I bring this up because I was speaking with an acquaintance the other day and he told me that he wanted to learn a few easy guitar songs from the ’60′s. He went on the say he had used a local private tutor a short while ago. And he lost interest in taking lessons in less than two months because the guy treated him like a kid. “What I really need is adult guitar lessons for beginners.” That really hit a note, because that is part of why I stopped taking private lessons.

My personal goal in the beginning was to play blues. Jimi Hendrix in particular. Obviously that is very advanced stuff. I’m an adult, and I did have some experience with playing the guitar. I had private lessons as  a kid, before DVD or online lessons were a thought. He was an excellent teacher, especially for a kid, but he was equally as adept at teaching adults. He is a rare bread. He is also resting in peace now.

Every guitar lessons for beginners program I have tried and recommend are exactly what I say they are. The thing that they don’t have going for them is,
A. They are not catered to grownups,
B. They are catered to kids, children and adolescents. That is fine, there are a lot of people who want to learn guitar. I want to learn like an adult. I learn like an adult.

O.K., I’m pretty much a learn by myself person. I like to get down to brass tacks as fast as I can. I don’t have any problem sitting down and working out a song, even if it takes me years to learn it. Like “Little Wing”, by Jimi Hendrix.

That being said, these adult guitar lessons are pretty impressive. It’s not a matter of how much experience you have, it’s all a matter of the manner in which you are approached. There is more than one way to approach every guitar player, or, just jump in where ever you want to. It’s not very expensive to sign up for a lifetime membership.

Have all the guitar lessons at your immediate disposal, Go as fast as you want, even go back if you wish to revisit some of the lesson. Plus there are the individual emails and videos. And because it can be installed on most laptop computers, you will be able to take your guitar and tutor with you wherever and whenever you wish.

Make learning the guitar fun, and learn your favorite easy bee bop songs. Learn guitar like an adult. GuitarPlayersCenter.com

Adult Guitar Lessons-Check them Out Now

When I was a kid, everything my dad did, I did. Paint the house, he would put a plastic dry cleaning bag over me as to keep most of me paint free. Mow the lawn. Whatever it was, I wanted part of the action. Well when I was about 11 years old my dad decided to take guitar lessons. Naturally I wanted to take guitar lessons too. We took lessons from different teachers, and now I can see why, he was grownup and needed Adult Guitar Lessons

In retrospect, now I can see the madness behind guitar lessons for beginners who are young as I was, and guitar lessons for adults. I was really lucky because we were trained by highly trained guitar teachers and professional players. The quality of education I received was second to none and I doubt that there are very many private tutors available nowadays with those two gentleman’s knowledge and teaching skills.

As a background, these were not electric guitar lessons. I lived in Maryland and what happened was my dad attended a show by a well know jazz guitarist at that time and still well known today. His name was Charlie Byrd. Mr. Byrd died in 1999. Well, my dad asked Mr. Byrd who his teacher was. Mr. Byrd replied that he did not have a teacher, but he had a coach and his name is Aaron Shearer.

Aaron Shearer is the father of teaching classical guitar. Although a terrific guitar player, he found the weakness in the teaching methods of the era and designed what is still considered today the finest guitar lessons program and books.

Anyway, it is quite clear that Mr. Yeatman, who was my teacher and a professional jazz guitar player was unmatched in his teaching skills, since he specialized in guitar lessons for beginners for children and kids, I took lessons from him.

On the other side of the pancake, my dad took his lessons from Mr shearer. He worked better with adults and that worked out for both of us. Even though we were both beginner guitar players, Aaron shearer had a different plan for my dad, than the plan Mr Yeatman developed for me, a kid.

I loved my guitar lessons and always practiced everyday until Jimi Hendrix hit the scene and that was the end of me playing guitar until 2007. Life got in the way. I was 52 years old then and wanted adult guitar lessons. Well, my teacher really knew his stuff, he went to Berklee School of music and can play guitar like any of the great masters, he was in the Jeff Beck category of player. He passed away last March.

Richard and I became best friends, even though I stopped lessons with him over 3 years ago. I did not feel like I was getting what I wanted out of the private lessons and they cost me a fortune to go back week after week and year after year. It was not personal and we stayed best friends until the day he died. RIP Richard Bro.

My search for a quality guitar lesson course for adults ended with a course designed specifically for adults, not kids. I have learned to be a good blues guitar player from much of what Richard taught me and what I could scarf off the internet. I’m a really hard worker, and I love it.

Here is a course I have come across not to long ago, and wish I had found it in 2007. It is for adults, or baby boomers as I am. I got a lot out of Richard, believe me, he schooled me in some techniques which take years to learn and are not generally found in any lesson book.

But, in retrospect, if I had come across this particular adult guitar lessons course back then, I think my progress would have been better, and I would probably have a few more Strats too!
I have no regrets at all, however, let me recommend that you at least check this excellent guitar lessons for adults course out. The input I have received from people who have used this home study guitar course is excellent. And it is free to check out. My comment area works now (I hope) so please let me know what you think.

I wanted to allow you the opportunity to examine Mr shearers lesson books. One of our affiliates has them for sale at a great price, you can examine them too if you choose. Make sure you read the customer reviews when you arrive at the landing page.
GuitarPlayersCenter.com

Classic Guitar Technique, Vol 1 (Book & CD) (Shearer Series)

Classic Guitar Technique Vol 2 (Shearer Series)

Adult Guitar Lessons

No matter what I look at, TV, the newspaper, a magazine, beginner guitar lessons adults, I notice the adds and content are mostly targeted for the younger generation, from 20 to 30 years old. Except for some medicine adds or doctors commercials, the older generation is going out of style.

Our focus is then the adult guitar lessons programs specifically designed for beginner and up adults, not for children or adolescents. It teaches you the way an adult mind will accept the information. No mamby pamby kids stuff.

One thing I noticed is the ratio of ads that target a younger audience is very high compared to the ‘adult’ other age group. The fact is that many advertisers budgets are focused on separating the 35 year old and under group from their wallets. Psychology!

If you are a baby boomer or even a Gen-Xer, arriving at 40, 50 or 60 years of age – it is sometimes hard to come to terms that we are no longer part of the “groovy” generation that these advertisers are spending big bucks to appeal to.

If you’ve shopped around for guitar lessons you may have experienced a similar reality.

Studies show that the prime age group for guitar lessons for beginners is the “12 to 25 year old males” category.

As a result, most guitar lessons programs focus on this segment of the beginner guitar lesson population. And understandably so, more money and more competition.

If you’re considering picking up the guitar “later in life”, then it’s important to realize there are dramatic differences between guitar lessons designed for a younger crowd, kids, and adults who want self study, learn at home guitar lessons.

When shopping for a particular beginner guitar course, be aware of certain key words that will give away that the program is focused more on selling to the younger demographic. Words and terms like: Shredding- Metal-Speed Picking- Become a Guitar God- Blazing Fast- Be a Guitar Superstar are a giveaway.

Mature students or adults who want to learn guitar or re-fresh their chops after many years off usually search for terms like, guitar lessons for grownups, adult guitar lessons, guitar lessons for adults, acoustic guitar lessons, classical lessons, play blues guitar, learn I-IV-V (1-4-5) turnaround, 12 bar blues, learn oldies songs, online guitar DVD’s, learn at home guitar lessons, learn scales and modes, guitar chords and how to read tabs and music. The older generation is generally not interested as much in the younger-kids style of music.

Also, if you recognize the artists and songs that the course teaches, that may be a good sign. If you see names of songs and artists that you don’t recognize, then that may be an indicator that the course is primarily intended for the 12 to 25 age group. Which may not fulfill the learning requirements of a grown up. And don’t forget there are thousands of courses to sift through, which takes time and sometimes money. Why waste time and money then?

