Lap guitars are a curiosity: a keyboard rather than a guitar and visual as opposed to tactile. My view is that a singer should sing out to the audience, not down to a guitar but there’s no problem if the lap guitarist doesn’t sing.
But having musical wisdom and the appropriate instrument is only the beginning.
Performing alone you need power and ways to conserve energy. There’s no-one to help you and it’s no use having an inoffensive pop voice: you need immediate impact. You need to fill the room with sound. Because solo performance is so demanding and arduous it’s important to be as economical with effort as possible. You have to go back to basic chords and getting melodies within chord shapes. If a musician was going to spend long periods on street corners then he needed strategies for maximising sound and impact. As Leadbelly said, “I never change chords; I just walk to the next one.” If there was an easier way of producing the same sound he would take it; if he could use the guitar as a percussion instrument in order to add rhythmic texture, he would; if he could add variety by using his voice in different ways: moaning, humming, answering back to his guitar, spoken asides to the audience, he did. At the end of the day the impact of his performance would determine whether people threw coins in his hat, or bought him drinks in the juke joint.
Take, for example, Blind Willie McTell from Atlanta who played a twelve string guitar. I really rate some of his Last Session recordings. Among his numbers in my repertoire are “The Dying Crapshooter’s Blues” and “Beedle Um Bum”. I am also interested in his song “Reckless Disposition”: a melodic and virile song full of relentless movement with interesting tuning – the same tuning as I use for “Friend Of The Devil” – a double drop D. His technique was very economical and was later taken up by some of the folkies. To understand what he did I needed another set of mathematics. For a start his bass note is lower than on my guitar. The natural thing to do is to take it down a note to make it deeper. You can get the note but not the melody line. So you take the first string down to D as well; then I’ve got my D chord with two fingers, my A chord with one finger – almost in an open tuning again – and my G chord is two fingers again. As well as getting economical chords finger-wise, bugger me I’ve got some spare fingers! What to do with them: well you do melody lines with spare digits. And just see how little the left hand is doing! You get economy of effort plus a different sound – ideal for someone standing on a street corner hoping to draw the punters. I repeat: why chase chords when you can walk to the next one?
With maximum skill and minimum effort the musician can add surprise. Voice and instrument can be varied and one technique is to have the vocals going faster than the instrument. Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro’ Blues” has vocals and guitar moving at different paces, the increasing pace creating tension. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Matchbox Blues” is another example. In parts of this the guitar is going faster than the voice and at a different rhythm giving an exhilarating sense of movement. His “One Dime Blues” has the guitar rhythms doing a little jig when the subject is hot. In Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues” the guitar has life of its own irrespective of the voice. The same can be said for “Crossroads Blues”: the guitar rhythms are not the same as the singing rhythms. The guitar is not just an accompaniment: it’s a separate voice.
Now these were all good musicians and would know what they were doing so it would be intentional. It’s surprising how few musicians have picked up on it. This dislocation of voice and guitar is there as musical punctuation: the musical equivalent of an exclamation mark, say, to add interest and definition. Another thing I’ve noticed is that there are very few musicians who know the value of the dramatic pause. This can maximise the effect of what is to come, creating a moment of tension and expectation, often followed by a musical surprise. A note is picked and it hovers, suspended, without the audience knowing what will happen next.
In a band the importance of a good, intuitive drummer cannot be over-stressed in this connection either. My drummer Melvyn could read my body language – specifically my elbows – and know how to respond: when to wait, when to act. One of the few beat-based electronic exponents of the blues, BB King, certainly knows how to introduce drama. He’s dynamite! A great exponent of contrast. There’s a musical pause – you can hear a pin drop – then a wall of sound. It adds shape; it adds tension; it adds climax and resolution. It’s the same in a joke or in a story; you have to get the pace right; you have to time the punchline or the effect is lost.
