Then your fingers realize just how much dexterity and quick-firing muscle memory is required to make the guitar sing like Doc’s.Īnd then you understand: You don’t have it. Until, that is, you try to play the riff yourself. So fast it sounds easy, like the notes are just sliding off the strings with no pressure. The little finger of his right hand glides along the pickguard to keep his hand in place by feel. He plays with soft hands, no brass in the notes, no aggressive “attack” on the strings.
He plays up and down the whole neck, the fluttering notes climbing the ladder with alternating up and down strokes, from the rattling bass of the fat, low E string all the way up to the high, lonesome sound at the top of the fretboard. With Doc, the guitar became the star of the show. Until Doc came along, in country and bluegrass ensembles, the acoustic guitar was used mainly for rhythm, keeping a steady midrange bed of sound under the vocals, fiddle, and mandolin. Except Doc likes to mute the bass string with the heel of his hand, creating a percussive backbeat, something like his own guitar hero, Merle Travis, might do.īut flat-picking - what the old-timers called “straight-picking” - put Doc on the map. The finger-style guitar is his own self-taught method using thumb and index finger - not much different from the style developed by some old-time banjo players. Now he was ours.ĭoc plays both finger-style and flat-picking. He’d already been touring for half as long as I’d been alive, but now he played for a whole new generation. And there was Arthel Lane “Doc” Watson playing on his Gallagher dreadnought, Ol’ Hoss. I’d never heard of Doc Watson until our piano player - coincidentally also named Doc - keyed up that album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken - a studio fusion of traditional players and some young country rockers called the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. I was a college kid trying to play over my head on a Martin dreadnought in a band called Renegade. If a sound could be called honest, it’s Doc Watson picking the riffs and singing the words of “Tennessee Stud,” that story-song about an independent man, his faithful horse, and his true love, the guitar cantering along underneath the words in a steady gait.
Clear as a Sunday sermon, but hinting of worldly mischief. Not polished or slick, neither too cool nor too sentimental. No pretension or stagey effort, just melodious voice with bottom, a workingman’s voice accented with the flavor of the North Carolina mountains. I never would have got through the Arkansas mud if I hadn’t been a-ridin’ that Tennessee Stud.” The rich baritone voice eases in, singing the words to an old Jimmy Driftwood ballad: “Long about eighteen twenty-five, I left Tennessee very much alive. Then a harmonica teases out a bass line, and suddenly a cascade of guitar notes tumbles out of the big JBL speakers with a kind of offhand precision, easygoing and sweet, as if the picker is playing on his front porch, playing simply for joy and not for any audience. At first all I hear are traditional old-time tunes - “Keep on the Sunny Side” and “You Are My Flower,” that sort of thing.
We’re sitting around my buddy’s dorm room, and he puts on a record he says will knock me out.
0 kommentar(er)
