Spanish Fandango, classical/blues nexus
"Spanish Fandango" is the "Smoke on the Water" of bottleneck guitar in open G. It's the first song you learn, and it's really really rootsy. But it turns out to be a piece of classical music.
Here are four pieces of music that straddle classical and roots.
Open Tunings & Slide - The American Legacy of “Spanish Fandango”:
In 1867, Justin Holland published his arrangement of the American popular song “Spanish Fandango”. The first recording on this page is my live recording of the original score obtained from the Library of Congress.
“Spanish Fandango” is arranged here in its traditional tuning - ‘open G’ - in which the strings of the instrument are tuned to the notes of a Gmajor chord. Through the dissemination of sheet music publications including Holland’s, this piece became a permanent part of the American guitar repertoire. Over the years, popular and traditional players arranged and recorded the tune - changing it slightly or dramatically along the way. John Hurt, Chet Atkins, and Mike Seeger are among the artists that have recorded their own arrangements. More than this, to this day blues and folk players refer to the ‘open G’ tuning as “Spanish” because of this history.
In the American guitar tradition, open tunings are often (and most commonly) used for playing with a bottleneck slide. David Hamburger’s track on this page “Chickens” is an example of traditional early 20th century blues slide playing. My track, “Keanae, HI” by Benjamin Verdery, showcases both the contemporary classical approach to slide playing in open tunings and the history of the slide. The slide itself is believed by players to have entered American guitar culture via Hawaii around the time of the 1915 World’s Fair. Finally, Kirby and I play “God Bless America” - with me on classical guitar and him on slide in a open tuning - combining two styles of “American roots” guitar.
playing Caffe Trieste tonight
Tonight, July 29, 2010, from about 7 to about 8:30 I'll be playing at Caffe Trieste in downtown San Francisco.
1667 Market St, at Gough, San Francisco, CA
Somebody Else Is Gettin’ It
Joe McGasko blogs about a dirty-ish old tune by Eddie Morton at The Free Music Archive
Somebody else is gettin' it, gettin' it
Right where his collar ought to be
Somebody else is gettin' it, gettin' it
Right where the chicken got the a-x-e
pals on punk
On punk vs the people -
The key, to me, is for a music to evolve which both permits complete participation and provides scope for instrumental virtuosity. I suspect this music will involve software synthesizers, but also give scope to new Yngwie’s. The hip hop folks understood in an earlier time that they could use electronica and manipulation of samples to tell a populist story not embedded in amber. I envision an electronic future that looks a lot like 1960s Folkways magazine crossed with Stevie Ray Vaughan goes to Berklee thermodynamics.
I keep waiting for digital instruments to become as expressive and potent in real time as analog ones. Not that live performance on digital instruments isn't often amazing, but as far as I know there's nothing with the same power in the hands of a virtuoso as, for example, the sax.
I saw both the pistols and the clash (and the ramones for that matter) and they definitely had guitar solo breaks but point taken wrt to attitude, esp. at the very early stages. (Note that no matter how “bad” a group of musicians are, if they go on the road for 5 years they can’t help but get proficient at their craft no matter what their attitude is.)
2nd: The whole musical backlash thing (“we’re not Yes/King Crimson/Foghat/etc.”) reached even “real” musicians – Elvis Costello came very close to not hiring Bruce Thomas because he admitted to liking Steely Dan.
but my point was that punk was not just another musical genre in the UK – there it had mass, numbers and broad cultural impact. Punk, like reggae, didn’t happen in the US because, really, there was nothing about to relate to – these were someone else’s fight (having said that, don’t ask me to explain the rise of “urban” hip hop amongst suburban boys lol)
True! I get it.
I remember the press about punk having this baggage about populism and it coming off as a complete falsehood because only the coolest kids dug it. But it makes sense that the populism was for real in the UK.
early sacred harp
In this picture of psalm singers in colonial America, notice that they're facing one another rather than an audience. This is still how Sacred Harp is done.
Engraving by Paul Revere included in William Billing's "The New England Psalm Singer" (Boston, 1770):
The hollow-square seating arrangement for Sacred Harp singing:
Spotted Pony tab and sheet music
A piece of handwritten sheet music for a fiddle tune called "Spotted Pony" came into my possession via a mandolin player I jammed with in LA by the name of Bill McClellan. I got to like the tune and wanted to teach it to a trumpeter I've been playing with in Oakland, but my original is covered with chicken scratch handwritten annotations and isn't readable any more. So I retranscribed it on the computer.
No problem, I like tweaking sheet music for readability. One change is that the font is bigger. The other is that rather than squeeze the piece into the top half of a portrait printout I gave it 100% of the space in a landscape printout. Also I nuked a couple of chords that were IMO needless complexity.
- PDF of the notation for typical treble-clef instruments. (Print in landscape mode!)
