donovan, and Sarah Jarosz. Cloud says he appreciates the open-ended way those musicians cross-pollinate genres with the directness and simplicity of acoustic folk. “I spent a lot of time getting my tone from amps and pickups,” says Cloud. “It’s really refreshing to be in this scene and get all of your sound just from your fingertips and the wood resonating.” AG

WHAT THEY PLAY MARIA QUILES 1999 Martin DCME mahogany dreadnought. Martin SP strings. Paige regular capo and Shubb C7B three-string partial capo (to simulate DADGAD tuning onstage). Korg PitchHawk-G tuner.

RORY CLOUD 1976 sunburst Guild D-35 that belonged to his mother, Cheryl Cloud. Martin Retro Tony Rice signature strings (MTR13 Monel). BlueChip picks. Shubb capo. Korg PitchHawk-G tuner. Cloud uses a Walker strap from Flying Possum Leather that loops over the upper bout. AMPLIFICATION Ear Trumpet Labs Edwina mic.

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BLUEGRASS BAND OF BROTHERS

L-R Clayton Campbell, Eric Gibson, Mike Barber, Leigh Gibson, Jesse Brock

Leigh Gibson tells how the Gibson Brothers got their groove By Pat Moran

L

eigh and Eric Gibson were kids working the family dairy farm when bluegrass rocked their world. At the time, the internet hardly existed and even cable TV hadn’t yet reached their rural neck of the woods. But if you’re thinking the Gibson boys grew up in the hollers of Kentucky, Tennessee, or North Carolina, think again. “You’ll have a hard time finding anywhere more remote than the northern edge of the Adirondack Mountains,” Leigh Gibson says. The Gibsons’ bond with bluegrass happened in upstate New York less than an hour’s drive from the Canadian border. Leigh Gibson admits it’s “not exactly traditional bluegrass country,” but says, “The way we grew up was similar to the first generation of bluegrass people. The subjects they wrote about, like family moving away to find work, resonated with us.” Formed in 1984, the Gibson Brothers Band sought early on to balance the traditions of seminal bluegrass artists like Bill Monroe with innovations drawn from classic country. The band has since amassed a devoted following through 12 studio albums and a rigorous 20 March 2016

touring schedule. Named Emerging Artist of the Year in 1998 at the International Bluegrass Music Association, Leigh Gibson went on to host the IBMA’s 2013 awards ceremony. Last year, the Gibson Brothers Band released Brotherhood, a celebration of the music of earlier brother acts, from the Louvins to the Monroes to the Everlys. Brotherhood drives home one key element that’s enraptured GBB fans for years: the uncanny, almost telepathic closeness of the brothers’ entwined vocal harmonies. Yet, Leigh Gibson says the music and rhythm are equally as important as harmony in contributing to the band’s enduring appeal. “We listen intently to one another, and try to find common ground,” Gibson says. “At this point, we have an intuition for one another. I can sense what the other guy is going to do.” FINDING THE GROOVE “The key word is restraint,” Gibson says. “When you listen to the great guitarists, you feel restraint in their playing. They’re not filling every hole and expressing every phrase.”

WHAT LEIGH GIBSON PLAYS A fire destroyed Gibson’s beloved Martin in the late 1990s and nowadays he plays a Brazilian rosewood dreadnought built by Wayne Henderson at Dream Guitars. It’s one of a matching pair of D-28-style instruments Henderson made for both Gibson siblings.

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GIBSON BROTHERS

For the type of music the Gibson Brothers Band does, playing rhythm guitar is Leigh Gibson’s most important job, he says, “because it goes much deeper than keeping time.” In bluegrass, it’s vitally important to “set a groove and keep it going, to make every song have its own identity and personality through rhythm and groove. Once [the band] gets a nice feel bubbling, then I can slash a bit with my right hand, brush chords a little longer and accent dynamically.”

The longstanding relationships among the other members contribute to that groove. Except for new mandolin player Jesse Brock, who joined about two years ago, the players have been locking in with each other for at least a decade. Fiddler Clayton Campbell joined the Gibsons in 2004. Bassist Mike Barber has been playing with the brothers for 22 years. “I can’t tell you how many times Mike Barber and I have hit a walk-up together that we’ve never done before,” Gibson says. “We

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both hear and anticipate it at the same time.” Such synchronicity might seem magical, he says, but “it’s magic that took countless years of playing together to create.” OH, BROTHERS! Leigh Gibson’s parents gave him his first “real guitar”—a Martin D-28—when he was 13. “It was way more guitar than I was player,” he remembers. “It inspired me to get better.” He and Eric took music lessons at Dick’s Country Store and Music Oasis in nearby Churubusco. Eric was inspired by a Flatt and Scruggs cassette; Leigh started by “learning the nuts and bolts of the guitar neck” from a book on flatpicking. While the boys looked for bluegrass to emulate, the influences of its “close cousin— classic country” kept creeping in, Gibson says. “It’s the music that we grew up listening to on the farm, in my dad’s pick-up truck. [It] was influenced by Western swing and cowboy music,” Gibson says. “When you think about it, Monroe was listening to all that stuff, too. He was singing Gene Autry.” Gibson was attracted early on to Tom T. Hall’s guitar playing, too, and “the kind of brushy rhythm that Cowboy Jack [Clement] brought to country music on Waylon Jennings’ records. Once I became a guitar player, those sounds were already in my head.” Eclectic influences still hold sway for the brothers. “Maybe some folks might see us as rule-breakers, but I don’t think we are,” Gibson says. “We do what we think makes us sound interesting and unique. We’re a bluegrass band but we’re also the Gibson Brothers.” Although the Gibsons aren’t afraid to experiment, they don’t do it for its own sake. “The arrangement is critical to a song,” Gibson says. “The best words, the best story in any song, can be ruined by a poor arrangement.” That was clear when the band was trying to work out the right approach to a tune by a favorite duo. “We couldn’t find a Stanley Brothers song that we sounded good singing, and that hadn’t been recorded to death,” Gibson says. An offhand comment by Rounder Records founder Ken Irwin gave the brothers a muchneeded epiphany: “If you slow down a fast song or speed up a slow one, you’ll get a good interpretation that nobody has ever heard.” Gibson laughed and joked to his brother, “What if we did ‘How Mountain Girls Can Love’ as a fast waltz?” It worked. But Gibson cautions against “trying to force fit anything into music. It either fits or it doesn’t,” he says. And that’s where Gibson’s key word— restraint—comes back into the picture. AG

L—R Mother Maybelle Carter, Merle Travis, Oswald Kirby, and Jeff Hanna of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Photo taken during the Will the Circle Be Unbroken sessions in August 1971 at Woodland Studios in Nashville.

24 March 2016

THE ‘CIRCLE’ UNBROKEN By Mark Kemp

Remembering an enduring classic as the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band celebrates a half-century of crossing cultures and generations

WILLIAM E. MCEUEN PHOTO

AcousticGuitar.com 25

NITTY GRITTY DIRT BAND

W

hat in the world are you listening to in there?” My mom was confused. It was the early 1970s, and she was hearing acoustic guitars, banjos, and fiddles blaring from the wooden stereo console in our living room. Ordinarily, mom would have been fussing at me for cranking the Rolling Stones’ “Bitch” at full volume. (“You don’t even know what a bitch is,” she’d once told me, with a grin. “It’s not a nice word.”) At best, she would hear me happily singing along to hits by the more acceptable Beatles or Jackson Five. But on this day, mom was hearing the “Grand Ole Opry Song”—and it was telling her story over music that was as familiar as the collard greens we’d have with Sunday dinner: It’s time for Roy Acuff to go to Memphis on his train With Minnie Pearl and Rod Brasfield and lazy Jim Day. Turn on all your radios, I know that you will wait To hear Little Jimmy Dickens sing, “Take an old cold tater and wait.” Joan Carlton Kemp knew Little Jimmy Dickens. She knew Roy Acuff. As a little girl, my mom had lived in Nashville for a spell, before the textile industry sent my grandfather to a mill in North Carolina. Her older siblings, Carolyn and Evelyn, had been members of the Grand Ole Opry, where every Saturday night they’d performed onstage as the Carlton Sisters. In those days, the Opry family would regularly hold picnics out in the country. On one such occasion, according to family lore, Acuff saved my mom’s life when she wandered into a bull pen, her red-and-white checkered dress flapping in the breeze, teasing one of the hulking animals. Acuff jumped the fence, grabbed my mom, and brought her to safety. I didn’t know any of this at 13, when I went to my hometown record store and bought the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s landmark 1972 album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken. All I knew of this band of Southern California hippies was that they’d had a hit with “Mr. Bojangles,” their new album featured a bunch of old people from Nashville—and everybody was talking about it. To be sure, the music on this album was pretty jarring to me. Mom feigned embarrassment. “I don’t like that stuff,” she said, scrunching up her face at the twangy chaos. “They called us hillbillies. You can go back to listening to the Rolling Stones now.” It was clear to me, though, that my musical choice that day had made my mother happy. 26 March 2016

She laughed, told more stories, and helped bring me closer to the music of my own region and bloodline. I will be forever grateful to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band for that. BENEFICIARIES OF THE ‘CIRCLE’ “I can’t tell you,” John McEuen begins, and then pauses. “I literally can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard your exact same story, with just a few details changed.” The Dirt Band’s fiddler, banjo player, mandolinist, and guitarist has been talking with me for an hour about the unintended chain reaction he and his group set off when they decided it would be cool to record with Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Merle Travis, Jimmy Martin, Roy Acuff, Mother Maybelle Carter, and other Nashville greats. “It was a very magical thing that we didn’t predict,” McEuen says. Will the Circle Be Unbroken did not come about by magic, though. It took a lot of hard work, lucky breaks, and a great career risk for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year with a tour the group kicked off in September 2015 at the Opry’s most well-known home, the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. The sold-out show, which will air on PBS in March, featured a string of famous admirers, including singer-songwriter John Prine, singer-guitarist Vince Gill, fiddler Alison Krauss, mandolin player Sam Bush, and early Dirt Band member Jackson Browne. “I was a freshman in high school,” Gill told the audience as he joined the Dirt Band onstage at the Ryman show. “‘Mr. Bojangles’ had come out, and it was a huge hit. I played the banjo a little bit . . . . There was a rock band in our area in Oklahoma City that was the hottest rock band—they were the coolest things ever. I was kind of a dork, because I played the banjo. They were going to do ‘Mr. Bojangles’ in their show at the school . . . and they asked me if I would play the banjo on ‘Mr. Bojangles’ with them. It was one of the coolest things that ever happened to me, because I was accepted.” McEuen, speaking by phone from a plane about to take off for Canada, laughs appreciatively at all the stories he’s heard about the Dirt Band’s impact. He reels off a few more memorable quotes: “‘I was in my room, 16 years old, playing rock ’n’ roll, and I put the Circle album on, and my dad heard it and opened the door and said, “Son, what are you listening to?” It was the first time we’d talked in three years and we’ve been best friends since.’ And, ‘I was playing classical violin until I was 23, and then I heard Vassar Clements on Circle and I never picked up another sheet of music again.’’’

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 1972 triple-disc milestone. Unlike other classic American albums of the rock era—such as Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, or Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On—Circle is exponentially larger than the artist name on the record spine. Its casual and genial musical communication among a group of young California hippies and older Nashville veterans was healing in a way that no amount of introspection or public protest could be during those difficult years of Vietnam War demonstrations, civil-rights struggles, and labor union losses. “I think what came out of those sessions is that there were these two gaps that were bridged—a generation gap and also the cultural gap,” Dirt Band singer and guitarist Jeff Hanna said in a video interview at the time of Circle’s 30th anniversary. “You know, there were peace marches and Nixon—the country was divided. “This was also around the time of the film Easy Rider,” Hanna continued. “So, we’re thinking, ‘Man, the [rednecks] that shot Peter Fonda [in the film] look just like those guys we’re going to Nashville to record with.’ Of course, the element that wiped out all of that misconception was the music. It helped take away some of the prejudice on both sides.” The Nashville musicians were getting pushback, too. “I know that there was a lot of explaining for the Scruggs family and for Mr. Acuff and for the Carters,” Hanna said. “People were saying, ‘What are you doing making music with these scruffy dudes from the West Coast?’” Circle was also the culmination of a perfect musical storm. By the early 1970s, country and bluegrass already had begun to seep more and more into popular music, sometimes as parody, but more often as tribute. The Dirt Band played a big role in this. Though rock bands had long flirted with country—in 1965, the Beatles released a cover of Buck Owens’ “Act Naturally” as the flip side of “Yesterday,” and that same year, the Byrds released a shimmery folk-rock rendition of the Porter Wagoner country hit “A Satisfied Mind”—few were doing the kind of bluegrass hoedowns heard on the Dirt Band’s self-titled debut album. Released in 1967, the record produced a minor folk-rock hit, “Buy for Me the Rain,” but it also included lots of jugband novelty songs and the McEuen-penned bluegrass instrumental “Dismal Swamp.” McEuen had been inspired by the Dillards, a more traditional bluegrass band that made inroads into the rock world via the folk boom of the early ’60s. “I was captivated by the Dillards,” McEuen says. “I was playing the acoustic guitar, learning

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NITTY GRITTY DIRT BAND NGDB today John McEuen, Jimmie Fadden, Jeff Hanna, and Bob Carpenter

how to play ‘Freight Train’ and things like that—fingerpicking guitar, you know—and six months into that, I saw the Dillards and thought, ‘Golly, Doug Dillard—he’s really something. That looks exciting!’” Between 1967 and 1970, the Dirt Band continued to explore old-time country music, while in the larger music world, others were doing the same thing. In 1968, the Byrds released Sweetheart of the Rodeo, featuring South Carolina-born Gram Parsons, who’d left an earlier proto-country-rock outfit called the International Submarine Band. With covers of songs by the Louvin Brothers and Merle Haggard—and a classic Parsons tune, “Hickory Wind”—Sweetheart put country music front and center in the hip rock world. The following year, Parsons formed the Flying Burrito Brothers, which released another country-rock classic, The Gilded Palace of Sin. By 1970, the Dirt Band had pulled out all the stops and gone full-fledged country and bluegrass on Uncle Charlie and his Dog Teddy, although much of the album was still well within the folk-rock idiom. It included gorgeous renditions of Mike Nesmith’s “Some of Shelly’s Blues” and Kenny Loggins’ “House at Pooh Corner” (both released as singles), alongside old-time and bluegrass tunes such as “Chicken Reel,” “Clinch Mountain Backstep,” and Earl Scruggs’ “Randy Lynn Rag.” But the highlight of Uncle Charlie was a cover of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles” that rocketed to the Billboard Top 10. All of that helped when McEuen and his brother Bill, the Dirt Band’s manager and producer, walked into the office of Liberty Records’ president Mike Stewart to make a case for doing an album of purely traditional bluegrass and Appalachian folk with a star-studded cast of veteran Nashville players. “When we went in to make the pitch, Mike Stewart listened for about a half an hour and then said, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to sell this, but I’ll put up the money.’ And he did. He put up $22,000.” A SMALL CIRCLE OF FRIENDS The future members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band didn’t have 22 cents among them when they first met as teenagers hanging out at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Long Beach, California. They did have a mutual love of folk and jug-band music, though. They’d flop down in the six or seven chairs around a coffee table inside the store and jam on acoustic instruments. “Everybody hung out at this place,” McEuen remembers. “We’d look at the records on the racks and try to figure out how Doc 28 March 2016

‘IT CAME TOGETHER SO FAST IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE NOW. BUT THE TIMES WERE VERY DIFFERENT THEN— THIS COULD NOT HAPPEN NOW.’ JOHN McEUEN

Watson played ‘Black Mountain Rag’ and ‘Deep River Blues,’ or how to play banjo songs by Earl Scruggs or the Dillards or whoever.” The “everybody” who hung out at McCabe’s included a young Jackson Browne, guitarists Hanna and Les Thompson, and harmonica and jug player Jimmie Fadden. Those four formed what would become the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, rehearsing in Hanna’s mother’s Long Beach garage. On May 13, 1966, the group landed a gig at the Paradox club in Tustin, an hour east in Orange County. “The Dirt Band started playing at the Paradox, and I’d be there,” McEuen remembers. “One night I sat in with them—this was before I joined.” He laughs. “I mean, it was no big deal or anything. I figured I’d rather be standing onstage than be in the dressing room waiting to go on. So I’m like, ‘I’ll go play a song with you.’” That gig marked the official beginning of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Before then, they were all just kids messing around, hanging out at McCabe’s playing jug-band songs, or at the beach, surfing occasionally. But now, they were onto something. Browne left to focus on a

career as a solo singer-songwriter, and McEuen was in. “You gotta understand, we were really young,” he says. “I was in my first year of college, one guy was a junior in high school, another was a senior in high school, another was trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. I think everybody still lived with their parents. I was over in Garden Grove, some of the other guys lived in Long Beach. It was just a bunch of kids from Southern California.” McEuen’s brother signed on as manager and got the band its deal with Liberty. Within a year, the Dirt Band had released two albums, a selftitled debut and Ricochet, and performed its Top 40 hit “Buy for Me the Rain” on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. In 1968, they appeared as a jug band playing at a party in the movie For Singles Only, starring Mary Ann Mobley. That led to a role the following year in the western Paint Your Wagon, in which they churned out a ramshackle song called “Hand Me Down That Can o’ Beans” in a rowdy scene featuring a drunken Lee Marvin dancing and singing along, and a typically cool and collected Clint Eastwood watching from the sidelines. But the members of the Dirt Band weren’t satisfied with the pop sound Liberty was imposing on them, and the band took a breather after the initial whirlwind. Everything changed when they returned to the studio to record Uncle Charlie. They’d recruited multi-instrumentalist Jimmy Ibbotson and gained a tremendous amount of creative freedom. Most importantly, they’d picked a great batch of songs to cover: Walker’s “Bojangles,” two Nesmith songs (in addition to “Shelly,” they recorded his moody

“Propinquity”), four Loggins tunes (along with “Pooh Corner,” they recorded his bluesy, rocking “Prodigal’s Return,” the fiddle-fueled “Yukon Railroad,” and the breezy “Santa Rosa”), as well as an acoustic-guitar-based version of Randy Newman’s aching, poetic piano song “Livin’ Without You.” Uncle Charlie was a bona fide masterpiece. But the following year, when the group attempted to repeat its success on All the Good Times—with covers of Browne and Hank Williams—it seemed forced and came off more like a subpar Poco album than prime Dirt Band. No matter. McEuen had bigger fish to fry. He was busy doing some serious negotiating with bluegrass royalty. FORMING THE ‘CIRCLE’ “Earl Scruggs came to see us at Vanderbilt University in November of ’70, and by 1971 we’d kind of become friends,” McEuen remembers. That year, Scruggs and his sons, the Earl Scruggs Review, played a five-night stand at the storied Tulagi club in Boulder, Colorado, and McEuen aimed to talk to the three-finger banjo stylist. “I went to see him every one of the five nights, and I’d take him back to his hotel,” McEuen says. “Jeff [Hanna] came one night and I told him, ‘I’m going to ask Earl if he’ll record with us.’ Jeff doesn’t ask questions like that. But he was in the car, in the back seat, on the way to the hotel after the last show.” That’s when McEuen got up the nerve to pop the question. “I said, ‘Earl, do you think maybe . . . uh . . . would you record with the Dirt Band?’ “He said, ‘I’d be proud to!’” The Circle was beginning to form. A week later, Doc Watson played at the same club in Boulder, and McEuen was back, ready to pop the question to the famed flatpicker. “I’d already talked to his son, Merle, a few months earlier in Pasadena, and it turned out Merle was a big fan of the Dirt Band. I had wanted to meet Doc that night, but ended up just chatting with Merle. He said, ‘You’re with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band? Cool, man!’ I told him, ‘Well, I’ll see you in Colorado.’ I didn’t say anything else to him other than, ‘It sure would be great to record with your dad someday.’” In Colorado, McEuen told Doc that the Dirt Band had already enlisted Scruggs, and that was all the guitarist needed to hear. “He got excited when I told him Earl was in, so I put Doc on the phone that night with my brother. Then later on that night, I talked to my brother on the phone for hours, and he said, ‘I’m going to get Roy Acuff and Merle Travis.’ And I said, ‘Maybe we can get Jimmy Martin.’ And that’s pretty much how it all came together.”

