Topic: Miller's Breakdown

[Johnm]

Hi andrescountryblues,
Here is a different video of Ralph Willis' "Eloise".  Perhaps this one will work for you.



All best,
Johnm

[Gumbo]

the first video was auto-generated by youtube (I think you can tell by the hashtag artist name #ralphwillis as the name of the uploader)

Someone said that those vids don't show up in some countries when posted on Facebook so maybe it's the same here

[ArthurBlake]

the first video was auto-generated by youtube (I think you can tell by the hashtag artist name #ralphwillis as the name of the uploader)

Someone said that those vids don't show up in some countries when posted on Facebook so maybe it's the same here

I seem to get that a lot on Weenie, it must be something to do with countries, I am in Australia and some videos just come up as unavailable.

[Johnm]

So is the most recently posted version of the Ralph Willis tune viewable for you non-U.S. Weenies?  Please let me know.
All best,
Johnm

[Pan]

So is the most recently posted version of the Ralph Willis tune viewable for you non-U.S. Weenies?  Please let me know.
All best,
Johnm

At least it shows here in Germany. The earlier video was denied because of copyright disputes between YouTube/Google and the German copyright organization GEMA. This happens quite often nowadays, I'm afraid.
Thanks for re-posting, John!

Cheers

Pan

[andrescountryblues]

So is the most recently posted version of the Ralph Willis tune viewable for you non-U.S. Weenies?  Please let me know.
All best,
Johnm

It works here. Thanks!

[Johnm]

Thank you, Pan and Andres, for letting me know that the re-posted Ralph Willis video is viewable for you.  Have at it, guys.
All best,
Johnm

[Prof Scratchy]

For the Ralph Willis one I'll say:A standard

09-10 = 5/3>4h; 4/0.1.2; 6/0

12-14= 6/0>1>2; 3/2;2/0>1>0;3/2>1; 4/2; 1/0; 2/>4>3>1; 3/2

206-208= 2/5;1/5;2/5;2/4;1/5;2/4;2/3;1/02/3;2/1>2h;1/5

For the Hattie Hart one I'll suggest:
Vestapol and C standard

[Old Man Ned]

I'm also saying A standard for the Ralph Willis.  Unfortunately not had time to go any further or listen to the Hattie Hart track.

[jopoke]

New to this thread, but will give it a go...

Hattie Hart's "I Let My Daddy Do That" - Sounds like one Guitar is in dropped D.  The other in C position Standard position. Pitch Db.

Ralph Willis "Eloise" tune in A standard tuning. 

Thanks,

Joe

[David Kaatz]

I agree on the Hattie Hart tune that one guitar is in dropped D tuning. There is a distinctive Tommie Johnson style run during one chorus, on the pair of D tuned strings that indicates that to me. Although I suppose one could do that in Vastopol tuning.
That's all I have for now.

Dave

[frankie]

The question for "I Let My Daddy Do That" is:
   * What were the playing positions/tunings employed by the two guitarists on the song?  At this stage, I don't think there's any way of knowing which of the two guitarists played each of the parts, so it's not an issue of who played what, just what playing positions/tuning were used to play the song.

This will sound crazy, and I'm not totally sold on it, but it sounds like the low guitar is played in spanish tuning, but with the 6th string as the root (assuming the guitar is tuned to G, he'd be playing out of D). The whole thing seems to live on the bottom 3 strings most of the time, with a couple of excursions to the 3rd string, and one place where I think I can hear a strum that includes the 2nd string ringing open at a 6th relative the I chord. The way he riffs over the IV chord makes drop D kind of unlikely, and that riff sits nicely in spanish, actually.

Since it sounds like Moanin' The Blues was played in much the same way, I'd guess that the low guitar was played by Allen Shaw, but I dunno..