I’m aware that some guitar playing is deceptively simple. The untutored eye follows the left hand and discerns, for example, that there are just three chords to a particular song. But look what the right hand is doing: it’s picking a tune, creating harmonies and this is how a song can be rendered more interesting, more layered: by picking rather than strumming. I can demonstrate this with a Little Feat number. If I strum the song as they do and then pick it as I do – the result is strikingly more complex.
Another way to add an element of surprise is to play a song in a different key. This can completely change the whole atmosphere of a song: from major to minor as Ella Fitzgerald sings. Some of the songs I do won’t go into any other key: because I’m playing melody lines, only a certain chord shape will allow me to have those melody lines and bass lines. You can only really travel around that chord to get those melody and bass lines. Each different chord has its own atmosphere. A lot of the songs I do are in a different key from the original so I am creating a different feel from the original – something that suits me and my style of playing.
Of course, the modern electric guitarist has many ways to create variety and drama but I can’t help but feel that some of these are cheap tricks having little to do with virtuosity – though effective and popular. One of the ways is to use distortion. Classic lead guitar solos are always distorted because musically speaking, people got louder and louder using the valve amp to saturation point to sustain notes longer. In the early days amps didn’t have distortion. Distortion was taken further by electronics so that modern amplifiers do have it. Imagine someone playing saxophone: if there’s a prolonged note in a melody and it’s not a quiet passage then the player would play the sax louder and like a harmonica, it’s on the edge of distortion. It’ll only sustain as long as the breath will hold. With the electric guitar you can take a note to the edge of distortion and hold it there indefinitely. With a clean note there is instant decay; with a distorted note there is much slower decay. Playing a distorted guitar covers all sins, making it easy for anyone to get away with approximation.
Slides And Gitfiddles; Half Tones And Quarter Tones
For immediate impact, though, the solo blues musician can add a whole new dimension through slide: an extra tool that enables the guitarist to get a vast array of notes in a short space. You can play slide with any guitar as long as it is open-tuned. Slide had very basic origins. There is a transcript described as “old-fashioned Southern vernacular speech” in which Mississippi Fred McDowell, who slid a bottle neck on his finger, describes the early use of the slide:
An my type of blue? I play it with a bottleneck? I first got this style from a beef bone, y’understan’ me. Rib wha’ come out of a steak? My uncle, when I was a small boy in the country. He ground this bone down, and filed it with a file, and put “t” on his little fi[ae]nger. But I play’t on my ri[ae]ng finger, y’understan’? and nis a-dis here bottleneck sound better’n the bone, cause you get more clar- clear sound outa it, [plays a chord](37)
Slide is the nearest thing to the human voice. The advantage of the monophonic instrument is that you can use it to emulate the human voice and you haven’t got the restrictions of frets. Voice and slide sound converge and diverge. There’s an explosion of notes in a short space but you can only hear the amalgamation. Violins and slide whistles and trombones also have this quality. How many notes are there as the slide slides down with no fret? A lot of notes. But the ear doesn’t discern them separately unless you hav
e a very special gift. When you do it in slow motion it is possible to hear the separate notes. Whereas frets limit you to half tones, this limit goes with slide. You can use the fingers as a slide but this still separates the notes: nothing gets rid of frets like slide does. Ry Cooder says of slide: “When nothing but the bar or knife touches the string the guitar tends to ring more; it’s released and open.” I agree. (38)
Playing slide takes the rhythm guitar and chord basics of a tune and allows your guitar to be a violin. Monophonic harmony note is the melody to what I’m playing in the chord.
I like the continuity you get in a slide performance. Listen to “Amazing Grace” on slide: there are so many harmonies, you can imagine a choir whereas played with frets it sounds a bit Scottish. You can only do it on certain songs. It either sounds OK or it doesn’t. Blind Willie Johnson uses one chord then a monophonic melody line, the chord droning, using the slide to produce the note. The man to listen to is Kokomo Arnold. He makes everyone else look as if they haven’t got out of bed.
