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.

1667 Market St, at Gough, San Francisco, CA

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

gurdonark:

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.

victor aka fourstones

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.

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:
]]> http://soupgreens.com/2010/07/26/early-sacred-harp/feed/ 0 http://soupgreens.com/2010/07/23/spotted-pony-tab-and-sheet-music/ http://soupgreens.com/2010/07/23/spotted-pony-tab-and-sheet-music/#comments Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:33:50 +0000 Lucas Gonze http://soupgreens.com/?p=939 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.

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.

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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:

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