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Post by carolinablues on Sept 6, 2013 15:30:27 GMT -5
Piedmont blues features the acoustic guitar playing a complex fingerpicking style in which a regular, alternating-thumb bass pattern supports a melody on treble strings. The highly syncopated guitar style connects closely with an earlier string-band tradition integrating ragtime, blues, and country dance songs; and predates jazz elements of the same style. Early influential Piedmont Blues artists are Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Blake , Blind Willie McTell , Rev. Gary Davis , and and Sonny Terry, to name a few who made Piedmont blues popular. Women were also masters of Piedmont guitar style, including Etta Baker and Elizabeth Cotten , whose “Freight Train” is one of the best-recognized fingerpicking guitar tunes. Archie Edwards is one of the early Piedmont from the region along with his friend, the late John Jackson, Warner Williams, and John Cephas who would drop by Archie’s Barbershop now and then to join in the Saturday jams.
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Post by dadfad on Sept 9, 2013 10:10:05 GMT -5
Hello, Carolinablues. While I love almost all things blues (especially acoustic pre-war), Piedmont blues holds a special place in my heart. In the late 60's when I was just getting into country-blues, I'd found Pink Anderson and tried to learn a little from him. (But to be honest, my skill-level at that time wasn't high enough to learn very much!) John Jackson was sort of my mentor and I learned a great deal from him from the mid-seventies up until just before his death. (The last words he ever said to me, when he called to wish me and my family a Merry Christmas in December of 2001 was "You keep on practicin' that backthumb pickin' now, ya hear?" (He'd always emphasised how I needed to master it to play "real Blind Blake"!) He didn't even mention that he was very ill.) One of the finest human beings I've had the honor to call my friend. I still miss him a great deal. John also introduced me to John Cephas and we became a good friends. He introduced us when I'd asked John (J) once about Skip James' style, to which he said he wasn't real familiar with, but he knew a man in the next county who was, which was John (C). I learned a lot from him too over the years. One time John (C) and I were sitting around his house and he was showing me a few things and on the tune he was playing he just kind of really got into it and sort of "took off." I just sat back and watched. When he was done I said "Damn, John... That was great." He said "Johnny, don't nobody care much about this kind of stuff no more." I said "No, it'll come back. You'll be big-time, they'll probably even name a guitar after you, like Clapton, or Kessel or somebody." He laughed and said "Hahahah... Yeah, sure they will! A John Cephas model geetar! Tell ya what, Johnny. I'll be sure to send you one just as soon as they do! Hahaha, a John Cephas geetar! Hahahaha!" Anyway, about twenty years later, UPS drops off a big package. I open it and it's a Bowling Green John Cephas model Taylor, signed by Bob Taylor and personalized to me by John. I called him right up and said "John, it's beautiful. I can't believe you remembered!" and he said "I told ya I would, Johnny, and I didn't forget." And I'd met Archie Edwards several times at house-parties and barbeques at John Cephas' house. Like I said, Piedmont style... Fuller, Wllie Walker, etc... is among my favorite styles. (With a very deeply respectful nod to Blind Blake and Lonnie Johnson of course!) Anyway, glad to see another Pidmont-style guy here!