That’s not to say that any of these courses are insufficient, in fact there are a number of good ones out there, it’s just to say that, as an older, more mature guitar student, we learn differently from children or young adults, therefore many of these courses may not be the best choice for you.

So do you want to choose the best Adult Guitar Lessons? And How?

First understand that you will need to decide what “type” of guitar lessons program is best for you. Basically you have a few choices – private guitar lessons, home study guitar lessons, online guitar lessons, and going it alone.

1. Private Guitar Lessons

This is a good way to go, if you can afford it. Not as popular as it once was due to the growing demand and lack of teachers. It is quite costly and the ratio of good teachers is going down. Like any program, not all instructors are created equal. You will be making a considerable investment in private lessons so don’t hesitate to “interview” a number of instructors before making a decision.

2. Learn At Home Study Courses

These usually include learn at home DVDs, CDs or Videos and guitar lesson books, and there are a number of good courses on the market. The best ones have 24 hour support. Be sure to determine to “target audience” or age group of these courses before buying. Costing much less money than private lessons, and you can retake the lesson over and over again until you understand it.

3. Online Guitar Lessons

This is typically the most economical solution, but care should be taken when shopping. Like any other course, determine what generation the material taught is focused on. Many of them have monthly membership fees. Which adds up.

4. Learn Guitar By Yourself

There is so much free information floating around on the internet that it’s often tempting to attempt learning guitar by grabbing bits and pieces of what is available for free. It’s free because something very important they want you need is not included! These students are often referred to as “Google Guitarists”. The problem is, without a structured learning program to follow, bad habits are formed and the learning process stops at a certain point, most of these students flounder and eventually end up quitting the guitar in frustration.

Once a decision is made as to what type of adult guitar lessons program is right for you, then take a hard look at the guitar instructor. Guitar lessons instructors can range from well known international guitarists, to veritable “youngsters” barely out of school.

Quite often, guitar students of “our generation” relate better to an peer instructor with a wealth of “real world” guitar playing experience, coupled with a healthy dose of “life experience”.

Learning how to play the guitar is a fulfilling and rewarding experience at any stage in life, and choosing the right adult guitar lessons program will ensure that the joys of making music stay with you for many years to come.

Over 40, 50, 60? Beginner, intermediate or advanced. The course is designed for adult minds, allowing you to achieve your goals faster than a generic or kids course. GuitarPlayersCenter.com

Looking For Guitar Lessons For Children and Kids?

Are you a total beginner looking for guitar lessons for beginners?

Special Report: Guitar Lessons For Beginners, Adults and Children.

Are You Taking Requests?

Sometimes my wife and I go out and watch some of the local talent playing around town. If the band asks for requests or perhaps someone has a request, and maybe a few requests are suggested, what happens if the band does not know those songs? I don’t know really, I’ve never been in a band. I play the guitar for myself and my wife, I know she loves hearing the same songs every day! And for my greatest fan, my dad, (RIP).

But, it would be reasonable for the band to say something like ”we don’t know those songs”. Personally, I think that is a fair response, otherwise, you might sit around all night listening, watching and waiting, then get disappointed when those songs don’t get played. I mean you are paying their wages basically. So it seems it would be in establishments overall best interests to keep things pleasant about it and promote good culture with the folks paying for the band.

Then we all know the rules.

But if the band knows the particular song, then what happens? Usually within the next few songs or during the next set, the request is carried out. I think the ratio of requests made, and the amount of those requests carried out is very high, like over 95%.

Only one or two times can I remember making a request to a band, and the band did not respond. Perhaps the band did not know the song, but the person with the microphone did not even acknowledge it. So, I was disappointed at the end. Not at the songs, I like their vibe, they are a good band, so I was not really mad and would go see them again.

You know what would have pissed me off? If I went ahead and mentioned it again, in a non aggressive manor, and the person with the microphone told me to ”go f… off. We work hard and can’t fill all of the requests. You assholes expect us to just play any old thing you want, give me a break.”

That is a good recipe for failure. It has all the ingredients to turn me right off and never go back. That’s just what I want, to go pay for entertainment or food and get a bunch of wiseguy bullshit. I was self employed in the automotive transmission industry for almost 25 years in this town. A nonsense response like that would have shortened my career fast.

Did I have a secret, no. There a lot of nice folks in my town who are self employed know the secret. What is it. Obviously to provide a superior service. And to be sincere to a fault, customers don’t like being disrespected or being wise-guyed.

It was much harder to figure out how to deal with a disgruntled customer.

One thing I knew was to treat them respectfully with genuine sincerity. Always. You can’t fake sincerity. Above all, never attack back, no matter how unreasonable they are being or how insulting said customer is being. Ever.

Why am I writing this? I did not have a bad band experience. I had a bad restaurant experience in town. I never actually even went there. However, I did meet the owner or part owner, and had a taste of some delicious potato salad. I mentioned it to her and she told me they take requests. Two weeks later I emailed and asked if they were going to have potato salad soon. That I had requested it.

Well, I got a highly aggressive, inappropriate and defensive response, it was much akin to the unlikely example I spoke of for most of this post. I won’t get into a rhetorical argument with a person who does not realize their customers pay the bills. And anything other than a sincere apology, which is the adequate response is not going to work with me. I pay, I want a pleasant experience.

There are a lot of good cooks in town, as there are plenty of good bands. The ones that understand that the customer is king and pays their bills are the ones that people find out about and frequent. If people find out you serve up a lot of ‘‘dick” when things don’t go so well, they are going to find another good cook or band to visit. GuitarPlayersCenter.com

Buddy Guy has a birthday every year. In fact, he had a birthday last year. What more can be said about Buddy Guy? Not much, and I’m sure plenty of people will write blogs celebrating the guitar player Buddy Guys birthday anyway.

Buddy is a lot more than a great guitar player to me. In fact lots of youngins’ don’t know who he is, or, if you don’t listen to the blues (what a bummer) you may not know. Buddy is the influence that influenced my influences, and I can listen to Buddy play the guitar for me all day, heck I’ve seen him in stink the concert hall up with the blues twice now, and, I’ll go back to as long as he is alive.

Buddy Guy was the innovator of high energy string bending electric blues guitar music. Buddy is a great (I don’t use that word lightly either) singer and songwriter too. Basically, except for few other originals, like Jimi Hendrix (Shucks, Jimi was simply an original), Albert King, Clapton, Bloomfield,  and the great blues players of that period of time, Buddy Guy influenced every electric guitar player in the world, know it or not. Learn to love it!

As I dedicate this day to ‘‘listen to Buddy Guy All Day”, day, I will think about the mass of primarily Texas Blues Guitar Players who like what they heard too. More people are probably familiar with Johnny Winter and Stevie Ray Vaughan. J.W. was one of the original Texas blues guitarists, and he had his own terrific distinct vibe, but I think SRV had the talent to take Buddy Guy’s intense vibe to new level.

SRV’s  style was and is infectious, there are more excellent guitar players than you can imagine, primarily in Texas who can play SR’s style really good. And, that is not a fair statement, since Buddy is still one of the best blues players in the world.

I look and listen at some the new young generation of blues players, one of them I am falling in love with. If you can get by all the gossip stuff, John Mayer is the real deal, one of the most intense players I have heard in years. He hits the right notes, for sure. Very tasty. Watch him and Buddy Guy on you Tube.