The big catch was getting the matriarch of modern country music (and inventor of lead guitar), Mother Maybelle Carter. “Earl had done an album in 1963—which had a big influence on me, by the way—that was a tribute to the Carter Family,” McEuen says. “He knew them, you know, so we asked him if Maybelle Carter might want to be part of this, and he made it happen.” The project came together quickly. “From the time that I asked Earl if he would record with us, to the start of the recording session, it had been eight weeks,” McEuen says. “It came together so fast it’s hard to believe now. But the times were very different then—this could not happen now. I don’t know if these types of people are even around anymore.” By August 1971, the whole cast—Scruggs, Watson, Martin, Acuff, Carter, Travis, Pete “Oswald” Kirby, Norman Blake, and fiddler Vassar Clements—were holed up with the Dirt Band at Woodland Sound Studio in Nashville. The atmosphere was positively electric. They recorded 33 songs in six days, including nowclassic performances of Martin doing “Grand Ole Opry Song,” Carter singing “Keep on the Sunny Side,” Acuff moaning “The Precious Jewel” and “Wreck on the Highway,” Travis picking and singing “Dark as a Dungeon” and “Nine-Pound Hammer,” and Watson flatpicking and telling the story of the “Tennessee Stud.” As they played and sang and talked, 105 photos were snapped. “We ran a tape recorder the whole time to capture all the between-song stuff—all that great talking,” McEuen says. “And that really makes the album.” He’s referring to such golden moments etched into music history as Doc Watson’s very first meeting with Merle Travis. Between “Lost Highway” and “Way Downtown,” you can hear Watson telling Travis that he’d named his son Merle after the inventive fingerstylist. There’s also the endearing moment just before the group launches into “Tennessee Stud,” when the good-natured Watson instructs Vassar Clements on when to take his solo: “Now, your fiddle break comes right after I get back and wup her brother and her paw and sing a chorus.” In 2002, when McEuen was remastering Circle for its expanded 30th anniversary release, he discovered more gems. “I went into the runoff tape and I found Vassar and Jimmy Martin talking, and more stuff from Maybelle. It was so much fun going through it again,” McEuen says. He adopts a Southern twang to imitate a Martin and Clements exchange: “‘Vassar, now who wrote ‘Uncle Pen?’ “‘You wrote the bridge, Jimmy.’ “‘I know, thank you very much.’”

McEuen’s fondest memories of the Circle sessions are incidents that could never happen in today’s music world, in which record company executives keep close tabs on every minute an artist participates in a project that’s not associated with his or her label. One such incident happened when Carter was at the microphone. “She was in there getting ready to start one of her songs and I took a phone call in the control room,” McEuen remembers. “It was a Columbia Records attorney, who was calling to say, ‘OK, you’ve been approved to do one song with Maybelle Carter.’ And I went, ‘OK, thank you very much. I’ll let everybody know,’ and I hung up.” McEuen laughs. “We were starting the fourth song. “My brother turned to me and said, ‘Who was that?’ I said, ‘Nothing. Doesn’t matter. Not important.’ I mean, could you imagine telling Picasso, ‘Hey Picasso, only this much blue—no more’? It’s a good thing there were some hippies behind the glass.” Hanna, in the video interview, recalled Carter as the glue that kept the proceedings grounded. “What Maybelle brought to the session aside from her wealth of talent was just this great, sort of spiritual calming. She was just like [adopts a serene look], ‘Boys, this is no big deal.’” Years later, Carter’s daughter, June Carter Cash, told Hanna that her mother had a fond way of referring to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. “She used to call us ‘them dirty boys,’” Hanna said. “That’s what June told us, which I loved! She said, ‘You know, mama always called you guys ‘them dirty boys.’ I thought that was the sweetest!” When Circle came out the following year, it did better than anyone could have imagined, inspiring young rock fans around the world to explore traditional music more deeply. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band went on to do many other things: In 1974, the group released a live album, Stars and Stripes Forever (whose humorous between-song banter I memorized as a teenager); briefly changed its name to just the Dirt Band in the late ’70s and began playing more predictable soft rock; switched to mainstream country in the 1980s; and returned to form in the ’90s with Acoustic and two more volumes of Circle that were good, though not monumental. If the members had stopped after the original Circle project, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band would have more than made their mark on music history. “When we got together, we wondered if we would be together after ten years as a band. That’s kind of a long run, actually,” Hanna recently told Billboard. “But 50 years is a run.” AcousticGuitar.com 29

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30 March 2016

THE ‘CIRCLE,’ UNBROKEN Two days after my interviews with McEuen, I’m driving to the Acoustic Guitar office when the phone rings. It’s McEuen. He’s back from Canada. “I just wanted to make sure you got everything you needed from me,” he says. “I got a voice message from you and didn’t know what day it came from.” “I’m good,” I tell him, and pause. “Well . . .” I feel a need to tell McEuen how much I appreciate the Dirt Band for bringing me closer to my mother, to my family’s connection to the Grand Ole Opry, to my personal connection with our shared musical roots. As a reporter, I’m also feeling a little silly about this. It’s not exactly the ideal objective distance from my subject. Besides, I’m sure he’s heard it a million times. Still, this is important to me. “I just want to thank you for doing Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” I stammer. “To me, it is absolutely one of the most important albums ever recorded, and yet it wasn’t even on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums list. I don’t think you guys have gotten enough credit for spurring the whole country-rock thing. The Byrds rightly get a lot, and so do Gram Parsons and the Burrito Brothers. You guys are easily as important to that music as those artists, particularly in terms of bridging the gap between generations. Without that, there would be no Americana movement still inspiring so many artists of all ages.” “Hey, man, that’s what it was all about,” McEuen says. “And everybody involved deserves credit. It happened because Jeff and Jimmy picked the right songs to release as singles from our earlier records—songs that got us on the radio. It happened because my brother and I told the record company we wanted to make an album of traditional folk music, and the record company trusted us enough after Uncle Charlie to let us do it. And it happened because all those musicians agreed to record with us. Roy Acuff and Maybelle Carter didn’t have to do this, but they did. Because of the band’s success with Uncle Charlie, we were able to do Circle and have it be heard by kids like you and so many others.” There’s a moment of silence before McEuen speaks up again. “Hey, do you mind saying that in your story—you know, the stuff about us being as important to this music as those others?” Done. Former AG editor Mark Kemp is the author of Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race, and New Beginnings in a New South (Simon & Schuster, 2004; University of Georgia Press, 2006).

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32 March 2016

WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

Instrument makers and players—including former Guns N’ Roses guitar slinger Slash—are mesmerized by the Tree By Mark Kemp

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GORDON ROSS PHOTOS

THE TREE

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aul Hudson was eager to see his new guitar, but he wasn’t expecting manna from heaven. After all, Hudson, better known as Slash, is the celebrated former Guns N’ Roses guitarist who’s owned some of the finest instruments in his neck of the rock ’n’ roll woods, from big-name vintage acoustics—a Martin D-18, Gibson J-200, and Guild D-100—to a string of signature Les Pauls. What more could he want? “I thought, ‘OK, let’s get this over with: I’m going to open the case and be happy and surprised and then we can move on,’” Slash says with a laugh. He’s talking about the day the guitar maker Reuben Forsland dropped by to deliver a jumbo acoustic he’d built for Slash from wood that came from the Tree, a mythic source of unusually dense and beautiful, centuries-old quilted 34 March 2016

mahogany that’s coveted by some of the most respected makers and players of acoustic guitars. “When I picked it up, I was completely humbled. It was a shock-and-awe moment. It changed everything I’d ever thought about acoustic guitars leading up to that point,” Slash continues, with a boyish wonder that betrays the reverence a head-banging kid might have for Slash himself. “It was the most amazing acoustic guitar I’d ever played or heard.” What was it about this particular guitar that made such a powerful difference to the guy who wrote GN’R’s most famous acoustic song, “Patience,” on an old beater he didn’t even own? “It’s perfect,” Slash says. “I was amazed that you can actually make a guitar that’s perfect—perfect intonation, perfect tension on the neck, perfect sound. And it’s beautiful. I was just floored. ”

‘WHEN I PICKED IT UP, I WAS COMPLETELY HUMBLED. IT WAS A SHOCKAND-AWE MOMENT. IT CHANGED EVERYTHING I’D EVER THOUGHT ABOUT ACOUSTIC GUITARS LEADING UP TO THAT POINT.’ SLASH

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he figured mahogany that makes up the back and sides of Slash’s guitar was floored, too—some 50 years ago, when it tumbled to the floor of a forest in Central America. There’s an old philosophical riddle that asks, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?” In the case of the Tree, a 500-year-old hunk of wood that once towered 100 feet and had a massive base ten feet in diameter, the answer is a resounding yes—a thousand times over. Discovered a little more than ten years after it was chopped down in 1965 and left in a ravine in the Chiquibul Jungle of what is now Belize, the Tree has been making beautiful

sounds for decades in the form of boutique guitars crafted at shops including Forsland’s JOI, as well as Santa Cruz, Bedell, Greenfield, Froggy Bottom, and even the Big Two acoustic makers, Taylor and Martin. The legend of the Tree really begins in the late 1970s, just after the birth of the boutiqueguitar movement, when luthiers at small shops were beginning to find big success. A friend had told Robert Novak, a wood importer in what was then British Honduras, about the felled mahogany tree. “When the guy told me he had this stuff, he asked, ‘How much will you pay for it?,’ ” Novak remembers. “I said, ‘What’s it look like?’ ” It looked like nothing Novak had ever seen. When he went to check it out, he was stuck by its rich, wavy figuring. “It was just very beautiful,” Novak says. He’s talking by phone from his home—still in Belize—amid shrill sounds of chirping birds that nearly drown out his voice

at times. He’s no longer in the wood-exporting business—he left that behind long ago for a career as a chiropractor. “And the wood was stable,” Novak continues, as if he’s talking about a patient’s back. “That’s unusual for something that had sat in the forest on the ground for so long.” Lying in that jungle ravine in the era of rugged Indiana Jones explorers and Jimmy Buffet pirates, Novak saw 13,000 feet of virgin lumber—and dollar signs. “I knew I could sell it,” he says, “but not because it was mahogany— you couldn’t really make much money selling mahogany unless you were dealing with millions of feet. What I made my money on was the unusual qualities of wood. Like everybody else, I was attracted by this tree’s quilted quality.” Getting the wood out of the jungle was no easy task. First, Novak’s crew cut it in half, but it still wouldn’t budge. “So then they had to cut

it in four sections and drag the logs out,” he says. “But in order to load them onto the trucks, they had to quarter those four sections—turn them into 13-foot pieces. Sometimes they couldn’t get but one piece on a logging truck at a time.” When the crew eventually got the wood out of the forest, they had to truck it some 90 miles to the coast, where they floated the logs out to a saw mill. “There was an old mill that was on the river that the Belize Estate Co. had had,” Novak says. “This redneck guy who had saw mills in Honduras and Nicaragua ran it.” The process of getting the wood into the hands of customers in the United States was painfully slow, but Novak was determined. “We started bringing it up, 1/16th at a time, and sawing it,” he says. “I wanted big boards, I wanted as wide a boards as possible.” Of the 13,000 feet of tree he’d seen in that jungle ravine, Novak harvested about 500 feet of high-quality, defect-free wood from the middle, 3,000 feet of heavily quilted wood, and five or six different patterns. By 1982, he was delivering his special mahogany to anybody who would buy it. “I just contacted everybody I’d ever sold to, and we had sold rosewood to Martin,” Novak says. “So I figured I’d call people who looked like they could handle something like this and were willing to pay enough money for it.” An article on Novak’s mahogany in a 1985 issue of Fine Woodworking magazine got attention from independent guitar builders, making it a hot commodity in the lutherie world. Novak ended up buying back some of the wood he’d initially sold, reselling it at higher prices. Though he won’t say how much he sold the wood for, the article quoted it as $10 to $30 per board—today, wood from the Tree fetches as much as $1,500 per 12-by-12-by-1-inch board. Guitar maker Michael Greenfield saw the Fine Woodworking article in the mid-1990s. “It was really spectacular stuff, but back then I never really paid much attention to it beyond that,” he says. However, “sometime right around the year 2000 I was visiting my friend Tom Ribbecke, who had just finished a 335style guitar for Seal, along with a very early Halfling for another client, which was made of the Tree. He had just strung it up, possibly the prototype. “This is great mahogany, period,” Greenfield adds. “I love mahogany guitars and this timber is as good as any I have heard.” As for Novak, he wishes he could find another Tree. “If I found another one like that, I’d clone it,” he says, “but it takes hundreds of years for a tree to grow that big.” AcousticGuitar.com 35

THE TREE

IT WASN’T UNTIL LAST YEAR THAT I HEARD PEOPLE WERE REFERRING TO IT AS ‘THE TREE.’ ROBERT NOVAK

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lash was impressed by the “esoteric locales” Reuben Forsland scavenges for the materials he uses in his guitars. When Forsland approached the guitarist with a menu of options for his custom jumbo, Slash chose 2,800-year-old glacier Sitka spruce for the top; another piece, he says, came from a house Jimi Hendrix once occupied; and for the back and sides, of course, he chose mahogany from the Tree. “The Tree was mentioned as this very special prized wood that had this great history,” Slash says, “so I picked it based on that.” Forsland had come across the Tree a few years earlier and thought it was stunning to look at, but it wasn’t something he wanted to work with at the time. “I had other woods I was focused on working with, but then earlier this year, Kevin Hennig and I were talking about sought-after tonewoods and the Tree came up as a great wood to combine with my ancient glacier Sitka spruce tops.” Hennig, owner of Symphontree Guitars in Vancouver, Canada, had been looking for guitars made from the Tree, but was never bowled over by one until he played the Santa Cruz 1929 00 Custom that Richard Hoover had made entirely out of mahogany from the Tree— back, sides, top, everything. “I had played a few guitars that claimed to be Tree,” Hennig says, but none of them sounded like the Santa Cruz. “That one did not sound at all like a traditional mahogany guitar. The look is stellar and the tone is enveloping and lively.” Like most builders, Hoover had been interested in working with Tree mahogany for some time, but not because the wood has some magical 36 March 2016

sonic quality. He was drawn to its stunning good looks. “It’s the beauty of the wood that’s desirable,” Hoover says. Making a Tree guitar sound good, he explains, is just part of the craft of building a great instrument. “When it comes to Tree wood, not all of it is suitable for a top—some of it is too flexible and too random in density,” Hoover says. “We chose a particular piece that was stiffer than most Tree wood you would find, and made it with proper bracing and thickness.” Hennig, though, maintains that mahogany from the Tree does have unique tonal qualities. “Tree mahogany is denser than traditional Honduran mahogany,” he says. “When I think of a traditional ’hog guitar, they tend to have a snappy box with a dry fundamental. Tree ’hog is like traditional ’hog on steroids—thus, you get a very snappy box and thicker, wetter tone.” About ten Tree guitars have passed through Hennig’s hands over the years, but he’s never seen the one that most captures his interest and imagination. “I imagine the G4.2 Michael Greenfield to be the ultimate Tree, but unfortunately, I never had a chance to play it,” Hentig says. “Michael is known as the ‘wood whisperer,’ and I can imagine the signature Greenfield tone paired with this wood would be intergalactic.” That was Greenfield’s first Tree guitar. “It’s the model that Andy McKee plays,” Greenfield says. “It is quite exceptional to have a 17-inch set of Tree, let alone matched sides. The guitar had a cutaway, ‘Grit’ Laskin-inspired arm and rib rests, and is bound and veneered in ebony. The black ebony is an extremely dramatic and striking contrast to the deep, red-brown of this mahogany. The Tree was married with a very old Adirondack red spruce soundboard from my personal reserve.”

