World ofSlide Guitar

featuringJohn Fahey,

Bob Brozman.Mike AuldridgeMartin Simpson

Debashish Bhattacharya

featuringJohn Fahey,

Bob Brozman.Mike AuldridgeMartin Simpson

Debashish Bhattacharya

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WORLD OF SLIDE GUITARby Mark Humphrey

On a cool May evening in 1996, I saw a legendary oldTennessee hillbilly entertain the parents and children of alargely Hispanic California school with Hawaiian tunes re-called from his youth. A multicultural experience? Yes,though unselfconsciously so. Pete Kirby had spent overhalf a century as ‘Bashful Brother Oswald,’ rube comic,high harmony singer and Dobro player in Roy Acuff’sSmoky Mountain Boys. At age 84, he had been summonedto California by a lifelong Acuff fan, Wayne Brandon, prin-cipal of Palmer Way Elementary School in National City, afew miles north of the Mexican border. Brandon’s elemen-tary school students had spent the previous month study-ing the history of Dobros, and the company had sent arepresentative to honor ‘Os’ for his lifelong contribution tothe instrument. This unassuming and genuinely countrysideman got a star treatment in National City (the mayoroffered the key to the city) rarely afforded him in Nash-ville: though an Opry regular for 57 years, official ‘mem-bership’ in country’s ‘Mother Church’ was only granted himin 1995. Under palm trees and a bright moon in an out-door amphitheater, Oswald, old enough to recall when hill-billies and Hawaiians first made music together, playedhis 1935 Dobro as a girl danced a hula to “The Island

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March,” a tune he learned in the early 1930s in Flint, Michi-gan from a Hawaiian known as Rudy Waikiki. The studentsthen did traditional Mexican dances to honor their guest(one featured the balancing of water glasses atop heads).The juxtaposition of the venerable Tennessean and his Ha-waii-drenched slide guitar music with Hispanic Californiaseemed both sweetly surreal and metaphorically perfect,a homecoming for a sound washed ashore short of a cen-tury ago in California and which went thence to transfixthe world.

While we can’t date its landfall precisely, one eventwas pivotal. On February 20th, 1915, the Panama-PacificInternational Exposition opened in San Francisco for aseven-month run. Ostensibly a celebration of the comple-tion of the Panama Canal, it featured exhibits from acrossthe U.S. and the world, including the Territory of Hawaii.The Hawaii Pavilion became the ‘hit’ of the Exposition, of-fering shows featuring hulas dancers and the music of theRoyal Hawaiian Quartette, a group led by Hawaiian gui-tarist Keoki Awai. Several other notable Hawaiian guitar-ists performed at the Exposition, including the vaunted (ifoft-disputed) father of Hawaiian-style guitar, JosephKekuku. Over 13 million visitors came to the Exposition,and while it wasn’t the first exposure of mainlanders toHawaiian music (the Royal Hawaiian Band had been atthe 1895 Chicago Fair), it is considered the watershedevent for the so-called ‘Hawaiian music craze’ (arguablythe first media-driven ‘world music’) of the following 20years. A torrent of Hawaiian recordings appeared in 1916,and some estimates suggest more Hawaiian records weresold on the mainland that year than recordings in any othergenre. By 1917, Hawaiian-style guitars were being offeredby such mail-order catalogs as Sears; the first Hawaiianguitar method book (written by Keoki Awai) was pub-lished in 1916.

The popularity of the Hawaiian guitar style quicklyspread worldwide via record, radio, and touring troupes.For every Frank Ferera, the Hawaiian-born Portuguesecowboy who made literally hundreds of records, there wereunrecorded obscurities like Rudy Waikiki who were none-theless important for inspiring men like Oswald, dissemi-nators of Hawaiian guitar styles into other genres.

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The melding of Hawaiian music with what we now callcountry music was widely evident in the 1920s, and Ha-waiian guitar sounds were popular and much-emulatedfar beyond the American South. Widely-traveled Hawaiiantroupes took it across Europe, Asia, Latin America, andAustralia: recordings of regionally popular music with Ha-waiian guitar are everywhere from at least the 1930s (Ha-waiian guitars seem to have been particularly popular inIndonesia).