I don’t want to dribble on about Buddy Guy, enough has been said. I just want to thank a genuine, still living, blues guitar god for indirectly teaching me the blues, Buddy hit the right notes a long time ago. Note: He also holds a week-long guitar course for intermediate blues players every year in Chicago. At the end of the week of learning, you get to play on stage with Buddy at his Chicago Blues Night Club.

How about that? Someday, if you will start to make few donations (donate button), I want to go to that guitar class. So sit back and get to know Buddy Guy. Enjoy him, it will become a lifetime obsession if the blues are in you. Are They? GuitarPlayersCenter.com

Blueprint For Beginner Guitar Lessons

Since there are certain clearly defined steps in any learn guitar quest, following a guitar lessons for beginners on DVD blueprint is one way to keep on track and maximize results. This effectively is known as taking beginner guitar lessons from theory to practice and placing concepts into actions so you can track, assess and refine results.

Suggestions for choosing a course:

1. Beginner Guitar Lessons For Kids and Children? or,
2. Beginner Guitar Lessons For Adults?
3. Is a Learn At Home Self Study Online Guitar Course Right for You?
4. Beginner Guitar Lessons in various Styles and Techniques.
5. Finally, Guitar Lesson Results.

You can use the mapped out clearly defined inescapable steps taking advantage of the lesson book which should be included in the course. Take Guitar Lesson Reviews and Research for instance.

Assuming you have conducted market research already and have selected the courses to research, now what?

Keep in mind that continuity in lessons and consistency in practice is the only way to effectively put said course into action and derive the benefits. By thoroughly mapping each lesson, you can have musical and educational appeal, which further allows you to determine what style you intend to learn during the introductory stages.

As far as beginners basic lessons are concerned the most basic procedures  are set in granite for the large part, so using some imagination in order to make it fun is important. These are not perfunctory steps, a good teacher, teacher being the operative word will benefit the student. Using a lesson book that allows you to track your beginning progress is a great way to learn.

One useful strategy is to: Combine a learn guitar DVD course with a well thought out lesson book, which  is of benefit to the student by way of the teacher. Thus having a lesson book for referral is of prime importance while using the DVD’s. A study guide is more to the point, having the most important items in writing is one key to successfully taking advantage of the DVD set.

Another useful strategy is: That having purchased an online guitar course for a one time fee, without the need for a reoccurring membership or weekly visits to the music school, lowers the cost of learning guitar without sacrificing results. For example, if you take private lessons, what happens if you did not quite ‘get’ the lesson that week, or developed amnesia as soon as you get home. A problem I’m well noted for. What solutions are at your avail?

Well, you can wait until next week to retake the lesson, which is job security for the teacher, and quite expensive to retake lessons, or have a teacher throttle your progress, thus making sure the lesson process takes a long time. If, for instance you chose  a highly reputable online guitar lesson curriculum with proven results, you can retake the lesson as many times as you need to in order to remember and put it in your muscle memory.

I learn by repetition, I’m not a beginner anymore, more of an intermediate player who does not need formal lessons on a regular basis. That is one of the unsung beauties of learn at home guitar lessons, at a certain point, you will feel comfortable enough with your knowledge to improvise, and that is a lot of fun.

What you will find in the best course is that every lesson has play along tracks to go along with the teacher. The curriculum I made best use of had some extra tracks at the end of each lesson for the passionate learner. My personal opinion is that to play along with a backing track of a particular song, with the teacher as well, a duet if you will, accelerates the response time and multitasking abilities of the brain, by repetition. If you have the focus, this is where you fall into the ‘zone’.

If you are interested in beginner guitar lessons, try the online course for beginners I like. We are not a new website and have gained rankings so you can easily find us on Google because of our dedication to finding the truth regarding the prospect of learning guitar. We have everything to lose by promoting a  crummy product. You have nothing to lose, if you don’t like it, there is nothing easier than getting your money back without any questions.

Hopefully this post has been of help to you. Online guitar lessons for beginners on DVD. Enjoy. GuitarPlayersCenter.com

Sometimes I feel real lonely since my Dad passed away. Nothing (I would capitalize the prior word if it was not rude) can fill the gap of losing one of your heroes and your greatest fan. That is too personal of a position of which he did a great job of, to take over after 57 years of doing an outstanding job.

Up to the last few years we would greet each other with a strong manly hug, nothing sissy about it. He wanted to hug and squeeze the strong chest of his son, and I wanted to hug him back. It’s about the feelings.

When it was time to depart, we would hug again, and then exchange some words that went something like this. I would say “I’ll see you later Daddy, you know I love you”, he would say, ” Well you know I love you too, but that is an unspoken truth”.  I know I was his favorite son. Oh, I was his only son! I am a Mamas boy too, so I did not leave my Mom out in any way.

My wife, as I stated in a recent lesson post is my biggest fan now, and she lets me know it here and there. I love it when she says so. But I still play the guitar for my dad. We took guitar lessons at the same time when I was 11 years old, for about 4 years, from different teachers.

My parents would come down and stay with us in Fl. for one month every year, which they did from 1982 to three years ago when he got ill. All of us really enjoyed their stay. The reason I took up playing electric guitar 5.5 years ago, was because of pressure from my dad, my mom and my wife, to learn guitar and enjoy something other than working. It was a struggle for a few days!, But in the end they won. So I found out about Richard Mac and he started my electric guitar vibe.

When ever they were down here, he always sat in the room I practiced in and just enjoyed like crazy anything I played. Well I was a beginner guitar player then and it cracks me up that he enjoyed my nonstop playing of scales and practicing of different exercises and techniques. He was raised on classical music and had no taste for Jimi Hendrix, but he sat there and enjoyed listening to me butcher songs he never heard before.

I always bring a guitar, usually my Mexican Start. I get to practice my guitar often when I go up North . I mean that I might sit down maybe 4 or 5 times a day, but for 30 minutes one time 45 another, not for longer periods.

Anyway,  last night I was working on ‘Pride and Joy’. We all know Stevie Ray Vaughan (SRV) wrote that song. You might think it is just a simple basic twelve bar blues song, but Ray never made anything simple. It can be simplified, and I don’t care how other people play SRV’s music, but I like to play Rays songs like he did. And he had some very unusual picking techniques. Anyway, the techniques he uses in the intro and in other parts of the song is a real brain twister.

I spend a lot of time just practicing the technique so I’ll become fluid and instinctual at it. It’s happening too, well worth the effort. Want to get to the top? Practice a lot, until your sick and tired of it, and then practice a bit more. The next day, surprise, you might be a little better at said technique, it’s true and it works, just be patient.

Well, my wife who has a very pleasing voice in her own right, and is a dang good finger-picker asked me to teach her “Pride and Joy”. WTF?

The song is simple, but it’s hard to get the rhythm and picking techniques to match up. Typical SR. She is not so interested in playing every note like SRV did, she wanted to know the chords and words and sing her version. Well that was easy,  she picked them up right away and put her golden vocal chords to the words and the words just came out of her head, like click bang we have an other super star here.

