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AcousticGuitar.com 5

CONTENTS

40 Happy Trails

Robert Earl Keen takes

a detour into bluegrass

By Mark Kemp

46 Their Roots Are Showing

5 Texans who are helping

the spirit of bluegrass evolve

48 Lucky 7

Don’t miss these

Texas bluegrass events

10 The Front Porch

96 Marketplace

97 Ad Index

March 2016

Volume 26, No. 9, Issue 279

On the Cover

Robert Earl Keen

Photographer

Darren Carroll

Special FocusTexas Bluegrass

18 Fresh Americana

Quiles & Cloud blend old

and new in acoustic collaboration

By Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

20 Bluegrass Band of Brothers

How the Gibson Brothers

got their groove

By Pat Moran

24 The ‘Circle’ Unbroken

Celebrating the Nitty Gritty

Dirt Band’s enduring classic

By Mark Kemp

32 Welcome to the Jungle

Instrument makers and players—

including Slash—are mesmerized

by the Tree

By Mark Kemp

Features Miscellany‘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 DirtBand.’p. 24

L—RBob Carpenter,

Jeff Hanna, Emmylou Harris,Jimmie Fadden (background),

Jimmy Ibbotson



6 March 2016

CONTENTS

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

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

Martin 00-15E, p. 84



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8 March 2016

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10 March 2016

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 onbeing a better accompanist, and much more.

Play on.

—Greg Cahill

The 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 blue-

grass roots of the Dixie Chicks to Robert EarlKeen, 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 Ses-

sions 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 blue-

grass,” Keen told Kemp. “[But] I always had an

affinity for bluegrass lyrics—the songs them-

selves, 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.”

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The roots of

Texas bluegrass:

The Mayfield Brothers

THE FRONT PORCH

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©2 0 1 6 S A NT A C R UZ G UI T A R C OMP A NY

Within its walls are the instruments that made you passionate,

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stores that we want to keep in our towns. Music is personal,

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and who sold it to you. Treasure your local guitar shop.

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Thanks to all for sharing in our journey

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NEWS

Spirit ofJohn FaheyTourMembers of the legendary

Takoma 7 reunite for new tourBY KENNY BERKOWITZ

15 The Beat

Chris Isaak goes Nashville

14 The Beat

The League of Women Strummers

16 5 Minutes with . . .

The modern bluegrass of Jon Stickley

THE BEAT

CONT. ON PG. 14

B ack in 1959, guitarist John Fahey took

money he’d saved as a gas-station atten-

dant 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 ofcountry 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.

C O U R T E S Y O F V A

N G U A R D

R E C O R D S

John Fahey

5 ESSENTIALTAKOMA ALBUMS

Bukka WhiteMississippi Blues1964

John FaheyThe Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death1965

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

Robbie Basho, John Fahey, MaxOchs, Harry Taussig, Bukka WhiteContemporary Guitar: Spring ’67 1967

Leo Kottke

6- and 12-String Guitaraka The Armadillo Album1969



14 March 2016

THE BEAT

THE LEAGUEOF WOMENVOTERS TOUR Patty Griffin, Sara Watkins, and

Anaïs Mitchell will hit the road

this spring to urge Americans

to get out and vote.

Teamed up with thenonpartisan 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

“His criticism of my work was brutal, espe-

cially 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. Iremember him saying to me, in his funny high-

pitched vibrato, ‘You’re the next guy, the next

gunslinger who will enter the O.K. Corral. You

need to keep developing your own style.’”

So Engelhardt did, mixing pop, psychedelia,

and the sounds of SoCal beach culture to

become “The Segovia of Surf,” while also teach-

ing 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 record-

ing 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 torealize that John was trying to help me reach my

potential. In the end, he was right, and I appreci-

ated him as my mentor. In essence, this tour is

about his dedication to steel-string fingerstyle

guitar and the enduring legacy he left behind.”

‘This tour is about

John’s dedicationto steel-string

fingerstyle guitar

and the enduringlegacy heleft behind.’TOULOUSE ENGELHARDT

Anaïs Mitchell

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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 DaveCobb and Paul Worley, and co-write with Music

City hitmakers Michelle Branch, Natalie

Hemby, Caitlyn Smith, Gordie Sampson, and

James Slater.

The album, Firs t 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 Aus-

tralia. “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 songwritingideas 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 theSun, 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 pearl-

oid). “Most of my playing is rhythm, with a few

little runs in between when I’m singing,” Isaaksays. “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 Metallica-

thrashing leads, forget it. I’m a terrible lead-

guitar player, I could never play lead in

somebody’s band,” Isaak adds.

“But I wish someone would ask me.” —K.B.

CHRIS ISAAK GOES NASHVILLE

Chris Isaak

S H E R Y L L O U I S



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 atLast , 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.

Bluegrasson His MindJon Stickley is steeped in

Tony Rice and a modern sound

BY KENNY BERKOWITZ

5 MINUTES WITH...

After surviving teenage

obsessions with grunge,

shred, and math rock, guitarist

Jon Stickley found his way

to bluegrass, switching from

electric guitar to mandolin asa 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

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.

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 toplay bass. We’ve given our instruments the capa-

bility 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 lis tening to all sor ts of

music, but was heavily influenced by punk andgrunge, and then became obsessed with blue-

grass 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.