- PDF of the guitar tablature for people who don't read the dots. (Note that this is the default fingering generated by Sibelius. My own is different).
- PDF of the part for B-flat instruments like trumpet.
- Sibelius file for people who have that software.
There's another song by the same name going around. This isn't that. If you find something called "Spotted Pony" you have to listen to know whether it's the same.
If anybody knows the source of this tune I'd be interested to hear it.
I think of these sheet music posts as mail to the future, for people who are searching and come across what they need here. I hope there is eventually a purpose, anyway.
Gerry on the Sunday gig at Nomad
My friend and former neighbor Gerry Olson blogged up last Sunday's performance at Nomad Cafe. He's a great writer.
Thursday night coffee gig / July 22, 2010
Thursday night (July 22, 2010) from about 7 to about 8:30 I'll be playing at Caffe Trieste in downtown San Francisco. I'll do a solo set and a set with the trumpeter Paul Mccue.
I'll do the solo set as 100% instrumentals. The creative concept is to focus obsessively on the ultra-narrow niche of music that is solo and acoustic and instrumental and lowbrow and victorian and american.
The set with Paul will be 20s-30s proto-country and early blues. Fun.
Caffe Trieste Downtown - Civic Center 1667 Market St, at Gough San Francisco, CA Mon-Thurs 6:30 AM to 9:00 PM Fri 6:30 AM to 10:00 PM Sat & Sun 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM Tel: 415-551-1000 Fax: 415-551-1030
Mural in this Caffe Trieste:
Sunday coffee gig / July 18, 2010
On Sunday morning (July 18, 2010) at 11am I'll be playing solo at a little coffee place called Nomad Cafe. It's on Shattuck in Oakland, a block or so from the Berkeley line.
This is the second time I've played there. It's a really relaxed and pleasant thing to do -- have a latte, read the Sunday paper, play a bit in this nice sunny space.
6500 Shattuck Avenue
Oakland, CA 94609
(510) 595-5344
Subway: Ashby BART
Africa Polka
Africa Polka is a song I got from Turner's Banjo Journal #10, a British magazine of sheet music from the 1880s or 1890s. I think it was a yankophile thing populated mainly with American music. There was a banjo fad going on in England, an early example of American folk culture crossing over to the top of the pops. It was similar to the way that Howling Wolf's shows in Britain in the 1960s influenced the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton.
I was playing with live dancing in mind. The part with just chords and no melody might be fun to jam over -- the chords are C-G-G-C and G-D-D-G.
The guitar has a couple rattles. There's a blooper note near the end that I am hoping doesn't really affect anything. YouTube reencodes the original video to sound and look really bad.
This recording is hereby in the public domain.
Punk and amazement
Punk was against solos. The Ramones, Sex Pistols, Clash made the absence of a guitar hero in their lineups a strength. It was ok to have pre-arranged instrumental elements -- the guitar line in the Ramones' version of "California Sun", the melodies in Ventures covers -- but the idea of soloing was squarely against doctrine.
The doctrine was DIY. Anybody can do this. It's the people's music. Three easy chords. Roll Over Beethoven. It was a cause, a manifesto, a revolutionary creed.
But in a sense instrumental virtuosity is more plebeian, more open, more democratic. Guitar heroism is the people's choice. Guitar heroics appeal to the people. The public demands them.
The reason the public demands them is that heroics are entertaining. It's not music, it's acrobatics, true. But that isn't a drawback for most people. Acrobatics are easier to understand than music! Acrobatics create a climax in the arc of concert that music is hard pressed to match.
Compare Yngwie Malmsteen's ultra fast metal riffing context to Bill Evan's complex piano chord voicings on Kind of Blue. Compare stupid but hot drum solos at an arena rock concert to sophisticated but emotionally frigid post-WWII classical music like Milton Babbit. (And leave aside the rare cases where instrumental acrobatics hit the target on a musical level). Instrumental heroics are crowd pleasers.
Purist punk has never been the music of the masses. The people speak with their numbers, and their numbers are squarely on the side of music that not anybody can do. The people want to be amazed by virtuosos.
This is an old story. Cheap thrills or elitist ecstasy -- pick one. The thing that amazes me is how punk turned the narrative inside out, so that the thing the people loved (virtuousity) became elitist and the thing the elites loved (purism) became populist.
Silver Crown Schottische
Silver Crown Schottische (mp3) is an 1895 song by J. H. Jennings that I stumbled onto via sheet music on a personal site.
This song isn't well known, I guess, but in a way it's not obscure at all, since a little part of it was adopted by a TV commercial and became known as The Oscar Meyer Weiner Song: "I wish I was an Oscar Meyer weiner, that is what I'd really like to be / cuz if I were an Oscar Meyer weiner / everyone would be in love with me."
This song wasn't completely lost. Look it up on Google and you will find references here and there. There's another version on YouTube, for example, though I think it's from a different version of the source, maybe retroactively arranged to emphasize the part used in the famous commercial.