So, I guess ‘Sometimes it’s not so lonely’ when you do have a great old lady/wife and the rest of your family are your friends too. And I’m only joking  about friends, I do have a few close friends. Enjoy. GuitarPlayersCenter.com

Guitar Tabs

Here Goldman repeats the old stereotype of black culture as simple, instinctive, and carefree, unencumbered by the white burden of intelligence, introspection, and responsibility. Historically, this particular Othering of blackness has been traced by David Roediger to the resentments of immigrant white workers toward a perceived competition in the form of freed black men in the years prior to the Civil War. The black Other, Roediger writes, “embod[ied] the preindustrial, erotic careless style of life the white worker hated and longed for” (Roediger 13-14). As Brian Ward recently noted:

White enthusiasts routinely reduced the diverse sounds and lyrical
perspectives of Rhythm and Blues to a set of stock characteristics
which they had always … associated with the unremittingly
physical, passionate, ecstatic, emotional and, above all, sexually
liberated black world of their imaginations. Paradoxically, in so
doing, white fans of black music neatly fitted black music, style
and culture into much the same normative categories so dear to the
most bigoted opponents of black music and black equality….
(Ward 12)

Eventually, though, Goldman writes, “the white kids will swing back into their own tradition, fortified and enlightened by the adventure of transvestism” (Goldman D25). The experience of immersion in the blues is seen as slumming, or, to extrapolate from Goldman’s metaphor, sexualized role-play.

Goldman gives the example of Paul Butterfield, a white musician who came to study the blues and “so ingratiated himself with his black masters that they took him on as an apprentice and taught him the blues the way no young black boy is taught in these evil tradition-spurning days” (Goldman D25). Because of the new, upwardly mobile northern black middle class, the classic arts are lost on black youth. (3) It is left to the visionary white men to recognize the value of the blues, and preserve it in its most authentic forms. This is the trope at the center of the blues revival–the fantasy of the white blues aficionado as the savior of black music–the benevolent master. He retrieves the dying tradition from the clutches of decadent black culture and reanimates it, even improves upon it.

Michael Bane, writing about American white blues revivalists, argues that “they learned the music from the bottom up. They won acceptance in the black community because, and solely because, they were so damn good” (Bane 183). The white revivalist, the commentator is relieved to note, does not desecrate the blues but masters it. Bane quotes Nick Gravenites (another white blues musician and composer from Chicago) in the same book, recounting Paul Butterfield’s early career:

I remember there was this place called the Blue Flame Lounge, and
Butterfield would be the only white guy there. He was part of an
all-black R&B review. At first he was a novelty act–white guy
playing blues harmonica. But he’d knock them out. He was better
than any of the people playing there, no matter who they were.
(Bane 186)

As the final element in the model, the white revivalist provides the black blues musician with his long-overdue financial rewards. As Gravenites boasted to Michael Bane, “We got ‘em contracts … and not just ‘nigger’ contracts either. We got them more money than they’d ever gotten before in their life” (Bane 194).

This is the classic model, but Goldman extends it further. Butterfield, writes Goldman, has transcended the limitations of the blues in a new music that uses the freedom of the blues as a base but goes beyond. Goldman describes Butterfield’s music:

Faster, freer, more wide-open than the present style of Chicago;
more contemporary in its harmonies and rhythms than the sibling
style of Kansas City; a time-machined mix, half past and half
present, half black and half white, the Butterfield Band style
of the moment is that rarest of things in American music–a viable,
convincing and enormously enjoyable extension of an old and
honored folk idiom. Butterfield has done for blues what no black
lad could do–he has breathed into the ancient form a powerful
whiff of contemporary life. (Goldman D46)

Writing about a 1977 club show by the Rolling Stones, Chet Flippo strikes a similar chord:

The Stones fully reverted to what they actually were in the
beginning: English schoolboys faithfully aping American Southern
blues singers. If there were any way to get temporary skin
transplants, these Limey boys would be black every night onstage.
As it was, they played it a hell of a lick and still sounded
surprisingly blacker that most white Limeys and than even a few
gentrified, upwardly mobile American negro singers who sensed that
“the blues” was actually sung by field niggers not long off the
ship. Better a marcelled hairdo and a drape suit and a record
contract in Chi-cago or New York than Can’t Bust ‘Em overalls and
a chaw of Red Man tobackky and kowtowing to the White Massa and
moaning about staring up the backside of a mule on those endless
plow rows instead of singing about dancing with some foxy
high-yellow pussy at the Aragon Ballroom…. [E]ven Mick Jagger,
middle-class and socially grasping as he was, had the lungs and
the soul to out-soul many brothers. (Flippo 85-86)Somehow in Goldman’s and Flippo’s discursive worlds, the avid study of black music allows the white artist to become a paradigm of hyperwhiteness, so white he’s black. In a parallel story, Goldman celebrates Steve Winwood, following his apprenticeship in black music, as “Super-Whitey No. 1,” as if immersion in black music paradoxically energizes the whiteness of its participants (Goldman D46). Eventually, too, the black practitioner is pushed out of the equation altogether. As Bane put it:

The central question changed from “Can a white man sing the blues?”
to “Can a black man sing the blues?” because after Cream the
whites had the terminology all sewed up. With the skill of a
surgeon, popular culture removed “black” from “blues” leaving the
term free to become almost synonymous with British groups in the
[John] Mayall cast. (Bane 159).

Albert Goldman’s account of Paul Butterfield’s musical development–his early apprenticeship in authentic blues, his mastery of the form, and finally his fortified return to superwhite rock–can be seen as a paradigm of the blues revival, at least within the discursive world of rock criticism and historiography. A more extensive study would be required to shed light on the ways that these ideas influenced actual practice–the ways that musicians and fans used these tropes in their music making, listening, and purchasing patterns. Nonetheless, I think that some of the viewpoints that I have highlighted may point the way to a better understanding of the fantasies and assumptions that informed late ’60s and early ’70s conceptualizations of rock.

Notes

(1.) This makes sense when one considers that by this time, the parameters of blues style had been codified for the mass audience by the blues revivalists. Thus the development of the form was arrested while a frozen, stereotyped pre-1960s blues style became dominant.

(2.) The characterization of black culture as simple and innocent can also be traced back to Romantic abolitionist literature–in “Africa Delivered; or, The Slave Trade Abolished,” James Grahame wrote: “In that fair land of hill, and dale, and stream, The simple tribes from age to age had heard No hostile voice” (quoted in Brantlinger 189) “until,” Brantlinger continues, “the arrival of the slave traders, who introduced to an Edenic Africa those characteristic products of civilization: avarice, treachery, rapine, murder, warfare, and slavery” (Brantlinger 189). (3.) Even the original black buyers of early blues records were considered to be unworthy consumers of the music. In The Country Blues, Samuel Charters writes about two relatively unpopular blues singers, Rabbit Brown and Robert Johnson, on the basis that “the blues audience is capricious and not in the least concerned with musical or sociological concepts” (quoted in Titon 228).

Works cited

Bane, Michael. White Boy Singin’ the Blues. New York: Da Capo, 1992 (1982).

Belz, Carl. The Story of Rock. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

Brantlinger, Patrick. “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent”. “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago, IL, and London: U of Chicago P, 1986. 185-222.

Cantwell, Robert. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996.

Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: Da Capo, 1975.

Flippo, Chet. On the Road with the Rolling Stones: 20 Years of Lipstick, Handcuffs and Chemicals. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985.

George, Nelson. The Death of Rhythm and Blues. New York: Pantheon, 1988.

Goldman, Albert. “Why Do Whites Sing Black?” New York Times, 14 Dec. 1969: D25, 46.

Haralambos, Michael. Right On: From Blues to Soul in Black America. London: Eddison Press, 1974.

Keil, Charles. Urban Blues. Chicago, IL, and London: U of Chicago P, 1966.

Marcus, Greil. Rock and Roll Will Stand. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969.

Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991.

Stallybrass, Peter, and White, Allan. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Time, 9 Aug. 1971: 41.

Titon, Jeff Todd. “Reconstructing the Blues: Reflections on the 1960s Blues Revival.” Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined. Ed. Neil V. Rosenberg. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1996. 220-40.

Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1998.

Winner, Langdon. “The Strange Death of Rock and Roll.” Rock and Roll Will Stand. Ed. Greil Marcus. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969. 38-55.