Jon Stickley TrioLost at Last

Self-released

A U S T I N

S T E I N S I C K A T P H I S H B O N E



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18 March 2016

n a courtyard stage at the FreshGrass

festival in western Massachusetts,

Quiles and Cloud gather around a

single microphone. Maria Quiles (pronouncedkey-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 festi-

val in the Berkshire Mountains is where, in

2014, they took a big step onto the national

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, andthe 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,” “Missis-

sippi 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 compel-

ling 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,

FRESHAMERICANA

Quiles and Cloud blend

old and new in tight

acoustic collaborationBy Jeffrey

Pepper

Rodgers

E M I L Y

S E V I N

O

L—R

Cloud, Quiles,

Westesson

and Pharis and Jason Romero—Quiles and

Cloud’s sound is not particularly Appalachian or

twangy. Their music leans more toward contem-

porary 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-to-

the-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.”




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.

‘[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 untilshe 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 song-

writers 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, butthen, 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 some-

times on tour elsewhere. At first the group’s rep-

ertoire mostly consisted of songs written

individually, but the two quickly began develop-

ing their duo voice. “The sound that we have

now has very much been developed through thisproject,” says Cloud. “We both sounded different

when we got together and had di fferent

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 nicenotes 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 musi-

cians 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

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

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20 March 2016

L-R

Clayton Campbell, Eric Gibson,

Mike Barber, Leigh Gibson,

Jesse Brock

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 happenedin 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

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, LeighGibson 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 gui tarists, you fee l

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 pairof D-28-style instruments

Henderson made for

both Gibson siblings.

L

BLUEGRASS BAND OFBROTHERS

Leigh Gibson tells how theGibson Brothers got their groove

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22 March 2016

GIBSON BROTHERS

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 hasbeen 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

For the type of music the Gibson Brothers

Band does, playing rhythm guitar is Leigh Gib-

son’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 throughrhythm 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.”

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 “realguitar”—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 Chur-

ubusco. 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] wasinfluenced 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 soundinteresting and unique. We’re a bluegrass band

but we’re also the Gibson Brothers.”

Although the Gibsons aren’t afraid to experi-

ment, 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 Recordsfounder Ken Irwin gave the brothers a much-

needed epiphany: “If you slow down a fast song

or speed up a slow one, you’ll get a good inter-

pretation 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

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24 March 2016

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.




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

UNBROKEN



26 March 2016

NITTY GRITTY DIRT BAND

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 May-

belle 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 Auditor ium in

Nashville. The sold-out show, which will air on

PBS in March, featured a string of famous admir-

ers, 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 hap-

pened to me, because I was accepted.”McEuen, speaking by phone from a plane

about to take off for Canada, laughs apprecia-

tively at all the stories he’s heard about the Dirt

Band’s impact. He reels off a few more memo-

rable 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 bes t 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.’’’

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. Ordi-narily, mom would have been fussing at me for

cranking the Rolling Stones’ “Bitch” at full

volume. (“You don’t even know what a bi tch

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 goto 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 theGrand 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 flap-

ping 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.

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 expo-nentially larger than the artist name on the

record spine. Its casual and genial musical com-

munication among a group of young California

hippies and older Nashville veterans was

healing in a way that no amount of introspec-

tion or public protest could be during those dif-

ficult 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’s30th 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 think-

ing, ‘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 miscon-

ception was the music. It helped take away

some of the prejudice on both sides.”

The Nashville musicians were getting push-

back, 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 “ASatisfied 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 jug-

band 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

W



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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 some-

thing. That looks exciting!’”

Between 1967 and 1970, the Dirt Band con-tinued 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 Caro-

lina-born Gram Parsons, who’d left an earlier

proto-country-rock outfit called the Interna-

tional Submarine Band. With covers of songs by

the Louvin Brothers and Merle Haggard—and a

classic Parsons tune, “Hickory Wind”—Sweet-

heart 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, TheGilded 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 pro-

ducer, 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 CI RCLE 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, Califor-

nia. 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 instru-

ments. “Everybody hung out at this place,”

McEuen remembers. “We’d look at the records

on the racks and try to figure out how Doc

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 startedplaying 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 fir st yea r 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 l ived 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 self-

titled 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 Single s 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 andsinging 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 impos-

ing 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

NITTY GRITTY DIRT BAND

‘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

NGDB today

John McEuen, Jimmie Fadden,

Jeff Hanna, and Bob Carpenter




“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

wel l as an acoust ic-gui tar-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 Uni-

versity in November of ’70, and by 1971 we’dkind 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 Nit ty

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 now-

classic 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 tocapture 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 Wat-

son’s very first meeting with Merle Travis.

Between “Lost Highway” and “Way Down-

town,” 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 comesright 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 suchincident 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 tellingPicasso, ‘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,’” Hannasaid. “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 humor-

ous between-song banter I memorized as a

teenager); briefly changed its name to just theDirt Band in the late ’70s and began playing

more predictable soft rock; switched to main-

stream 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.”



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 every-

thing 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 theCircle 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 spur-

ring 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, particu-

larly in terms of bridging the gap between gen-

erations. Without that, there would be no

Americana movement stil l 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

TONI DEMURO




TO THEWELCOME

JUNGLEBy Mark Kemp



34 March 2016

THE TREE

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,” Slashcontinues, 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. ”

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 cele-

brated 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 acoust ics—a Mar tin D-18, Gibson

J-200, and Guild D-100—to a string of signa-

ture 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 sur-

prised 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 unusu-

ally dense and beautiful, centuries-old quilted

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

S

T

‘WHEN I PICKEDIT UP, I WASCOMPLETELY HUMBLED.IT WAS A SHOCK-

AND-AWE MOMENT.IT CHANGEDEVERYTHING I’DEVER THOUGHT ABOUT

ACOUSTIC GUITARSLEADING UPTO THAT POINT.’SLASH

G O

R D O N

R O S S

P H O T O S




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 boutique-guitar 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 mahog-

any 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 beauti-

ful,” 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 atten-tion 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 real ly spectacular stuff, but back then I

never really paid much attention to it beyond

that,” he says. However, “sometime rightaround the year 2000 I was visiting my friend

Tom Ribbecke, who had just finished a 335-

style 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.”



