2/24/2023 0 Comments Collumbia pants anytune![]() ![]() ![]() So, as a matter of principle, I didn’t want the fact that I’d learned to play “Maple Leaf Rag” to mean I stopped playing “Columbus Stockade.”īesides all of which, for most folk/roots musicians of roughly my generation this was a common language. I like Jelly Roll Morton and Ornette Coleman, or Charley Poole and Merle Haggard, or Pablo Casals and Aretha Franklin for different reasons and in different moods, and I’m glad to be able to listen to all of them. Plus, in a lot of moods, I’m one of those people myself. I might think of it as less sophisticated, or less complex, or more hokey and folky than the blues and ragtime I was picking up from Van Ronk and afterwards, but whenever I played something like “Columbus Stockade,” there were a few people who reacted like, “OK, this I really like!” And not always the people I expected. I’m not saying I’m better at it (honestly, I could never make a flatpick behave the way I wanted) or that it’s better suited to a kid from Cambridge, Massachusetts, but I’ve been playing it since I was seven or eight years old, and it’s part of me.įor a third, people always liked it. In a slightly alternate reality, if he hadn’t succumbed to Huntington’s disease, it is easy to imagine him at Newport in the 1960s jamming with other folk revival discoveries from the Southwest like Mance Lipscomb, who had a similarly broad repertoire and similar experience playing a wide range of regional blues and dance tunes.įor another thing, this was the music I started on, and it continues to feel natural in ways some of the styles I picked up later never will. I felt like a lot of the blues revivalists I liked had started out with Woody, Cisco, and Pete Seeger, but abandoned that music when they got into blues, and I understood the temptation but didn’t want to give in to it.įor one thing, I really like Woody Guthrie’s music - his guitar playing, his harmonica playing, his singing, even his fiddling - and he had good taste in songs. I’d spent the previous couple of years learning blues and other stuff that lent itself to fingerstyle guitar, but I never lost my taste for the Woody/Cisco sound, and it had even become a matter of principle for me. One of the pleasures of playing on the street with Rob was that I had a second voice on the choruses of my favorite Woody Guthrie – Cisco Houston duets. ![]()
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