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Post by carolinablues on Sept 9, 2013 12:16:00 GMT -5
Hello, Carolinablues. While I love almost all things blues (especially acoustic pre-war), Piedmont blues holds a special place in my heart. In the late 60's when I was just getting into country-blues, I'd found Pink Anderson and tried to learn a little from him. (But to be honest, my skill-level at that time wasn't high enough to learn very much!) John Jackson was sort of my mentor and I learned a great deal from him from the mid-seventies up until just before his death. (The last words he ever said to me, when he called to wish me and my family a Merry Christmas in December of 2001 was "You keep on practicin' that backthumb pickin' now, ya hear?" (He'd always emphasised how I needed to master it to play "real Blind Blake"!) He didn't even mention that he was very ill.) One of the finest human beings I've had the honor to call my friend. I still miss him a great deal. John also introduced me to John Cephas and we became a good friends. He introduced us when I'd asked John (J) once about Skip James' style, to which he said he wasn't real familiar with, but he knew a man in the next county who was, which was John (C). I learned a lot from him too over the years. One time John (C) and I were sitting around his house and he was showing me a few things and on the tune he was playing he just kind of really got into it and sort of "took off." I just sat back and watched. When he was done I said "Damn, John... That was great." He said "Johnny, don't nobody care much about this kind of stuff no more." I said "No, it'll come back. You'll be big-time, they'll probably even name a guitar after you, like Clapton, or Kessel or somebody." He laughed and said "Hahahah... Yeah, sure they will! A John Cephas model geetar! Tell ya what, Johnny. I'll be sure to send you one just as soon as they do! Hahaha, a John Cephas geetar! Hahahaha!" Anyway, about twenty years later, UPS drops off a big package. I open it and it's a Bowling Green John Cephas model Taylor, signed by Bob Taylor and personalized to me by John. I called him right up and said "John, it's beautiful. I can't believe you remembered!" and he said "I told ya I would, Johnny, and I didn't forget." And I'd met Archie Edwards several times at house-parties and barbeques at John Cephas' house. Like I said, Piedmont style... Fuller, Wllie Walker, etc... is among my favorite styles. (With a very deeply respectful nod to Blind Blake and Lonnie Johnson of course!) Anyway, glad to see another Pidmont-style guy here! Thanks Dadfad. Great stories. Open D minor tuning wasn't very popular in the Piedmont was it? But I guess John Cephas was good in many styles.
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Post by carolinablues on Sept 9, 2013 12:30:16 GMT -5
Etta BakerBaker's music that surfaced in the 1960s, was enough to influence many guitarists in the folk revival, from Bob Dylan to Taj Mahal. Etta, who was recognized as a treasure of the Piedmont Blues style popular through the mountains of Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia by researchers in the Piedmont, remained a hard working woman for 50 years following this revival. As those days passed, Etta Baker raised nine children. Her Obituary from the Charlotte Observer MORGANTON, N.C. - Etta Baker, an influential blues guitarist who recorded with Taj Mahal and was awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, died Saturday, family and friends said. She was 93. No cause of death was provided, but her health had been failing for years, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported on its Website. Baker died in Fairfax, Va. while visiting a daughter who had suffered a stroke. "She just had to go, she just had to see my sister," said Darlene Davis, another daughter who lives next door to Baker's house in Morganton. "She was a great mother and a tower of strength for the family. We always looked up to her." She was raised in a musical family in Western North Carolina. Baker made her first mark in music in 1956, when she appeared on a compilation album called "Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians." The recording was very influential on the growing folk revival, especially her versions of "Railroad bill" and "One-Dime Blues." She worked for 26 years at a textile mill in Morganton before quitting at age 60 to pursue a career as a professional musician. Baker became a hit on the international folk-festival circuit, playing Piedmont blues, a mix of clattery rhythms of bluegrass as well as blues. Mahal, who recorded an album with Baker in 2004, was among those who found inspiration from her rhythmic finger-picking. "I came upon that record in the '60s," Mahal said. "It didn't have any pictures so I had no idea who she was until I got to meet her years later. But man, that chord in 'Railroad Bill,' that was just the chord. It just cut right through me. I can't even describe how deep that was for me, just beautiful stuff." Baker also raised a family that eventually numbered nine children. She also suffered great losses. Her husband suffered a debilitating stroke in 1964. That same year she was in a serious car accident that killed one of her grandsons. In the span of a month in 1967, her husband died and one of her sons was killed in the Vietnam War. Baker toured well into her 80s, but finally had to quit because of heart problems. This year she no longer had the strength to play guitar so she focused on playing banjo. She could still play great a month ago, said Wayne Martin, who plays fiddle on her banjo collection coming out next year. Baker also is to appear on blues-rock guitarist Kenny Wayne Shepherd's next album due out in November. "She embodied everything we love about the South," said Tim Duffy, who worked with Baker through his Music Maker Relief Foundation. "She was strong, warm, witty, gentle; a gardener and also the world's premiere Piedmont-style blues guitarist," he said. "Like B.B. King and single-string blues, anybody who has picked up acoustic finger-style guitar has been influenced by Etta whether they know it or not." Funeral plans were not immediately available. . Published in Charlotte Observer from September 24 to September 27, 2006 Grave
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Post by dadfad on Sept 9, 2013 15:06:12 GMT -5
Yes, John Cephas actually picked it up (Dm or Em tuning) later, as he began playing more gigs in the DC area and got to know Skip. (I'd tried to find Skip on one of my earliest blues-trips, to Bentonia, MS, back in the late 60's. (All I had to go on was an article about him I'd found with a brief synopsis in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature back then, not knowing he'd long since moved to the DC area and had died a month or two earlier. However I did meet and get to know Jack Owens in Bentonia who also played in Dm, but his style was nothing like Skip's.)