Mike Daley is a producer at CBC Radio in Toronto, Canada. He is currently working on a Ph.D in ethnomusicology at York University while pursuing an active performing and recording career. His dissertation, on Jimi Hendrix and rock historiography, is near completion.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Popular Press
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group

“Why Do Whites Sing Black?”: The blues, whiteness, and early histories of rock.
Popular Music and Society, June, 2003, by Mike Daley

Related Article: The Blues, The Blacks and The Whites-2

I loaded up my ruff cut planks and drove the 1/2 mile to Allan’s house and we started to game plan. Allan is way more imaginative than I am concerning wood patterns and design, he also has more experience by a long-shot.

Black Walnut Stratocaster Body Mock Up.

This is the basic design Allan came up with, which I approve of wholeheartedly. The problem we found with the Black Walnut boards I had chainsawed were twofold. The guy who cut the log really butchered the piece of wood. Bad cuts, terrible internal gouging and inconsistent width. I’m really annoyed about that. If my shoulder was not rehabbing from surgery, I could have done a much better job.

The other issue we ran into is that there are some serious cracks in the planks I had cut. There is no way of determining cracks inside the log before it was cut. Since it’s about 50 years old and the ends were not sealed at all, it was not unexpected. That is where the light colored wood, or Maple wood comes in.

By striping the guitar with Maple, we can get enough good Black Maple for not only a Strat, but a matching Telecaster too. How cool is that?

With that in mind, we trimmed (when I say we, I mean I assisted Allan) the ‘sap’ wood off the edges with a large band-saw. Then took it over to his industrial sized jointer and ran it over the super high speed cutting knifes enough times to get a completely flat surface on one side. That is what a jointer is for, to flatten and true one side of an unfinished board so you can go to the next step.

Which is the planer. The planer then planes or cuts with super high speed knives the untrue side, so you will have a flat piece of wood at the desired thickness. Very cool operations. We ended up with about a 1 5/8 thickness for our guitars. Teles and Strats are actually 1 3/4 ” thick. Since these will be a little thinner, I will make them hard-tail guitars without tremolos.

That will work for me because I expect a guitar built with Walnut and Maple to be heavy. It probably will be quite bright sounding too.

I’m about 99.9% sure I’ll use P-90 pickups, which sound great and won’t require a pick guard, which would cover a lot of the beautiful wood. I was in some turmoil over whether to go traditional with a pick-guard or not. The beauty of the woods and P-90 pups made my mind up.

I’m not going to color the guitar, it will be clear-coated more than likely, so the beauty will show. anyway, We both had a great time on Saturday and can’t wait to get back at it one night this week. We still have more planning and lots of work ahead of us, but the project is now officially underway.

It won’t happen overnight, but you know I’ll keep you well informed. I enjoy working with Allan because he is passionate about woodworking and is having as much fun as I am. He also is not a stranger to major orthopedic surgery either and is nice enough to make sure I don’t over work my rebuilt shoulder. Stay in touch. Enjoy and share if this post interested you. GuitarPlayersCenter.com

Important Related Post: A Hand Built Walnut Stratocaster is Eye Candy and Music To My Ears

Celestion Vintage 30 Speaker

Cockeyed Picture of Amp and Strats.

Things are looking up. My shoulder is rehabbing like crazy. Quite frankly, I’m more than satisfied with my progress. The pain is gone, I do my rehab every day, and rehab makes the muscles in my shoulder sore, but the ‘pain’ is gone. And sore is good, that means the muscles are working and getting stronger. I’ll do the exercises to both shoulders for the rest of my life. Best of all, I’m playing the blues on my guitar for over an hour a day before my shoulder fatigues.

I’m also in a major learn to play new guitar songs roll. You already know it’s either Jimi Hendrix or Stevie Ray Vaughan music. I wanted to mention the stock ‘Blue Marvel” speaker crapped in my Peavey Classic 30 amp. It did not take long to decide what to replace it with. My old friend and guitar teacher, Richard Mac always used Celestion Vintage 30 speakers, so you don’t have to put to much thought into what is in it now.

I also changed the power tubes. What can I say, it is like a second honeymoon. I’m just getting into amps and reverb and distortion and loving it. I was borrowing a Marshall JCM 600 combo while my Peavy was down. I played the shit out of that amp. Remember, it was in the spring time here in Florida and not too hot to play in the garage, so my neighbors and our best friends got serenaded every day, and they loved it. Or maybe they just love me, but I always got a compliment. They like Stevie Ray.

Well, speaking of compliments, my greatest fan (my Dad was my greatest fan before he passed away, everything I play is for him) was listening in on me last night, my wife. She was doing computers and I was enjoying the new tone and reverb of my amp. And I was working on “Empty Arms” by Stevie Ray Vaughan. I know she likes that song and the type of beat it has.

Well, it’s possible my facts are not in exact order, but I’m positive this is what she said. “Dude, you have all the tools now” All you need is more fluidity. Fluidity is rhythm to me and I work my ass off on that. It is my weakness, but practice, practice and I’ll nail it someday. She is a heck of a finger picker in her own right and showed me a few ideas on how loose up and then she asked me to….

“teach me” “Empty Arms”. I needed the positive input, I work, or actually have practicing the little top secret SRV and Jimi Hendrix tricks Richard Mac taught me for years now. I love it, but it can be tedious. We spent a while going over the intro section and ha a good time, I hope we play more together in the future.

My evening was made with that sincere compliment, she does not bullshit anyone, so I know it’s true. I mean if you are ugly and ask her how you look, she might say “your ugly”, (but only to me)!! Honest she is, and that is good for me too. So I felt good last night.

Back to my amp. It seems like every accomplished guitar player i know has a Classic 30. Even if they have Jimi Hendrix Stack or Bogner Shiva setup, there is always a usable Peavy in the room. Although my speaker experience is limited as of now, I have to say that the Celestion Vintage 30 and new power tubes really brought out the life in my amp, and makes playing Jimi Hendrix stuff sound more authentic.

It sounds so wide open, with clear reverb and a new clarity in every note I struck. I understand it is a personal issue, but I would highly recommend this speaker for blues players. Although, I think most folks would love it regardless of genre.

That is about it on this post. Keep on playing your guitar, even if you are in a rut, just play your way out of the rut. The harder the material you choose the deeper and longer the rut can be. My style is to choose Jimi and Stevie Ray vibes right from my first lesson, and I have put a lot of practice time in. Never even approached an easy song, myself. But that does not work for everyone, that is why they make guitar lessons for beginners programs.

People want immediate gratification in the process of learning guitar, so I recommend learning in a more classical manner than jumping on Jimi Hendrix right off the bat. So, I still can’t and don’t care to play any simple songs now, but I can make good sense out of many Jimi Hendrix and SRV and Buddy Guy songs and leads, exactly the way they played them, or it does not count for me.

Life is good for the moment. That is subject to change, So, maybe my wife and I will party this weekend, we don’t drink, we have other ways of adjusting our attitudes that are more fun and less harmful than alcohol or hard drugs. You have to use your imagination to decide what I mean!!

Take a tip from the scale-master, learn your scales and some chords, I know a lot of guitar players will say “I never had a guitar lesson”, well good for them, that does not mean you don’t need lessons. Good luck and enjoy. GuitarPlayersCenter.com

PS. I wanted to update you, my friend Allen and I are getting together tomorrow to start planning what pickups and other electronics to use in my black walnut Stratocaster project.

He has the template an excellently equipped wood shop, and more experience at building a guitar. Stay informed. I’ll keep you posted.