36 March 2016

lash was impressed by the “esoteric

locales” Reuben Forsland scavenges

for the materials he uses in his

guitars. When Forsland approached the guitar-

ist 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 neverbowled 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 inter-

ested in working with Tree mahogany for some

time, but not because the wood has some magical

sonic quality. He was drawn to its stunning good

looks. “It’s the beauty of the wood that’s desir-

able,” Hoover says. Making a Tree guitar sound

good, he explains, is just part of the craft of build-

ing 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 Hon-

duran 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 Green-

field 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 Ican 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.”

THE TREE

Shen 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 atten-

tion this tree has gotten. It’s very beautiful and

it should get attention.”

But does the legend of the Tree precede theactual 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

W

IT WASN’T UNTIL

LAST YEAR THAT I HEARD

PEOPLE WERE REFERRING

TO IT AS ‘THE TREE.’

ROBERT NOVAK



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TEXAS

BLUEGRASS40

Happy Trails

Robert Earl Keen takes

a detour into bluegrass

46

Their Roots Are Showing

5 musicians who are helping the spirit of Texas bluegrass evolve

48

Lucky 7

Don’t miss these


SPECIAL FOCUS

A M M A R

D A S H T I

SPECIALFOCUSTEXASBLUEGRASS

Slim Richey was

a fixture of the

Austin music scene



40 March 2016


HAPPY

TRAILSs 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 pre-

ferred the rustiest, twangiest, old-time country

music they could find.

“It wasn’t the kind of music that was of thetimes,” Keen admits, “but it was what we liked.

And one of the great things about that old-

timey 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 HermannHall 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-blue-

grass album in his more than 30-year career. It

started when Keen wrote down 100 bluegrass

A

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 PeterRowan’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.”




JOEY LUSTERMAN

Davey Graham

Robert Earl Keen



42 March 2016

een—sporting a cowboy hat, black

blazer, orange-and-gray striped button-

down shirt, and multicolored shoes—

leans back in his chair in a conference room at

Acoustic Guitar’s office in Point Richmond, Cali-

fornia, and lets out a big Lone Star laugh. He’ssurrounded by instructional books on everything

from improving your jazz vocabulary to master-

ing the art of flatpicking. Intimidating stuff, to

say the least. “I knew the whole deal with blue-

grass—a lot of it is about the singing, the high-

lonesome 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 Ses- sions. 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 com-

plaining about Keen’s gruff harmonies when he

launches into “Footprints,” “Dark as a Dungeon,”

and other tracks from Happy Prisoner. He’s per-

forming 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 ineither 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 break-

through 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.

SPECIAL FOCUS TEXAS BLUEGRASS

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 sis-

ter’s old nylon-string Alvarez along with himand 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 Duck-

worth, who’d started playing the fiddle, formed

a band and began working up versions of the

bluegrass songs they’d listened to on eight-

tracks 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 spa-

ghetti 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.

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 offfor 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 rear-

view 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 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—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

K R ‘THE THING ABOUTBLUEGRASS IS THATIT’S THIS REALLYHAPPY-SOUNDING

MUSIC, BUT THESTORIES ARE TRAGIC.IF YOU PICK IT APART,THERE’S A LOT OFDEAD BODIESTHROUGHOUTTHE HISTORYOF BLUEGRASS.

AND I LOVE THATKIND OF THING.’

CONT. P.44




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 ofpeople 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 allkinds 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—

andone 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 cal led 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 wasa 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 nowhe 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 dreadnought-

size 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.

WHATROBERTEARLKEENPLAYS

J O E Y L U S T E R M A N



44 March 2016

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 littletrepidation 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 musi-

cians started jamming together. “We got in there

and all of that childlike thinking and feelingcame 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 throughat 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 trans-

form 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 s ince the lord knows when”

and “Yonder comes the preacher and the chil-

dren are a-cryin’ / Chickens a-runnin’ and the

toenails a-flyin’—yes sir.”

The feel of Happy Prisoner is casual, remi-

niscent 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 Pris-

oner with the same dramatic flair.“That was totally coincidental,” Keen says.

“We were at this studio called the Zone, in Drip-

ping 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 startedtalking. 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 “Way-

faring 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 kil ls 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 hearthat 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

SPECIAL FOCUS TEXAS BLUEGRASS

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46 March 2016


These 5 musical acts have kept

the spirit of Texas bluegrass evolvingBy Mark Kemp

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, flat-

picked 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 some-

thing altogether new and exciting.Bluegrass first made its way to the panhan-

dle 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.

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 instru-

ments 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 inDripping Springs, near Austin, when he died

last year at 77 from lymphoma.

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 kitschycowboy 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 bluegrass-

playing girls, such as the members of Della Mae,

who were waiting in the wings.

THEIRROOTS ARESHOWING

Slim Richey

W




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 bydada 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, ghoul-

rockers 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 experi-

mental ambient and noise music. In 2015,

Barnes won the Steve Martin Prize for Excel-

lence in Banjo and Bluegrass.