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hen Novak hears people talk with such reverence about the mahogany he dragged out of a Belizian jungle nearly 40 years ago, he’s not just a little amused. “It wasn’t until last year that I heard people were referring to it as ‘the Tree,’ ” Novak says with a laugh. “I was surprised, so I looked it up and was like, ‘Oh geez, I never even saw any of this!’ But it’s cool the amount of attention this tree has gotten. It’s very beautiful and it should get attention.” But does the legend of the Tree precede the actual wood? Is Tree mahogany any better than other mahogany, or has its appeal become the stuff of myth? “I wouldn’t say it’s mythic,” Hoover says. “But to me, it’s about the beauty of the wood. That’s its appeal. “Let’s use the Tree and Brazilian rosewood in the same explanation,” Hoover continues. “Both woods are really beautiful, and that makes them desirable; both are also rare, which makes them desirable. From there, it takes on a mythos that goes above and beyond the actual material. To ascribe sound quality to Tree wood is a very general statement, because wood from the Tree varies greatly. It would be hard to make a specific statement about the sound of the Tree.” Slash doesn’t seem to care why his new instrument made from Tree mahogany and ancient Sitka spruce sounds so good and plays so well. But he’s absolutely sold on the way Reuben Forsland put it all together in a perfect mix of sound and vision. “It just has this very smooth, very neat and tidy sound, but it’s also really warm and it resonates beautifully,” the guitarist says. “I have it up in the bedroom and still, every time I pick it up, it just blows my mind.” AG

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SPECIAL FOCUS TEXAS BLUEGRASS

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TEXAS BLUEGRASS 40

Happy Trails Robert Earl Keen takes a detour into bluegrass

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Their Roots Are Showing 5 musicians who are helping the spirit of Texas bluegrass evolve

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AMMAR DASHTI

Lucky 7 Don’t miss these Texas bluegrass events

Slim Richey was a fixture of the Austin music scene

AcousticGuitar.com 39

SPECIAL FOCUS TEXAS BLUEGRASS

HAPPY TRAILS s high school juvies in Houston, Robert Earl Keen and his best friend Bryan Duckworth would hop into Duckworth’s 1970 Ford Maverick, pop a few Texas Pride beers, shove eight-tracks of Bill Monroe or the Stanley Brothers into the tape deck, and cruise around town. Other kids were in VW microbuses listening to the Beatles or Black Sabbath. But Keen and his buddies preferred the rustiest, twangiest, old-time country music they could find. “It wasn’t the kind of music that was of the times,” Keen admits, “but it was what we liked. And one of the great things about that oldtimey music is that it wasn’t as expensive as the new stuff. You could get a hell of a lot of it for cheap.” Anyone who knows anything about REK knows that this is hardly the first time the story of Robert and Bryan’s youthful transgressions has been told. Way back in the late 1980s, the Texas singer-songwriter recorded a live version of a song he wrote called “The Bluegrass Widow,” wherein he spins the same yarn to a packed house at the  Sons of Hermann Hall in Dallas to explain how he came up with “quite possibly the worst bluegrass song ever written.” It’s not, of course, but Keen has always been wary of performing songs in the genre he loves and respects so much. Until now, that is. Last year, Keen released Happy Prisoner: The Bluegrass Sessions (Dualtone), his first all-bluegrass album in his more than 30-year career. It started when Keen wrote down 100 bluegrass

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40 March 2016

Robert Earl Keen’s road still goes on forever, but it’s taken a detour into bluegrass By Mark Kemp and folk standards he wanted to perform with old-time instrumentation. Then he phoned up some famous friends—Lyle Lovett, Natalie Maines, fiddler Sara Watkins, mandolin player Kym Warner, banjo picker Danny Barnes, and a few others—and booked a recording date for late 2014. Keen chopped the list down to 30 songs, and he and his friends recorded 28 of them. The final version of Happy Prisoner features 15 classic tracks (20 on the deluxe edition) that span folk and bluegrass history, from Monroe’s “Footprints in the Snow” to Monroe and Peter Rowan’s “Walls of Time” to Richard Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.” It was a project Keen had long dreamed of doing. Problem was, he was scared. After all, he’s the guy who wrote the “worst bluegrass song ever.”

Davey Graham

Robert Earl Keen JOEY LUSTERMAN

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SPECIAL FOCUS TEXAS BLUEGRASS

een—sporting a cowboy hat, black blazer, orange-and-gray striped buttondown shirt, and multicolored shoes— leans back in his chair in a conference room at Acoustic Guitar’s office in Point Richmond, California, and lets out a big Lone Star laugh. He’s surrounded by instructional books on everything from improving your jazz vocabulary to mastering the art of flatpicking. Intimidating stuff, to say the least. “I knew the whole deal with bluegrass—a lot of it is about the singing, the highlonesome harmonies, the incredible playing,” Keen says. “So I put off doing this album because I was never comfortable with that. “I was not comfortable with my voice singing bluegrass.” Minutes earlier, Keen had performed two simple, gritty songs with profound storylines for AG’s online video series Acoustic Guitar Sessions. Cradling a battered Collings OM2H, he dedicated one of the tunes, “Mariano,” a tender song about a Mexican immigrant, to his late mother, who would always request it. What Keen says is true—his shaky baritone rasp is not the typical voice of a bluegrass singer, and he isn’t a virtuoso guitarist. He’s a storyteller—and that was his entry point for Happy Prisoner. “I always had an affinity for bluegrass lyrics—the songs themselves, how cool the stories are,” Keen says. “So I eventually worked my way through the idea that I couldn’t do bluegrass, and I invited all these friends of mine to come in and pick with me.” No one gathered in a meadow the following day at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is complaining about Keen’s gruff harmonies when he launches into “Footprints,” “Dark as a Dungeon,” and other tracks from Happy Prisoner. He’s performing on the Rooster stage at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, and he even does a few bluegrass versions of some of his more famous electric originals, like “The Road Goes on Forever,” a song that Texas road warrior Joe Ely transformed into his own anthem when he released it on his 1992 album Love and Danger. Though Keen is not a household name in either country or pop, he’s written songs for many artists who are: The Dixie Chicks teamed up with comedian Rosie O’Donnell in 2000 for a hilarious version of his holiday novelty song “Merry Christmas from the Family.” George Strait recorded a beautiful lilting cover of Keen’s Mexican-flavored “Maria” for his No. 1 country album of 1998, One Step at a Time. And Nanci Griffith included Keen’s twangy family song “Sing One for Sister” on her 1987 commercial breakthrough Lone Star State of Mind. But Keen’s fans are rabid, and the ones in this meadow at Golden Gate Park are singing along with every word.

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obert Earl Keen vividly remembers the first time he thought music might be a good way to earn a living. He was doing a pretty crappy job of chaperoning for his younger sister, who at 16 was a foosball champion in Houston bars. “She’d go out there with her pack of Benson & Hedges and people would buy her shots and she’d kick their asses in foosball,” Keen remembers. “But in the other part of the bar somebody was playing a guitar in the corner—covers of Loggins and Messina, and that kind of ’70s folkie stuff, you know— and I was like, ‘Man, that’s the deal!’ To actually get up really close to somebody who was playing in a bar? That really turned the switch for me. I thought: I could do that.” When he packed up to go to Texas A&M University in the mid-1970s, Keen took his sister’s old nylon-string Alvarez along with him and learned to play a few basic country songs. “I got this songbook called The Ten Greatest Country Songs Ever Written. It had stuff in it like ‘Country Roads’ and ‘Cold Cold Heart,’ so I learned all those songs. The first one I learned was the Willie Nelson song ‘Hello Walls.’ The only song in that book that I didn’t learn was ‘The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.’” Before long, Keen and his old pal Duckworth, who’d started playing the fiddle, formed a band and began working up versions of the bluegrass songs they’d listened to on eighttracks as teenagers. “We ran into some kids who were from very rural areas,” Keen says. “We were from Houston, you know, so we were city slickers, but these kids were from places like Tampa and Levelland [Texas]. They loved country and bluegrass and western swing, and they’d be playing fiddle and mandolin, and it was great. So we just started hanging out with them and playing and it morphed into this thing called the Front Porch Boys. Over the years, we had about ten different members.” The band played, literally, on the front porch of a house on Church Street in the Texas college town of College Station, right across the road from a Presbyterian Church. The scene wound up as the subject of Keen’s wry 1984 tune, “The Front Porch Song.” “At that point, we weren’t playing in bars because we didn’t have a sound system,” Keen says. “We played at a few flea markets and spaghetti suppers at churches, and did a mixture of bluegrass stuff like Stanley Brothers and Bill Monroe, but also country stuff that’s pretty close to bluegrass, like Hank Williams’ ‘Lost Highway.’” Eventually, the Front Porch Boys caught the ear of fellow A&M student Lyle Lovett, who was studying journalism and was known for booking country-rock and folk groups around town.

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‘THE THING ABOUT BLUEGRASS IS THAT IT’S THIS REALLY HAPPY-SOUNDING MUSIC, BUT THE STORIES ARE TRAGIC. IF YOU PICK IT APART, THERE’S A LOT OF DEAD BODIES THROUGHOUT THE HISTORY OF BLUEGRASS. AND I LOVE THAT KIND OF THING.’

When Keen’s band mates left town during a school break, he and Lovett became buds. Lovett would change Keen’s life—as well as his musical direction. Keen, an English major, knew he wasn’t a great singer, but he could spin a great story, and when he graduated from A&M in 1980, he set off for Austin, where he began playing original songs to whoever would listen. Four years later, Keen released his debut album, No Kinda Dancer, and bluegrass had become a tiny glimmer in his rearview mirror. Within another three years, he would record the live album that included the story about that song he was playing—you know, the “worst bluegrass song ever.” And yet, bluegrass never stopped tapping on Keen’s shoulder. “I didn’t stop loving bluegrass,” he says. As a lyricist, he found himself drawing from the same deep, dark well. “The thing about bluegrass is that it’s this really happysounding music, but the stories are tragic. If you pick it apart, there’s a lot of dead bodies throughout the history of bluegrass. And I love that kind of thing—that great outpouring of emotion in these really simple songs.” By the early 2000s, Keen knew he had to man up and record the damn bluegrass album he’d always dreamed of. But it still took a while to get all the players together. “What makes this record work—what I think probably shines through the most—is that I got people like Danny Barnes and Sara Watkins, who also had CONT. P.44

JOEY LUSTERMAN

WHAT ROBERT EARL KEEN PLAYS After learning how to play on his sister’s Alvarez classical, Keen got a Martin D-35. “My parents were notoriously cheap,” he says. “They were the kind of people who would say, ‘Son, that costs $12. You can get one for $5.’ But when I came home from school after my first year, my mother, from out of nowhere, said, ‘We’re going to go get you a good guitar.’ I said, ‘Great, whatever.’ “So we went down to this little music store and she said, ‘I want the best guitar in this place.’ And the guy said, ‘Well, we have this Martin D-35.’ I was thinking, there’s no way my mom’s going to buy me a Martin guitar, no way. And she said, ‘Okay, does it have a case with it?’ And he said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ I thought, God, this is really going to happen. She just wrote the check. I couldn’t believe it. “When I got that guitar, it was one of those things where I took it in the backyard and just played and played, non-stop, day after day after day, writing songs,

just doing whatever I could do to get fairly good on it. “I had that guitar for several years before I got a D-28, and since then I’ve had all kinds of guitars.” Eventually, Keen became a Collings player. “I’ve known Bill Collings for years. We were pals. We’ve even gotten into some trouble together, because Collings. . . .” He trails off. “He knows how to have fun.” Collings is also serious about his guitar business, Keen says. “I used to take my Martins to him to get them repaired—fret job, neck reset, that kind of thing—and one day, in the early ’90s, he says, ‘I’m not going to do this for you anymore.’ I said, ‘What?’ He says, ‘Because you need to buy one of my guitars.’ I said, ‘You’re right.’ “So, we sat down and decided what he would make for me, and we drew up the plans for this C-10—it’s a beautiful guitar— and I played it for about a year and I felt like I was going to bust it up. I was on the road a lot. So, I got on this record—

a compilation of Merle Haggard songs called Tulare Dust, on Hightone Records. I recorded my song, sent it in, and somehow I got a check for $1,800. And I thought, ‘Man, I am going to get another Collings so I won’t smash up my C-10. I called Collings and said, ‘I want something just like the C-10, but a little broader and something that, if I break it, I’m not going to freak out about it.’ It’s this great OM2H that I still have. “But after I paid for it, Larry Sloven at Hightone called me up and said, ‘Oh, that check was a mistake. I sent you too much money!’” Keen laughs. “I guess I knew something was weird, because I had gotten paid so quickly and you never get paid that quickly—or that much—from an independent record company. I said, ‘Too late, man, it’s already spent. I spent that money on this guitar.’ He says, ‘You’re gonna have to send me that money.’ And I said, ‘You can’t get blood out of a stone.’ I haven’t

seen Larry Sloven in years, but I guess I still owe him. I always liked Larry.” Keen’s had several Collings guitars over the years, and now he has a brand-new one. “About two years ago, they called up Charles Ray, my road manager, and said, ‘Come over here.’ And Charles says, ‘What for?’ It turns out they gave me this guitar! It’s a replica of a guitar that I play. It has the same kind of pickup stuff in it, so when I break a string on stage I just grab this new guitar and plug it in, and it sounds just like my old guitar. I love it.” For Happy Prisoner, Keen played three guitars: his older Collings OM2H, a dreadnoughtsize mahogany Collings, and a 1946 Martin tenor guitar he bought from Tony Williamson in North Carolina. “That tenor is just the most beautiful sounding instrument,” Keen says. “It doesn’t have a ton of sound, but it’s just so fragile and so beautiful. It’s like champagne or something— just kind of bubbles out.” —M.K. AcousticGuitar.com 43

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44 March 2016

SPECIAL FOCUS TEXAS BLUEGRASS

left this traditional, old-timey, backwoods kind of bluegrass behind long ago.” Barnes had been a member of the Bad Livers, an Austin band known in the ’90s for doing banjo- and fiddle-fueled cover versions of punk and rock songs by the Misfits, Butthole Surfers, Slayer, and Iggy Pop, alongside original tunes with provocative titles like “Shit Creek.” These days, when he isn’t writing and recording fairly straightforward singer-songwriter albums, Barnes releases cassettes of experimental music that mix banjo with avant-garde noise rock. Watkins, of course, is the former Nickel Creek singer and fiddler who’s since moved more towards indie-folk on her solo albums. None of the musicians on the Happy Prisoner sessions were doing standards like “Dark as a Dungeon” anymore. “So when we all got in there and started playing these old songs, there was a little trepidation about whether we could do this old music again,” Keen says. “It was like going back and riding a bicycle without gears.” Or, as Barnes puts it, “like going a few rounds with Joe Louis.” The banjo player laughs but then gets serious. “For people who love this kind of music, it’s like a language,” Barnes says. “You can run into somebody from the opposite end of the globe and you have a common parlance. And I’ve known these people for years. Robert and I go way back.” Everything gelled quickly when the musicians started jamming together. “We got in there and all of that childlike thinking and feeling came out,” Keen remembers. “Everybody was having a great time. We were just laughing and having the best time. We’d play through ‘99 Years and One Dark Day,’ and everybody was like, ‘Yeah! That’s so great!’ And then we’d play another song and then play another. We were just so happy. All of us had left this stuff behind, but we’d never quit loving it. We just hadn’t had a reason to play it in a while. “Of all the records I’ve ever made, this was the most fun and exciting.” he fun and excitement shines through at the outset of Happy Prisoner, as the scratchy, percussive guitars of the Flatt & Scruggs song “Hot Corn, Cold Corn” get the engine turning. Keen and company transform the unconventional bluegrass tune into a blues stomp, with a deep, bass vocal singing the words along with Keen’s raspy baritone, and an electric slide slithering in between lines like, “Old Aunt Peggy won’t you fill ’em up again / Ain’t had a drink since the lord knows when” and “Yonder comes the preacher and the children are a-cryin’ / Chickens a-runnin’ and the toenails a-flyin’—yes sir.”