The relation of the Hawaiian-style guitar to African-American blues is more problematic. It is often stated that

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the bottleneck style is an adaptation of Hawaiian-styleguitar, but this is, at best, a half truth. W.C. Handy heardthe bottleneck style in 1903 at the Tutwiler, Mississippitrain station: “a lean, loose-jointed Negro had commencedplunking a guitar beside me while I slept,” Handy wrote inhis 1941 autobiography, FATHER OF THE BLUES. ”Hisclothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. Hisface had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As heplayed, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar inthe manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who usedsteel bars. The effect was unforgettable...the weirdest musicI had ever heard.” Handy’s encounter with Delta style slideguitar predates the earliest known Hawaiian guitar record-ings (1909 Edison cylinders by Joseph Kekuku), and surelyno touring Hawaiian troupes had made it to Mississippi by1903. While some slide-style blues guitarists were indeedinfluenced by Hawaiians (Casey Bill Weldon was dubbed‘the Hawaiian Guitar Wizard’), there’s good reason to be-lieve the blues slide style is essentially African in origin.One-string bow instruments are common in Africa, espe-cially the west coast and Congo regions from which slaveswere taken. The musical bow is essentially a hunting bow;its pitch is varied in a number of ways, including sliding ahard object (such as a stick or a knife) along its length.According to Dr. Dave Evans’ “Afro-American One-Stringed Instruments,” (WESTERN FOLKLORE, 1971),“There is even one report of a genuine ‘bottleneck’ tech-nique: a member of the Mtende tribe of Kenya used a gourdresonator attached to his bow and the broken-off neck ofthis gourd as a slider worn on the middle finger of his lefthand.”

In Hawaii, however, there is no parallel tradition to ex-plain the origin of Hawaiian guitar. Chordophones wereentirely imports to the islands; guitars probably appearedwith the vaqueros brought from Mexico to thin out cattleherds in the 1830s. Portugese laborers may have intro-duced steel-string guitars in the 1860s. Hawaii’s ‘slack key’style is believed to have emerged in the 1880s, and ‘slackkey’ elements (not the least of them chordal ‘open’ tunings)contributed much to the evolution of Hawaiian guitar. Aprovocative article by South African steel guitarist KealohaLife, “Dawn of the Steel Guitar” (GUITAR PLAYER, April

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1972), suggests Swedish and Norse seamen entertainedthemselves and Hawaiian natives with dulcimers frettedwith quills. Playing guitar lap style and fretting with a hardobject may have been a native attempt to emulate thedulcimer’s sound. Life further suggests contact with Middleand Northern European sailors and such instruments asthe zither may have influenced the Hawaiian guitar’s tun-ing and fingerstyle approach while the dulcimer surely in-fluenced the later construction of ‘hollow-box neck’ gui-tars such as the Weissenborn.

If we believe the legends concerning the Hawaiianguitar’s origins attached to Joseph Kekuku, the whole thingwas an accident. In one account, Kekuku drops his combon his guitar, is intrigued by the sound, and begins (around1894) fretting with the back of his comb. (A variant of thecomb story also brings a Honolulu barber, William Brad-ley, to claim inventing Hawaiian guitar.) In another ac-count, a pocket knife falls on Kekuku’s strings, and in yetanother, Kekuku drops his guitar on railroad tracks and issmitten by the steel-on-steel slide wail; picturesque talesof clumsiness transformed into serendipitous discovery.There is good reason to doubt Kekuku was the first guitar-ist in the Hawaiian style (for one thing, it’s believed to havebeen played at King Kalahau’s 1886 Jubilee Celebrationby one Gabriel Davion, of whom more later), but anotherchapter of Kekuku’s legend (one which shows him as morewillful than accident prone) bears repeating: in this ac-count, he often played with a violinist cousin and was en-vious of the sliding glissandos possible on a fretless in-strument. This led him to experiment with sundry ways ofgetting a violin-like tone on guitar by fretting with a comb,a glass, and eventually the steel bar he made in the schoolshop of the Kamehameha School for Boys.

Kekuku’s triumph over the tonal limitations of the fret-ted guitar illustrates a thread common to the many ap-proaches to slide guitar evident in this video. The slidestyle allows a guitarist to approximate the fluid tone of theviolin and, even more importantly, the human voice. Thevocal quality of slide guitar is everywhere evident in itsmany variants: in the Hawaiian approach and its countryderivatives; in the African-American bottleneck blues styleand its gospel relative where slide guitar often acts anti-

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phonally as a second voice; certainly in the Indian classi-cal style in which the instrumental approximation of vocalnuances (called gayaki ang) is developed to a fine art. Sofor all the evident contrast in the performances on thisvideo, each of these artists has variously honed a uniquevoice with which to sing through his guitar.

Bob Brozman

The Hawaiian guitarists who came to ‘jazz age’ Americaquickly adapted their style to perform popular mainlandmusic as well as more traditional sounds. Vaudeville wasstill going strong, and instrumentalists who were showmenwith broad repertoires were much in demand. Bob Brozmanis a contemporary vaudevillian who balances an archivist’sreverence for the past with a showman’s knack for wow-ing an audience.

Brozman, 42, came to Hawaiian music by way of theblues and his fascination with National guitars. “Saw onewhen I was 13 and that was it,” Brozman says of Nation-als. He got his first a year later (a 1933 Style O which hestill plays) and sought out any albums with Nationalsprominent on the covers. “I just basically followed the musicthat was played on Nationals and kept going deeper and

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wider,” says Brozman, who took a left turn from Son Houseand Bukka White when he discovered Sol Hoopii and simi-lar Hawaiian guitar wizards.