Mississippi John Hurt uses the slide to fret the note, as if he’s using his finger. I do this and I use all the notes in between with slide and I also use my finger as slide.
A lot of people use slide as if they are playing an ordinary guitar whereas the real masters of it play melodies to anchor the whole thing. “Stormy Weather” and “Vagabond” have to be very precise whereas harsher songs such as “Black Ace” and “Dust My Broom” rely more on power, though there is still an anchoring of melody.
People often ask me to explain about slide guitar. A slide guitar is a gitfiddle: a combination of guitar and fiddle. It has no frets and is played flat or conventional with a slide or a bar resting on the strings. I have a 1947 Gibson Hawaiian guitar I traded for a copy of a National. Through one of those musical coincidences the very same week a 1938 Gibson Hawaiian guitar arrived through a friend, off the internet.
The weight of the slide is important. It should be heavy enough to create the required sound but not uncomfortable. Slides come in different weights and are usually made of metal. Original slides were fashioned from bottle necks or, more gruesomely, from hollow bones. I frequently demonstrate the purpose and method of using slide or bar by placing the guitar on my lap, producing a distinctive Hawaiian sound when the bar is used. Although it takes more effort, it is possible to get quarter tones and half tones by pressing the strings down.
Practice is one of the main factors in successful slide playing. The other is open tunings: strings are tuned so that a chord is achieved without fretting, or pressing any of the strings. With such a tuning other chords may be played by simply barring a fret or through the use of a slide.
Practice applies to all areas of course but aptitude must count too. There are some really good guitarists who can’t play slide. When I first started playing guitar in the Sixties and met famous slide guitarist Mississippi Fred McDowell, he handed me his guitar and when I tried to play it I realised it was out of tune according to my way of playing. I didn’t move the pegs but I started to distinguish which strings were out of tune and where they were out of tune. I was sorting out the mathematics. The first string was two frets lower, which in fact made it a D and going across the guitar I realised the next three strings were in tune – according to tradition. The fifth string was one note higher which made it a G. The sixth string was tuned on the same fret to the fifth string, which made it a D. So from the bass string (the thickest) it was D G D G B D. And that’s how I first learnt about open stringing for slide playing. So by sitting and working it out and using the mathematics from my piano playing, a new world opened to me. This was open G tuning and this was the occasion when Roosevelt “The Honeydripper” Sykes said, hearing me: “Ain’t bad for a pink!”
You’ve got an open chord; if you’re playing slide you’re already one finger down but you’ve got a completely open guitar to do the rhythm line, putting melody on top with slide. It’s easy to play rock ‘n’ roll or blues with this tuning. Most rock ‘n’ roll is based round the twelve bar: first recorded in the Twenties. So open tuning without slide is rock ‘n’ roll. A lot of Rolling Stones music is open tuning; Keith Richard plays a lot in open G including “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Honky Tonk Women”.
To continue the story. It didn’t take me long to realise there were certain things I couldn’t do in open G tuning. There were songs I couldn’t play in that tuning because the notes wouldn’t flow where the fingers could go. So I needed another set of tables: more mathematics. Because slide guitar demands open tuning it has to be tuned to a chord. This is why musicians have several instruments lined up, depending upon what songs they are doing. They can be tuned to D, G, E, C and so forth. They can also be tuned to minor chords.
To play slide guitar well, it’s got to be picked. Electric players don’t pick and a lot of people emulate them because that’s all they’ve heard. In reality, because you’ve only got a bar on the finger of your left hand, your right hand becomes more important. To demonstrate this I usually play the opening part of “Black Ace” to show the right hand picking and the left hand sliding.
Damping provides another control. It is used to suppress quirky notes and overtones you don’t want when playing slide. You just let your fingers fall across the strings. Some musicians use the palm of the hand. Some use the right hand but I find it easier to use the spare fingers of the left hand.