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 alterna-

tive country on his 1986 album Guitar Town

(MCA), an album often identified with Nash-

ville. 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-blue-

grass 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 fingerpick-

ing; 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 complexcompositions, 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 blue-

grass traditions into the new millennium with

style and grace.

Opposite

Danny Barnes

Top

The Dixie Chicks,

1992 L—R:

Martie Erwin,

Robin Macy,

Laura Lynch,

Emily Erwin

Bottom

Steve Earle T E D

B A

R R O N

C O U R T E S Y O F P O O R

D A

V I D ’ S

P U B



48 March 2016

lan your 2016 waltz across central

and eastern Texas for bluegrass festi-

vals 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.

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 Hell-

benders’ 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 Interna-

tional 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

KERRVILLE FOLK FESTIVAL

MAY 26–JU NE 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 16–18NACOGDOCHES, 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 Genera-

tion 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


LUCKY 7 Don’t miss these 2016


By Mark Kemp

P

Mary Gauthier




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, includinga 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 FESTIVALOCTOBER 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 Gras-

cals, and the Helen Highwater Stringband.

bloominbluegrass.com

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Fifty years ago, the Yamaha FG180 became the first love

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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 Ci ty

Ramblers, one of the most influential groups in

the 1960s folk revival. And her half-brother, Pete

Seeger, became one the most famous folk musi-

cians 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 JamesChild’s exhaustive compilation of 305 English

and Scottish folk ballads, along with their Amer-

ican 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.

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

Peggy Seeger, 1960

G E M S

R E D F E R N S

C O L L E C T I O N

Child’s PlayPeggy Seeger marks her lifelong

commitment to ‘The Child Ballads,’

a treasure trove of folklore

BY

ANDY

HUGHES

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and the truth ys

58Weekly Workout

Learn to be a betteraccompanist

62Woodshed

How to play ‘Pete’sBarrelhouse Rag,’ pt. 2

SONGCRAFT



52 March 2016

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 col-

lected 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 fascinat-

ing—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 Ican’t play such complicated guitar lines any

more, I am paying more attention to the words,

and I am singing them more soulfully. The impor-

tant 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

‘The Child Ballads

need very careful

handling when

you perform them.

They are a

beautiful collection

of stories that

have been handed

down and downand down through

the generations.’

PEGGY SEEGER

Ewan MacColl and

Peggy Seeger, 1977




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 etiquet te 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, themiller 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 heav-enly 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 iden-

tify with this and that. I do go into this in somedetail 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 in format ion. 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 influenceof ‘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

Smokey darkness

Escape the expected. Experience graphite. www.rainsong.com1.800.788.5828

http://www.rainsong.com/

http://www.rainsong.com/



54 March 2016

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Ex. 1c

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 andC 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 upper-

case 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 correspond-

ing major scale. Here are the I, IV, and V chords

you get in the five easiest keys on the guitar.

I IV V

C F G

A D EG C D

E A B

D G 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

The 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,” “ThisLand 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 exam-

ples as used in classic songs.

CHORDS BY NUMBER

In a nutshell, the I, IV, and V are the most

commonly used chords in any major key. Allthree 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 D E F G A B

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Three Chordsand the TruthUnlocking I-IV-V chord progressions

BYJEFFREYPEPPER

RODGERS

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.

TAKE TWO

To get a handle on how the I, IV, and V worktogether, 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.)

THE BASICS

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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.

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 relation-

ship between the I and the V is the same.

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.

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56

March 2016

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THE BASICS

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VIDEO LESSONACOUSTICGUITAR.COM

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THE BIG THREE

Now put the I, IV, and V together. With a nod to

Richard Berry, who waited far too long to get

proper credit and compensation for writing

“Louie Louie,” play that song’s signature

rhythm in the key of A in Ex. 3a. The progres-

sion 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).

The I, IV, and V can be reshuffled in any

order in a song. The final set of examples shows

a strumming pattern similar to what Neil Young

uses in “Helpless,” which goes I–V–IV. In the key

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. 4c).

HOW TO USE THE I–IV–V

Once you can quickly find the I, IV, and V in

various keys, all sorts of useful things become

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 blue-

grass 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 the next chord. Whenever

you’re learning songs, you’ll see these three

chords at work, by themselves or in conjunction

with other chords.

And as the saying goes (usually attributed

to Nashville songsmith Harlan Howard), all you

need to write a song are three chords and the

truth. Now you know a great place to find the

three chords. Take the I, IV, and V in any key,

shuffle them around, find a groove, startsinging, and see what happens.

As for the truth . . . well, it’s out there. AG

Whenever you’re learning songs, you’ll see

these three chords at work, by themselves

or in conjunction with other chords.

LISTENTO THIS!

HelplessCrosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Deja Vu

Atlantic

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58 March 2016

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Play the Right StuffThese tried-and-true tacticscan help you be a better accompanist

Many professional guitar players find

themselves onstage or in the studio

accompanying singer-songwriters, some of

whom also play guitar or other chordal instru-

ments. In such cases, the singer-songwriter

rarely tells the sideperson exactly what to play.

It’s usually up to the player to come up withmusical 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.

WEEK ONE

Knowing a variety of voicings for any particularchord 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

BY

ADAMLEVY

BEGINNERS’

TIPWhen a song uses a

common chord progres-

sion, look for a way to

play it that sets this song

apart from any other.