In the early seventies, the New York native studiedmusic at Washington University in St. Louis while workingin a trio called String Bean, Jelly Roll and Trash Can.Brozman’s honed his chops playing vintage blues, hokumand ragtime while traveling the country as a street musi-cian. His scholarly side found him writing a senior thesisabout the musical connection between pioneering Deltabluesmen Charley Patton and Tommy Johnson. All thewhile, he sought out National guitars and vintage blues,ragtime, jazz and Hawaiian recordings. His labor as re-searcher and collector would eventually yield rich fruit: fivereissue albums of Hawaiian guitar classics recorded be-tween 1915 and 1935 produced by Brozman for theRounder and Folklyric labels and the 300-page book, THEHISTORY AND ARTISTRY OF NATIONAL RESONATOR IN-STRUMENTS (Centerstream – dist.Hal Leonard Interna-tional). Additionally, the 1989 album, THE TAU MOE FAM-ILY; REMEMBERING THE SONGS OF OUR YOUTH (Rounder6028) found Brozman working with survivors of Hawaiianguitar’s classic era in a recreation of their 1929 recordingsession. The collaboration was prompted, improbablyenough, when Tau Moe himself contacted Brozman to re-quest one of his albums!

Brozman moved to California in the mid-Seventies andperformed in situations as varied as accompanying coun-try singer Lacy J.Dalton and per forming as par t ofR.Crumb’s Cheap Suit Serenaders. Dubbed “the thinkingman’s slide guitarist” by France’s GUITAR & BASS MAGA-ZINE, Brozman has since continued his authoritative ex-plorations of vintage slide styles while venturing boldly intovirgin terrain: he recently completed the score of a Frenchfilm, IMUHAR, with North African musicians and describesthe soundtrack (to be released by Sony) as “mixed-upMiddle Eastern, Algerian pop and bluesy slide guitar stuff.”

Articulate and opinionated, Brozman offers provoca-tive observations on what drives him musically: “Theconfluence of the first and third worlds is where all thegreat music happened,” he says. “When people say, ‘Whyare you playing all these different kinds of music?’

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I explain the connection is one of colonial exploitation, po-litical oppression, and how the oppressed rise above allthat through music. Not that I’m at all political in my mu-sic, I just think it’s interesting how colonization createdmusic. I don’t do the ‘I’m sorry I’m a white guy’ routine. Iam what I am. In America, being Jewish isn’t exactly likebeing invited to white country club, either.”

Brozman opens our dvd with a sprightly showpiece,“Hawaiian Melodies,” which happens to be among the ear-liest recorded ‘stops out’ Hawaiian guitar instrumentals.In 1913, the Hawaiian Quintette’s Walter Kolomoku waxeda version of it for the Victor Talking Machine Company.Brozman performs it on a 1931 Style 3 National Tricone inopen G tuning (from bottom to top, D-G-D-G-B-D). Hedescribes the piece as “in the late 1920s style of playing,sort of just before the Sol Hoopi style.”

“Twilight Echoes” is a dreamy piece learned from pio-neering multi-instrumentalist Roy Smeck. Brozman per-forms it on a 1920s Weissenborn Hawaiian guitar inSmeck’s E7th tuning: G#-B-D-G#-B-E. “The 4th string Dis higher than the third and second strings,” says Brozman.“I used it in a soundtrack for an Australian documentaryby Dennis O’Rourke called ‘Half Life.’ It’s a documentaryabout American nuclear testing in the Bikini Islands andhow it really screwed over the people there.”

Brozman’s final exposition of vintage Hawaiian stylesis a standard of the genre, “Moana Chimes.” Brozman callsit “the quintessential ethnic Hawaiian tune. If you can un-derstand that tune, you understand Hawaiian music, be-cause of the odd measures and some of the bar techniques.It’s a real antiquated style of playing. I don’t want to soundobnoxious, but I’m basically the last living practitioner ofthat style.” Here Brozman plays a 1929 Style 4 NationalTricone in open G tuning.

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Debashish Bhattacharya

In the 19th century, the guitar arrived in Hawaii andnew approaches to the instrument – slack key and Hawai-ian slide style guitar – were innovated by indigenous mu-sicians. More recently, something similar has happened tothe guitar in India. For a half century or better, Hawaiianstyle guitar has been popular in film soundtracks (‘filmimusic’) and related popular and light classical music.Nearly 40 years ago, Pandit Brij Bhushan Kabra beganexperimenting with North India’s classical music on anarchtop guitar modified for slide playing. Kabra’s exampleinspired others, and today a guitar adapted to the subtle-ties of Hindustani music joins the sitar and sarod as anaccepted and highly expressive medium for one of theworld’s great art musics.