Star Spangled Banner: Jimi Hendrix

We had a blast on the 4th of July, my wife and the dogs and I. We had a low key day, just sat back and grooved on a rainy day (Jimi Hendrix). You should listen to the song if you have not, because Jimi and I both agree on how to spend a rainy day. So why is this post about a few guitar lessons with Steve Vai?

First off, I figured out how to hook up my little (bad ass) MacBook computer to our (6 years old LCD TV). Then I plugged the computer into the accessories output on my stereo and, click bang, we had a 32″ or 37″ monitor (I don’t remember and I’m to lazy to look) . Nice. Like a small miracle. We watch our favorite shows one day late for free on the computer for 6 months a year.

We only turn the TV service on so I can watch every Redskins football game. Perhaps I can buy the NFL package for computer use!! That would be the bomb, because we all know the Skins will win the super bowl this year!

But yesterday we were watching YouTube videos of various artists playing Jimi Hendrix songs. In particular ”Little Wing”, one of his greatest accomplishments. We watched G-3 with Satriani, Malmsteen and Vai. I love the G-3 vibes, but I like it more with Eric Johnson instead of Yngwei. Every one of those guys plays the guitar like we all wish we could. But Steveie Vai seems to have the Jimi ‘independent’ vibe.

There is something very special about the way Steve Vai plays Hendrix songs. It is in the Jimi Hendrix ”I’m doing it my way” mentality. It’s hard to put an exact finger on it, but his Hendrix shit sounds so much like the way Jimi played songs in his own experimental manner. Everything Jimi did was new and experimental at the time.

You know that Steve Vai is considered an experimental guitar player. He is not classified as rock guitarist or a blues guitar player either. He is so off the wall with his pedal usage and guitar vibe, he can play any style with emotion and heart. Steve does some wacky stuff, you can find it on (you guessed it) YouTube.

So, we laid back and grooved on our rainy day being blown away by Jimi Hendrix and Steve Vai. Try it, you will like it. 32 or 37 inches of computer monitor is a mind blower. Can you imagine watching on an eighty inch TV?

There are not many people I would take guitar lessons from, you already know that by my writings on online guitar lessons, but Vai would be the man if I had a chance. Experimental, I like that. Watch some Steve Vai doing Jimi Hendrix songs, let me know. I bet you see exactly what I do. The man, in my opinion is the best living guitarist today, that includes Jeff Beck. GuitarPlayersCenter.com.

Continuation: The Blues, The Blacks And The Whites:

Robert Cantwell characterizes the entire folk revival as “a complex response … to the ongoing adjustment of newcomer groups, whether racial, ethnic, or generational, to the conditions of life under an industrial and post-industrial social and economic system” (Cantwell 53). Comparing folk revivalism to nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy, Cantwell argues that the “invention of the folk” provides a sense of security in a changing world, allowing the dominant culture to define itself contrastively (54-55).

The blues revival of the 1960s was in many ways an extension of the late ’50s/ early ’60s folk revival, at least in the US. In Britain, blues revivalism was an outgrowth of the trad jazz movement, which Ed Ward calls “a pallid but enthusiastic attempt to recreate the Chicago and New Orleans styles of the twenties” (Ward 343). Jeff Titon defines the blues revival as a time when a music “by and for chiefly black Americans [was turned] into a music by black and white Americans primarily for white Americans and Europeans” (Titon 223). I would add white European (mainly British) musicians to the mix as well. Titon traces the beginnings of the revival in the United States to the publication of Samuel Charters’s book The Country Blues in 1959, and locates its demise at the 1970 Ann Arbor Blues Festival (Titon 223-24). I suspect that these watermarks a more a matter of personal meaning for Titon than of historical accuracy; but as the account of a fairly typical blues revivalist, his version will do for now.

The idea of blues itself is a constructed one, based on contributions from a number of sources: collectors who, in building discographies, helped to define blues by their exclusions and inclusions of certain records; critics like Samuel Charters, who created blues in their romanticized image of the Old South and untainted black culture, of the solitary, anguished bluesman in a shabby hotel room (I’m thinking here of that paragon of blues authenticity, Robert Johnson, who was kind enough to provide blues revivalists with a neatly delimited body of work, a Faustian legend, and an early death); and the musicians who reinterpreted the blues for a wide audience, inevitably narrowing its stylistic breadth and promoting a small canon of blues “standards.”

The blues revival involved, at first, the collecting of old blues records. Almost immediately, urban musicians began to duplicate these performances, usually within the acoustic country blues idiom. By the mid-’60s, younger British musicians were adapting the urban blues as well. Eventually, some older black blues performers reaped trickle-down benefits from the publicity given them by Eric Clapton and others. B. B. King, Albert King, and Muddy Waters found large white audiences, especially on the college circuit.

In any case, most urban blacks did not participate in the 1960s blues revival–as Nelson George describes, blues was no longer relevant to the young, while the older listeners were uncomfortable in the new social contexts of the music (George 46). I should point out that this was not true in many regions of the United States, where blues continued to be very popular with black audiences through the ’60s and beyond. But within urban contexts, many of the black blues musicians who suddenly found themselves playing for large, affluent white audiences welcomed the extended lease on their careers, and some in fact preferred the white audiences to black ones. As B. B. King told Time magazine in 1971: “The blacks are more interested in the jumpy stuff. The whites want to hear me for what I am” (Time 41). For musicians like King, who preferred to remain within the ’50s style, the white audience was a boon. For other blues musicians who might have wished to update their styles, the revival was less fortuitous? The white audience, according to another King interview from 1968, “knew about the blues before I came there…. [T]hey were interested in what I had to offer, and they came to listen, not dance, not clap their hands, or do anything of this sort, just listen” (Time 41).

Goldman’s 1969 essay is a distillation of some of the most potent ideas about race and authenticity that were circulating at the time in writing about rock music. The assumptions that he so vividly illustrates have had a lasting impact on the ways that we understand the history of rock, and, by extension, a large part of the cultural history of the last fifty years.

Goldman, in “Why Do Whites Sing Black?,” begins with a romanticized scene of old Memphis, at a time when “America was still a land of brutal innocence” (D25). Describing a cast of “plough jockeys and parlor belles … shouting congregations and shouting bluesmen,” he talks of the “plangent sounds” of the blues “rising in a dense, pungent cloud over Memphis,” where they remain until reclaimed by “this generation’s longing for the good-time years” (D25). (2) Meanwhile, Beale Street has crumbled, and presumably authentic black culture as well. The metaphor of music as a cloud that arises from culture, to hover autonomously above while the world below changes, powerfully illustrates Goldman’s assumption of music as autonomous from its social context, a body of texts which assume independent status as they are released, and which can be “retrieved,” literally plucked out of the ether at a later date to infuse a new generation with some kind of magical culture energy.