A solo guitarist is a one man band. To be convincing he has to hold the audience in the same way a play does: with skill, artistry, dexterity, surprise, timing, variety and a good story. Get one of these aspects wrong and the illusion goes, the atmosphere melts into drab reality.
Audience
Add one other person to your lone guitar doodling and things change. There’s an increase in pressure, a shared experience and real or imagined expectations. Opinions – not necessarily unwelcome, negative, or unproductive – make it a performance; a dialogue rather than a monologue; a restriction rather than the freedom to explore, make mistakes and be unselfconscious. You have an audience.
In the early days of my musical collaboration with Whitty, it often happened that we were each other’s audience and the audience watching us was not all that relevant. Our public performances were an extension of the private playing we did all the time in the shop.
At jam nights there’s a blurring of performers and audience, of performance and rehearsal and a cross-fertilization of musical ideas which can be exciting. In the Cheshire Cheese days the Skunk Band would encourage new bands to get up, often providing some musical scaffolding so they wouldn’t feel too exposed. Or jam night can be deadly: cliquey, self-indulgent and musically barren. Why don’t they come clean and say they just want to fiddle with the equipment – and drink?
But there is always a need for jam nights – otherwise they wouldn’t happen. I was involved in local jam nights at The Cheshire Cheese, The Leisure Club, The Limelight, The Royal and Square One. Jam nights in one particular venue have their moment, then there’s a decline and then they sprout up elsewhere. Andy Smith reckons the heyday is about eighteen months but some go on longer than that. Why do people pay a lot of money to see performers then talk all the way through? I can understand this happening when the entertainment is not the only agenda – like in a pub – or when it is completely informal – like a jam night – but when the entertainment is the point of being there why hijack the space? It’s disrespectful, unfair to the rest of the audience and a waste of money. It’s up to the performer to grab the attention of course, but they have to be given a chance.
Generally speaking audiences in folk clubs are more respectful; the audience has made a conscious decision to listen. In the Sixties and early Seventies, people would listen and wait until the end of a song before going to the bar. Hard to believe, I know. But many in the audience would be waiting for their turn to perform so this protocol was in everyone’s interest.
But even more formal situations like competi
tions are not immune. In 1989 I was competing with four bands in a big Birmingham pub at the Banks ’ Best of Blues Competition. The four bands were all doing rhythm and blues numbers. I stuck my neck out during my solo set. I had no problem competing with the bands but I drew a line at the in-house competition. “It’s difficult to compete with piped music. Unless you turn it off, I won’t continue and I doubt whether anyone else will be able to, either.” They turned it off, grudgingly. I don’t know if I sabotaged my chances. I didn’t care.
It was strange to find that I was the wrong audience on one occasion. Reputation is double-edged. Sometimes being well known in a district does you no good. People take you for granted; you don’t get the recognition. Familiarity breeds contempt they say, or indifference. Sometimes reputation can induce fear in others. Once I was sitting in The Barbridge after a meal and a band started to set up. “You won’t be sitting there, will you?” a girl said. “Only I’ve seen you perform at Square One and I’d be too nervous if you were sitting there watching me.” So that was me, a performer, being what someone imagined would be a critical audience: one she didn’t really want! So I left, of course. It was a sort of compliment when I think about it.
If you’re in a band the best venue is an intimate setting with 150-250 people in the audience and a space for dancing. If you’re partying on stage, they’ll join in. As a performer, you’re the first person to party; you can’t have a barrier because you having no barriers is the only way you can get the audience to let theirs down. It’s getting that first half dozen to dance that matters. In the old days you could rely on all the girls immediately going onto the floor with their handbags. I’ve seen some bizarre examples of people letting down their barriers. On one occasion there were couples waltzing at the same time that bikers were doing a “wanky dog” dance. A song like “Goodnight Irene” can get people up and waltzing even though it’s being performed by a very loud band.
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