The background for this movement again leads us tothe worldwide ‘Hawaiian music craze’ which followed WorldWar I. The popularity of Hawaiian recordings didn’t by-pass India; nor did touring Hawaiian troupes (Brozman’sfriend Tau Moe was there in the mid-1930s and returnedduring World War II). Local performers of Hawaiian musicfollowed; a Calcutta-based group called the Aloha Boyswas formed in 1938 and quickly became popular record-ing artists and performers on All-India Radio.

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The eventual absorption of elements of Hawaiian musicand the adaptation of Hawaiian-guitar style was inevitablein a culture which had already made uniquely Indian useof such European instruments as the violin and harmonium.

While the recent history of slide guitar in India can beclearly traced to Hawaiian influence, there are those whobelieve it was really a return voyage for a style which ema-nated from India. The following statement from KealohaLife’s 1972 GUITAR PLAYER article, “Dawn of the SteelGuitar,” offers much for etymologists, ethnologists andethnomusicologists to dispute, but is nonetheless notewor-thy: “Four thousand years ago in India there existed aninstrument called the swarabat sitar, literally ‘plectrumguitar,’ since it was plucked with a quill,” Life writes. “Likeits Japanese counterpart, the bugako biwa, it was playedwith a hardwood roller bar...The Bihari race of EasternBengal, a Polynesian-speaking people, migrated to thePacific via Java...Though they brought no musical instru-ments with them, their folk-memory may have subcon-sciously precipitated the invention of the steel guitar.”

Whether or not there is anything in this, we know thatan instrument played with a bamboo slide, the ekatantri(‘one string’), was popular in medieval India, and folk vari-ants of it have persisted into this century. The slide style isalso applied to two rare but, in this context, significantIndian concert instruments, North India’s vichitra vina andSouth India’s gottuvadyam (or chitraveena). A slide ap-proach to plucked chordophones was long established inIndia before the Hawaiians arrived, and in fact an Indian isamong the claimants for primacy among Hawaiian styleguitarists. Gabriel Davion is said to have been kidnappedfrom India by a sea captain and subsequently jumped shipin Honolulu. He is reported to have been heard playingguitar with a pocketknife on a single string (shades of theekatantri) as early as 1884, and is believed to have popu-larized the style by his performance at King Kalahaua’sJubilee Celebration in November 1886.

Seventy–two years later, Brij Bhushan Kabra spotteda guitar in a shop in Ahmedabad. The shopkeeper wanted300 rupees for it, 50 rupees more than Kabra had. Heturned to walk away, saying, “Money saved.” The shop-keeper shouted, “Wait! You come back.” A bargain was

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struck and Kabra, son of a patron of classical music andbrother of Damodar Lal, Ali Akbar Khan’s first disciple,bought himself both an instrument and a dilemma. Givenhis family background, if he were to play music surely itmust be India’s classical music. Was this even possible onguitar?

Encouraged by Ali Akbar Khan, he learned that it in-deed was. The influence of the fretless sarod was echoedin Kabra’s voicing of Indian classical music on slide-styleguitar. (Khansahib’s training links Kabra and his disciples,Debashish Bhattacharya among them, with India’s mostesteemed musical lineage, or gharana, the Senia MaiharGharana.) Kabra’s 1958 impulse buy was an archtop Hof-ner, a German copy of Lloyd Loar’s violin-inspired guitardesign, first seen in Gibson’s 1922 L-5. It may be arguedthat the archtop f-hole guitar, with its dual capacities forprojection and mellowness, is well-suited to Indian music.Like Kekuku’s supposed dropped comb discovery of Ha-waiian slide style, this marriage of instrument and musicseems to have been a happy accident: such a guitar wasavailable when the Segovia of this school was seeking aninstrument, so today such guitars are the standard amongHindustani slide guitarists.

Debashish Bhattacharya, 33, began playing a round-hole six string guitar. A child prodigy, he was performingon All-India Radio by age seven. Bhattacharya studiedWestern music at an early age before immersing himselfwholeheartedly in Hindustani music via studies with someof Calcutta’s most prominent sitarists, among them PanditManilal Nag. He adroitly applied their lessons to guitar andin 1984 became the first guitarist to receive the President’sAward of India.

In 1986, Bhattacharya began intensive studies withKabra. It was during this time that Kabra gave him themodified Hofner guitar seen in this video. Bhattacharyamodified it further: Kabra’s three primary playing strings(tuned D-A-D) became five (usually tuned A-D-F#-A-D).Inspired by sarod design, Bhattacharya added three ‘sup-porting strings’ (strings strummed for emphasis) to the leftof the primary strings and two chikaris (tonic drone stringsused rhythmically in a manner similar to a banjo’s fifthstring) to their right (chikaris traditionally are on the left

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of the playing strings on Indian instruments). Finally, headded the dozen sympathetic strings which provide theechoic overtones common to many Indian stringed instru-ments. “It is important to Indianize the guitar,” saysBhattacharya, and working from his 1985 sketches withCalcutta luthier Bhabasindhu Biswas, he did that dramati-cally. Kabra dubbed his disciple’s creation Dev Veena, “theveena (stringed instrument) which has been sent to us byGod (Dev).”

