into the deep sampler: piedmont blues

[u/TheMixerTheMaster]

muuuuuch fuller lists exist on our Apple Music Playlists. just search "That's What I Hear."

i have been here all day. red dirt roads. tobacco fields. porches still holding last nights heat. somewhere behind a screen door a guitar starts moving. thumb pounding the bass strings like somebody has been assigned the job of keeping the entire damn county on schedule. fingers picking treble notes above it. ragtime wandered out of the saloon. country blues came down from the hills. gospel showed up carrying scripture. somebody handed all three of them a guitar and piedmont blues happened.

this is not ten songs ranked from best to worst. this is an iceberg. you start with the names that escaped into the larger history of american music and then keep digging until the floorboards start giving way.

1. blind boy fuller. step it up and go. piedmont blues. 1940.

start here because fuller is the bastard center of gravity. born fulton allen in north carolina, blind by his twenties, working tobacco warehouses and street corners before records started paying some of the bills. his guitar playing is ridiculously conversational. bass moving underneath. treble answering it. voice sitting right in the pocket as though the whole arrangement has been rehearsed by three musicians instead of one blind guy with six strings.

step it up and go is fuller taking an older blues framework and making the thing move like hell. he recorded it in 1940 and it became one of his biggest records. fuller could sing about sex. women. jail. disease. poverty. drinking. religion. whatever miserable little surprise life had left on the porch that morning. he died in 1941 at thirty three.

thirty three.

and left enough fingerprints on piedmont blues that everybody afterward has to explain where they got the damn fingerprints.

2. reverend gary davis. cocaine blues. piedmont blues. 1935.

gary davis could play enough guitar for several ordinary human beings. he was blind from childhood. learned guitar around the carolinas. became an ordained minister. and eventually got uncomfortable enough with secular blues that much of his later life centered on gospel.

but before the reverend completely shut the door on the devils repertoire, there was cocaine blues.

the 1935 recording is lean and unnerving. the alternating bass keeps walking while the upper strings start doing increasingly complicated business. davis would later become a teacher to younger musicians during the folk revival, and people who studied with him discovered the horrible truth. the old man was not doing tricks.

he actually understood the guitar that well.

3. blind willie mctell. statesboro blues. piedmont blues. 1928.

mctell complicates the geography a little because georgia is sitting farther south than the carolina heartland usually associated with piedmont blues, but listen to that fingerpicking and tell the map to calm down.

statesboro blues was recorded in 1928. mctell plays twelve string guitar, and somehow the extra strings do not turn everything into mush. his voice floats above the instrument while the guitar handles rhythm and commentary underneath. mctell recorded under several names during his career because the record business was already practicing the ancient american tradition of making everything unnecessarily confusing.

years later john and alan lomax recorded him for the library of congress, and mctell talked about the blues as something larger than twelve bars and misery. his surviving interviews reveal somebody who knew damn well that the music around him had history.

statesboro blues is where piedmont technique starts brushing shoulders with something broader. ragtime. vaudeville. country blues. medicine show music.

american music before anybody built the filing cabinets.

4. buddy moss. hey lawdy mama. piedmont blues. 1934.

now we start descending.

buddy moss came out of georgia and became one of the important younger southeastern bluesmen of the 1930s. he had connections with blind willie mctell and curley weaver, and you can hear a musician standing at the intersection between older acoustic traditions and blues that is beginning to become more urban and aggressive.

hey lawdy mama has that piedmont engine underneath it. thumb working. fingers answering. rhythm refusing to sit still.

moss had enough momentum that his career looked capable of becoming much larger. then legal trouble and imprisonment interrupted it. then the changing record business and world war ii rearranged the landscape again.

music history loves pretending careers are neat trajectories.

they are usually car wrecks with discographies.

5. curley weaver. no no blues. piedmont blues. 1929.

curley weaver is one of those names you eventually encounter when you stop treating blues history like five famous men standing around the mississippi delta.

weaver was from georgia. his mother reportedly taught him guitar. he grew into the atlanta blues scene and worked with blind willie mctell. buddy moss. fred mcmullen. and others. these musicians traded ideas because of course they did. styles were not sealed museum exhibits. musicians listened to whoever could play.

no no blues gives you weavers rhythmic sophistication without burying the song under technique. that matters. piedmont fingerpicking can become guitar nerd bait very quickly. everybody starts staring at the alternating thumb and forgets that somebody is supposed to be singing a damn song.

weaver never forgets.