T

‘WHEN WE DID THIS ALBUM, I FELT LIKE I WASN’T GOING TO BETRAY THE MUSIC BECAUSE I HAVE SUCH A GREAT LOVE FOR THE LYRICS.’ The feel of Happy Prisoner is casual, reminiscent of the sessions that spawned the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s cross-generational classic Will the Circle Be Unbroken. One of the highlights is Peter Rowan’s spoken-word story about how he and Bill Monroe came to write “Walls of Time.” It’s the same yarn Rowan had spun during an appearance on Acoustic Guitar Sessions several months ago—and he delivers it on Happy Prisoner with the same dramatic flair. “That was totally coincidental,” Keen says. “We were at this studio called the Zone, in Dripping Springs, Texas, and Peter had come out there just to visit with Mike Morgan, who owns the studio. Peter didn’t even know I was there, so when I saw him I said, ‘Man, we did your song and I’d like for you to come in and hear it.’ He’s listening to it and he starts telling this story about driving Bill Monroe’s bus and I said, ‘Would you mind if we recorded this?’ He said, ‘Sure,’ so I just went in there and said what you hear on the record”—the intro has Keen asking, “Peter, can you tell me about ‘Walls of Time’ and how it came about?”—“and he just started talking. It was amazing!” Keen duets with Lovett on the Jimmie Rodgers classic “T for Texas”—which features some dazzling acoustic-guitar and banjo runs, and a warm, rubbery bass—and with Maines on a spare version of the bluegrass standard “Wayfaring Stranger.” But two of Keen’s favorite moments are “Poor Ellen Smith” and “Dark as a Dungeon,” the latter included on the deluxe edition of Happy Prisoner. “‘Poor Ellen Smith’ just kills me every time I hear it,” he says, “whether it’s by a full-blown bluegrass band or solo, like Norman Blake’s version. When I hear that song, all I hear is the story. And I think, how great is that? It’s just pure description. “It’s the same with ‘Dark as a Dungeon,’” Keen continues. “When I hear that song, I see the dungeon and the sort of blue light surrounding it, and I feel the darkness and moisture. I’m transported right there. And that’s what I love about bluegrass. So when we did this album, I felt like I wasn’t going to betray the music because I have such a great love for the lyrics. It’s just great poems set to music. And if you take away the music, it’s powerful on its own—it’s poetry, a painting in your brain.” AG

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SPECIAL FOCUS TEXAS BLUEGRASS

THEIR ROOTS ARE SHOWING These 5 musical acts have kept the spirit of Texas bluegrass evolving By Mark Kemp

W

ho talks about Texas bluegrass? Hardly anyone. That’s partly because the Lone Star state is better known for producing great singer-songwriters, outlaws, and big-hat country stars. But fiddles, banjos, mandolins, and hard-driving, flatpicked acoustic guitars have a rich history in Texas. And like every kind of Texas music, the players twist it and turn it and make it something altogether new and exciting. Bluegrass first made its way to the panhandle town of Dimmitt, near the New Mexico border, around 1950. That’s when the Mayfield Brothers left their family’s ranch to pursue a sound inspired by Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. When the folk revival of the 1960s hit, bluegrass bands were waltzing all across Texas. By the 1970s, Texas hippies were taking fiddles and banjos where they’d never been before. It continues to be a major part of the diverse Texas music scene. Here are five influential Texas acts that have kept the spirit of Lone Star bluegrass evolving. 46 March 2016

1. SLIM RICHEY Born in the east Texas town of Atlanta, Slim Richey was a hot jazz guitarist who opened Warehouse Music in Fort Worth, selling instruments and instructional materials to all kinds of musicians, many of them bluegrass players. By the late 1970s, Richey was merging jazz with banjos and fiddles, and in 1977 he released the pivotal jazz-bluegrass fusion album Jazz Grass. Richey was still playing music and living in Dripping Springs, near Austin, when he died last year at 77 from lymphoma.

Slim Richey

2. THE DIXIE CHICKS This chart-topping trio may be best known for country-pop hits and outspoken singer Natalie Maines, but the Dixie Chicks started out in 1989 as a straight-up bluegrass band. When sisters Martie and Emily Erwin left an earlier bluegrass act, Blue Night Express, to form the Chicks with guitarist Robin Lynn Macy and bassist Laura Lynch, they all were heavily steeped in fiddles, banjos, high-lonesome harmonies, and kitschy cowboy music. Macy and Lynch soon moved on, replaced by Maines, whose honeyed soprano brought mainstream appeal to the Chicks. One thing is certain: the Dixie Chicks—in all its forms—inspired scores of younger bluegrassplaying girls, such as the members of Della Mae, who were waiting in the wings.

COURTESY OF POOR DAVID’S PUB

Opposite Danny Barnes

TED BARRON

Top The Dixie Chicks, 1992 L—R: Martie Erwin, Robin Macy, Laura Lynch, Emily Erwin

3. BAD LIVERS After watching long-haired banjo player John Hartford duel with guitar-god Glen Campbell on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, young Danny Barnes knew what he wanted to do when he grew up. He started playing banjo and acoustic guitar, but was also drawn to the avant-garde. When Barnes and upright bassist Mark Rubin formed the Bad Livers in Austin, in 1990, they began mixing bluegrass-based covers of songs by dada rocker Captain Beefheart with blues tunes by Mississippi John Hurt. But they soon found that post-punk audiences particularly liked the group’s twangy takes on songs by experimental Austin punk band the Butthole Surfers, as well as covers of the metal band Motörhead, ghoulrockers the Misfits, and Detroit mad-man Iggy Pop. In more recent years, Barnes has brought all of that together on his solo singer-songwriter albums and underground cassettes of experimental ambient and noise music. In 2015, Barnes won the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass.

Bottom Steve Earle

4. STEVE EARLE Growing up in San Antonio, Steve Earle was inspired by Texas songwriter Townes Van Zandt to start playing and singing his own material. Earle started out by helping to pioneer alternative country on his 1986 album Guitar Town (MCA), an album often identified with Nashville. He then moved on to more of a literate Southern-rock sound before bottoming out on drugs and booze. When he returned from hell, he’d transformed himself into an outspoken protest singer and storyteller. Like fellow Texan Robert Earl Keen, Earle felt the need to reach back into his bluegrass past in 1999, and he teamed up with the Del McCoury Band for The Mountain (E-Squared), an all-original, all-bluegrass album dedicated to Bill Monroe, who had died three years earlier.

5. SARAH JAROSZ Before Sarah Jarosz became a sensation in her teens and 20s for her astonishingly nimble mandolin runs and acoustic-guitar fingerpicking; a sublime cover of Radiohead’s “The Tourist;” and her nuanced original songs in the indie-folk vein, she was a 12-year-old bluegrass prodigy. Jarosz’s early experiences jamming onstage with Ricky Skaggs and David Grisman inform every gentle pluck heard in her complex compositions, whose mature, deeply moving lyrics betray an old soul—a longstanding Texas tradition. At just 25, Jarosz already has three albums and one live EP under her belt, and numerous collaborations with such progressive bluegrass royalty as Jerry Douglas, Bela Fleck, and Dan Tyminski. She’s brought Texas bluegrass traditions into the new millennium with style and grace.

AcousticGuitar.com 47

SPECIAL FOCUS TEXAS BLUEGRASS

LUCKY 7 Don’t miss these 2016 Texas bluegrass events By Mark Kemp

lan your 2016 waltz across central and eastern Texas for bluegrass festivals large and small—from Sherman to the north, Kerrville and Driftwood to the south, and Nacogdoches to the far east. But first, check out AG’s Lucky 7 guide to some of 2016’s hottest offerings.

P

OLD SETTLER’S MUSIC FESTIVAL APRIL 14–17 DRIFTWOOD, TX Since 1987, the Old Settler’s Music Festival has presented a wide array of rootsy American music, much of it bluegrass. The 2016 lineup includes the Del McCoury Band, Jerry Douglas & the Earls of Leicester, the Wood Brothers, Sarah Jarosz, Della Mae, Jay Farrar, the Hellbenders’ bluegrass Tommy, and many others. oldsettlersmusicfest.org LONE STAR FEST APRIL 22 & 23 ARLINGTON, TX The top-notch lineup for the 2016 edition of this annual event sponsored by the Dallas-based Bluegrass Heritage Foundation includes International Bluegrass Music Association winners Flatt Lonesome and the Kenny & Amanda Smith Band, as well as Bobby Giles & Music Mountain, Pine Island Station, the Herrin Family, Robertson County Line, the Coleman Brothers & Lone Star Boys, and Pearl & the Polka Dots. lonestarfest.com 48 March 2016

KERRVILLE FOLK FESTIVAL MAY 26–JUNE 12 KERRVILLE, TX It’s not exclusively bluegrass, but bluegrass lovers won’t feel out of place at the legendary Kerrville Folk Festival, one of the longest-running and most-respected folk fests in the United States. Since 1972, and over 18 continuous days and nights, Kerrville has brought a who’s who of American folk music. This year’s all-star lineup features Judy Collins, Sheryl Wheeler, Matt Nakoa, Kenny White, Johnsmith, Vance Gilbert, Terri Hendrix, Slaid Cleaves, Mary Gauthier, Ruthie Foster, and Trout Fishing in America, as well as blues-guitar clinician the Rev. Robert B. Jones, Jay Mankita, children’s concerts, and more. kerrville-music.com SANDYLAND BLUEGRASS REUNION MAY 13–15, SEPTEMBER 16–18 NACOGDOCHES, TX Each year on the second weekend in May and third weekend in September, the good people of east Texas (and beyond) descend on Sara and Cowboy Barrett’s Triple-B Farm for a pair of no-frills holiday weekends filled with local and regional bluegrass gospel. Past acts have included the Herrin Family of Fort Worth, Church Hill Bluegrass of Henderson, Harmony Ridge of Rusk, and the Herzog Family Band of Bremond. Keep checking that website for the 2016 lineups. And can we get a Hallelujah? sandylandbluegrass.com

DEEP SUMMER BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL AUGUST 26–29 SHERMAN, TX Bill and Annette Hayes throw their Melody Ranch Deep Summer Bluegrass Festival each year on their 18-acre expanse of flat, north Texas ranch land during the last weekend of August. The 2015 lineup included Oklahoma’s hard-driving Mark Phillips & the IIIrd Generation Bluegrass Band, along with Texas bands Dueling Hearts of China Spring, the Upper Grassmen of Calder Howe, Copper Canyon of Lewisville, and lots more. For the 2016 lineup, keep checking the website. melodyranchbluegrassfestival.com

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SALMON LAKE PARK LABOR DAY BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL SEPTEMBER 1–4 GRAPELAND, TX Floyd and Fanny Salmon of Salmon Lake Park hold all kinds of gospel and bluegrass music events at their Grapeland campground, including a Memorial Day weekend bluegrass fest, but one of the most popular is the Labor Day weekend bluegrass festival, now going on its 40th year. The lineup this year features regional acts from throughout the South including the Farm Hands, Saltgrass, the Tennessee Gentlemen, the Little Roy and Lizzy Show, Run Boy Run, Gold Wing Express, and Catahoula Drive. (If you’re in Bellville on the last weekend of October, some of these same acts will be at the Pickin’ & Grinnin’ fest.) salmonlakepark.com BLOOMIN’ BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL OCTOBER 14 & 15 FARMERS BRANCH, TX One of the hottest Texas fests (for both music and food) is the Bluegrass Heritage Foundation’s annual Bloomin’ Bluegrass Festival and Chili Cookoff. Held each year since 2010 in the 27-acre Farmers Branch Historical Park, just 15 minutes from the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, the terrific 2016 lineup includes the Del McCoury Band, the Peter Rowan Bluegrass Band, Hot Rize, Lee Ann Womack, Balsam Range, the Grascals, and the Helen Highwater Stringband. bloominbluegrass.com

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54 Basics

Three chords and the truthys

58 Weekly Workout

62 Woodshed

Learn to be a better accompanist

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How to play ‘Pete’s Barrelhouse Rag,’ pt. 2

SONGCRAFT

Child’s Play

Peggy Seeger marks her lifelong commitment to ‘The Child Ballads,’ a treasure trove of folklore

BY ANDY HUGHES

Peggy Seeger, 1960

How did you find ‘The Child Ballads’ and what have they meant to your music? When I was a child, about three years old, I developed very bad croup. My mother put me to bed, and she put a kettle of boiling water next to my bed, because the steam was reckoned to help breathing for a child with croup. One day, I stepped out of bed, right into the kettle—I still have the scar on my right foot. I was raced off to hospital, where I immediately caught strep throat. I remember lying on a shelf, and they were feeding me Jell-O, which I couldn’t stand for years after, and my parents came to visit me, and I remember seeing them look at me through

GEMS REDFERNS COLLECTION

Peggy Seeger is no stranger to folklore. Her father was the famed folklorist Charles Seeger; her mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was a trailblazing avant-garde composer. Her folk musician brother, Mike Seeger, co-founded the New Lost City Ramblers, one of the most influential groups in the 1960s folk revival. And her half-brother, Pete Seeger, became one the most famous folk musicians of the modern era. In 1964, Peggy Seeger and her husband Ewan MacColl recorded the influential Folkways album Traditional Songs and Ballads, which included two songs from the American scholar and folklorist Francis James Child’s exhaustive compilation of 305 English and Scottish folk ballads, along with their American versions. For Seeger, that album marked the beginning of a lifelong association with The Child Ballads, which also would be recorded by the likes of Joan Baez, Fairport Convention, Pentangle, and Steeleye Span, to name a few. AG correspondent Andy Hughes caught up with Seeger, 80, backstage at the 2015 Cambridge Folk Festival and discussed her connection to The Child Ballads.

AcousticGuitar.com 51

SONGCRAFT

a window. They told me afterward that the way they had found me was by following the sound of a little voice singing “Barbara Allen.” That was the first ballad that I ever learned, and it has been a very good friend to me ever since. I learned lots of The Child Ballads growing up, and I loved the stories—really loved them. Then I went to college—I was very much in demand at the local hootenannies. I attended the female equivalent of Harvard, which was Radcliffe, and so I had access to the Harvard Library. And Boston is where Francis Child had lived—his house is there. So I virtually lived in that library, and collected umpteen versions of ballads. I didn’t really think a whole lot about how to sing them until I got together with Ewan MacColl, and we started to discuss the way that you sing ballads. It does matter, because there are a lot of ballad singers who just deadpan their way through, and I think you have to do more than that. You have to use your imagination when you sing these ballads, not necessarily to jazz them up. I started using theater techniques to sing a nine-minute unaccompanied song. It’s fascinating—you re-live it every time, you really do. I talk about it, and describe it in the memoir that I am writing, about how to think when you are singing these songs. It’s not just about words and music; it really isn’t. It’s a lot more than that. So I am a member of the middle class, singing songs that were written by the working

class, and that talk about lords and ladies, so I have to work out the motivations behind the ballads—why they were written and performed in the way that they were. The Child Ballads represent a big challenge to anyone who is going to sing them. At the Folk Awards this year, one singer, who is well-known, sang one of my favorite ballads, accompanied by a nine-piece band. And it was too much, it drowned the ballad, absolutely drowned it. There seemed to be very little concentration by the singer, and all anyone could think about was the instrumentation playing here and there and everywhere, and not a thought for the poor little ballad. This person is a good singer; I couldn’t figure out why anyone thought she needed nine instruments behind a Child ballad—I just found myself very distracted. When you say you collected the ballads, did you literally write them down? Oh, yes, I have a book that I have been collecting ballads in since I was about 15. It has a stave for the melody line, and I write the words in. I am a folklorist’s nightmare because a lot of the time I cannot remember where I have heard a ballad from. I also am unaware of how much I have changed it, but I have been listening to that method of singing all my life. I am not really a traditionalist. I sing folk songs, but I am not a folksinger in the traditional way.

Was it the appeal of ‘The Child Ballads’ that got you interested in folk music in the first place? I loved the texts and the stories. I think in my early days, I over-accompanied them, and I sang them awfully fast. Now, in my dotage, because I can’t play such complicated guitar lines any more, I am paying more attention to the words, and I am singing them more soulfully. The important thing about The Child Ballads is that they are bones—they are the bones of songs, and the vital thing about the ballads is how sparsely they are clad. This was very clearly brought home to me when Ewan MacColl and I were working with the Critics Group [a master class for folksingers]. We had lots of discussions on the proper way to sing The Ballads, and the answer was, as simply as possible, without a lot of histrionics and changes of tempo, and rising and falling of pitch. One of the members of the Critics Group was a teacher, and he taught 11 and 12 year olds. He sang “The Twa Sisters” (The Two Sisters) to his class, and then he asked them to draw pictures based on the ballad they had heard, and the result was mind-blowing. He asked them what color was the dress that the drowned sister was wearing? One said red, one said green, one said blue. That’s an example of the bones of the song, and each listener clothes it depending on what their vision is of what they heard. If you present the scenario where

Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, 1977

‘The Child Ballads need very careful handling when you perform them. They are a beautiful collection of stories that have been handed down and down and down through the generations.’ PEGGY SEEGER

52 March 2016

one sister is drowned, every listener will picture it individually and differently. He brought the pictures to the room where we met, and put them on the wall for us to look at, and the majority of pupils had remembered the sisters, and not the suitor who came to call. The story, for those who don’t know it, is that there are two sisters who both fall in love with the same man. In the Scottish version of the ballad, the older sister is plain, and the younger sister is beautiful. The etiquette in those days was, if you came courting, you courted the older sister first—the youngest sister was not supposed to marry before the older sister had been spoken for and married. So the suitor comes to call, and falls in love with the younger sister, and the older sister pushes her into the river, and she floats down. Depending on which version you hear, the miller pulls the girl out of the river, steals her ring and her beaver hat, and pushes her back into the river again. In an older version, a fiddle player comes along and he makes a fiddle out of her breastbone, and he makes strings from her long yellow hair, and he takes it along to the wedding of the older sister to the suitor of the younger sister. This is one of the major Child ballads, and this is why they are so strong—it’s because the words are just bare bones. The listener is left to imagine a whole lot, there is never too much detail telling us what to think. There is almost no descriptive language used. There is no heavenly choir of angels telling you to feel sad at this point. Of the pictures, I remember two of them. One is painted as though the artist is standing behind the older sister, who is looking down the river, and in the distance there is a hand waving, the drowning sister. The other picture, which was placed right next to it, is a close-up view of the drowning sister, and in the distance is a stick figure of the older sister, with a huge smile on her face. You can identify with people in a ballad, and if the ballad is sung strongly, you can identify with this and that. I do go into this in some detail in my memoir. I have been singing these ballads for over 70 years, and at one point, I sang one of them at every concert I did for a three-year period. When you sing a song that often, you find different ways to clothe it in your own mind. Is it fair to say that ‘The Child Ballads’ are a cornerstone of your work because you learned them so early on in your life? I would say it is, yes. I have written several songs that sound like ballads, with that same bare aspect of description in them. The Child

Ballads are very special. They are not like The Broadside Ballads—they are very different. The Broadside Ballads were cheap, and sold by the yard, so the more complicated and the longer it is, the better. The Broadside Ballads are very, very wordy, long lines usually, and many, many verses—too much information. The Child Ballads are the opposite—every line matters, every particle. In The Child Ballads, there is narrative, and there are verbs, there are hardly any adjectives, and no adverbs. And whether there’s an “a” or “the” matters. The Child

Ballads need very careful handling when you perform them. They are a beautiful collection of stories that have been handed down and down and down through the generations. What do you think about the influence of ‘The Child Ballads’ on other acoustic musicians? Do you think that they serve as a good grounding, or that they should? I’m not sure that they should, but they are wonderful traditional songs, and sometimes I do think that traditional is best. AG

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AcousticGuitar.com 53

THE BASICS

Three Chords and the Truth

BY JEFFREY PEPPER RODGERS

Unlocking I-IV-V chord progressions

he chord trinity known as I–IV–V is one of the most useful theoretical concepts for any musician. The I–IV–V is a skeleton key for countless songs in folk, country, rock, blues, and beyond, revealing the basic similarities of, say, “Louie Louie,” “Ring of Fire,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Helpless,” “Three Little Birds,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” “This Land Is Your Land,” “Man of Constant Sorrow,” and “I Fought the Law.” Understanding I–IV–V progressions can help you jam along with songs you’ve never played before or change a song’s key without using a capo, and it can get you started writing your own songs, too. In this lesson, I’ll explain what I–IV–V means and how these chords lay out in various keys. Then you can play through some examples as used in classic songs.

