Topic: Son House' guitar on the BBC

[Richard]

The other evening on one of those little watched BBC channels (BBC4 ?) by chance I saw there was program entitled Blues at the BBC. Well, judging by the credits this was quite a recent production and was basically a collection of one numer, one artist vids in chronological order. It was the B&W stuff that intrigued me with the likes of Lightening Hopkins etc.

However one of the first colour vids was of Son House doing Death Letter. His guitar was as expected was a single cone National, painted in it's day and had more patination than you would ever dare imagine! It looked a very desirable basket case, wrecked but nevertheless fantastic although if honest it didn't sound that good!

Now, the reason for this post, was to say that in keeping with the  rest of the guitar, the end of nut where the top two strings were, appeared to have been very badly reconstructed out lumps of some strange grey material which had been planted on top of what was I assume a broken nut. Whether those top two strings could actually ring out through all the gunge may not have helped the tone!

Luvly!

Some of you may be pleased to note that principle got the better of me and I gave up watching when it came to the second appearance of a certain Mr Clapton.

[Parlor Picker]

I saw it as well, Richard, having firstly sat through about 40 minutes of Sonny & Brownie. I hated the tone of McGhee's guitar which had a horrible electric pick-up jammed across the sound-hole. It also struck me what a better blues musician Sonny Terry was than Brownie (just my opinion and I'm braced for the deluge of complaints). By then, their act was a bit tame and featured far too many simple 12-bar accompaniments.

Did you notice the skewed angle at which Son House held the slide?  It was way off the square and resulted in some very noticeable discords (sometimes desirable, sometimes not). As always, his performance was very intense. Some of the other performances in the programme were a bit dodgy to say the least, but the aforementioned Mr. E. C. was not as bad as in some of clips of him (like when invited on stage with J.J. Cale only to find he hadn't a clue what was going on and didn't know what to play [EC not JJ]).

Some of those BBC4 programmes have been excellent - I particularly remember the one about the aristocrat who befriended Thelonius Monk and the recent one about Peter Green.

[blueshome]

" the skewed angle at which Son House held the slide"

This was a characteristic of his playing and was most exaggerated at the 12th fret. This is not a bad thing to do if barring the 1st 2 strings with guitar tuned to Spanish, otherwise it's normal to flatten the 2nd string slightly. When Louisiana Red plays Muddy Waters songs in Spanish he detunes that string a quarter tone.

[Richard]

Seems I missed the Brownie McG prog altogether!

I'd go with Phil on the slide angle and usually when I tune (yes I do, well once a year) in Spanish I keep the 2nd string a touch flat. For high bass G tuning it does help to actually have the thing properly in tune!

[thecountryblues]

It also struck me what a better blues musician Sonny Terry was than Brownie (just my opinion and I'm braced for the deluge of complaints).

Ok, here is a complaint
Don't be messin' with my man Brownie.
There are people who could play better guitar.
There are also those who could sing better.
But, Brownie was a wonderful singer, a nice person and a really great bluesman.
He was the direct heir of Big Bill Broonzy and the mn knew thousands of songs. He was a walking folk treasure of song.
I have a very personal affinity. In 1967, when I was only 11 years old, I saw the duo perform in my small hometown in Germany. It impressed me for life.
Brownie was warm, kind and played sweetly--even though at the time I did not understand a single word of english.
I still own many of his CDs today and love him still.
So please don't put him down.

[Parlor Picker]

Frank - my comments were based on that single performance. It was an opinion I had not thought of or voiced before. Of course, one of the motives for my comments was to initiate a response on the forum.  I was not intending to "diss" him, merely commenting that in my humble opinion, Sonny came across as a more interesting player on the strength of that performance, not on the basis of his long and illustrious career.

I have great respect for most musicians, and especially one so important to the blues as Brownie.