Bhattacharya is accompanied in this video by tablamaster Kumar Bose and Sutapa Bhattacharya, his sister,on tambura. He begins with a folk tune from Assam, “Songof Life.” Widely popular, it is associated with Assamesetea growers, who dance to it. “The tune is so lively!” saysBhattacharya. “When I first went to Gauhati, Assam, Iplayed for a group of schoolchildren. They didn’t know meand I didn’t know them. So how to communicate? How toget their heart? Somebody told me, ‘Play something thatcan make them happy.’ So I started ‘Song of Life,’ andyou can feel 2,000 boys in a big hall, all clapping. It wasgreat! The lyric is fantastic. Life is like a man. He is thesymbol of life. He is asking people, ‘Come! Come danc-ing. Come running. I came here to see your glorious face,your smile.’ This is the real song of life.”

The second performance is a Dhun set to Raga Kirwani.Dhun is a type of light air or melody with a repeated themeand improvised variations. It may be based on a folk tuneor a popularization of a classic raga. Kirwani is a SouthIndian (Carnatic) raga which has been integrated intoHindustani music by such influential instrumentalists asRavi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan. Its basic scale, with aflat third and flat sixth, you may recognize as our Har-monic minor scale. Bhattacharya’s five primary strings aretuned to D minor for Kirwani: A-D-F-A-D. His extensiveuse of harmonics is beautifully guitaristic, while the sing-ing quality of his bar work recalls the emotional and highlyornamented Thumri vocal style. Bhattacharya is the sonof classical vocalists, and he continues to study with oneof India’s finest, Ajoy Chakraborty.

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Mike Auldridge Never underestimatethe power of bloodlines.In Februar y 1928,Ellswor th T. Cozzensbecame the first Hawai-ian guitarist to accom-pany the vaunted ‘fa-ther of country music,’Jimmie Rodgers, onrecord. Cozzens playedseveral instruments(standard and Hawaiianguitars, mandolin andbanjo) and wrote songsbesides. Rodgers waxedtwo of his songs, in-cluding one destined tobecome a sentimentalcountr y standard,“Treasures Untold.” Tenyears after Cozzens’

session with Rodgers, his nephew, Mike Auldridge, wasborn. As a child, Auldridge heard his uncle play at familygatherings and was rather unimpressed by the old man’smusic. In time, of course, that changed, and this brilliantDobroist would eventually title one of his albums TREA-SURES UNTOLD.

Uncle Ellsworth’s were the first of many recordingsRodgers would make with Hawaiian style guitarists; themildly risque “Everybody Does It in Hawaii” is said to havebeen quite popular in India! Rodgers’ familiarity with Ha-waiian music predates his recording career: a 1925 photoshows the future ‘Blue Yodeler’ as part of a ‘Hawaiian Show& Carnival’ (complete with Hawaiian style guitarist) whichtoured the Midwest in 1925. His recordings with Hawaiianguitar accompanists helped ingrain their sound into themusic we now call country. It would be hard to imagine itwithout the presence of some sort of slide guitar, be itacoustic or a pedal steel.

The Dobro is a kind of ‘missing link’ between the two.

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Like the National, it is a resonator guitar invented by theDopyera Brothers in Los Angeles. The Dobro appeared latein 1928, selling for $27.50. Cheaper than Nationals, Dobrosquickly became widely popular, and by 1937 the companywas making as many as 55 guitars a day. The rise of elec-tric lap steels and the advent of metal shortages as Americatooled up for World War II ended Dobro production littleover a decade after it began. The ‘missing link’ instrumentmight have been largely forgotten if it weren’t for its sig-nature presence in Roy Acuff’s Smoky Mountain Boys;Bashful Brother Oswald’s crying Dobro lines were promi-nently featured on record and radio by Acuff, who was atthe height of his popularity during World War II. Oswaldkept the Dobro sound alive in traditional country musicand influenced its subsequent use in bluegrass.

Growing up in the Washington, D.C. area, MikeAuldridge heard lots of traditional country and bluegrassin the 1950s. He was enthralled by the Dobro playing ofJosh Graves, best known for his work in Flatt & ScruggsFoggy Mountain Boys but working with Wilma Lee andStoney Cooper on Richmond, Virginia radio station WRVAwhen Auldridge first heard him. Auldridge had been play-ing guitar since age 13, but finding a Dobro was anothermatter: when he began searching for one at age 16, theywere nearly 20 years out of production. Auldridge’s firstresonator instrument was an old National, but he preferredthe sound of a Gibson J-45 which he played Hawaiian stylewith a raised nut. Finally, a letter to Graves led him to buya Dobro from his idol in 1961.