Although I didn't really know her, John Jackson introduced me to Etta once at a guitar workshop around maybe 1990 or '91. Even then she seemed to be quiet and frail, but a very nice woman. She and John seemed to be good friends.
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Post by AlanB on Sept 10, 2013 0:55:46 GMT -5
There seems to be no mention of the 1975 LP Music From The Hills Of Caldwell County (Physical Records 12-001) which brought Etta Baker to wider notice. I've scanned the sleeve notes. BakerEtt.pdf (96.66 KB)
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Post by carolinablues on Sept 10, 2013 9:05:40 GMT -5
Thanks for posting those sleeve notes. They are a great summary of Piedmont Blues as we know them in the NC Mountains. There seems to be no mention of the 1975 LP Music From The Hills Of Caldwell County (Physical Records 12-001) which brought Etta Baker to wider notice. I've scanned the sleeve notes.
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Post by carolinablues on Sept 10, 2013 9:15:19 GMT -5
John Cephas' Obituary Written by Tony Russell Published in The Guardian, Thursday 7 May 2009 The singer and guitarist John Cephas, who has died aged 78, emerged on the blues scene in the mid-1970s. At that time many African-American musicians of his generation were uninterested in this music, particularly the old-fashioned acoustic blues, to which he was committed. His 32-year partnership with the younger harmonica player Phil Wiggins harked back to Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, who used the same instrumental tools to build an international following in the 1950s and 60s. By the time Cephas and Wiggins appeared, however, McGhee and Terry were barely on speaking terms, even on stage, and the younger and more affable act inherited many of their fans. But despite their similarity to the earlier duo, "Bowling Green John and Harmonica Phil" were no clones. Cephas, in particular, promised to become a singer of considerable presence and individuality. That promise was steadily fulfilled in a series of albums over three decades, all collaborations with Wiggins - first for the German company L+R, later for the Chicago-based Flying Fish and Alligator labels - such as Dog Days of August (1987), which won a WC Handy award in the traditional category, the more elaborately produced Flip, Flop, & Fly (1992), and Homemade (1998). Their most recent album, Richmond Blues, was released in 2008. Although he mainly finger-picked his guitar in the tradition of McGhee, Blind Boy Fuller and Reverend Gary Davis, Cephas frequently selected material in other regional styles or from other genres. His and Wiggins's stage sets mixed familiar Virginia themes such as Red River Blues with songs from the Mississippian Skip James, while their albums' guest musicians included jazz guitarist Tal Farlow, the Malian kora player Djimo Kouyate and a four-trombone "shout" band. Cephas was born in Washington DC and grew up in Bowling Green, Virginia. He began playing guitar on an instrument given to him by his father, a minister. As a young man, he sang with a gospel quartet and played at house parties with his cousin David Talliaferro, but music was secondary to his job as a carpenter for the National Guard armoury in Washington. But in the mid-1970s, he began performing in public, first with the pianist Big Chief Ellis, until he died in 1977, then with Wiggins. In the 1980s he retired and took up music full time. Personable and articulate, Cephas was ideally suited to the work most likely to be offered to a musician in his idiom, principally festivals, workshops and group tours with other "roots music" performers, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and the National Council for the Traditional Arts, of which he was a long-serving board member. "The NCTA was family to John," says its chairman Joe Wilson. "He knew we helped create his career in music, and he never stopped trying to pay us back." He and Wiggins also toured overseas, often for the US state department. They visited Britain with the American Folk Blues Festival in 1981, and the Soviet Union for the Smithsonian in 1988. They also participated in educational programmes and played in prisons and rehabilitation centres. "More than anything else," Cephas said, "I would like to see a revival of country blues by more young people ... more people going to concerts, learning to play the music. That's why I stay in the field of traditional music. I don't want it to die." He was one of the founders of the DC Blues Society in 1987 and received a National Heritage Fellowship award in 1989. In February 2009, he was honoured by the state of Virginia as one of eight trailblazers designated by the Library of Virginia's African-American history month. Last November, he curtailed his travelling because of ill-health. He is survived by his companion Lynne Volpe, at least seven children and numerous grandchildren. John Cephas, blues singer and guitarist, born 4 September 1930; died 4 March 2009
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Post by AlanB on Sept 10, 2013 11:22:59 GMT -5
John Cephas' Obituary Published in The Guardian, Thursday 7 May 2009 An excellent obit authored by Tony Russell, the credit to whom seems to have gone AWOL. .