1

WEEK 1

WEEKLY WORKOUT

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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 voic-

ings, the notes are more spread out.) It would

behoove you to memorize these shapes in all 12

major keys so that you can complement virtu-

ally 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 particularshape 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

BEGINNERS’

TIPSome songs may only

need a second guitar part

in one section—

perhaps

the chorus—so don’t be

afraid to not play for awhile.

2

some wide gaps.) Ex. 2b is a first-inversion G

triad in an open-position spread. It’s an ear-

pleasing 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 non-

triadic 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 oppo-

sites. To really get the gist of these exercises, be

sure to repeat the Guitar 1 part several times sothat 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 com-

bined 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 wil l help the overal l

harmony sound more clear.



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KEY C A G E D

C no capo capo III capo V capo VIII capo X

F capo V capo VIII capo X capo I capo IIIBb / A# capo X capo 1 capo III capo VI capo VIII

Eb / D# capo III capo VI capo VIII capo IX capo I

Ab / G# capo VIII capo X capo I capo IV capo VI

Db / C# capo I capo IV capo VI capo IX capo XI

Gb / F# capo VI capo IX capo XI capo II capo IV

B capo XI capo II capo IV capo VII capo IX

E capo IV capo VII capo IX no capo capo II

A capo IX no capo capo II capo V capo VII

D capo II capo V capo VII capo X no capo

G capo VII capo X no capo capo III capo V

What’s notable about Ex. 6 is how the two

parts don’t change chords with the same fre-

quency. 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 antici-pates 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 chang-

ing chord by chord, right on the beat. Experi-

ment 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.

WEEK THREE

This week you’ll be using common first-posi-

tion 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 guitar-

ist’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.

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 prac-

tice, 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, main-

taining 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 toconsider 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

BEGINNERS’

TIPIt can be very informative

to sing the song you’re

working on a part for,

even if you don’t consider

yourself a singer.

3

B

c

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13 12 10 88

F C

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q = 106

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WEEK 4

of short melodies that you know well and trans-

pose each of them up and/or down to as many

registers as are practically playable on the

guitar. If you’re feeling particularly adventur-

ous, 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 amelody 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’

TIPSolid rhythm is the

backbone of any great song,

so don’t shirk practicing

rhythmic stuff.

4

Ex. 8

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62 March 2016

WOODSHED

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 yourthumb 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

Last 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, aspromised, here’s a look at three additional vari-

ations on the piece.

Variation 5 returns to the standard eight-

bar 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

The Rag Picker, Pt. 23 more variations on ‘Pete’s Barrelhouse Rag’

BYPETE

MADSEN

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

B

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64 March 2016

chords, then hitting a chromatic octave run that

lands on a C chord.Play Variation 7 a tempo at 180 bpm. The

last seven bars use the C–C7–F–Fm turnaround,

which switches back to half time at the end.

The last phrase is a nod to the Third Man theme

by Anton Karas, the Viennese zither player and

composer who scored the 1948 soundtrack to

the British film noir.

A lot is going on in these variations, and

they’re a bit of a workout. To make them more

VIDEO LESSONACOUSTICGUITAR.COM

WOODSHED

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33

approachable, try one eight-bar section at a

time. And don’t be afraid to compose or, better yet, improvise your own variations—a practice

that’s in keeping with the ragtime tradition.

Pete Madsen is a San Francisco Bay Area-based

author, instructor, and performer who specializes

in acoustic blues, ragtime, and slide guitar. His

latest titles are A Guide to Bottleneck Slide Guitar

and Improvising and Variations for Fingerstyle

Blues , both available at learnbluesguitarnow.com.

Anton Karas, 1951

http://embed.wistia.com/deliveries/40924cdae5ea9eedf3c9b6415986f38a0989b13c/file.mp4















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66 March 2016

ACOUSTIC CLASSIC

The

BondGirl007 inspired this fingerstyle

Tommy Emmanuel ballad

BY ADAM PERLMUTTER

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

Some 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 direc-

tion in his ballad “Ruby’s Eyes.”

The composition, excerpted here from a new

Tommy Emmanuel songbook, offers an excellent

introduction to Emmanuel’s trademark contra-

puntal approach, which earned him the honor-

ific 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 theB-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 pull-

offs to the chord with your fourth finger. In bar

23–26 and elsewhere, fretting the sixth-string

notes with your thumb, as Emmanuel does

Tommy Emmanuel

Little by Little

Guitar Tab Songbook

Hal Leonard





68 March 2016

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harmonics



70 March 2016

ACOUSTIC CLASSIC

As 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 contempo-

rary interpretations, as performed and recorded

by Doc Watson, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (see p.

Mama’s Gone‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken’

is sad but can be uplifting

BY DAN APCZYNSKI

versions—including at least one fantastic record-

ing 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-chuckrhythm shown below for a melancholy interpre-

tation, or kick up the tempo and experiment

with more upbeat strumming patterns like the

one shown in measures 5 and 6. AG

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

The Carter Family

Can the Circle Be Unbroken

Banner





72 March 2016

ACOUSTIC CLASSIC

Twisted

Sister‘O the Wind and Rain’

is a murder ballad about

squabbling siblingsBY ADAM PERLMUTTER

The 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 her2008 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 longPeggy Seeger

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.

Al l of the ve rses have a so rt of ca ll -and-

response 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 mea-

sures a little roll, and let all of the notes ring for

as long as possible.

Overall, the fret-hand fingerings should bepretty 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 V I C K I S H A R P




Tuning: D G D G B D

let ring throughout sim.