Goldman praises the contemporary white appropriations of the blues as a vestige of racial harmony in the midst of strife. He writes:

Spun out of the grooves of a hundred million records and spread
across the country by a hundred million speakers, the Memphis Soul
Sound enfolds the nation now like an evangelical tent, rocking with
hymns to the newly proclaimed brotherhood of black men and white
men in modern America. (Goldman D25)

While it seems at first that Goldman is interpreting Memphis soul as integrationist, in fact he qualifies his statement by pointing out that his utopian black–white culture occurs through the mediation of “a hundred million records.” His argument rests on the unstated assumption that because records circulate as commodities, the recording medium allows the easy crossing of cultural borders. But, as Robert Cantwell points out, “folk revivalism is inherently political … because it involves the movement of cultural materials … from enclaved, marginal, usually poverty-stricken people toward the centers of cultural power…” (Cantwell 51). The process of appropriation is always infused with the unequal power relations that operate at every level of Western society. Yet Goldman asks: “how can a pampered, milk-faced, middle class kid who has never had a hole in his shoe sing the blues that belong to some beat-up old black who lived his life in poverty and misery?” Goldman answers his own question with a thesis that white kids are trying to save their souls. Adopting as a tentative identity the firmly set, powerfully expressive mask of the black man, the confused, conflicted and frequently self-doubting and self-loathing offspring of Mr. and Mrs. America are released into an emotional and spiritual freedom denied them by their own inhibited culture.
(Goldman D25)

Mike Daley is a producer at CBC Radio in Toronto, Canada. He is currently working on a Ph.D in ethnomusicology at York University while pursuing an active performing and recording career. His dissertation, on Jimi Hendrix and rock historiography, is near completion.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Popular Press
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group

This stuff just floors me, I can’t get enough of it. I hope you are as riveted as I am about The Blues, The Blacks and The Whites, and enjoyed the first part, come back tomorrow for another installment. Enjoy. GuitarPlayersCenter.com

We certainly have a lot to owe to he first recording artists. The first person to sign a contract with a recording company was Caruso, a famous opera singer around the turn of the century. Folks like Thomas Edison (who was a rat bastard)  used their business savvy as well to make recorded sound a ‘taken for granted’ fixture in every home, car and you name it, today.

This article added so much to my education and it seems to stand alone as far as being complete with a basic history of both books I’m reading now, I thought you might be interested. Except, the article is extraordinarily long, so I will break it up into several segments. I know you will become hooked on this article and come back for more. Enjoy

“Why Do Whites Sing Black?”: The blues, whiteness, and early histories of rock.
Popular Music and Society, June, 2003, by Mike Daley

The rock critic Albert Goldman, who was later to become notorious for his biographies of Elvis Presley and John Lennon, wrote an essay in 1969 for the New York Times called “Why Do Whites Sing Black?” This essay provides a classic framework of essentialism and selective representation in discussing white appropriations of the blues. In the present article, I use Goldman’s piece as a framework for a discussion of the 1960s blues revival. I argue that the blues revival depended on a stereotyped representation of black culture, and that this in turn was used to remedy a perceived lack of authenticity in white rock music. This colonization of black music involves a process of “Othering,” where the dominant culture renders the subordinate culture in terms of difference, and that difference allows the dominant culture to define itself. The Other–coded as low culture–is used as a counterbalance to the high culture. Stallybrass and White identified this complementarity when they wrote:

A recurrent pattern emerges: the “top” attempts to reject and
eliminate the “bottom” for reasons of prestige and status, only to
discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent on
the low-Other … but also that the top includes that low
symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own
fantasy life. The result is a mobile, conflictual fusion of power,
fear and desire in the construction of subjectivity….
(Stallybrass and White 5)

While one may be tempted to dismiss Goldman as a crank, especially considering the almost pathological hostility of his Presley and Lennon books, it might be instructive to remember that this piece appeared in one of the most respected newspapers in the world; moreover, I would suggest that his ideas only render explicit a number of unwritten and unsaid assumptions about black and white musics. It should also be noted, though, that Goldman’s writing often appeared in newspapers and periodicals that were not marketed to the typical rock audience. Thus, he was regularly charged with explaining rock music to the “establishment,” who may have regarded this music with some suspicion to begin with. Rather than challenging the racialist assumptions of the status quo, though, Goldman regularly pandered to mainstream ideas about the role of black culture in the arts. This is not to say that Goldman was an anomaly among rock writers. As I shall illustrate later, the ideas about race and authenticity promulgated in “Why Do Whites Sing Black?” were shared by writers like Chet Flippo, who preached to the converted (the “hip,” younger rock audience) at Rolling Stone for many years.

To put Goldman in some context, I would like to discuss some of the contemporary tropes about authenticity and blackness in rock music as illustrated in some of the earliest published histories of rock. But the modern idea of authenticity is much more pervasive than just within rock criticism.

The discourse of folk authenticity can be traced back at least as far as the nineteenth-century Romantics, inasmuch as it articulates a longing for a fantasized lost innocence–as if the folk society is a reflection of the modern culture “before the fall,” as it were. Writing in the mid 1960s, Charles Keil attributed white interest in black music to “a felt deficiency of some sort in the American mainstream” (Keil 49). If we can locate the historical center of the blues revival in the late 1960s, the time of Goldman’s writing, then the unspoken obverse of the romanticization of the blues is the perceived commercialism–the loss of innocence–of mainstream rock. The discourse of pop music decadence probably began around the time of the payola hearings in 1960 and followed through the heyday of the teen idols of the early ’60s, but it reached its peak thanks to the efforts of the first generation of rock critics and historians. These writers built a discursive construct of rock as an art form in constant precarious tension with the market forces that facilitated its dissemination.

Several histories of rock music appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the first wave of rock historiography. Carl Belz’s The Story of Rock is a good example. Like innumerable others, he constructs the history of rock as a series of discrete eras, beginning with the innocence of the ’50s and culminating in the commercialized and decadent present, which for him was the period between 1968 and 1971. Rock music during that time was “plagued by uncertainty about its own identity–particularly in relation to pop commercialism” (Belz 210). He gives as examples of rock profiteering “the promotion of James Taylor as an authentic and original folk singer and of Johnny Winter as a master of the Delta blues” (212). Langdon Winner, writing in 1969, places rock’s crisis of authenticity somewhat earlier. He proclaims that, “[t]he issue of creativity versus pure commercialism, of course, takes us to the very heart of the motivational maladies which afflicted rock and roll at that time” (Winner 43). For a while, Winner writes, the commercial forces gained the upper hand: “For all intents and purposes, rock and roll died in 1961 and remained in that condition until its renaissance in early 1964″ (39), a victim of surf music, teen idols, and Beach Blanket Bingo. The renaissance, as played out over the rest of the ’60s, consisted of innovations in three areas: technology and technique, rhythm and time, and the scope of musical resources. Tellingly, all of these developments are related by Winner to new infusions of African-American musical aesthetics. The new technological possibilities of the electric guitar are revealed by Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield and Jimi Hendrix, three blues-raised musicians (Winner 45). Innovations in technique are attributed to renewed study of Albert King, B. B. King and Muddy Waters (46). The replenishment of rock rhythmic resources is ascribed to the “soul beat[s]” of James Brown, Sam and Dave, and Otis Redding (47). Finally, the increased scope of musical resources available to rock musicians includes spirituals, Charles Mingus, and Chicago blues (48).

Notes

(1.) This makes sense when one considers that by this time, the parameters of blues style had been codified for the mass audience by the blues revivalists. Thus the development of the form was arrested while a frozen, stereotyped pre-1960s blues style became dominant.

(2.) The characterization of black culture as simple and innocent can also be traced back to Romantic abolitionist literature–in “Africa Delivered; or, The Slave Trade Abolished,” James Grahame wrote: “In that fair land of hill, and dale, and stream, The simple tribes from age to age had heard No hostile voice” (quoted in Brantlinger 189) “until,” Brantlinger continues, “the arrival of the slave traders, who introduced to an Edenic Africa those characteristic products of civilization: avarice, treachery, rapine, murder, warfare, and slavery” (Brantlinger 189). (3.) Even the original black buyers of early blues records were considered to be unworthy consumers of the music. In The Country Blues, Samuel Charters writes about two relatively unpopular blues singers, Rabbit Brown and Robert Johnson, on the basis that “the blues audience is capricious and not in the least concerned with musical or sociological concepts” (quoted in Titon 228).