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Post by carolinablues on Sept 10, 2013 12:11:19 GMT -5
John Cephas' Obituary Published in The Guardian, Thursday 7 May 2009 An excellent obit authored by Tony Russell, the credit to whom seems to have gone AWOL. . Thanks for the correction.
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Post by carolinablues on Sept 14, 2013 9:09:34 GMT -5
John Dee Holeman John Dee Holeman (born April 4, 1929) is an American Piedmont blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter. His music includes elements of Texas blues, R&B and jazz. In his younger days he was also known for his proficiency as a 'buckdancer'. (Wikipedia) JOHN DEE HOLEMAN Born on a farm in 1929, John grew up in the hills of Orange County, North Carolina. He began serious guitar-picking at the age of 14. His first teachers were his uncle and his cousin, both blues musicians in the Piedmont style, a distinctive approach to the blues found throughout the Carolinas and Virginia hill country east of the Appalachians. Pretty soon, John was playing well enough to start picking up songs from records. He listened to Piedmont masters such as Blind Boy Fuller and to the great bluesmen from the Delta. The Delta left a deep mark on his playing. By his mid teens, John was playing professionally at house parties throughout the neighboring farm country. He added buck and tap dancing to his repertoire in his early twenties. Very quickly his dancing was as much in demand as his guitar playing and singing. As John’s fame as a bluesman spread, he began touring, first in the South and then to festivals and concerts throughout the country. He has been featured in the Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Tour, has given concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York and Wolf Trap in Washington, D.C., and has toured abroad for USIA’s Arts America Program. He continues to perform and tour actively. In 1988, his achievements as a master Piedmont bluesman earned him a National Heritage Fellowship, the highest cultural award of the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1994, John’s home state honored him with the North Carolina Heritage Award (Courtesy Mapleshade Records)
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Post by carolinablues on Sept 16, 2013 19:07:24 GMT -5
Blind or Reverend Gary Davis was also one of the best fingerstyle Piedmont blues artists. From Laurens, SC, Reverend Gary Davis has influenced many musicians, from Jerry Garcia to Stefan Grossman. Reverend Gary Davis Website
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Post by carolinablues on Sept 16, 2013 19:20:51 GMT -5
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Post by AlanB on Sept 16, 2013 23:53:57 GMT -5
Blind or Reverend Gary Davis was also one of the best fingerstyle Piedmont blues artists. From Laurens, SC, Reverend Gary Davis has influenced many musicians, from Jerry Garcia to Stefan Grossman. Reverend Gary Davis WebsiteNext Spring will see the publication of two books about RGD. tinyurl.com/plaxxt3
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Post by carolinablues on Sept 17, 2013 7:22:17 GMT -5
Thanks AlanB. We all look forward to those.
I hope the dissertation delves into Rev Gary Davis' experiences with the banjar or banjo and how they influnce his fingerstyle guitar. If one listens closely to his music, he will hear some of the African musicology typical of the 19th century banjar. At least to me. But that may not seem significant to others.
Rev. Gary Davis was, at any rate, a multi instrument artist.
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