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Washington Phillips

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outfidel:
Does anyone have tab (guitar, not zither or dolceola or whatever) that they can share for Washington Phillips songs?

I'm most interested in "Denomination Blues" and "What Are They Doing in Heaven Today" -- but Phillips fascinates me and I'd be interested in learning any of his songs.

Thanks!

waxwing:
Hey Michael,
Try posting over at the IGS forum, as I know Dennis Roger Reed has been working on a version of Denomination Blues which he just posted, here, about having showcased at the Folk Alliance in San Diego. He was chagrined because all his other songs were original but DB was all anyone wanted to talk about. I was in a workshop here in the bay area where he was asking Mary Flower for some ideas, but when he showed her he was using two partial capos to create the tuning she just laughed and threw up her hands. It sounded great tho'. If I remember right, he used a 5 string capo at the second fret, leaving the bass E open , and a 3 string capo on the fourth fret of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th strings (like an 'A' chord below the other capo). So strummed this gave a 'B' chord with an 'E' bass. Hmm, that doesn't sound right. Maybe he also detuned the bass 'E' string. But he was using relatively straight forward little figures and pulling on that low note perhaps in the IV chord, that would make sense. It did have a very different sound.
All for now.
John C.

Rivers:
I have a half-baked version of Denom Blues using open G slide, sometimes 12 string. Version was originally inspired by Ry Cooder's but sounds nothing like it any more. I think DB (and Tattler etc) sound good on a high pitched instrument like a mando or Tacoma Papoose.

I've always opined that the dulceola is such a strange happy sounding thing you couldn't get a blue note out of one if you tossed it off a cliff. I just love his songs though.

uncle bud:
As an aside, there an interesting (and very detailed) analysis of Washington Phillips and how he did not play the dulceola on his recordings here. At Port Townsend last year, Andy Cohen went on about the no dulceola theory. And also played a mean dulceola. (You ain't heard boogie woogie until you've heard it being played on a dulceola.)

If memory serves (which it rarely does), John Miller once fooled around with a Phillips tune at Port Townsend by capoing up real high and playing out of a C position (or G?). It was pretty straightforward and sounded remarkably nice. This technique might work even better on a twelve-string.

uncle bud

frankie:
Outfidel, I'm not sure if you're interested in doing these tunes in their actual keys or not, but it seems like a good way to find a starting point for working out a way to play these tunes.  I don't have my tuner handy, but fooling around with Denomination Blues, it sounds like it's played in the absolute key of F (based on where I'm pitched at the moment, which may not be A=440).

Given that, there's some nice movement over the V chord that descends from a high E (12th fret) to A, followed by a little riff that goes from C descending to A.  You could work it out in F, but capoing would tend to result in a more "chimey" sound - something that would echo the sweetness of whatever instrument is being played by Phillips.

My first impulse was to work it out in C, capoed at the fifth fret, but after messing with it, if you lower the 6th string to D and capo at the 3rd fret, a lot of the figures work really nicely in the key of D - and in more than one octave.  If one were so inclined, I imagine that one could "Spence-ify" the very last riff and play it on the middle two strings - something that occurs over and over in Joseph Spence's music.

There's no real reason to play in dropped-D, though - sometimes it's fun to work in D without having that tonic note trying to get your attention all the time...

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