Re: Blues, Stomps, and Rags #7
Originally Posted by
JL277z
Anyway, I met Howard Armstrong in the late 1970s or early 1980s when he was a faculty member one year at the Fiddle Tunes festival in Port Townsend WA. It's been a long time & I don't remember all the details but I do remember that I liked his music, and he was a great guy & had a good sense of humor. He was there with an accompanist he called "LC" (or Elsie?) who, if I recall correctly, he said was his brother. Both were good musicians.
Howard wasn't too pleased that they made him play acoustic though, at that festival, he said he preferred electric. That preference was a mystery to me until decades later when I finally tried an electric instrument, woohoo what a rush,
so many more options for finesse with expressiveness. So, now I finally understand what Howard was saying. Although, of course, in his case he sounded just fine regardless of what instrument he was playing.
Thanks. I had the pleasure of hearing Martin, Bogan, and Armstrong at the 1975 Mariposa Folk Festival in Toronto, and thoroughly enjoyed them. A great many early blues musicians started out acoustic, then went electric, which was especially important for volume when playing bars, then went acoustic again when they were "re-discovered" by folk and blues revivalists. In fact, some blues players had different repertoires and instrumentation for their black and white audiences. Again, many of these people were commercial musicians, and played what paid. In the director's commentary to the documentary, Louie Bluie, Terry Zwifoff points out another issue. He was trying to get the musicians to reproduce their early sound. He said this especially irritated Ted Bogan. Zwifoff said something to the line of, I can't blame him; he spent his whole life learning chords, and I'm asking that he play like he did as a less skilled musician.
Enjoy the videos.
Robert Johnson's mother, describing blues musicians:
"I never did have no trouble with him until he got big enough to be round with bigger boys and off from home. Then he used to follow all these harp blowers, mandoleen (sic) and guitar players."
Lomax, Alan, The Land where The Blues Began, NY: Pantheon, 1993, p.14.
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