T

CHORDS BY NUMBER In a nutshell, the I, IV, and V are the most commonly used chords in any major key. All three chords are built from notes in the key’s corresponding major scale. Take the key of C major, for instance. Here are the notes in the C major scale, numbered 1 to 7. C 1

D 2

E 3

Ex. 1a

F 4

G 5

G

C

B

œ 3

54 March 2016

C

x 32 0 1 0

œ œœ œ 3 0 0 0

œ œ 3 3

œ œœ œ 3 0 0 0

I C A G E D

IV F D C A G

V G E D B A

Since these groups of chords are all built from the same pattern in their respective keys, they fit together the same way. A song that

B 7

x 32 0 1 0

3 2 0004

#4 & 4

A 6

The I chord is built from the first note of the scale, a C—when you stack two other notes from the scale on top (moving up the scale, you add the third and the fifth notes, E and G), you get a C major chord. The I is the tonic chord in the key—the harmonic home base—and gives the key its name. The IV chord is built similarly from the fourth note of the scale (F, with A and C then stacked on top) and is an F major; and the V chord, built from the fifth note of the scale (G, plus B and D), is a G major. An uppercase Roman numeral means the chord is major; lowercase is used for minor. You can find the I, IV, and V chords in any other key the same way—by building from the first, fourth, and fifth notes in the corresponding major scale. Here are the I, IV, and V chords you get in the five easiest keys on the guitar.

Ex. 1b

G

A

x0 213 0

3 2 0004

j œ œœ ‰ œ œœœ œœ œœ

0 1 0 2 3

3 0 0 0 2 3

œ œœ œœ œ œ œ

œ œœ œ

###

3 0 0 0

0

3 3

D

G

2 1 00 3 4

D

x x0 132

TAKE TWO To get a handle on how the I, IV, and V work together, start by focusing on pairs of chords— first, the I and IV. Think of these as the “amen” chords: in a typical ending of a hymn, the IV comes with the “ah” and resolves to the I on “men.” Some songs use only the I and IV. One classic is Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People,” which is the basis of the first set of examples. Play the two-bar rhythm pattern in the key of G in Ex. 1a As you can see, the IV (C) makes only a brief appearance at the end of measure 1. Use the G fingering shown, with the ring, middle, and pinkie, to speed up the change to C and back. Take it slowly and loop the example— all examples in this lesson are designed to be looped. In Ex. 1b, play the same pattern in the key of A, where the I is A and the IV is D. (Note that I’m using a less common fingering for A that makes for a smooth change to D because the index can stay planted on the third string, but you may prefer another fingering.)

Ex. 1c

A

C

x0 213 0

x x0 132

0 2 2 2

0 0

0 2 2 2

2 3 2 0

0 2 2 2 0

Ex. 1e

E

0 23 1 00

F

x 32 0 1 0

j œœœ œœœ œœœ ‰ œœœ œœœ œœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

Ex. 1d x x0 132

D

goes, say, from C to F to G in the key of C is using the same underlying progression as a song that goes G–C–D in the key of G, or another song that goes D–G–A in the key of D. These songs are all I–IV–V.

0 0

nnn

0 2 2 2

œœ œ œœ œ œ 3

A

x0 213 0

xx 3 21 1

E

0 23 1 00

0 1 0 2

3 3

œœ œœœ œœ œ 0 1 0 2

1 1 2 3

0 0

B

3

0 0 0 2 3

3 3

0 0 2 3

0 0

2 2

0

3 3

2 2 2 0

0 0

Ex. 1d

C

D

x 32 0 1 0

j œ œ & ‰ œœœ

x x0 132

œœ œœ œ œ œ

0 1 0 2 3

B

G

3 3

0 1 0 2

2 3 2

0

Ex. 2a

C

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Now try this pattern in three other keys: C (Ex. 1c, where I is C and IV is F), D (Ex. 1d; I is D and IV is G), and E (Ex. 1e; I is E and IV is A). Can you hear how these are all the same progression transposed to different keys? Try singing a bit of “Everyday People” over each one of the examples (“and so on and so on and scooby dooby doo . . .”). You just need to find the right starting note for the melody in each key.

3 3

E

0 23 1 00

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D

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Next, check out the I and V. The V is the crucial chord that resolves most powerfully to the I. Hank Williams’ ever-popular “Jambalaya” uses only the I and V in a repeating eight-bar pattern. Try it out in Ex. 2a, in the key of C: I is C and V is G. Play an alternating bass/strum pattern with a short bass run in measure 6. Then play the same basic pattern in D (Ex. 2b) and in A (Ex. 2c). Regardless of the key, the relationship between the I and the V is the same.

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4

0

2 3 2 0

Û

0

Û

0

Û

At a jam session, when someone kicks off a bluegrass or traditional folk song, you can bet good money it’ll use the I, IV, and V. AcousticGuitar.com 55

THE BASICS

Ex. 2c

A

E

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&

###

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B

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0

A

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### œ œ œ # œ œ œ œœ œœ œœ ‰ ‰ œœœ œœœ ‰ œœ œœ œœ ‰ ‰ œœœ œœœ ‰ œœ œœ œœ ‰ ‰ œœœ œœœ ‰ œœœ œœœ œœœ ‰ ‰ œœœ œœœ ‰ & œ œ œ œœœ œœœ œœœ œ œ œ œ œœ œœ œœ œ œ œ 2 2 2 0

B

2 2 2 0

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Ex. 3c

C

F

x 32 0 1 0

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xx 3 21 1

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Ex. 4b

G

D

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B

# œœ Û Û Û œœ œœ 3 0 0 0 2 3

56 March 2016

ÛÛÛ

1 1 2 3

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# # œœ Û Û Û œœ Û Û Û œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œ

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x0 213 0

Ex. 4c

x 32 0 1 0

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C

x x0 132

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x x0 132

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xx 3 21 1

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VIDEO LESSON ACOUSTICGUITAR.COM

LISTEN TO THIS! Ex. 2c

THE BIG THREE put the I, IV, and V together. With a nod to E Now Richard Berry, who waited far too long to get 0 23 1 00 proper credit and compensation for writing “Louie Louie,” play that song’s signature rhythm in the key of A in Ex. 3a. The progression goes I–IV–V–IV (in A, that’s A–D–E–D), climbing up and back down. Once you’ve got that rocking, try it in G (Ex. 3b, G–C–D–C) and in C (Ex. 3c, C–F–G–F). 0 The I, IV, and V can be reshuffled in any 0order in a song. The final set of examples shows 1 2a strumming pattern similar to what Neil Young 2 goes I–V–IV. In 2 the key uses2in “Helpless,” which 0 0 0 0 of D, that’s D–A–G (Ex. 4a). In G, I–V–IV is G–D–C (Ex. 4b), and in A it’s A–E–D Ex. 3b (Ex. 4c).

A

x0 213 0

## & #

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0 2 Helpless 2 Crosby, Stills, Nash2& Young 0 Deja Vu 0 Atlantic

B

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x x0 132

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C

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x 32 0 1 0

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C

x x0 132

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Whenever you’re learning songs, you’ll see # # œ œ chords œœ themselves œ these ‰ œœœœ by œœ œœ œœœ ‰ ‰ œœœatœœœwork, & # three œœ œœœ ‰ ‰ œœœ œœœ ‰ or in conjunction with other œ chords. œ œ œ œ œ 2 2 2 0

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HOW TO USE THE I–IV–V Once you can quickly find the I, IV, and V in Aall sorts of useful things become various keys, x0 213 0 possible. If you’re singing a I–IV–V song in G and it’s a little low for your voice, rather than capoing up the neck you could just play the I–IV–V in A. At a jam session, when someone kicks off a bluegrass or traditional folk song, you can bet good money it’ll use the I, IV, and V—and you’ll know where to look for 0 the next chord. Whenever 2 you’re learning songs, you’ll see these three 2 chords at work, by 2 themselves or in conjunction 0 0 with other chords. 2 4 0 0 And as the saying goes (usually attributed to Nashville songsmith Harlan Howard), all you need to write a song are three chords and the C Now you D know a great place C truth. x 32 x x0 132 x 32 0 1 0to find the 010 three chords. Take the I, IV, and V in any key, shuffle them around, find a groove, start singing, and see what happens. As for the truth . . . well, it’s out there. AG

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2 3 2 0

Û ÛÛ Û ÛÛÛ AcousticGuitar.com 57

WEEKLY WORKOUT

Play the Right Stuff These tried-and-true tactics can help you be a better accompanist

any professional guitar players find themselves onstage or in the studio accompanying singer-songwriters, some of whom also play guitar or other chordal instruments. In such cases, the singer-songwriter rarely tells the sideperson exactly what to play. It’s usually up to the player to come up with musical parts that complement the singer and vitalize the song arrangement. Creating cool parts from scratch may seem to be a mysterious art form but it needn’t be an intimidating pros-

pect. In this Weekly Workout, I’ll offer some tried-and-true tactics, that—if practiced and comprehended—will ensure that you’ve always got a few aces up your sleeve.

M

WEEK 1 Week

BEGINNERS’

TIP 1

When a song uses a common chord progression, look for a way to play it that sets this song apart from any other.

WEEK ONE Knowing a variety of voicings for any particular chord is an invaluable asset to any sideperson. This is especially true when working with a singer-songwriter who plays guitar, because you need to keep what you’re playing out of the way

1

Ex. 1a

G # 3 œœœ & 4

œœ œ

œœœ

3 3 4

7 8 7

10 12 12

B Ex. 2a

Ex. 2b

Ex. 1b

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œœ œ

8 7 9

12 12 12

Ex. 2c

Ex. 1c

Ex. 1d

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0 0 2

4 5 5

7 9 10

Ex. 2d

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0 2 3

5 5 7

9 10 10

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G add2

G5

Gm

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3 3 3

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58 March 2016 Ex. 3c

w w w

2

Ex. 3d

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ww w

Ex. 3a

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# ww & c ww

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BY ADAM LEVY

Ex. 3b

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11 12 12

3

Ex. 4a

Gm

Ex. 4b

Gm/Bb

Ex. 4c

G m(add4)

Ex. 4d

G5

of what they’re playing. As a general principle, using opposites can be a good starting point for crafting your part. For example, if the artist is playing voicings in a low register, try playing higher voicings. If the artist is up high, try playing below. If they’re using full-voiced chords, try smaller shapes, such as triads. If they’re playing rudimentary chord shapes, try adding a seventh, ninth, or other colorful chord tone. Ex. 1a–1d illustrate all of the close-position inversions of a G major triad playable within the first 12 frets. (Close position means that the three notes in each of these triads are within the same octave. In open-position chord voicings, the notes are more spread out.) It would behoove you to memorize these shapes in all 12 major keys so that you can complement virtually any other voicing in any other register. That said, rudimentary triads are not the right sound for every musical situation. It’s important to have other types of voicings at your fingertips. You’ll find interesting examples of G-major voicings in Ex. 2a–2d. Ex. 2a offers a high-and-wide sound. (While this particular shape would be nearly impossible to replicate in other keys without the aid of a capo, it’s still worth learning for the concept at work: Open strings can be used to render voicings with

some wide gaps.) Ex. 2b is a first-inversion G triad in an open-position spread. It’s an earpleasing chord on its own and can sound even sweeter when strummed or plucked along with another guitarist’s run-of-the-mill G chord. The G (add2) in Ex. 2c is a little more jangly, thanks to the very close proximity of the two highest notes, A and B. In Ex. 2d, the third of the chord (B) is eliminated for a droning sound. You’ll need to know how to get around with minor chords as well, so check out the triads in Ex. 3a–3d and the specialized voicings in Ex. 4a–4d. In Ex. 4a–4d, you’ll mostly find minor versions of the same chords you played in Ex. 2a–2d. The one exception is Ex. 4c. The nontriadic note here is the fourth, not the third, simply because this shape lays more easily under the fingers than a Gm (add2). Again, you’ll want to memorize these in all 12 minor keys. WEEK TWO The focus this week will be on rhythmic opposites. To really get the gist of these exercises, be sure to repeat the Guitar 1 part several times so that you can keep it going in your mind while you play the Guitar 2 part. Better yet, record the Guitar 1 part—using your smartphone, looping pedal, or whatever tech tool you have

handy. Then play the Guitar 2 part along with Guitar 1 to hear how they work together. In Ex. 5, Guitar 1 plays a familiar C chord, using a typical strumming pattern. To go with that, you could play something like the Guitar 2 part, in which all of the chordal attacks are offset from the Guitar 1 part. When the two parts are played together, this can give the combined feel some buoyancy. Notice that the chord voicing in Guitar 2 is in a higher register than Guitar 1 and contains no third (E). Since the standard C chord already contains two thirds (the Es on strings 1 and 4), choosing a voicing without the 3 will help the overall harmony sound more clear.

BEGINNERS’

TIP 2

Some songs may only need a second guitar part in one section—perhaps the chorus—so don’t be afraid to not play for awhile.

AcousticGuitar.com 59

&

#c w ww 7

ww w

8 0 WEEKLY WORKOUT 0

B

3 0 2

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3 5 5

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Week 2 Ex. C5

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Week 3 WEEK 3

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60 March 2016

What’s notable about Ex. 6 is how the two parts don’t change chords with the same frequency. In measure 1, Guitar 2 hangs on the Am chord while Guitar 1 goes to G. In measure 2, Guitar 2 is more active than Guitar 1—with a C shape that gives the static F some melodic motion (in the lower two voices) and an Am that anticipates the repeated downbeat. Both of these serve to give this part some forward momentum. Remember, you don’t always have to take a song’s chord progression literally—that is changing chord by chord, right on the beat. Experiment with anticipation and delay, and perhaps skip a chord or two. When the singer-songwriter (or someone else in the band) is laying down the primary changes, you don’t necessarily have to, and what you don’t play can be as musically valuable as what you do play.

For example, the singer-songwriter (or other guitarist) is playing Ex. 7a, which is in the key of C major. If you want to get into a different register, you could play Ex. 7b (key of A, capo III), Ex. 7c (key of G, capo V), Ex. 7d (key of E, capo VIII), or Ex. 7e (key of D, capo X). If the other guitarist is already capoed up the neck, you can choose to play below or above them. The table shown in Ex. 8 will help you use the capo to get around in any key. For further practice, take a simple song that you’re familiar with in first position and learn to play it with a capo in two or three different registers, maintaining the original key. WEEK FOUR Of course, playing chords is not all you get to do as a second guitarist. You’re just as often asked to play fills and hooks, and even full-on solos. When playing melodies in any capacity, you need to consider some of the same principles you’ve been working with all along in this series so that you don’t clutter the musical arrangement. In Ex. 9a-9c, you’ll see the same two-bar phrase in three different registers—high, middle, and low. Can you hear how different they sound, even though the notes are the same? This is just one short example to illustrate the point. Your homework is to choose a couple

WEEK THREE This week you’ll be using common first-position forms you most likely know already. What makes them valuable here is the use of the capo, which—once again—will allow you to keep your part out of the way of another guitarist’s part. This is accomplished by playing the song in a different key (C, A, G, E, or D) that favors first-position chords, then using the capo to match your chords to the song’s actual key.

of short melodies that you know well and transpose each of them up and/or down to as many registers as are practically playable on the guitar. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, transpose these melodies to other keys as well. In the course of your career, you’ll be asked many times to change the key of a melody or chord progression. Being able to do so on the spot is a feather in your cap. Adam Levy is guitarist and songwriter based in Los Angeles, where he is chair of the guitar performance program at Los Angeles College of Music. His guitar work has appeared on recordings by Norah Jones, Tracy Chapman, and Ani DiFranco, among others. adamlevy.com

BEGINNERS’

TIP 3

It can be very informative to sing the song you’re working on a part for, even if you don’t consider yourself a singer.