Drafted that same year, Auldridge’s professional mu-sical career didn’t begin in earnest until 1969, when hejoined Emerson and Waldron and began to find his owndistinct Dobro sound. “The only reason I have a style,”Auldridge told Bobby Wolfe (“Mike Auldridge: Mr. Smooth& Tasteful,” BLUEGRASS UNLIMITED, April 1992), “is thatuntil I joined a band in 1969, I had tried to play like BuckGraves but I knew I wasn’t quite getting it. We were in thestudio cutting our first Emerson and Waldron album and Ihad to come up with a break. I asked myself what Joshwould do and it dawned on me that I had no idea whatJosh would do. So, I then said, ‘What am I going to do?’That was the beginning of my style. It just happened. If I

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had to describe my style, I’d have to say that tone andsmoothness are the important things to me. Tone is ev-erything.”

Auldridge’s signature tone was a cornerstone of theSeldom Scene’s sound for more than 20 years (he joinedthe band in 1971). In 1992, he formed Chesapeake, thegroup he performs with in this video. Bassist T. MichaelColeman, singer/guitarist Moondi Klein are also SeldomScene alumni; mandolinist Jimmy Gaudreau was long as-sociated with the Tony Rice Unit. “In this band I never stopthinking, and that’s why I love this band,” Auldridge toldRick Henry ( “Chesapeake,” BLUEGRASS UNLIMITED,December 1994). “The arrangements are so complex thatyou can’t let your mind wander for a second or you’re lost.”

Auldridge and Chesapeake open their performanceswith a Western Swing standard, “Deep Water,” written byFred Rose and recorded by Bob Wills & His Texas Play-boys in 1947. “It’s a song I’ve known for years and playedon pedal steel and I just put it over on the Dobro,” saysAuldridge. He performs on an eight-string Dobro made byR.Q. Jones and uses a C6th tuning (bottom to top: A-C-E-G-A-E-D). The medley, “House of the Rising Sun/WalkDon’t Run,” is performed on a six string made by IvanGuernsey and is in standard Dobro G tuning: G-B-D-G-B-D, called ‘high bass’ tuning in old Hawaiian method books.“I’ve been doing that as a medley onstage for years,” saysAuldridge. “‘House of the Rising Sun’ is on my first albumin 1971. When I did that first album, (fiddler) VassarClements and Josh Graves were on that album with me. Ithink we were in the studio kicking around ideas, and thatcame up: ‘Let’s do that.’ We were looking for that type ofsong. ‘Walk Don’t Run’ I think was on my second albumon Takoma. It dawned on me one night that we could run‘em together, and we’ve been doing it ever since. I don’tknow if I could play one without the other now. ‘Walk Don’tRun’ I got from a jazz guitar player named Johnny Smith,but it was really a hit for the Ventures. I had first heard itby Johnny Smith before the Ventures did it, though I kindof did it like the Ventures.”

If Auldridge’s eclectic forays afar of bluegrass leaveany doubts about his roots, he brings it home with “Span-ish Grass,” an Auldridge original which has become a stan

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dard among bluegrass Dobro players and which finds himagain picking the six string in open G. “‘Spanish Grass’I’ve recorded a couple of times,” says Auldridge, “first whenI was with Emerson & Waldron in the late 1960s. It wasone of the first instrumentals I ever wrote or recorded, prob-ably about 1969. That’s another one I’ve been playing eversince, the kind of tune that fits the bluegrass field.” Bycontrast, “Wave” (on the eight string in C6th tuning) washedup from the bossa nova field. “‘Wave’ is a song that’s on‘The Dobro Sessions’ album that was a Grammy winnerlast year,” says Auldridge. “As far as I know that’s the onlyrecording on Dobro of that song, an Antonio Carlos Jobimjazz standard from the 1960s.” The second half ofChesapeake’s second medley, “Little Rock Getaway,” is aswing era standard composed in 1933 by pianist JoeSullivan and popularized by the Bob Crosby Orchestra.“I first heard it done by Jim and Jesse as a bluegrass in-strumental,” says Auldridge, who performs it with his char-acteristic relaxed drive on his C6th eight-string.

Martin Simpson“The great thingabout the slide isthat it emulates thevoice so well,” saysMar t in Simpson.“That’s what makesit so appealing, asfar as I ’m con-cerned. It was origi-nal ly the blues,that’s where I firstheard it. But its re-lationship to the hu-man voice is whathas always drawnme in and kept mecoming back to it.Now, the more Iplay slide the lesslike anybody else

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I sound and the more I do it the more I find in it. I’m still asfascinated by the sound as I was when I first heard it.”