[Johnm]

Hi all,
It looks as though perhaps everyone who was going to respond to this puzzler has done so already, so I will post the answers, as best I can.
For Ralph Willis's "Eloise", here are the answers:
   * His playing position was A position in standard tuning as everyone had it--well done!
   * For the passage from :09--:10, Ralph Willis is walking up into an E chord.  He hits the open fourth string on the + of beat three, and on beat four plays a triplet hitting the first fret of the fourth string on the first note, the second fret of the fourth string on the second note of the triplet, and on the third note doing a grace note hammer from the first to the second fret of the fourth string, resolving then to an open sixth string on the downbeat of the next measure.  Willis's ploy of doing a grace note hammer in the middle of a triplet shows some real finesse, and he absolutely nails it.  Prof. Scratchy's solution was very close to this, but just started the phrase a little bit earlier.
   * In the passage from :12--:14, Willis is moving into his IV7 chord, D7.  He hits the first fret of the sixth string on the + of beat four in the ninth bar of the form, begins bar ten with a triplet that starts at the second fret of the sixth string and then goes from the first fret of the second string to the open second string.  Beat two is a triplet going from the second fret of the third string to the first fret of the third string and the second fret of the fourth string.  Beat three is a triplet going from the open first string to the third fret of the second string to the open second string.  Beat four is a triplet in which Willis slides his A partial barre from the first to the second fret of the second string for the first two notes of the triplet and finishes with the second fret of the third string.  Boy, the phrase has a beautiful flow to it.
   * For the phrase from 2:06--2:08 Willis hits the open fifth string on beat one and the + of beat one.  On beat two, he plays a triplet starting at the fifth fret of the second string, going to the fifth fret of the first string and returning to the fifth fret of the second string.  On be three, he similarly plays a triplet, moving everything from the second beat down one fret, going from the fourth fret of the second string to the fourth fret of the first string and back to the fourth fret of the second string.  On beat four, he does a grace note hammer and pull from the second fret of the second string up to the third fret of the second string and back, resolving down to the second fret of the third string on the + of beat four.  Once again, he nails a tricky passage.
 
I wonder if one reason Ralph Willis doesn't seem to generate more enthusiasm among present-day Country Blues fans (apart from not having been heard by many of them) is that his vocals most often have a jivey, off-hand, humorous quality.  Perhaps some people construe that as not feeling the music deeply, or as lacking a particular kind of emotional intensity they're looking for.  This is just guesswork on my part, and since I like Willis's singing, I may be way off base.  In any event, he was an ace player, really as strong as just about any East Coast player when working in his most favorite positions.