Ex. 8 KEY C F Bb / A# Eb / D# Ab / G# Db / C# Gb / F# B E A D G

C no capo capo V capo X capo III capo VIII capo I capo VI capo XI capo IV capo IX capo II capo VII

A capo III capo VIII capo 1 capo VI capo X capo IV capo IX capo II capo VII no capo capo V capo X

G capo V capo X capo III capo VIII capo I capo VI capo XI capo IV capo IX capo II capo VII no capo

E capo VIII capo I capo VI capo IX capo IV capo IX capo II capo VII no capo capo V capo X capo III

D capo X capo III capo VIII capo I capo VI capo XI capo IV capo IX capo II capo VII no capo capo V

BEGINNERS’

TIP 4

Solid rhythm is the backbone of any great song, so don’t shirk practicing rhythmic stuff.

Week 4

WEEK 4

Ex. 9a

q = 106 Fœ

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B

Ex. 9c

Ex. 9b

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8

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AcousticGuitar.com 61

WOODSHED

The Rag Picker, Pt. 2

BY PETE MADSEN

3 more variations on ‘Pete’s Barrelhouse Rag’

ast month, this column focused on my ragtime piece “Pete’s Barrelhouse Rag”— inspired by the piano-based jazz-blues form that’s heavyily syncopated and that was popular in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Now, as promised, here’s a look at three additional variations on the piece. Variation 5 returns to the standard eightbar format, but gives the bass line a rest and allows you to navigate up and down the neck with a series of single-string runs. You’ll start out with some ascending sixth intervals (which suggest a C chord), then some descending

thirds (suggesting E). For the A7 chord, you’ll use a shortened version of a C shape. In the second bar of this passage, remove your third finger from string 3 and place it on string 5, fret 12 and then on string 6, fret 12. Then use your thumb on the ninth-fret C on string 6. The D chord once again uses thirds to descend the neck; for the G chord, some minor seconds close out this verse with a quirky flavor. Variation 6 is essentially a repetition of the opening verse from the previous lesson, but with a single-string run at the end. This segues into a half-time section, which is built on

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four-bar phrases that are divided between G and C chords. The first four bars have you playing open G and G7 chords; the second two bars contain a turnaround in C that I borrowed from Robert Johnson’s “From Four Until Late,” moving between the chords C, C7, F, and Fm. The second four-bar pass uses a series of CAGED-voiced G7 chords, followed by another Johnson-style turnaround. The third pass through these adds another higher voicing to the G7 and returns to the “From Four Until Late” changes. You exit the half-time section by bouncing back and forth between G7 and G7

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VIDEO LESSON

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ACOUSTIC CLASSIC

The Bond Girl

007 inspired this fingerstyle Tommy Emmanuel ballad BY ADAM PERLMUTTER

Tommy Emmanuel Little by Little Guitar Tab Songbook Hal Leonard

66 March 2016

ome years ago, Tommy Emmanuel was watching the James Bond movie Moonraker (1979) when an interesting harmonic moment tickled his ear: in the theme song, the sound of a B chord with the addition of the raised fifth, moving to an E minor-major ninth chord. Emmanuel then took this idea in a new direction in his ballad “Ruby’s Eyes.” The composition, excerpted here from a new Tommy Emmanuel songbook, offers an excellent introduction to Emmanuel’s trademark contrapuntal approach, which earned him the honorific of Certified Guitar Player from the country legend Chet Atkins. Emmanuel is known to sail effortlessly at impossibly fast tempos, but “Ruby’s Eyes” is taken at a moderate clip, around 108 bpm, making it approachable. Coming up with efficient fret-hand fingerings is key to mastering the piece. For instance, in the B-chord measures, fretting strings 4, 3, and 2 with your second, third, and fourth fingers will set you up for adding the hammer-ons and pulloffs to the chord with your fourth finger. In bar 23–26 and elsewhere, fretting the sixth-string notes with your thumb, as Emmanuel does

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throughout the piece, will make it easier to add the first-string grace notes. As for the pick hand, Emmanuel performs the piece with a thumb pick and bare fingers. Try doing the same, or if you’d prefer, use straight fingerpicking. Generally speaking, picking the notes on the lower strings with your thumb and the upper strings with your other fingers should do the trick; use your thumb to strum the chords containing more than four notes. The tune features a couple of nice examples of harmonics. In bar 37, assign your index finger to the harmonics at fret 7 and your fourth to those at fret 12. Remember to let the notes cascade together for a shimmering effect. The harmonics that end the piece are less straightforward. Here, while your fret hand holds down the B chord indicated in tablature, position your pick hand about 12 frets above that shape, and lightly press its palm against strings 6–4 as you strum, causing that bottom quartet to sound an octave higher than fingered. It might take a bit of experimenting to pull this off, but the effect is worth the effort. AG

RUBY’S EYES

WORDS AND MUSIC BY TOMMY EMMANUEL

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AcousticGuitar.com 69

ACOUSTIC CLASSIC The Carter Family Can the Circle Be Unbroken Banner

Mama’s Gone

‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken’ is sad but can be uplifting BY DAN APCZYNSKI

s with many songs that date back before the 20th century, it’s a little difficult to trace the exact origin of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” An early version bearing this title was published in a book of hymnals, arranged for four-part choir and attributed to Ada R. Habershon and Charles H. Gabriel. The song’s melody and phrasing are similar to contemporary interpretations, as performed and recorded by Doc Watson, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (see p.

A

70 March 2016

24), Willie Nelson, and many more, but with different lyrics. Today’s renditions bear a much closer lyrical resemblance to the song recorded by the Carter Family in 1928 under the title “Can the Circle Be Unbroken.” While I’ve based this arrangement on the Carter Family’s version, I—like Watson, Nelson, and most others—have kept the original title. While the song’s narrative is sad, the song doesn’t need to be performed that way. Some

versions—including at least one fantastic recording on Willie Nelson’s 1978 album Willie and Family Live (featuring background vocals by Emmylou Harris)—offer an uptempo gospel feel that turns the depressing subject matter on its ear. Use the simple quarter-note boom-chuck rhythm shown below for a melancholy interpretation, or kick up the tempo and experiment with more upbeat strumming patterns like the one shown in measures 5 and 6. AG

WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN

WORDS AND MUSIC BY A.P. CARTER

Strum Pattern

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7 G When IGsaw thatDhearse come rollin’ For to carry my mother away

Em

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Em Missed my mother, she was gone All of my brothers, sisters crying

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G

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Repeat Chorus

G

D7

Em

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What a home, so sad and lone Repeat Chorus Repeat Chorus

G7

3. Oh, I followed close behind her G

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C G her 3. Oh, I followed close behind Tried to hold up and be brave

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By and by, Lord, by and by Em There’s a better home awaitin’

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Tried to hold up and be brave Em But I could not hide my sorrow

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©1935 BY PEER INTERNATIONAL CORP. COPYRIGHT RENEWED. INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT SECURED ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF HAL LEONARD CORP

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G Will the Ccircle be unbroken By and by, Lord, by and by

D7 awaitin’ G There’sGa better home In the sky, Lord, in the sky D7

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G

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4. I went back home, my home was lonesome

D7are carrying G For thisGlady you Lord, I hate to see her go

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Undertaker, please drive slowEm For this lady you are carrying

For to carry my mother away Chorus

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In the sky, Lord, in the sky

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When they laid her in the grave Repeat Chorus

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For this lady you are carrying

1 0 0 0 2

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AcousticGuitar.com 71 2. 2.2.II said Isaid saidto totoGthat that thatundertaker undertaker undertaker 1. 1.1.IGI was Iwas wasstandin’ standin’ standin’ bybymy my mywindow window window G D7 G D 7 G by D 7 G 2. 2. I I said said to to that that undertaker undertaker 1.1. For I Iwas was standin’ standin’ bymy mywindow window Lord, I hate to see her go to carry my mother by away What a home, so sad and lone

4

ACOUSTIC CLASSIC

Twisted Sister

‘O the Wind and Rain’ is a murder ballad about squabbling siblings

72 March 2016

VICKI SHARP

BY ADAM PERLMUTTER

Peggy Seeger

he Child Ballads aren’t really songs for the young. Rather, they’re songs collected by the Harvard professor and folklorist Francis James Child (1825–1896), who in the mid- to late-1800s assembled the 305 traditional numbers that appear in the ten-volume series The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (see the interview with Peggy Seeger on page 51). Included in the collection is the haunting murder ballad “The Twa Sisters” (Child 10)— also existing under such variants as “The Cruel Sister,” “The Bonny Swans,” and “O the Wind and Rain”—about a fratricide in which the victim is reborn as a musical instrument. The song has been interpreted by everyone from Bob Dylan and Tom Waits to Jerry Garcia and Peggy Seeger. This arrangement is based on Seeger’s recording of “O the Wind and Rain,” from her 2008 album, Bring Me Home (Appleseed). It could be played as an accompaniment or as a stand-alone solo. Seeger’s version doesn’t have any guitar and is dominated by a harmonium rendering a harmonically static backdrop in long

T

tones. Here, the droning quality is captured on guitar through the use of open-G tuning and an alternating bass pattern that’s identical in every measure, lending a hypnotic effect. Before you play the piece, note its unusual structure—a nine-bar verse, played 13 times. All of the verses have a sort of call-andresponse pattern in which the first line is answered with the lyric “O the wind and rain” and the third line with “Cryin’ the dreadful wind and rain.” When you delve into the arrangement, pick the bottom three strings with your bare thumb or a thumb pick and the higher strings with your index, middle, and ring fingers. Give the chords falling on beats 1 and 3 of most measures a little roll, and let all of the notes ring for as long as possible. Overall, the fret-hand fingerings should be pretty straightforward, but those in bar 5 could be a little tricky. Try grabbing the fifth-fret A with your third finger and the seventh-fret B with your fourth, making sure to play the notes in a smooth and singing way. AG

Verse

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AcousticGuitar.com 73

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She floated on down to the miller’s dam O the wind and rain Father father there swims a swan Cryin’ the dreadful wind and rain

10. He made a fiddle bow of her long yellow hair

The miller ran for his drifting hook O the wind and rain And pulled that poor girl from the brook Cryin’ the dreadful wind and rain

11. He made a fiddle of her little breast bone

He laid her on the bank to dry O the wind and rain A fiddler man came walking by Cryin’ the dreadful wind and rain

12. And the only tune that fiddle could play

He saw that poor girl lying there O the wind and rain He took 30 strands of her long yellow hair Cryin’ the dreadful wind and rain

13. Was yonder’s my sister sittin’ on a rock

SHUBB The best performers will settle for no less.

[email protected] • www.shubb.com 707-843-4068 74 March 2016

O the wind and rain He made fiddle pegs of her little finger bones Cryin’ the dreadful wind and rain

O the wind and rain With a sound that could melt a heart of stone Cryin’ the dreadful wind and rain

O the wind and rain The only tune that fiddle would play was Cryin’ the dreadful wind and rain

O the wind and rain Tyin’ my Johnny a true love’s knot Cryin’ the dreadful wind and rain

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SHOPTALK

A Storied Past

AG TRADE

Eric Jay strums through memories at Mandolin Brothers, which is up for sale.

Staten Island’s Mandolin Brothers guitar store is up for sale BY KENNY BERKOWITZ

oni Mitchell wrote about it in “Song for Sharon.” Judy Collins, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Ed Helms, Sarah McLachlan, Don McLean, Graham Nash, Bruce Springsteen, Stephen Stills, and Dave Van Ronk all shopped there. Paul McCartney had his Höfner violin bass repaired in the basement. Now, 45 years after Stan Jay opened Mandolin Brothers on Staten Island, a short ferry ride from downtown Manhattan, his children are trying to sell the shop where they grew up. “In a way, it’s like the death of a person who’s been in the hospital for a year,” says Alison Reilly, 37, who works in the store with her brother, Eric Jay, 34. “This has been going on for such a long time that it sinks in, little by little every day, until you get to the point where you’re expecting it to happen. You’re prepared. You understand.” In December, a little more than a year after Stan Jay died of lymphoma, his family put

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Mandolin Brothers on the market, hoping to find a buyer for the store, its inventory, or both before the end of 2015. In its prime, the showroom was filled with 900 instruments, mostly acoustic and mostly high-end, with a focus on guitars, banjos, and mandolins. These days, fewer than 100 remain, including a 1934 Martin 000-28 Herringbone guitar (Eric’s favorite) and a 1919 Gibson F4 mandolin (Alison’s favorite), along with other treasures, like a collection of molds from the estate of luthier John D’Angelico. As of press time, the Jays had entertained some “serious inquiries,” but hadn’t yet received any offers. That leaves Alison and Eric working in the store four or five days a week, as they have for most of their lives, and packing up some old memories. And what memories! There was the time Conan O’Brien stopped by, looking for a guitar. “I was surprised by how

tall he is,” says Eric. “And he’s actually a good guitar player, which was nice to see as well.” There was the time Sheryl Crow asked to have a couple of guitars brought to her Manhattan studio. (“When she was done, I asked, ‘Could we take a picture?’” says Alison. “She brought us over to a microphone and told us to stick our fingers in our ears and pretend we were singing. So now I have this really awesome picture that looks like I’m singing with Sheryl Crow. Which was not the case, but it makes a really great photo.” “If we can’t sell the company itself, we still have to sell the stuff that’s here,” says Eric, who lives in an apartment above the showroom. “We’ll be doing that for as long as it takes, essentially. It’s been a daunting thing to come to grips with, but we’ve dealt with the realities every single day for months now, over the whole last year. And if it doesn’t happen, we’ll shut the place down and go our merry way. “Find some other line of work.” AG AcousticGuitar.com 77

MAKERS & SHAKERS

A Fearless Innovator Custom-build pioneer—and Pat Metheny collaborator— Linda Manzer is no stranger to experimentation

NIGEL DICKSON

BY ADAM PERLMUTTER

78 March 2016

s one of the world’s great luthiers, Linda Manzer handcrafts stringed instruments of uncommon beauty, both aesthetically and sonically. But her first creation didn’t show much promise. “When I was in grade school I took a handsaw to an acoustic guitar”—after seeing the Beatles on television—“trying to turn it into an electric guitar with papier-mâché wings put on it to make it look like John Lennon’s Rickenbacker. The experiment failed!” Manzer says. In her shop in Toronto, Ontario, Manzer’s experiments—and innovations like the Manzer wedge—are the big winners. She makes steelstrings, nylon-strings, archtops, and other guitars and fretted instruments that have changed the way guitarists play. Though she offers standard models—like the Manzer, a concert-sized flattop, and the Au Naturel, an elegant 17-inch archtop—her instruments are usually made-to-order and one-of-a-kind. Manzer makes between eight and ten guitars each year. Her lowest priced are about $19,000. Working in such limited capacity has allowed her to fulfill her original vision as a luthier. “I’ve always wanted to keep a close connection with each guitar from start to finish,” she says. Carlos Santana, Bruce Cockburn, Paul Simon, Liona Boyd, Milton Nascimento, and Julian Lage are among the prominent and wide-ranging guitarists who have close connections with their Manzer instruments. But the luthier has enjoyed a particularly intimate and rewarding relationship with the jazz wizard Pat Metheny, for whom she’s made dozens of fretted instruments of all types: conventional guitars as well as instruments ranging from soprano guitars and sitar guitars to a cubist-looking creation, dubbed Pikasso, with 42 strings. “Linda has been an amazing collaborator for me over years,” Metheny says. “Besides her work as a conventional guitar maker, she turns out to be quite fearless. She is able to take a fairly wacky idea for variations on the basic idea of what a guitar is from me and not only figure out the engineering issues required to make it happen, but find a way to also craft an amazing-sounding instrument that is quite beautiful as well. What is also notable about her instruments is that they continue to get better year after year.” 

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anzer, who is 63, grew up in Toronto and was equally inspired by her father’s collection of big band and classical records and by folk music. As a teenager, she once canoed to Toronto Island and, being short of cash, snuck into the Mariposa Folk Festival to see Joni Mitchell play. Mitchell sang “A Case of You,” accompanying herself on the dulcimer, and Manzer became enchanted by the rustic Appalachian instrument.

