Ramblin' on My Mind: New Perspectives on the Blues

4. The Hands of Blues Guitaritsts

4 The Hands of Blues Guitarists ANDREW M. COHEN In this paper I contend that there was regional clustering to the ways that African American folk and blues guitar players from the early part of the twentieth century held their picking hands and that these postures facilitated certain musical patterns while inhibiting others. The player’s picking hand posture therefore serves as an important determinant of the elusive quality called “style.” If there is such a thing as regional style, we should see it expressed in visual images showing how different players held their hands, even as we hear it expressed on their recordings. The Sample I constructed a sample based on recordings,visual images (photographs and videos), personal observation, and biographical data. The ninety-four black guitar players in this sample are listed with information on their birth year, the place where they learned the guitar,their typical hand position,and their approach to keeping time.In all but one case timekeeping was done with the right thumb on the bass strings of the guitar.A list of the players, along with the relevant information about them, appears in Appendix Table 4.7 below. Statistics (mainly percentages) and tables drawn from these data will appear as I go along. My sample includes four women,one of whom (Elizabeth Cotten) played the guitar left-handed and upside down. It includes eleven blind men. At least five nonstandard tunings were used.Some players typically played with a slide, some did so rarely, and some never did. Eight National steel guitars THE HANDS OF BLUES GUITARISTS . 153 (a metal-body guitar with a thin metal resonator inside) plus one wooden Regal guitar with a metal resonator were used, along with a nine-string guitar and a half-dozen twelve-string guitars tuned to several different pitches. Most played one or another version of a six-string guitar, for the most part wooden flattop models. Of the players who survived into the 1960s and beyond, most adopted electric guitars when they could. Most of the guitars cost their owners very little, and many were not very good instruments. Hand positions show consistent patterning through all this. The sample is not random in any valid statistical sense, but it is broad. Its geographic spread covers the South, thinly in some places and more thickly in others. Table 4.1 shows the distribution of the players by state. The largest number of players are from Mississippi. Adding Alabama, western Tennessee , eastern Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, along with some outlier states that were the targets of migrants from this region (Oklahoma, Illinois, Indiana , Kentucky), brings the total to fifty-eight. I call this the “Deep South” region. Although this region divides into two subregions, it is stylistically quite distinct from the East. Table 4.1. Distribution of players in the sample by state. State Number of players Alabama 3 Arkansas 2 Delaware 1 Florida 1 Georgia 10 Illinois 2 Indiana 1 Kentucky 2 Louisiana 3 Mississippi 28 North Carolina 7 Oklahoma 1 South Carolina 7 Tennessee 8 Texas 10 Virginia 7 West Virginia 1 Total 94 154 . ANDREW M. COHEN Thirty-six examples make up the“Eastern”region (Florida,Georgia,South Carolina, North Carolina, eastern Tennessee,Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland , and Delaware). The sample breaks in Tennessee and Georgia. Players from eastern Tennessee seem to have played Deep South blues with Eastern technique, judging by how they held their hands and their general instrumental agility. Many of the players associated with Atlanta came from elsewhere . I include them in the Eastern part of the sample even though their influences seem mixed. Styles and hand positions for outliers universally correspond to their respective hearth areas. The word style clouds discussion whenever it comes up. One may speak variously of a regional style (analogous to a dialect), a local style (analogous to a patois), or a personal style (analogous to an idiolect). Understanding is impeded when the term is applied to a genre (“blues style”) or a format (“string-band style”). In this paper I use the word only to discuss how a player used his or her thumb to keep time, establish rhythm, and articulate bass notes. This allows me to talk about guitar players in general rather than blues or gospel players, songsters, or country-dance musicians, since those roles often overlapped within the same person. Many of the players were exclusively blues...