What were the first slide sounds Simpson heard?“Probably Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson on SamCharters’s COUNTRY BLUES,” he says, “so the first twoslide tunes I ever heard were ‘You’re Gonna Need Some-body On Your Bond’ and ‘Preachin’ Blues,’ which is a fairlyheavy way to start. I was 12 or something.” Simpson wasf irst exposed to tradit ional music in Scunthorpe,Lincolnshire, England: “When I was seven years old,” hetold interviewer Paul Hostetter, “we learned ‘Barbara Allen’in a music class and I think at that point I was lost.”Simpson’s passion for the British (and Anglo-American)ballad tradition is still evident in his music, as is his equalpassion for American blues.

Simpson began playing guitar at 12 and was kickingaround the English folk pub circuit while still in his teens.“There isn’t really anybody else of my generation that camethrough as a guitar player the way I did,” the 43 year oldSimpson told Hostetter (“Traveling Man,” ACOUSTIC GUI-TAR, September/October 1994).” The previous generation,in performing terms, is Nic Jones and Dick Gaughan andMartin Carthy and those people. Then there’s a little space,and then there’s me. I do feel somewhat like I’m holding atorch for the English guitar.”

As the Young Turk of the English folk scene in the late1970s, Simpson was much in demand as an accompanist,and worked for nearly seven years with the superb singerJune Tabor. He also worked in the Albion Band with AshleyHutchings, the central figure in English folk-rock. “I loveaccompanying,” says Simpson, “It’s an incredible art.” Theace accompanist wed singer Jessica Ruby Simpson; thecouple moved to the U.S. in the late 1980s.

Since then, the Simpsons have been busy fronting theirBand of Angels while the venturesome guitarist of the familyhas done everything from an album of airs (LEAVES OFLIFE, Shanachie) to one of blues (SMOKE AND MIRRORS,Thunderbird). “I’ve always been quite possibly too eclec-tic for my own good,” he admits, “although I think I’m man-aging to make more sense of all the different threads thatI have.” Following Martin’s metaphor, Michael Parrishwrites: “The thread that runs through all of Martin Simp-

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son’s work is a passion to ferret out the emotional corethat makes traditional music so compelling—difficult tointellectualize, but immediately recognizable on a viscerallevel.” (“Martin Simpson: From Scunthorpe to Santa Cruzin Search of One Really Good Note,” SING OUT!).

Simpson’s segment of this dvd opens with “Greenfieldsof Canada,” which he describes as “one of those exquisite,sinuous Irish tunes. It’s really a vocal tune. I’ve been play-ing it for 20 years. It’s in C minor tuning, which is C-G-C-G-C-Eb. That’s played on a Bourgeois Blues made by DanaBourgoise. It’s a ladder-braced koa guitar.” Simpson usesthe same instrument to play “Great Change Since I’ve BeenBorn.” He says, “That’s in open D major, D-A-D-F#-A-D.It’s actually a tune that Gary Davis recorded in the 1930sin absolutely typical Rev. Gary Davis style; standard tun-ing with a lot of chord changes. But it has that wonderfulgospel feel and melody to it. All I did was try to emulateBlind Willie Johnson a little bit.”

Simpson calls his final entry, the Fred McDowell-in-fluenced “Masco Blues,” “just an improvisation in G tun-ing, D-G-D-G-B-D.” The sole exponent here of the bottle-neck slide style offers an anecdote about his slide which,if not quite on a par with the Joseph Kekeku yarns, is atleast illustrative of an inventive Southern spirit.

“That particular one was made by a friend of a friend,David Sheppard in Greensboro, North Carolina,” saysSimpson. “He and I were talking about slides one day, anda guy sitting there listening to our conversation said, ‘Letme see that; I could do that.’ This guy works on motor-cycles and turns engine blocks. He went away and hestarted to experiment with stainless steel slides. He sentthe first one and then another one. We started to refer to itas ‘the slide of the month club.’ The one that I used on thatis one of my absolute favorites that the guy made. It hasparallel side on the outside, but on the inside it really fitsyour finger beautifully. It’s heavier at the playing end thanat your hand end. Actually, I tried to get (slide makers)Latch Lake to make some like it, but for them to tool up tomake something like it in stainless steel, the end resultwould have cost something like a hundred bucks!” Leaveit to the shade tree mechanics, Martin.