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When Manzer went to buy a dulcimer for herself, she found that a kit for making one cost half the price of a finished instrument and went with the budget option. That turned out to be a pivotal decision. “That was the moment I discovered the joy of gluing a bunch of pieces of wood together, then putting strings on it and bringing a musical instrument to life,” she says. Manzer made several more dulcimers while in high school, then went off to art college, ostensibly to study painting. But after trying two different schools, she realized the scene was too conceptual for her liking—she preferred making things, rather than ideas. While at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, she says, “I kept finding myself in the woodworking shop making more dulcimers. Then I realized that I wanted to make guitars and sought out a teacher.” Finding a teacher in the 1970s—long before the internet made lutherie readily accessible— was no mean feat. Manzer wrote or telephoned any possible lead she could think of and eventually scored the name of one Jean Larrivée, whose workshop happened to be in her hometown. “He rarely hired people, but he had a waiting list as long as your arm. And also, at that time, there were no women doing anything like this. So basically, I just bugged him until he hired me,” Manzer says. In 1974, Manzer began working with Larrivée, sweeping the floors of his shop and making coffee runs before polishing nuts and saddles and later strutting all the backs and tops on his guitars. In the process, she developed a strong foundation for making her own instruments. “It was a very magical time,” Manzer says. “I learned all aspects of guitar making, and I figure we produced about 1,500 guitars over the course of my apprenticeship. Jean was—and still is—one of the most gifted builders on the planet.” fter three and a half years of apprenticing with Larrivée, Manzer opened her own business, crashing on friends’ couches so she could afford the shop’s rent. It was during those salad days that she first encountered Metheny. “I had been a fan of Pat’s music from the first note I heard him play in concert with Joni Mitchell in 1979,” she says. “I sent a letter backstage to him in 1981 when he played in Toronto and we met. He tried a guitar and he ordered one from me, which he’s done about every year since.” The first guitar can be heard on “Lonely Woman,” Metheny’s reading of the Horace Silver composition on his 1984 ECM album, Rejoicing. Before he met Manzer, Metheny had been approached by other luthiers angling to build

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Left The Manzer Wedge Below The 42-string Pikasso

him guitars, and he always politely declined. But he couldn’t resist Manzer. “Linda’s guitar really offered me something I have not ever found quite anywhere else,” he says. “There is a clarity and evenness to the sound and the feel of the guitar that I can only compare to what a great piano is like. Each note leads to the next note in a way that is totally coherent and connected. It’s an incredible instrument.” After a few years at the workbench, Manzer began to feel restless, and in 1981, she took a year off to travel the world by herself, and with a knapsack on her back, went from the Caribbean to China. Not long after she returned to Toronto, she got a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. In 1983, she used the money to travel to Long Island, New York, to apprentice with archtop luthier James D’Aquisto, a protégé of John D’Angelico. “Watching him work was magical,” Manzer says. “His whole being was focused on making the best guitar in the universe. His method was very intuitive. He would pick up a piece of wood, and just from feeling its weight and rubbing it with his hands, he would know what he could do with it and exactly how it would AcousticGuitar.com 79

MAKERS & SHAKERS

sound. He taught me the simplicity of trusting your intuition and applying reason. “Working in his shop was like stepping into a time machine to the richest culture of American guitar making,” she continues. “I worked at D’Angelico’s former workbench to build my first archtop, carving the top and back using D’Angelico’s beautiful little hand planes. By the time I finished the top and back plates, a day or two of hard work had passed and I had a deep sense of the wood’s acoustic properties. It was an incredible learning experience that is the foundation of how I build archtop guitars today.”  In 1984, after Metheny bought several conventional guitars from Manzer, he engaged her with a challenge: build an instrument with as many strings as possible. After spending time with this puzzle, Manzer determined that the upper threshold was 42 strings. The four-necked Pikasso (sic) took a year to build and is one of the most unusual fretted instruments ever realized. “Whenever Pat gets a guitar idea, I do my best to bring his concept to life,” Manzer says. “The incredible thing about working with him is how he pushed my envelope and encouraged me to explore what the guitar could be.”

he making of Pikasso produced a less radical, but more influential, design feature: the Manzer Wedge, an ergonomic tapered body shape that has become standard among guitar makers. Manzer arrived at the design through a discussion with fellow guitar maker Tony Duggan-Smith, also a former Larrivée apprentice. “The idea was to lean the top back by squeezing the side under the arm so you would have a better visual of the 42 strings,” she explains, “and to widen it on the knee side so the internal air volume of the body was the same. It turned out to be very comfortable as well and I started doing it on all my guitars.” Just as Manzer had to figure out how to build Pikasso, Metheny, more than 30 years later, is still learning to play it. “Honestly, when Linda delivered it to me, it took me about a year of just staring at it before I figured out how I wanted to try to play it,” Metheny says. “Figuring out the different ways of tuning it is an ongoing thing as well. I feel a long way from mastering it.” In her fifth decade as a luthier, Manzer continues to thrive. Not long ago she made a

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limited-edition series of 30 Metheny-Manzer Signature guitars ($32,000 each), which has almost sold out—Paul Simon is among the lucky owners. “The guitar is designed to be a tribute to our journey and is patterned after the very first guitar I made for Pat,” Manzer says. “But it also includes many features he and I incorporated into the guitars over the years, including the Wedge and a very elaborate, hand-cut 200piece inlay featuring Pat’s art on the fingerboard and peghead.” Manzer’s got a waiting list of one year; on her workbench are three archtops, a 17-inch, 16-inch, and 14-inch; and she has an interesting collaboration in the works. She and six other Canadian builders are each making a guitar inspired by a prominent Canadian painter, and she’s in the rough-drawing stage of an instrument based on the work of Lawren Harris. “It’s been easy to stay inspired,” Manzer says. “I love what I do and I can actually make a living doing it. Plus I get to interact with some of the most inspiring, greatest artists and know truly wonderful people in the world of guitar-making. I pinch myself that I got so lucky.” AG

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GUITAR GURU

The Glue Quandary Do bonding agents affect a guitar’s sound? The jury is still out BY DANA BOURGEOIS

Q

Why is hot hide glue preferred by some luthiers, while others use synthetic glues, and what are its advantages and disadvantages? Doug MacKenzie Cary, North Carolina

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Hide glue, animal glue, and protein colloid glue are names for adhesives made from the connective tissues of various animals. Used by woodworkers in a wide variety of forms for millennia, animal glues are made by boiling hide, bones, sinew, or hoofs and refining the residues into granulated solids. Glue is prepared by dissolving granules in warm

GOT A QUESTION? Uncertain about guitar care and maintenance? The ins-and-outs of guitar building? Or a topic related to your gear?

82 March 2016

water to form a gelatinous protein compound that can be refrigerated and stored for future use. When heated in a double boiler, the gelatin liquefies into a workable glue that quickly sets after cooling to room temperature. Unfortunately, animal glues offer users many opportunities to produce flawed joints. Room temperature and wood surface temperature must be carefully controlled; working time is short, even under shorter, less-than-optimal conditions; glue strength decreases with each reheating; viscosity requires constant adjustment; and gelled glue will eventually degrade even under ideal conditions, or rot if improperly stored. In addition to difficulty of application, even the best animal glue joints are susceptible to failure in hot and humid conditions, and under cold conditions are less tolerant to shock. It’s little wonder that, up until their recent revival, animal glues had largely been replaced by modern adhesives that offer greater ease of application, longer work time, improved shelf life, and greater consistency. In expert hands, however, disadvantages become assets. Violin makers traditionally use their freshest glue for permanent joints, such as the center joint of carved tops and backs. The same pot of glue can be reheated and used for less critical joints, such as block assemblies, linings, and the like. Glue that has been

Ask Acoustic Guitar’s resident Guitar Guru. Send an email titled “Guitar Guru” to editor Blair Jackson at [email protected], and he’ll forward it to the expert luthier.

reheated many times is ideal for joints intended for future disassembly, such as top-to-rim and fingerboard-to-neck joints. Clean disassembly is easily accomplished by the application of moderate heat or by administering a well-directed shock—old glue is entirely removable with warm water and a rag. Common wisdom holds that modern polyvinyl wood glues impart a damping effect on vibrating surfaces, while animal glues are vibrationally inert. I attempted to test this theory for several years by making a pair of identical guitars, one constructed entirely with hot rabbit-hide glue and one using only Titebond polyvinyl aliphatic resin glue. The two OMs were built simultaneously and with adjacent-cut tops, backs, sides, necks, and braces; tops and backs were voiced as closely as possible. The pair of newly finished guitars was informally blind tested by quite a few players of all levels of ability, many of whom reported hearing subtle or distinct differences. The funny thing is, player preference was nearly evenly divided between the two instruments. (Unfortunately, follow-up testing of well-played guitars is no longer possible.) A number of makers whose work I hold in the highest regard swear by the sonic virtues of animal glues, and I freely admit that they may know something I don’t. In my shop, animal glue is typically used on our more expensive guitars, the ones that, not incidentally, also get the most desirable woods. I personally love the sound of these guitars, but I attribute their success to more than the glue. I’ve always believed—others may reasonably disagree—that design, selection of individual top and back woods, and individual voicing accounts for perhaps 75 percent of the sound of a guitar. If neck, bridge, brace wood, finish, and countless other factors account for the remaining 25 percent, how much influence can we attribute to glue? Like fine cuisine, a guitar is about its ingredients. But it’s also about how they are combined. In the end, it’s the meal that matters. Dana Bourgeois is a master luthier and the founder of Bourgeois Guitars in Lewiston, Maine.

If AG selects your question for publication, you’ll receive a complimentary copy of AG’s The Acoustic Guitar Owner’s Manual. Dana Bourgeois

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NEW GEAR

Solid mahogany top

Ebony bridge

High-Tech Retro

Martin’s new all-mahogany 00-15E pairs a vintage look and feel with modern electronics BY ADAM PERLMUTTER

hen most people think small-bodied mahogany guitars, they think blues fingerpicking or folk strumming. But Martin’s 00-15E sounds as good when you flat-pick Thelonious Monk’s Latin-tinged jazz standard “Bye-Ya” as it does when you fingerpick arrangements of piano pieces by Erik Satie. On “Bye-Ya,” the guitar has a surprising amount of headroom, while the Satie pieces reveal a wide range of tonal colors as you move your hand between the fretboard and bridge. The 00-15E’s mahogany soundboard isn’t as excitable as spruce, but the guitar is responsive whether I’m playing gently or digging in with a pick. Single-note lines and complex chords alike are clear and brilliant up and down the neck.

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Guitarists who don’t like to plug in will be glad to know that the 00-15E’s voice is warm and mellow, clear and balanced throughout the sonic spectrum. There are no dead spots anywhere on the neck—all of the notes ring clearly and are buzz-free, and the intonation is perfect. AMPLIFIED OLD-SCHOOL If you want to plug in, though, you’ll love the electronics system: Fishman’s F1 Aura+, which is designed specifically for Martins. For this clever system, the guitar company recorded a tone donor—a 1935 Martin 00-55, which is essentially today’s 00-17S—with nine highquality microphones. The images, or timbral

samples, work in tandem with an undersaddle pickup to make this modern Martin sound like a miked golden-era model. The multi-function controls are not straightforward to operate—for instance, the volume control also engages the tuner and phase control—but they offer flexibility in editing both the images and the sound of the pickup, as well as the compressor and anti-feedback controls. On the other hand, the default Easy Mode gives a nice sampling of the electronics’ possibilities, having three preset images and the dry pickup and a single tone control, for adjusting the mid scoop. The staunch purist should be impressed by the Aura+, which is miles ahead of the traditional

VIDEO REVIEW ACOUSTICGUITAR.COM/GEAR Top Open-geared tuners with butterbean knobs Bottom Solid mahogany back and sides

Ebony fretboard

AT A GLANCE

MARTIN 00-15E RETRO

1.75-inch nut

BODY 00 size

ELECTRONICS Fishman F1 Aura+

Satin finish with 15-style burst on soundboard

EXTRAS Martin SP Lifespan phosphor bronze light strings (.012–.054)

NECK Mahogany neck

PRICE $2,549 list $1,999 street Made in the USA martinguitar.com

Hardshell case

24.9-inch scale length

electronics system. It delivers an exceptionally natural and “old” sound on all of the images, and its miked sounds are convincing—a Neumann M147 and a Telefunken ELA M260, among others, were used in the recording sessions for the electronics. The system makes for an incredible tool for performing and recording alike. LOOKS SHARP With its subtly shaded top, fretboard inlays shaped like diamonds and squares, and opengeared butterbean tuners, the 00-15E has the understated good looks of a classic vintage guitar. The lack of body binding and other decorative embellishments is not only visually appealing,

but it keeps the price down. So do the A-frame X bracing and simple dovetail neck joint. Inside and outside the box, the craftsmanship on the review model I received is as good as what I’ve found in review models of other recent high-end Martins. The builders paid meticulous attention to everything from the fretwork to the kerfing. But the guitar plays better than your typical vintage instrument. Right out of the box, its action and neck adjustment are perfect. What’s more, the shape of the neck—which Martin calls Modified Low Oval with Performing Artist Taper—makes it as good to cradle in the open position as it does beyond the 12th fret. And it

has the winning combination of a short scale (24.9 inches) and wide nut (1.75), making it as easy to fingerpick as to play chords involving wide stretches. Martin’s 00-15E Retro is an awesome little guitar that, when played unplugged, stacks up favorably to the company’s top-of-the-line models. The guitar’s Fishman F1 Aura+ system takes things over the top, making it rich with tonal possibilities and one of the most compelling acoustic-electrics on the market. Contributing editor Adam Perlmutter transcribes, arranges, and engraves music for numerous publications. adamperlmutter.com. AcousticGuitar.com 85

NEW GEAR

AT A GLANCE

TAYLOR 326E BARITONE-6 SEB BODY Grand Symphony size Solid mahogany top Solid sapele back and sides Ebony bridge Satin finish NECK Mahogany neck Ebony fretboard 27-inch scale length 1.78-inch nut Taylor nickel tuners Satin finish EXTRAS Expression System 2 electronics Elixir baritone strings (.016–.070) Hardshell case PRICE $2,318 list/$1,799 street Made in the USA taylorguitars.com

Six-String Symphony

The Taylor 326e baritone offers a wide tonal palette BY ADAM PERLMUTTER

t first I wasn’t sure what to do with the Taylor 326e. Like any six-string baritone guitar, the instrument—tuned a perfect fourth lower than standard—sits between the register of a standard guitar and a bass guitar, and not always gracefully. My go-to chord-melody arrangements sounded murky and it felt tonally disorienting to play the instrument. But digging deeper and experimenting with both repertoire and register, I began to appreciate the tonal possibilities inherent to this nicely executed modern baritone with a throaty low voice.

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86 March 2016

DEEP SONG Despite a 27-inch scale length—1.6 inches longer than the standard dreadnought or OM scale, and 2.1 longer than short scale—it feels natural to play the 326e. I can pull off lowposition chords requiring large stretches with the same ease as on a regular guitar. The strings on the baritone, gauged .016–.070, are much thicker than the 12s that makers use on most modern guitars, but thanks to the baritone’s comfortable low action and its lowprofile neck, it’s not straining on the fret hand.

VIDEO REVIEW ACOUSTICGUITAR.COM/GEAR

Overall, the 326e has a firm and imposing voice—it’s the nightclub bouncer of guitars. Its registral balance is pretty good, though the treble isn’t quite as present as the bass and the mid. Single notes in the guitar’s lowest quarters sound warm and cello-like, not in small part because the baritone’s sixth string is just a minor second apart from the lowest string on a cello.

The 326e brings additional tonal possibilities— and delivers them with authority. Those committed to the baritone, should definitely check out this brawny contender.

With this in mind, I placed a capo at the first fret, to play the prelude from J.S. Bach’s Cello Suite No. 3 in C major. The baritone sounded rich in this context, and it was particularly satisfying to play low notes that aren’t unavailable on a standard-tuned regular guitar. When strummed, the 326e packs a wallop— it’s got great projection and sustain. But it can get slightly muddy, as it did, for instance, when I strummed a low open Gmaj7 chord with a D in the bass—the individual voices blended together in a way that wasn’t ideal. Strumming voicings with fewer notes—for example, twonote seventh chords with only thirds and sevenths, in the manner of Freddie Green, the longtime Count Basie guitarist—tends to yield better results. I remembered that Pat Metheny had recorded an entire album, One Quiet Night, on the solo baritone acoustic. Using guitarinstructor.com, I purchased scores from this album. Playing Metheny’s interpretations of Norah Jones’ “Don’t Know Why” and Gerry and the Pacemakers’ “Ferry ’Cross the Mersey” revealed that when fingerpicked, the guitar has

a sort of symphonic effect that lends itself to solo fingerstyle guitar. Whatever the approach, when plugged into a Fender Acoustasonic amplifier, the 326e’s onboard electronics—Taylor’s Expression System 2—does a terrific job of capturing the guitar’s natural acoustic sound with a minimum of fuss. THE NITTY GRITTY The 326e, with its Shaded Edgeburst finish on a mahogany soundboard, is good-looking. Taylor is known for its consistent high-level craftsmanship, and overall the review model hits most of the marks. Its fretwork is clean and tidy, as are its nut and saddle slots. The decorative work is precisely articulated and flush with the body. Plenty of players are satisfied with the range of a standard guitar, but the 326e brings additional tonal possibilities—and delivers them with authority. This US-made instrument isn’t necessarily easy on the wallet, but those committed to the baritone, should definitely check out this brawny contender. AG

AcousticGuitar.com 87

VIDEO REVIEW ACOUSTICGUITAR.COM/GEAR

NEW GEAR

AT A GLANCE

BLUERIDGE BG-1500ESB BODY 14-fret super jumbo Solid Sitka top Flamed maple back and sides Rosewood bridge Orange sunburst high-gloss finish NECK 3-piece laminate maple Rosewood fingerboard 25.6-inch scale 111/16-inch nut ELECTRONICS Fishman Presys Plus

Defying the Laws of Tradition

A Blueridge super jumbo with a modern twist BY GREG CAHILL

EXTRAS Bone nut and saddle Hardshell case PRICE $995 MSRP/$799 street Made in China sagamusic.com

88 March 2016

he first thing you notice when you strum the Blueridge BG-1500ESB Jumbo is the robust warmth of its tone—like a splash of sunlight filtering through tall trees in the Smoky Mountains that give this company its name. OK, the allusion to the Smoky Mountains is a bit misleading, since this guitar has several modern appointments that defy the laws of tradition. Those include a bright orange sunburst, Art Deco-style rosewood bridge and headstock inlay, and vintage-style keystone tuners. Overall, the effect is Gibsonesque. But strumming an open-G chord, unplugged, delivers a full, rich sound with punchy bass, clear mids, and shimmering treble—a sparkle that is characteristic of Blueridge guitars. Add to that the low string action that makes even a barred F chord easy to play, loud volume (the super-jumbo body boasts a 17-inch lower bout), a solid Sitka top, and stunning flamed maple back and sides, and you have a guitar that delivers the goods. While Blueridge has made its name manufacturing affordable unadorned dreadnoughts with high-end tonewoods that are popular with bluegrass players, the BG-1500ESB is a kin of the company’s flagship BG-2500, but with less ornate woods and inlay.

