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Early Southern Guitar Sounds ReviewAt 75 years old, Mike is still alive and kicking very hard as the most outstanding player, historian, and analyst of Southeastern traditional music Black and white in America. He's unique in that as he likes to say, he was never very good at "book learning" and with the exception of a few out of print music instruction books and his brilliant "Talking Feet" book and film which should be in every home, most of his writing has come in liner notes, or talks at performances or where old time music savants gather. However, he has created a body of work in his 60 years of performances and in the many living traditional singers and musicians he has recorded and promoted, and in the recordings he has done with the New Lost City Ramblers, the Strange Creek Singers, and with other old time musicians like Alice Foster (now Gerard) and Paul Brown.
This album is apparently a successor to his magnificent Southern Banjo record that catalog traditional Black and white Southern banjo playing magnificently coming like this set does with an instructional DVD.
Even more than on the Banjo Sounds set, Mike covers a broad selection of different old time guitar sounds, both African American and European American and much mixed. Old time guitar comes from many places. Some of it comes from the polite usually sentimental parlor guitar styles that were a big part of 19th Century genteel life and the chief center of guitar playing until the early 20th Century when inexpensive factory made guitars with steel strings first became available by mail order throughout the rural South.
The emergence of the steel guitars came at a time that a revolution in music was going on, Ragtime and the Blues and the beginnings of Jazz were stirring. The old fiddle repertoire was being changed by the addition of banjos to what had often been solo fiddles. People were trying to make music that combined the old traditions with the new sounds and people moving to the guitar were using techniques that they had used on the banjo as well as making new music no banjo had ever played.
Spanish Fandango on this CD was one of the signature pieces of the standard parlor and performance guitar styles of the 19th and early 20th Century. If you bought a book on how to play guitar in 1890, it might have had the Spanish Fandango as the last piece showign you really could play. It was so popular with Southern white and Black guitarists, that the open G tuning which it is done in is still known by many as the "Spanish Tuning."
On the other hand, the John Henry on this album is exactly the kind of slide D Sebastopol Tuning (named for the "Seige of Sebastopol" written by the same author as the Spanish Fandango and also a parlor guitar specialty) that Black guitarists especially in Virginia and North Carolina aspired to play when the guitar and the blues swept in in the 1910s and 1920s.
One of my favorites here is the reproduction of Frank Hutcheson's magnificent "Worried Blues," a slide guitar. There is much else here.
Now, I first met Mike at the Banjo collectors gathering where he would frequently bring a rare old banjo played by an historic banjoist like Dock Boggs or Josh Thomas. On this CD he delves into his own collection and those of friends and collaborators to present an array of historic guitars whose description in the well written notes open the door to the history of guitars in the US.
This recording belongs in every home
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