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John Fahey

The Washington, D.C. area nurtured both a traditionalcountry/bluegrass scene and a folk/blues scene in the1950s. Mike Auldridge and John Fahey were both tuningup for their appointed roles in ‘the world of slide guitar’ atthe same time and place: Fahey was born in the D.C. sub-urb of Takoma Park February 28, 1939; Auldridge Decem-ber 30, 1938 in Washington, D.C. Though their paths werewildly divergent, Auldridge’s first solo albums would ap-pear on Fahey’s pioneering independent label, Takoma,which also unleashed Leo Kottke on the world. “John kindof invented the audience for solo steel-string guitar andthe industry behind it,” Kottke told Dale Miller. “WithoutJohn it wouldn’t have happened.” Fahey’s influence waspervasive not only among the so-called ‘American primi-tive guitarists’ he recorded for Takoma but among mostacoustic American guitar soloists who came of age in the1960s and 1970s. “I was influenced by Fahey in learninghow to use open tunings,” Bob Brozman told Mark Hunter.“What I like about Fahey’s stuff is that he really exploresharmonic movement in an open tuning – the idea of mov-ing one note against a drone.”

Fahey’s legend is that of an enigmatic maverick and

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survivor. He made his first self-produced album, BLINDJOE DEATH, in 1958 for $300. Always the odd man out,he performed his unique pastiches of blues, hillbilly andneoclassical guitar to bemused folk audiences in the eraof protest singers. His syncopated rendition of the Episco-pal hymn, “In Christ There Is No East or West,” became afingerpicker’s standard. He went South to ferret out pre-War bluesmen Skip James and Bukka White; he wrote amaster’s thesis on bluesman Charley Patton; he studiedexistential philosophy and made albums with titles likeDANCE OF DEATH AND OTHER PLANTATION FAVORITES.To his great chagrin, this self-proclaimed ‘existential gui-tarist’ would be credited with inspiring the ‘new age’ guitarschool embodied by Will Ackerman, Alex de Grassi, andMichael Hedges.

Today, Fahey is being called the ‘father of alternativeguitar’ in some circles, which suits him better. After a fewfallow years he’s back on the tour trail, often performingwith young ‘unplugged’ acts to audiences in their twentieswho regard Fahey as elder statesman. He’s recordingagain, experimenting and pushing the envelope of acous-tic guitar sounds.

Fahey’s performances here show the traditional rootsof his eclectic style. “Steel Guitar Rag,” he told MichaelBrooks in a 1972 GUITAR PLAYER interview, is the tunethat first started him playing slide style. “The first versionI heard sounded pretty easy, open D tuning (D-A-D-F#-A-D),” said Fahey. It was recorded by Louisville, Kentucky’sSylvester Weaver for OKeh on November 2, 1923, makingit the earliest known ragtime-blues slide guitar recording.The tune quickly entered the repertoire of ‘hillbilly’ gui-tarists: West Virginia’s Jess Johnston and Roy Harveywaxed a version for Gennett in 1930, and electric steelplayer Leon McAuliffe made it a Western Swing standardwhen he recorded it will Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys in 1936.

The second piece Fahey performs is in open G tuning,a tuning he learned from Elizabeth Cotten. This bluesy “Un-titled” piece Fahey calls “Unfinished: most of it’s impro-vised.” His square neck guitar he describes simply as “a$40 guitar handmade by some guy in Minneapolis.” Likehis fellow D.C. native, Mike Auldridge, Fahey uses theStevens steel bar, long a favorite with Dobro players.

Running Time: 58 minutes • ColorPhoto by Anna Grossman

Nationally distributed by Rounder Records,One Camp Street, Cambridge, MA 02140

Representation to Music Storesby Mel Bay Publications

© 2004 Vestapol ProductionsA division of Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop, Inc.

Bob BrozmanHawaiian MelodiesTwilight EchoesMoana Chimes

Debashish BhattacharyaSong Of LifeDhun Set To Raga Kirwani

Mike AuldridgeDeep WaterMedley: House Of The Rising Sun

Walk Don't RunMartin Simpson

Greenfields Of CanadaGreat Change Since I've Been BornMasco Blues

John FaheySteel Guitar RagDiscarded

Mike AuldridgeSpanish GrassMedley: Wave

Little Rock GetawayThis dvd reveals a world of sounds – Ameri-can, Hawaiian, Indian, English – vibrant withemotional nuances conjured from a cold pieceof steel. The sound of slide guitar evokes audi-tory landscapes: the drowsy expanses of Paris,Texas or the heated intensity of the MississippiDelta. But as the 14 superb performances heredemonstrate, it can also paint India’s Assamese highlands, Hawaiian beachesor the “Greenfields of Canada”.

Bob Brozman’s mastery of vintage acousticHawaiian guitar styles offers a lively history les-son in sounds popularized after World War I andinfluential for decades thereafter. DebashishBhattacharya showcases the relatively recent in-tegration of slide guitar into Indian classical andfolk music. Mike Auldridge, accompanied by hisband, Chesapeake, drives his Dobro everywherefrom East Coast bluegrass to Western Swing. Mar-tin Simpson demonstrates the style's blues rootsas well as its adaptability to Anglo-Celtic music.And premier “American Primitive” guitarist JohnFahey shows the simple strength in slide-drivenblues and old-time country.

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ISBN: 1-57940-990-3

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