The source site that I learned this from is a good hearted project. It was a page titled "19th Century Tunes" that describes itself this way: Click below to get gif files of some 19th Century Tunes from old books I own.
That's it. Nothing complicated -- somebody took a bit of trouble to scan some old books, and after a while other musicians had the pleasure of turning the scans into sound. I believe the person who created that page and the scans is mandolinist named Jim Garber.
The instrument on this recording is an 1900 Fairbanks mandolin. Made in Boston.
Relax Your Mind Corrections
The management of this publication admits that errors were made. In the earlier entry on "Relax Your Mind" by Leadbelly the author said that it was about road rage. On subsequent examination it turned out to be about paying attention to your driving.
The management also wishes to apologize for only doing the music notation in the key of C#, which is painful to read because it has seven sharps. It also wishes to apologize for using the convention from guitar notation of using ledger lines below the staff for the lowest notes, because a guitar tuned down a minor third is ridculously low and nobody can read that shit. On subsequent examination the management decided to show the tune in C and move it to an octave which sits where it belongs in the stave. Which looks like this:
the black giant of white spirituals
Jesus Rose from The Colored Sacred Harp
This slim, oblong book contains as much community effort, as much eccentricity, and as much rich material as any of the shape‑note hymn compilations it is designed to resemble. It has a layered and recursive form, in which various streams separate and converge: a biography, a personal memoir of the folk revival, a critical survey of scholarly literature on African American Sacred Harp singing, a generous selection of evocative photographs spanning the twentieth century, and a CD that ranks among the most valuable and carefully compiled collections of historical Sacred Harp recordings ever assembled. John Bealle's introduction plays the role of the traditional "rudiments of music" section of a shape‑note hymnal, providing a concise and sensitive history of Sacred Harp singing, its diverse adherents, and its intersections with the folk revival. Joe Dan Boyd's prologue prepares the reader to engage the main body of the book (which dates from 1969) as a document of "the eager, innocent spirit by which so many people engaged traditional culture at that time" (p. 24). Boyd's self‑awareness pervades the book and makes it a more complex work than most other celebratory folklore biographies.
In many respects, judge Jackson (1883‑1958) was much like other leading figures in the southern communities that sang from The Sacred Harp in the early twentieth century. He was born poor and rural, did agricultural work all his life, gained a patchwork music education from a variety of singing‑school teachers and friends, taught his own large family to sing, became a prosperous and charismatic cultural leader in his own community, and eventually compiled a shape-note tunebook that included some of his own compositions.
Here's the shape note for singing along:
Relax Your Mind transcription
Update 3 days later: see Corrections for a version of the notation which ordinary mortals can read.
I put some time this morning into figuring out the guitar riffs on a tune called "Relax Your Mind" by Leadbelly, aka Huddie Ledbetter. It took some sweat so I figured I'd share the result for other people to use.
Here's an MP3 of the riff: MP3 of the riff.
This is how to play the part:
Notice that the part is in the very unusual key of C#. I think Leadbelly tuned the guitar down a minor third, so that the E string was C#, the A string was F#, etc. Since I don't tune like that I modified the lowest note in the piece from low C# to C# an octave above that, on the 4th fret of the A string. If you feel like tuning down, the note I changed is the first one in bar 4.
The chords for the song are the same throughout: C#, C#7, F#, C#, C#, G#7, C#. It's an eight-bar pattern rather a 12-bar pattern like bar bands usually do.
If you want to tweak the sheet music and have Sibelius (the software I use for notation), here is the source Sibelius file: Sibelius source file.
If you use a digital instrument instead of the analog kind, here's a MIDI version of my transcription: MIDI version of my transcription.
A cool thing about this song is that it's about road rage, even though it was written way back in the 1930s. He's saying that when you're getting pissed off about driving you need to take a deep breath. Given that he was a full bore murderer, I think he knew about road rage.
His musical ideas here are strongly influenced by ragtime and early jazz. He leans on chromatic runs that are close cousins of boogie woogie. The phrasing is so intricate that in one cadence he touches almost every pitch in an octave without doing more than three adjacent semitones.
I probably muffed a couple notes in my transcription, so please share any corrections you come up with.
I found the original recording on MOG and on YouTube.
the dot com bubble explained
Jane i left you and them boys for no other reason than this to come here to procure a littl property by the swet of my brow so that we could have a place of our own that i mite not be a dog for other people any longer.
-- A forty-niner writing to his wife.
(From Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush).
Right on, brother.
useful music
A scrap of guitar playing that I posted on Freesound is part of an iPhone app called iLogMiles.
Similarly, I posted my Homestyle Mandolin sample pack over on CC Mixter and it got reused in a groovy organic squawk-jazz groove called "go find yourself" by Speck
I love it when my music is useful. Making music is mainly narcissisism. Putting it to work changes that.