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month of May.

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2. Two sweet sisters side by side

O the wind and rain Both of them want to be Johnny’s bride

Cryin’ the dreadful wind and rain

3. Johnny give the young one a gold ring

O the wind and rain

Didn’t give the other one anything


J

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4. The sisters went a walking by the water’s brim

O the wind and rain

The older one shoved the younger one in


5. Shoved her in the river to drown

O the wind and rain

And watched her as she floated down


J

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74 March 2016

O THE WIND AND RAIN

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

O the wind and rain

He made fiddle pegs of her little finger bones


11. He made a fiddle of her little breast bone

O the wind and rain

With a sound that could melt a heart of stone


12. And the only tune that fiddle could play

O the wind and rain

The only tune that fiddle would play was


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

O the wind and rain

Tyin’ my Johnny a true love’s knot


.

.

œ œ

6. She floated on down to the miller’s dam

O the wind and rain

Father father there swims a swan


7. The miller ran for his drifting hook

O the wind and rain

And pulled that poor girl from the brook


8. He laid her on the bank to dry

O the wind and rain

A fiddler man came walking by


9. He saw that poor girl lying there

O the wind and rain

He took 30 strands of her long yellow hair


œ

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AG TRADE88New Gear

A Blueridge jumbowith a modern twist

A Storied PastStaten Island’s Mandolin Brothers

guitar store is up for sale

BY KENNY BERKOWITZ

84New Gear

Martin 00-15E isin a mellow tone

86New Gear

Taylor baritonepacks a wallop!

Joni 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 onStaten Island, a short ferry ride from down-

town 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

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 show-

room 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 favor-ite) and a 1919 Gibson F4 mandolin (Alison’s

favorite), along with other treasures, like a col-

lection 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

SHOPTALK

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 Ihave 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’l l

shut the place down and go our merry way.

“Find some other line of work.” AG

Eric Jay strums

through memories at

Mandolin Brothers,

which is up for sale.

N E W Y

O R K T I M E S



78 March 2016

MAKERS & SHAKERS

A Fearless InnovatorCustom-build pioneer—and Pat Metheny collaborator—

Linda Manzer is no stranger to experimentation

BY ADAM PERLMUTTER

N I G E L D I C K S O N




As one of the world’s great luthiers, Linda

Manzer handcrafts stringed instruments of

uncommon beauty, both aesthetically and soni-

cally. 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 theBeatles 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 Ricken-

backer. 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 steel-

strings, 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 areusually 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 gui-

tarists who have close connections with their

Manzer instruments. But the luthier has enjoyed

a particularly intimate and rewarding relation-

ship with the jazz wizard Pat Metheny, for whomshe’s made dozens of fretted instruments of all

types: conventional guitars as well as instru-

ments 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-soundinginstrument that is quite beautiful as well. What is

also notable about her instruments is that they

continue to get better year after year.”

Manzer, who is 63, grew up in Toronto and

was equally inspired by her father’s collec-

tion 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.

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 dis-

covered 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 pre-

ferred making things, rather than ideas. While

at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design,

she says, “I kept finding myself in the wood-

working 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 eventu-

ally 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 Lar-

rivée, sweeping the floors of his shop and

making coffee runs before polishing nuts andsaddles and later strutting all the backs and

tops on his guitars. In the process, she devel-

oped 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 apprentice-

ship. Jean was—and still is—one of the most

gifted builders on the planet.”

After three and a half years of apprenticing

with Larr ivée , Manzer opened her own

business, crashing on friends’ couches so shecould 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

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 con-

nected. 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 Carib-bean 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

Left

The Manzer Wedge

BelowThe 42-string

Pikasso



80 March 2016

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 firstarchtop, 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 foun-

dation of how I build archtop guitars today.”

In 1984, after Metheny bought several con-

ventional 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-neckedPikasso (sic) took a year to build and is one of

the most unusual fretted instruments ever real-

ized. “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.”

The 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 guitarmaker 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 comfort-

able 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, ittook 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 con-

tinues to thrive. Not long ago she made a

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 firs tguitar 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 200-

piece inlay featuring Pat’s art on the finger-

board 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 collabora-

tion 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 onthe 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 inter-

act 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

MAKERS & SHAKERS

• Trad. Song Week, July 3-9• Celtic Week, July 10-16

• Old-Time Week, July 17-23• Contemporary Folk Week, July 24-30

• Mando & Banjo Week, July 31- August 6• Fiddle Week, July 31- August 6

Guitar Week, July 24-30, with Pat Donohue, Peppino D’Agostino,Del Rey, Greg Ruby, Al Petteway,Muriel Anderson, Steve Baughman,Tony McManus,Sean McGowan,Robin Bullock,Pete Kennedy,Vicki Genfan,

Josh Goforth,Steve James,Scott Ainslie,Gerald Ross,Paul Asbell,& more.

Folk Arts Workshops at

Warren Wilson College

PO Box 9000

Asheville NC 28815828.298.3434

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82 March 2016

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 hoofsand refining the residues into granulated solids.

Glue is prepared by dissolving granules in warm

GUITAR GURU

Why is hot hide glue

preferred by someluthiers, while others use

synthetic glues, and what are its

advantages and disadvantages? Doug MacKenzie

Cary, North Carolina

GOT A QUESTION?

Uncertain about guitar care and

maintenance? The ins-and-outs

of guitar building? Or a topic

related to your gear?

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.