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An afternoon picking session with AG contributing editor Mark Kemp finds the BG1500ESB to be a well-rounded, versatile guitar. It’s low action, thin neck profile, and 111/16-inch nut are comfortable for fingerstyle while playing Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train,” using my thumb to bar the descending bass line on “The House of the Rising Sun,” and noodling a parcel of moody chord shapes. Strumming the Beatles’ “Eight Days a Week” produces a woody tone, and that signature intro-outro riff is blessed with a chiming effect. Kemp’s bluegrass licks fly effortlessly from the rosewood fretboard. He found the guitar’s high register a bit bright, a product, in part, of the maple back and sides, but I also attributed that to the new strings. The BG-1500ESB really shines when played through a Henriksen “Bud” acoustic amp— lightly picked folk songs sparkle and country ballads have a suitably warm glow. The onboard Fishman Presys Plus electronics deliver a natural tone and add fire to Kemp’s rendition of the Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil.” At a street price as low as $799, the BG1500E holds its own against many higherpriced jumbos, offering a unique blend of the modern and the traditional. AG

When art is your life We focus on every detail so we’re worthy of sharing that journey with you.

www.alvarezguitars.com

NEW GEAR

AT A GLANCE

SESSION ACOUSTIC DI FEATURES Active DI/preamp with -12dB to +26dB gain 1/4-inch 10 Megohm impedance instrument input

Two outputs: DI and unbalanced line Input gain and output volume controls Saturation and multiband compression/EQ controls Anti-feedback notch filter Ground lift switch, mute footswitch, phase switch, high pass filter switchable between 40, 80, 120, and 200Hz Powered by XLR Phantom power, 9-volt battery, or external power supply (not provided) Battery check button DIMENSIONS 1.5 lbs. 6.25 x 4 x 1.75 inches PRICE $359 list/$249 street Made in USA lrbaggs.com 90 March 2016

Not Your Typical Stomp Box LR Baggs Session Acoustic DI puts studio magic at your, er, toes BY DOUG YOUNG

ny acoustic guitarist who plays through an amplifier knows how frustrating live sound can be. You’ve got a great-sounding guitar, but as soon as you plug in, you’re hearing the sound of a pickup that inevitably fails to deliver what your guitar is capable of. Although pickups have definitely improved over the years, manufacturers have also started to turn to electronics as a way to overcome the limitations of pickups and deliver more pleasing sounds. LR Baggs has been at the forefront of working to build both better pickups and better electronics, although their electronics offerings have focused on fairly traditional approaches—until now. The inspiration for LR Baggs’ latest device, the Session Acoustic DI, began when Lloyd Baggs and his team noticed that the studio recordings they made to promote their pickups always sounded surprisingly good. The Nashville

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engineers they were using were clearly injecting some special magic, and the Baggs team began to wonder why they couldn’t capture the processes they used and create the same sounds live. They focused on two somewhat complex effects that are commonly used in the studio recording and mastering process: saturation and multi-band compression, packing them into an easy to use preamp/DI. COMPETITIVE CORE FEATURES At its core, the Session Acoustic DI is a simple active direct box that combines a high impedance input with a line out (for amplifiers) and balanced XLR output for a PA, a gain control, mute switch and a notch filter for controlling feedback. The Session DI can run off a battery, an external power supply, or run off phantom power from a mixer. Rounding out the feature

set, a ground-lift switch helps eliminate hum, and a configurable high pass filter allows you to reduce unwanted low frequencies. All in all, the Session DI’s core feature set is competitive with many other active DIs without even considering the extra signal processing. STUDIO MAGIC With the Session Acoustic DI, Baggs has distilled two fairly complex studio mastering tools down to two simple knobs. The easiest control to understand is called “saturate.” Saturation is essentially harmonic distortion. As guitarists, we associate distortion with overdriven electric guitar sounds—not usually desirable for acoustic tones. But in small doses, distortion adds pleasing aspects to music: think of the “warmth” of a good tube amplifier compared to solid-state, or the analog sound of tape compared to digital recording. Turning up the saturate control on the Session DI has the audible effect of adding warmth and fatness to your tone in a way that is different than what you can get with EQ. It seems to produce an increase in the lower midrange in the 200Hz to 1KHz range and also appears to add complexity at higher frequency ranges. A little saturation goes a long way, and higher settings produce audible distortion, so just as in recording, you’ll want to use the effect with care. The second knob is called “comp EQ,” and requires a little more explanation and experimentation. A studio multiband compressor basically consists of multiple compressors, each of which limit the dynamic range over a specific frequency range without affecting other frequencies. As implemented by the Session DI, the process acts like a dynamic EQ that tames spikes by cutting certain frequencies when you play hard, but leaving them untouched when playing quietly. Using multiple bands means that the effect can, for example, reduce harshness by limiting higher frequencies without affecting the guitar’s bass response. Studio multiband compressors can have dozens of knobs and be quite complex to set up properly. With the Session DI, there is a single “comp EQ” knob, but in reality there are two knobs that interact to control the effect. The Session DI’s compressor/EQ has a fixed threshold—the level at which the effect kicks in and reduces the gain—but you can control the amount of compression by adjusting the gain control; basically changing how loudly or softly you need to play to activate the effect. The “comp EQ” control determines the blend between the raw signal and the compressed signal, which affects how much effect you hear. The audible effect of the comp/EQ is to smooth out your sound. The behavior seems

most pronounced in the upper midrange, between 1kHz and 5kHz, where the Session DI tames some harshness, while still retaining the bass and sparkling highs. The effect allows the warmth of the guitar to come through when you play softly, but prevents both a buildup of mud and limits the aggressiveness of the upper mids as you dig in and play harder. SLEEPER EFFECT In use, I found the Session Acoustic DI to be pleasant to play through. Both effects are quite subtle—this isn’t a typical stomp box effect that you will switch on to radically change your sound. The overall effect is much like what happens when a mastering engineer puts the final touches on an already good recording— things just get a little bigger, fuller, smoother, and more polished. I found the benefits of the Session DI to be most noticeable when I used it for a while and then turned the effects off—it was most obvious that I missed what had been added after it was gone. There is a bit of overlap between the saturate control—that tends to add fatness and lower mids to your sound—and the comp EQ that tends to tame the mids, at least when you play hard, so some experimentation with adjusting the gain, saturate, and comp EQ controls is called for. When playing fingerstyle guitar, I enjoyed the added warmth of just a bit of saturation, and a little compression enhanced the way the guitar felt more than how it sounded. With heavy strumming, I had to be careful not to use too much saturation, but it was much easier to hear—and feel—how the comp/EQ smoothed out my sound. Although I did not try the Session DI with a band, I suspect it would help an acoustic rhythm guitar sit in the mix more consistently. Part of the Session Acoustic DI’s appeal is its simplicity. Some guitarists may be concerned about the lack of EQ and other features, but because the device offers its own way to sculpt your sound, you may not need additional EQ. Yet another option is to use the Session DI as an effect in conjunction with another preamp that provides other features. For example, inserting the Session DI into the effects loop of Baggs’ Venue preamp allows you to use the Venue’s five bands of EQ while adding the Session DI’s saturation, and compression. The Session Acoustic DI is a sort of “sleeper” effect. It’s difficult to demo because it doesn’t produce a clearly identifiable sound like a chorus effect or reverb. The audience won’t notice you’re using it, but they may comment on how your guitar sounds just as good as a recording! AG

Download 21 Songwriting Tips from the Masters and you’ll learn to write better songs with advice from from Pete Seeger, Joni Mitchell, Jakob Dylan, Elvis Costello, and more! SONGWRITING BASICS FOR GUITARISTS

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94

Playlist Punch Brothers release outtakes

Playlist Nouveaux Honkies live the Gypsy life

MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES / STRINGER

Playlist Eric Bibb does Lead Belly

94

PLAYLIST

MIXED MEDIA

PLAYLIST

Acoustic Allmans

Duane Allman plays slide in his hotel room before a 1970 Allman Brothers’ performance in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Universal reissues padded versions of a simple acoustic-based classic BY MARK KEMP

orty-five years ago, the Allman Brothers Band went acoustic. Sure, Idlewild South was only the group’s second album, but from Duane Allman’s joyous strumming that kickstarts “Revival” to his ominous acoustic riff that drives the mournful “Midnight Rider,” the record was quite a departure from the sustained scorch of raw electric blues on the band’s 1969 self-titled debut. Not that Idlewild South is bereft of searing electric blues. “Don’t Keep Me Wondering” and “Hoochie Coochie Man” burn as hot as anything on the first album, and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” the song that brought second guitarist Dickey Betts into the limelight, is a sweet, fluid, Latin-flavored, instrumental electric-guitar classic. But Idlewild South’s gentle acoustic guitars, and such piano-based songs as “Please Call Home,” showed a side of the Allmans that indicated they were more than just blues-rock shredders. Some of that acoustic ambiance—particularly in the gospel-tinged “Revival,” with its

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“love is everywhere” lyrics—may have come from the setting of many of the rehearsals: a cabin just west of the band’s home base of Macon, Georgia, dubbed Idlewild South, after Idlewild Airport (now JFK) in New York City. In the liner notes to the 45th anniversary expanded reissue, Allmans expert John Lynskey quotes the late bassist Berry Oakley’s wife, Linda, recalling a party during the holidays just before the recording sessions: “We all sat around, with a fire going in the fireplace, and at midnight we all got in a circle, arms locked together, and we sang ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken.’ That was a pivotal moment, a testament of love.” Universal Music’s expanded versions of Idlewild South come in the now-familiar three configurations: a single-CD basic remastered edition, a two-CD deluxe edition that adds another 12 songs, and a super-duper deluxe package that adds 14 tracks and Blu-ray sound. Most of the extra tracks are remastered versions of live recordings already available on the official bootleg Live at Ludlow Garage: 1970 released in 1990, but

there also are outtakes or alternate studio versions of “Statesboro Blues,” “One More Ride,” “Elizabeth Reed,” “Midnight Rider,” and “Revival.” The alternate mix of “Midnight Rider” will be of special interest to acoustic guitar fans. The Allmans recorded the version that appeared on the original album in Macon in February 1970, but worked on it again in March at Criteria Studios in Miami. The latter version, Lynskey writes in the liners, included “a new vocal track from Gregg, strong harmonies from Duane and Berry, as well as an acoustic slide part by Duane and a funky little outro.” The slide riffs are amazing to hear, but for an album so important for its acoustic textures, one would have hoped for even more of the Allmans’ acoustic flirtations. Perhaps no more exist, but it’s a shame there’s so much remastered electric music from an already-available source of great live performances and so few extras revealing the subtle acoustic brush strokes that distinguish Idlewild South. AcousticGuitar.com 93

PLAYLIST

Eric Bibb and JJ Milteau

Punch Brothers

Nouveaux Honkies

Lead Belly’s Gold Stony Plain

The Wireless Nonesuch

Blues for Country The Nouveaux Honkies

A stunning acoustic tribute to the legendary Lead Belly If you’re going to cover Huddie Ledbetter, you need to reach back to a time before the blues, to an earlier tradition of “musicianers,” singer-guitarists who traveled from town to town, performing on plantations and street corners. That’s where Lead Belly (1889–1949) got his start, playing in Shreveport’s red-light district. Bibb wisely has chosen songs in which Lead Belly’s anger still resonates, drawing contemporary parallels in “On a Monday” (about being unjustly imprisoned), “Bourgeois Blues” (liberal white hypocrisy), “Titanic” (racists getting their just desserts), and “Grey Goose” (an old bird who’s too tough to die). Bibb balances that protest side with gospel (“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”), skiffle (“Stewball”), folk (“Pick a Bale of Cotton”), and heartache (“Where Did You Sleep Last Night”), and includes Lead Belly’s No. 1 hit (“Goodnight, Irene”). Finally, Bibb has written three new songs from Lead Belly’s point of view, tracing his journey from “cotton picker to city slicker” and returning from beyond the grave to confront John Lomax, the “big boss man” who helped make Lead Belly famous. It’s a potent combination, made in France with a small band of Parisians and Americans— mostly Jean-Jacques Milteau, playing harmonica with a sweet, accordion-like tone, but also Gilles Michel (bass), and Larry Crockett (percussion) on the album’s live cuts—jamming alongside Bibb, who alternates between six-string and 12-string guitars, and guitjo in an effortless, easygoing rhythm. Bibb has been listening to Lead Belly so long that he’s made these songs his own, finding his own ex-pat groove in a mix of Northern soul, Southern folk, and European blues. —Kenny Berkowitz

5 outtakes connect with awe-inspiring musicianship Recorded during sessions for last year’s The Phosphorescent Blues, then included on the double-vinyl version of the album, these five songs are almost as good as the 11 that made the original CD, and that’s saying a lot. Punch Brothers are thinking, writing, and playing at such an incredibly high level that each new track reveals how far they’ve pushed beyond bluegrass and into some undefinable place: Did I just hear what I thought I heard? How did they do that? On “I Wonder,” the only previously unreleased track, the sense of adventure begins in the falsetto sadness of Chris Thile’s singing and keeps going in the droning legato of Paul Kowert’s bass, the crispness of Noam Pikelny’s banjo, the quiet, steadying flatpicking of Chris Eldridge’s guitar, and the gracefulness of Gabe Witcher’s fiddle. It’s also in dynamics that rise and fall, the neo-classical arpeggios and Beach Boys-like harmonies, the weightiness of lieder, the drive of bluegrass, and the momentary stab at pop. That’s just the first song. Other cuts are more old-timey, or more clearly comical, or more Tin Pan Alley, and one, the almost-newgrass “The Hops of Guldenberg,” has become a showstopper for Eldridge. Like Phosphorescent Blues, this album is about technology and connectedness, with a stunning combination of intellect, technique, and adventurousness that makes this band unlike any other. And like that previous album, this EP finds the band moving closer to warmth, toward humanity that isn’t easy to hear in their music, using the simple, lonely tragedy of Elliott Smith’s “Clementine” to begin exploring a new direction. —K.B.

Husband-and-wife duo draw from their Gypsy life Many bands write about the road. The Nouveaux Honkies live it. Year-round, husband and wife Tim O’Donnell and Rebecca Dawkins roll through America’s southland in a renovated RV with a fully equipped recording studio. The couple’s restless, rambling existence informs their third album, Blues for Country, in the braided stream of roots genres—country, blues, honky tonk, R&B and Texas swing—that runs through their music. Built on the chugging rhythms of O’Donnell’s Guild guitar, the Nouveaux Honkies craft lived-in songs, which draw on the band’s modern-day gypsy experience for subject matter. Propelled by Dawkins’ spinning-wheel fiddle and O’Donnell’s swaying, swinging guitar, “Life Ain’t Easy” laments the troubadour’s tough road with playful, self-deprecating wit. In contrast, “Whiskey’s Getting Harder to Drink” is a cleareyed catalog of the wear and tear that honky tonkin’ takes on body and spirit, and “Hours into Days” details how distance dissolves love over the melancholy Celtic lilt of Dawkins’ violin. Yet Blues for Country balances the mythology of the traveling musician with a celebration of music making. On the title track, O’Donnell insists that bookers find the band “too blues for country, too country for blues,” but his lament is leavened by the lively swagger in his vocal and the coquettish seesaw of Dawkins’ fiddle. Likewise, a cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty” counters reverence with exuberance when O’Donnell uncoils a silvery, Spanish-spiced lead on his Guild guitar. Blues for Country is a paean to wandering minstrelsy that feels right at home. —Pat Moran

94 March 2016

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AcousticGuitar.com 97

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GREAT ACOUSTICS

Left 1955 Martin 0-15 Right 1951–1954 Gibson J-45

Meet the Milk Carton Kids

Vintage Gibson and Martin guitars join in perfect harmony BY GREG CAHILL

sk the Milk Carton Kids the secret of their sound and the question prompts goodnatured ribbing between the musicians. “The hardest thing about playing together became apparent the first time we ever played together,” says Joey Ryan, referring to his musical partner, Kenneth Pattengale. “My instinct, at least as a guitar player, is to be very straight timewise. . . .” “I know, that is so annoying,” Pattengale interjects. “Yeah, but with Kenneth . . . if I’m Newton then Kenneth is Einstein, in regards to our concepts of time,” Ryan explains. “Kenneth’s concept is very elastic, very relative. And mine is more absolute.” “Did Newton have the big head?” Pattengale asks, eliciting a chuckle from his duo partner. Moments later, the pair are tightly locked in musical reverie, their vocals blending in angelic fashion and their guitars—a vintage Gibson and a vintage Martin—equally harmonious. Ryan plays a Gibson J-45 (circa 1951– 1954)—a gift from an anonymous fan who once

A

asked him to describe his dream guitar and then bought it for him on eBay. Ryan tunes the guitar down a whole step. The Gibson, he says, has a short decay: “The notes sound like a poof of air coming from the soundhole, and it has a thumpy low end. I always liked it just to sing along to by myself, but then when we got together it turned out that it really complemented the sonic range of Kenneth’s guitar.” That’s Pattengale’s 1955 Martin 0-15. He had the top and back shaved to .0095 of an inch in thickness, making for a lively response. Martin Guitars is working to create a replica of his 0-15—which Pattengale says is in desperate need of a neck reset; he famously ties a hankerchief around the third fret to damp the string buzz—for a possible limited-edition signature model. “It’s a very boxy-sounding guitar, but it has all the warmth retained,” Pattengale says. He agrees that the Martin complements Ryan’s Gibson, and then adds with a smile, “Together, the two of us achieve the sound of one guitar player.” AG

Acoustic Guitar (ISSN 1049-9261) is published monthly by String Letter Publishing, Inc., 501 Canal Blvd, Suite J, Richmond, CA 94840. Periodical postage paid at Richmond, CA 94804 and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send changes of address to Acoustic Guitar, String Letter Publishing, Inc., PO Box 3500, Big Sandy, TX 75755. Changes of address may also be made on line at AcousticGuitar.com. Printed in the USA. Canada Post: Publications Mail Agreement #40612608. Canada Returns to be sent to Imex Global Solutions, PO Box 32229, Hartford, CT 06150-2229.

98 March 2016

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Introducing Martin’s Standard Series

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