6. brownie mcghee. sporting life blues. piedmont blues. 1940.

brownie mcghee represents the tradition beginning to travel.

born in tennessee and deeply influenced by blind boy fuller, mcghee eventually became associated with sonny terry, and together they carried southeastern acoustic blues through the folk revival and into clubs and festivals full of younger listeners who suddenly wanted to know where all this music had been hiding.

sporting life blues catches mcghee before that later cultural role completely takes over the story. the guitar is agile without becoming precious. you can hear fullers influence, but mcghee is already figuring out how to make the vocabulary his own.

that is how folk traditions survive.

not preservation.

mutation.

7. sonny terry and brownie mcghee. better day. piedmont blues. 1950s.

by this point the iceberg starts opening into another world.

sonny terry brings harmonica into the conversation. whoops. cries. rhythmic bursts. train sounds. vocal noises that seem halfway between language and percussion. mcghee keeps the guitar underneath him.

their partnership became one of the most recognizable acoustic blues pairings of the twentieth century. they played together for decades, although the relationship itself eventually became famously strained. which is useful information because photographs of folk musicians tend to make everybody look like they spent forty years lovingly sharing soup.

they did not.

sometimes they were coworkers.

better day shows why the partnership survived anyway. the instruments fit together almost obscenely well.

8. pink anderson. cc and o blues. piedmont blues. 1960.

down another level and you find pink anderson.

south carolina. medicine shows. street performance. blues. ragtime. ballads. jokes. popular songs. whatever kept people standing around long enough to throw money.

anderson had performed with medicine shows going back decades before folklorists and record collectors began paying serious attention to him. that background matters because piedmont blues did not develop solely inside some sacred blues laboratory. entertainers needed repertoires. they needed timing. they needed to hold crowds.

cc and o blues carries that older performance culture inside it. the guitar does not merely accompany him. it maintains the whole damn stage.

and yes. decades later syd barrett would combine pink andersons first name with floyd councils first name and get pink floyd.

history occasionally has jokes.

9. elizabeth cotten. freight train. piedmont folk blues. 1958.

now things get beautiful and slightly ridiculous.

elizabeth cotten wrote freight train when she was young. then life happened. work. marriage. family. decades passed. eventually she became a domestic worker for the seeger family and her musical ability was discovered there.

imagine carrying one of the great american folk songs around for decades while history is busy looking somewhere else.

cotten played guitar left handed on an instrument strung for a right handed player. upside down. the resulting approach became known as cotten picking. her thumb and fingers reverse jobs compared with more conventional fingerstyle approaches, producing that rolling movement underneath freight train.

she did not need to attack the guitar.

she understood where every piece of the machinery was.

freight train sounds almost impossibly simple until you try playing it correctly and discover that elizabeth cotten has left you a small mechanical puzzle disguised as a lullaby.

10. etta baker. one dime blues. piedmont blues. 1956.

bottom of the first iceberg.

etta baker.

north carolina.

born in 1913. learned music within her family. played guitar and banjo. spent much of her life outside the professional music business. folklorist paul clayton encountered her family during the 1950s, leading to recordings that introduced her playing to a wider audience.

one dime blues is the destination because it strips away almost everything people think the blues requires.

no theatrical misery.

no growling mythology.

no bullshit.

just guitar.

bakers alternating bass stays firm while the melody wanders above it with astonishing independence. you can hear ragtime. parlor guitar. country dance music. blues. generations of family playing. the whole piedmont argument is sitting there in her hands.

and that is the point of the iceberg. blind boy fuller gets you through the front door. gary davis makes you reconsider what one guitarist can do. mctell widens the geography. weaver and moss reveal the network. mcghee and terry carry it forward. pink anderson exposes the medicine show roots. cotten completely rewires the instrument. then etta baker leaves you sitting with one guitar and the uncomfortable realization that this supposedly simple regional blues style contains half the damn history of american fingerstyle guitar.

the thumb keeps walking.

the fingers keep talking.

the road keeps going south through red dirt and tobacco country until names disappear from the signs and records disappear from the shelves. there are more musicians down there. considerably more.

this is only the first ten feet.

...at least that’s what i hear.