If AG selects your question

for publication, you’ll receive

a complimentary copy of

AG’s The Acoustic Guitar

Owner’s Manual.

Dana Bourgeois

A

Q

The GlueQuandaryDo bonding agents

affect a guitar’s sound?

The jury is still out

BY DANA BOURGEOIS

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 mod-

erate heat or by administering a well-directed

shock—old glue is entirely removable with

warm water and a rag.

Common wisdom holds that modern polyvi-

nyl wood glues impart a damping effect on

vibrating surfaces, while animal glues are vibra-

tionally inert. I attempted to test this theory for

several years by making a pair of identical

guitars, one constructed entirely with hot rab-

bit-hide glue and one using only Titebond poly-

vinyl 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 levelsof 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 ofthese 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 luthierand the founder of Bourgeois Guitars

in Lewiston, Maine.

water to form a gelatinous protein compoundthat 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 tempera-

ture must be carefully controlled; working time

is short, even under shorter, less-than-optimal

conditions; glue strength decreases with each

reheating; viscosity requires constant adjust-

ment; and gelled glue will eventually degrade

even under ideal conditions, or rot if improp-erly stored. In addition to difficulty of applica-

tion, even the best animal glue joints are

susceptible to failure in hot and humid condi-

tions, and under cold conditions are less toler-

ant 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 forless critical joints, such as block assemblies,

linings, and the like. Glue that has been

R Y A N

F I T Z S I M M O N S





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84 March 2016

NEW GEAR

High-Tech RetroMartin’s new all-mahogany 00-15E pairs

a vintage look and feel with modern electronics

BY ADAM PERLMUTTER

samples, work in tandem with an undersaddle

pickup to make this modern Martin sound likea miked golden-era model.

The multi-function controls are not straight-

forward 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

When most people think small-bodied

mahogany guitars, they think blues finger-picking 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.

Guitarists who don’t like to plug in will be

glad to know that the 00-15E’s voice is warmand mellow, clear and balanced throughout the

sonic spectrum. There are no dead spots any-

where 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 high-

quality microphones. The images, or timbral

Ebony bridgeSolid

mahogany

top




BODY

00 size

Satin finish with 15-styleburst on soundboard

NECK

Mahogany neck

24.9-inch scale length

MARTIN

00-15ERETRO

AT A GLANCE

VIDEO REVIEWACOUSTICGUITAR.COM/GEAR

electronics system. It delivers an exceptionally

natural and “old” sound on all of the images, andits 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 open-

geared 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 craftsman-

ship 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 aseasy 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 compel-

ling acoustic-electrics on the market.

Contributing editor Adam Perlmutter

transcribes, arranges, and engraves music for

numerous publications. adamperlmutter.com.

ELECTRONICS

Fishman F1 Aura+

EXTRAS

Martin SP Lifespan phosphor

bronze light strings (.012–.054)

Hardshell case

PRICE

$2,549 list

$1,999 street

Made in the USA

martinguitar.com

Ebony fretboard

TopOpen-geared tuners

with butterbean knobs

BottomSolid mahogany

back and sides

1.75-inch nut

http://embed.wistia.com/deliveries/b1f714621693277e8ba671a586a21160726cb5d3/file.mp4








86 March 2016

NEW GEAR

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

AT A GLANCE

AYLOR 32BARITONESEB

Six-StringSymphonyThe Taylor 326e baritone

offers a wide tonal palette

BY ADAM PERLMUTTER

At 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 appre-

ciate the tonal possibilities inherent to this

nicely executed modern baritone with a throaty

low voice.

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 low-

position 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 bari-

tone’s comfortable low action and its low-

profile neck, it’s not straining on the fret hand.





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 partbecause the baritone’s sixth string is just a minor

second apart from the lowest string on a cello.

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 particu-

larly 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, two-

note seventh chords with only thirds and sev-

enths, 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 guitarin-structor.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’snatural 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 decora-

tive 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 addi-tional tonal possibilities—and delivers them

with authority. This US-made instrument isn’t

necessarily easy on the wallet, but those com-

mitted to the baritone, should definitely check

out this brawny contender. AG

The 326e brings

additional tonal

possibilities—

and delivers them

with authority.

Those committed

to the baritone,

should definitely

check out this

brawny contender.

http://embed.wistia.com/deliveries/e5e65e5bcd4d59833a826b84b917517ffda6e71d/file.mp4






88 March 2016

NEW GEAR

AT A GLANCE

BLUERIDGEB -1500E B


Defying theLaws of Tradition

A Blueridge super jumbo with a modern twist

BY GREG CAHILL

T

he first thing you notice when you strum

the Blueridge BG-1500ESB Jumbo is therobust 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 tra-

dition. 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 strum-

ming an open-G chord, unplugged, delivers a

full, rich sound with punchy bass, clear mids,

and shimmering treble—a sparkle that is char-acteristic 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 manu-

facturing 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.

An afternoon picking session with AG con-

tributing editor Mark Kemp finds the BG-1500ESB 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, ofthe 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 ren-

dition of the Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil.”