The Hattie Hart puzzler, "I Let My Daddy Do That" ended up being much more difficult than I thought it would be when I posted it.  I'm impressed that everyone picked up on the fact that one of the guitars was being played in the C position, since I didn't think that was necessarily easy to hear.  Just for identification purposes, let's say the C player was Memphis Willie B.
As for the playing position of the Allen Shaw part, Vestapol, Dropped-D and Spanish have all been proposed, and as much as can be heard of the part, any one of them could work.  I don't think I can definitively say what position/tuning was used, but if we look at what was played in this part, perhaps we can determine which of those options was most likely to have been used.
As Frank noted, the playing of this low guitar part to a great extent lives on the bottom three strings.  It centers around the V note of the key, played on the fifth string.  In the opening verse it goes from V up a whole step to VI, then up to I note above on the open fourth string and then a bent bIII note going back and forth down to the root on the open fourth string.  In both Vestapol and Dropped-D, the move from V to VI on the fifth string would involve going from the open fifth string to the second fret of the fifth string.  In Spanish, the same pitches would be found at the second and fourth fret of the fifth string, a little odd, but certainly not a knuckle-buster to play.  When the low part goes to the IV chord, the notes played in the bass are V up to VI up to I up to II up to bIII back to II back to I back to VI.  In Vestapol and Dropped-D, those notes would be found at the open fifth string and second fret of the fifth string and the open fourth string and second and third frets on the fourth string.  In Spanish, the notes on the fourth string would live in the same place, but the notes on the fifth string would each live two frets higher.  Going to the V chord, the low part plays a pick-up triplet, going from V to VI to bVII, and then goes 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +, moving from VII to the V note an octave above the one the triplet started on, down one whole step to IV, continuing down to II, the going from a bent bVII note down to V where the pick-up triplet started.  This phrase strong favors Vestapol and Dropped-D over Spanish in terms of ease of execution.  The ascending triplet that starts the phrase sits at open-second fret-third fret on the fifth string, and the VII note that is then resolved into is at the fourth fret of the fifth string, with all of this sitting very easily under the left hand.  The same passage sits two frets higher in Spanish, with the triplet at the second-fourth-fifth frets of the fifth string and the VII note at the sixth fret of the fifth string.  This seems very awkward and non-intuitive in the left hand to me.  The remainder of the V chord phrase is one of the few places in this guitar part where Vestapol and Dropped-D would have different left hand solutions thus far.  In Vestapol, you would jump from the fourth fret of the fifth string to the open second string, continuing down to the first fret of the third string to the second fret of the fourth string, ending up with a bent third fret of the fifth string resolving down to the open fifth string.  In Dropped-D, you'd jump from the fourth fret of the fifth string to the second fret of the third string, resolve down to the open third string, continuing to the second fret of the fourth string, ending on the fifth string as you did in Vestapol. 
In a subsequent verse comes the boogie bass over the IV chord that makes the strongest case for the Spanish tuning that Frank suggested.  In Spanish, it would live at the open fifth string-fourth fret fifth string-open fourth string-second fret fourth string-third fret fourth string and then back in the reverse of the ascending line.  In Vestapol and Dropped-D, the first two notes of the boogie bass would be awkwardly located at the fifth fret of the sixth string and the second fret of the fifth string.  Spanish tuning also makes the sixth note in the treble that Frank remarked upon most easily accessible, on the open second string.  In Vestapol, the same note would live at the second fret of the second string, a place Bo Carter often used it when playing in Vestapol.
All of this having been said, there is something screwy going on with this tune.  When you listen to it carefully, it becomes apparent that there are either three guitars playing through-out, with one doing a simple chordal accompaniment for the most part or the duo recorded the track on a stretch of tape they had already recorded a previous take on, and there was bleed-through from the previous take.  I think the second explanation may be the correct one.  Listen to the solo, especially noting the stretch going to the IV chord, around 2:24; you can clearly hear a guitar enter in the low part with a different tonal quality than had been present in the solo up to that point, while the low part continues to play, and the high part keeps going.  What is up with that?  There are places from the beginning of the rendition on, where the high part is up the neck, the prominent single string work in the bass is happening, and there is unaccounted for chordal texture in the mid-range.  Once again, as performed by a duo working live, the texture and division of labor makes the sound that is heard impossible.  I don't know if we'll ever know exactly what happened.
Sorry to be so gabby, but the rendition really poses some tough questions.  The high guitar part is in C position, and while I can't be certain about the low part, my best guess would be dropped-D tuning.  The fact is, though, that with a reasonably agile left hand, the low part could have been played in any of the three suggested tunings/positions.  If those of you who have been reading this are guitarists and have the time to do so, I suggest you try playing the passages that were described in the three different playing positions/tunings and see which would suit your own preference in the left hand.  It will also clue you in to figuring out where the same melodic line would sit in different tunings or positions.

Thanks for your participation and I'll try to find another puzzler soon.

All best,
Johnm   

[jopoke]

Thank you for the detailed explanation John. Based on the responses from both you and Frank, I realize I need to work on more Spanish and Vestapol tunes.  I don't play in these tunings enough to have considered either an option.

This is a fantastic thread, regret I did not get involved sooner.

Thanks,

Joe

[Johnm]

Well, it's good to have you join in, Joe.  Don't be a stranger!
All best,
Johnm