Works cited

Bane, Michael. White Boy Singin’ the Blues. New York: Da Capo, 1992 (1982).

Belz, Carl. The Story of Rock. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

Brantlinger, Patrick. “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent”. “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago, IL, and London: U of Chicago P, 1986. 185-222.

Cantwell, Robert. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996.

Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: Da Capo, 1975.

Flippo, Chet. On the Road with the Rolling Stones: 20 Years of Lipstick, Handcuffs and Chemicals. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985.

George, Nelson. The Death of Rhythm and Blues. New York: Pantheon, 1988.

Goldman, Albert. “Why Do Whites Sing Black?” New York Times, 14 Dec. 1969: D25, 46.

Haralambos, Michael. Right On: From Blues to Soul in Black America. London: Eddison Press, 1974.

Keil, Charles. Urban Blues. Chicago, IL, and London: U of Chicago P, 1966.

Marcus, Greil. Rock and Roll Will Stand. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969.

Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991.

Stallybrass, Peter, and White, Allan. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Time, 9 Aug. 1971: 41.

Titon, Jeff Todd. “Reconstructing the Blues: Reflections on the 1960s Blues Revival.” Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined. Ed. Neil V. Rosenberg. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1996. 220-40.

Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1998.

Winner, Langdon. “The Strange Death of Rock and Roll.” Rock and Roll Will Stand. Ed. Greil Marcus. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969. 38-55.

Mike Daley is a producer at CBC Radio in Toronto, Canada. He is currently working on a Ph.D in ethnomusicology at York University while pursuing an active performing and recording career. His dissertation, on Jimi Hendrix and rock historiography, is near completion.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Popular Press
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group

If you are a subscriber, the next part of the article will come in the mail tomorrow, I know you are hanging in there and can’t wait. If you are new, well, get a subscription, I can’t guarantee everything I write about or come across will be this good, but, if you enjoy this vibe, I score every now and  then. I give the author credit on every page, he deserves it. To be continued tomorrow.

Enjoy. GuitarPlayersCenter.com

Remember The Pretty Black Walnut Guitar Tone Wood Log?

I spent weeks and months Google Searching for someone with the capability to cut my black walnut log into 2 inch thick boards and having zero luck. I ditched the idea for a while. It’s almost enough to reduce a grown man to tears. So with the upcoming trimming of a few trees in our yard. I decided to ask the tree man if he could rip that log into boards.

So I asked the tree man if he could cut the log into boards. “Sure can” he said. It’s a good thing I had them cut into two and a half inches thick planks, we will need every inch of wavy plank to get the desired thickness of one and three quarters of an inch thick (1 3/4″).

Looking at the pictures you can see how beautiful the wood grain is, and what a poor job of cutting. If you click the pictures they should enlarge. I saved the sawdust, about 10 pounds worth.

After deciding which part of the wood is the prettiest I will have employ a jointer and then a planer to get each plank 100 percent square, then plane the planks to exactly 1 3/4″ thickness. The planks will have to be cut to size and then glued together and clamped tight for a week or so before the machining process starts.

Once the glue is 100% dry, it will be cut to the final body size. Then I will need the use of a Strat body template to cut and route the block of wood into a Stratocaster body pattern. And the machining will continue as I keep you updated.

Plenty of thought will go into the pickups, and electronic controls. I already know about the neck, it will be a AAA Birdseye Maple Soft V stock headstock Strat neck, with a 25 1/2′ scale length. I like the Sperzel locking tuners as an upgrade on my Mexican Strat, so I’ll use a set of them probably.

I listed a few related articles below to complete this post. Enjoy.

GuitarPlayersCenter.com

Related Articles:

Active Guitar Tone Controls or TBX Boost as in The Eric Clapton Strat.

Learn Guitar Repairs Without The Hassle.

Graduate To Online Home Study Guitar Lessons For Beginners.

This Learn at home Guitar DVDs guitar curriculum is a dream come true for all aspiring guitarists who don’t enjoy private guitar lessons for beginners. Not everyone likes to have to see a private teacher every week. It is expensive too. Anyway, that is just a stupid argument manufactured by private teachers. That somehow you are not getting a good guitar education if it is by using an online guitar DVD curriculum.

Most of us get enough of that stuff by simply going to school every day. When I was a kid we sat around all afternoon listening to the song we wanted learn about a million times. We had 33 RPM records. We had to slow them down by hand and repeat certain parts of the songs 100′s of times. Nothing like doing it to etch it in granite in the mind. No loopers or slow down tools.

For almost a decade, people have shown a keen interest in online guitar lessons DVDs for beginners. It is very inspiring for young guitarists to watch YouTube videos of some of the great players. People are trying to learn and master the various playing techniques needed to become at a minimum, a serviceable guitar player. However, for many intermediate players, the process of learning the techniques used by the upper echelon guitar players is one that is quite difficult with a lack of reliable resources and quality instruction from the guys that have created and already mastered the style. This is precisely the reason why the instructional guitar for beginners DVD guitar lesson program has properly structured lessons for all guitarists interested in learning the skills it takes to shred like the pros.

After examining and experiencing all sorts of guitar lessons for the sake of trying to determine which teaching styles are the most effective, the two most important things I learned are that you have to make a commitment to your guitar education. It is not a free or easy goal to go for. Obviously very few people will play at the level Jeff Beck plays at, but for most young players, simply teaching a student a few of the students favorite easy to learn guitar songs with 2 or 3 chords is the fastest and most gratifying way to learn.

Concerning your commitment, you gotta set time to practice your guitar every day if possible. Practice is essential for your development. Practice is not a fun word, but it is fun to practice. I look at it as playing my guitar. I’m making sounds that sound good. After a while you may not even notice that you have graduated to playing some chords and notes to a simple rhythm in your head. Nothing in particular, just a beat. That is just the beginning of the fun.

These essential aspects vital to mastering your eventual style are often not articulated by instructors in private lessons making it long and hard (is that the private instructors intention?) for the player to grasp some of the more complex techniques and overall concepts. However, this is something that Steve Krenz has been able to overcome and truly provide some of the most in depth instruction on the market. With a propensity for putting instructions in understandable terms.

After receiving the package, I was quite impressed with the breadth of information included in the 20 plus Guitar Instruction DVD/Guitar Lessons for beginners program. While all of the established aspects of these classes were included, such as ‘no hype’ one on one instruction and lessons for the beginner, but, as you advance their is a free extra lessons set on every technique thinkable, alternative tuning, diminished licks, and stylistic techniques, it also provides many things that surprised me. For example, the collection of lessons comes with an excellent lesson book that provides tabs and further instruction for all lessons taught on the DVDs.

Watching the first DVD really brought me up to date fast on how advanced online guitar lesson DVD’s have become. Helpful ‘on screen’ guitar tabs and down to earth, hands on lessons further make it extremely easy for almost anyone to understand and follow along. With DVD courses, you can look at the lesson you are studying as many times as you need to. Repetition is one of the keys to learning.

There are also some great tips I found included that you wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else, such as personal advice from our guitar instructor on preventing common mistakes and injuries associated with playing professionally.

There are many different programs, applications for DVD lessons on the market these days, many of which made me skeptical. However, the opportunity to learn techniques from a professional guitarist is something that truly wasn’t possible before the internet age we are living in. The fact of the matter is we couldn’t even think of a better scenario or format for these home instructional DVDs. It is very obvious the teacher is passionate about teaching guitar.

For those of you who are interested, these Home School Guitar Lessons are designed for presentation by educational specialists and educational psychologists to be presented in the most effective manner for all age groups of beginner guitar players. GuitarPlayersCenter.com