At a street price as low as $799, the BG-

1500E holds its own against many higher-

priced jumbos, offering a unique blend of the

modern and the traditional. AG

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

EXTRAS

Bone nut and saddle

Hardshell case

PRICE

$995 MSRP/$799 street

Made in China

sagamusic.com

http://embed.wistia.com/deliveries/17a86b3b350f2465a1ac5a47f2d108a1bdc53110/file.mp4





When art is your life

We focus on every detail so we’re worthy

of sharing that journey with you.

www.alvarezguitars.com

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http://www.alvarezguitars.com/



90 March 2016

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 andoutput 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 Phantompower, 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

E I N ACOUSTI

Not Your TypicalStomp BoxLR Baggs Session Acoustic DI

puts studio magic at your, er, toes

BY DOUG YOUNG

Any 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 havedefinitely improved over the years, manufac-

turers 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

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 andmastering 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 imped-

ance 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

NEW GEAR




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 under-

stand 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 digitalrecording. 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 experi-

mentation. A studio multiband compressor

basically consists of multiple compressors, eachof which limit the dynamic range over a specific

frequency range without affecting other fre-

quencies. 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 harsh-

ness 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 thresh-

old—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 ofmud 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 theSession 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 satu-

rate 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 con-

trols 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 strum-

ming, 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 aneffect 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

Songwriting Basics for Guitarists.

store.AcousticGuitar.com

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!

© 2012Stringletter SONGWRITING BASICS FORGUITARISTS • 21Songwriting Tipsfromthe Masters 3

6 TWEAK THE CHORDS. “It’s amazing

how much cooler it gets when you

changeonenoteinachord,”SeanWatkins

oncesaidina conversationwithhisthen-

band mates in Nickel Creek. His guitar

parts often use modal chords (with no

third) and suspensions that add a nice

opennesstothesound.Checkout thedif-

ferences between Examples 1a and 1b ,

andbetweenExamples2aand2b,tohear

howaone-fingerchangeina chordmakes

abigimpact.

7 UNCHAIN THE MELODY. An insight

about chords and melodies from a

youngDavidWilcox—interviewed20years

ago—stillringstrueforme.“Ilearnedfrom

listening to James Taylor that you don’t

want your melody to be the root of the

chord,”Wilcoxsaid.“Youwantthe melody

tobeaninterestingnote inthechord.And

ifyouhavea givenmelodynote,thereare

differentchordsthatgowithit,sopick one

wherethemelodyisa fifthora seventhor

athirdora ninth,butnotthetonic.”

To make this concrete, take a look at

Examples3aand3b(playthesameaccom-

paniment—showninExample3a—forboth

examples). Notice that in Example 3a the

melodynotes arethesameas theroots of

the chords, while in Example 3b the mel-

odyis shifted ontoother notes. In this ver-

sion, themelodylifts freeof thechords and

has much moreimpact.

B

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SONGWRITING BASICSFOR GUITARISTS

By Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

21SONGWRITINGTIPS FROMTHE MASTERS



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PLAYLIST

MIXED MEDIA

94Playlist

Eric Bibb doesLead Belly

94Playlist

Punch Brothersrelease outtakes

94Playlist

Nouveaux Honkieslive the Gypsy life

Acoustic AllmansUniversal reissues padded versions

of a simple acoustic-based classic BY MARK KEMP

Forty-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 kick-

starts “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 searingelectric blues. “Don’t Keep Me Wondering” and

“Hoochie Coochie Man” burn as hot as anything

on the first album, and “In Memory of Eliza-

beth Reed,” the song that brought second

guitarist Dickey Betts into the limelight, is a

sweet, fluid, Latin-flavored, instrumental elec-

tric-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—particu-

larly in the gospel-tinged “Revival,” with its

“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 afire 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 con-

figurations: 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 record-

ings already available on the official bootleg Live

at Ludlow Garage: 1970 released in 1990, but

Duane Allman plays slide

in his hotel room before

a 1970 Allman Brothers’

performance in Spartanburg,

South Carolina.

M I C H A E L O C H S

A R C

H I V E S

/ S T R I N G E R

PLAYLIST

there also are outtakes or alternate studio versions

of “Statesboro Blues,” “One More Ride,” “Eliza-

beth 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.



94 March 2016

PLAYLIST

Eric Bibb and JJ MilteauLead Belly’s Gold

Stony Plain

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 Shreve-

port’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” (racistsgetting 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, easy-

going 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 North-

ern soul, Southern folk, and European blues.

—Kenny Berkowitz

Punch BrothersThe Wireless

Nonesuch

5 outtakes connect with

awe-inspiring musicianship

Recorded during sessions for last year’s The

Phosphoresc ent 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 unre-

leased track, the sense of adventure begins in

the falsetto sadness of Chris Thile’s singing and

keeps going in the droning legato of Paul Kow-

ert’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, ormore Tin Pan Alley, and one, the almost-new-

grass “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.

Nouveaux Honkies Blues for Country

The Nouveaux Honkies

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, theNouveaux Honkies craft lived-in songs, which

draw on the band’s modern-day gypsy experi-

ence 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 clear-

eyed 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 mythol-ogy 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



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98 March 2016

MeettheMilkCartonKids

Vintage Gibson

and Martin guitars

join in perfect harmony

BY GREG CAHILL

GREAT ACOUSTICS

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 94804and 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 alsobe 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.

Ask the Milk Carton Kids the secret of their

sound and the question prompts good-

natured ribbing between the musicians. “Thehardest 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

VIDE O ATACOUSTICGUITAR.COM

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 ashort 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 hanker-

chief around the third fret to damp the string

buzz—for a possible limited-edition signaturemodel. “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

Left

1955 Martin 0-15

Right

1951–1954

Gibson J-45



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Introducing Martin’s Standard Series

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ACOUSTIC AMPLIFICATION BY®

Date post:	05-Jul-2018
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Acoustic Guitar 279.pdf

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