Acoustic Guitar 273.pdf

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SEPTEMBER 2015 | ACOUSTICGUITAR.COM

OTIS TAYLOR | INDIGO GIRLS | JASON ISBELL | KAREN DALTON

3 S

ON

G

S

SPIRIT FAMILY REUNION

Wake Up, Rounder

FAIRPORT CONVENTION

Matty Groves

JOHN McCUTCHEON

Joe Hill’s Last Will

NEW GEAR

MARTIN GPCRSGT

EPIPHONE

MASTERBILT AJ-45ME

GUILD WESTERLY

F-1512 12-STRING

WARREN

HAYNES

SOUTHERN ROCKER

TEAMS UP WITH

RAILROAD EARTH

PLUS

THE STRANGE

STORY OF

JOHN LENNON’S

LOST GIBSON

UNPLUGGED

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AcousticGuitar.com 5

Special Focus

Acoustic Guitars

in the Classroom

18 Deep Blues

Otis Taylor explores the rock classic “Hey Joe” and the dark side of his songs By Kenny Berkowitz

22 Into the Mystic

Warren Haynes and Railroad Earth unite on Ashes & Dust By Pat Moran

Features

Miscellany

Strummin’

& Learnin’

The New York

City Guitar School

offers classes

from ‘Blues Guitar

Basics’ and

‘Play the Beatles’

to ‘Ear Training

for Guitarists’

and ‘Songwriters’

Circle.’

COMMUNITY LEARNING, P. 34 SAM O A J O D HA 005-009_273_TOC.indd 5 7/8/15 9:32 AM

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PolyTune® Clip perfectly combines state of the art tuning technology with an unprecedented attention to aesthetics and functionality. Unmatched in speed, precision and grace, PolyTune Clip isn’t just the best PolyTune we’ve ever made - it’s the best tuner by any measure.

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AcousticGuitar.com 7 CONTENTS

NEWS 15 The Beat

Remembering folksinger Karen Dalton; rediscovering guitarist Peter Walker; Leon Redbone retires; Iris DeMent returns

17 News Spotlight

A chat with Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls

PLAY

42 Take It Easy

How your guitar can provide music therapy

44 The Basics

What mode is that?

46 Weekly Workout

Using the CAGED chord system to open up the fretboard

Songs to Play

50 Joe Hill’s Last Will

John McCutcheon pays tribute to the labor legend 52 Wake Up, Rounder!

Sunny vibes from Spirit Family Reunion 54 Matty Groves

A classic English murder ballad

AG TRADE 57 Shoptalk

Boutique builders turn out at Memphis guitar fest; Yamaha revamps Silent Guitar; a wireless MIDI controller for acoustics; plus, Fab Four guitar mystery solved

62 Makers & Shakers

The saga of Virginia-based luthiers Huss & Dalton

64 Guitar Guru

Why 12-fret guitars sound so good

66 Review: Martin GPCRSGT

A no-frills workhorse electro-acoustic

68 Review: Guild Westerly F-1512

Jumbo-size jangle from a 12-string

70 Review: Epiphone Masterbilt AJ-45ME

Modern “vintage” guitar pays tribute to J-45

72 Pickin’

Ibanez AVT2E-NT tenor guitar

74 Great Acoustics

1976 Gurian S3R

MIXED MEDIA 76 Playlist

Jason Isbell’s roots-rock gem,

Something More Than Free; also,

Dar William s’ Emerald, Little Wings’

Explains, and Helen Avakian’s Notes from Helen

Michaud Guitars were on exhibit at the Memphis Guitar Fest p. 57

PolyTune® Clip perfectly combines state of the art tuning technology with an unprecedented attention to aesthetics and functionality. Unmatched in speed, precision and grace, PolyTune Clip isn’t just the best PolyTune we’ve ever made - it’s the best tuner by any measure.

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8 September 2015

NEW INSTRUCTIONAL SERIES AVAILABLE: ‘BE A BETTER ACOUSTIC GUITARIST’

Be a Better Acoustic Guitarist has real-world advice and expert insight that will

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Acoustic Guitar’s 25th Anniversary Songbook celebrates the artists, the culture,

and the community driven by the joyful sound of acoustic guitars and songs. This newly released volume features classic songs by Bob Dylan, Doc Watson, Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, the Milk Carton Kids, Lead Belly, Ben Harper, Mississippi John Hurt, Woody Guthrie, Ani DiFranco, Iron & Wine, and many others. Pick one up today! $19.95. store.acousticguitar.com.

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FROM THE HOME OFFICE

This month, you’ll find a special section on guitars in the classroom that includes an article on guitarists who are enrolled in, or who have graduated from, degree-granting roots-music programs. There also are features on the bene-fits of studying at a community music school (you had me at sliding scale) and the St. Louis Classical Guitar Society’s program in Ferguson, Missouri.

Elsewhere, you’ll find a cover story on S o u t h e r n r o c k e r Wa r r e n H a y n e s ’ n e w unplugged collaboration with Railroad Earth; a report on John Lennon’s lost Gibson J-160E, one of the most iconic guitars in acoustic rock history; an interview with bluesman Otis Taylor, discussing his new album based on the rock classic “Hey Joe”; a review of the Epiphone AJ-45ME, a real workhorse and a real bargain for budget-conscious guitarists; a dispatch from the inaugural Memphis Acoustic Guitar Festival; a transcript of a rare Earl Bell blues song, as well as two other songs to play; a Weekly Workout on mastering the CAGED chord system (no pain, no gain); and much, much more.

Me? I’m going back to my noodling.

Play on! —Greg Cahill

I

’m looking for inspiration in the sweet sound of a Santa Cruz PJ parlor guitar, the AG 10th anniversary custom model that hangs from the wall outside of my office. (It’s so easy to play a rag on this short-scale neck.) The door is closed, but passersby can see through the vertical window on the side of the doorway. It probably looks like I’m hard at work, though I’m really just noodling, shaking off a bad head cold and playing little blues runs, while trying to fill this page with thoughtful prose before slipping out to a baseball game.

Well, at least the noodling’s going well. It’s the end of June and one of the first heat waves of the summer is battling the cool marine layer on San Pablo Bay. This time next week, I’ll be standing in front of a Fourth of July BBQ, and I’ll be perched on the patio with one of my own guitars.

Noodling, most likely.

I do a lot of noodling, so much so, in fact, that

AG is publishing a special section next month on

the art of noodling as well as backyard jam eti-quette, a primer for couch potatoes (Are you sensing a lazy-hazy summer theme here?), and other tips for those who play around the house.

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Gone noodling

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OPENING ACT

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NEWS

F

olk artist handful of covers before her tragic death in Karen Dalton only recorded a 1993, but thanks to guitarist Peter Walker and

the roots imprint Tompkins Square, the world is hearing her original songs for the first time. The woman Bob Dylan described in his

autobi-ography Chronicles as having “a voice like Billie Holiday” and playing guitar “like Jimmy Reed” recorded a mix of traditional and new music by such folk contemporaries as Tim Hardin on

her two studio albums, 1969’s It’s So Hard to

Tell Who’s Going to Love You Best and 1971’s In My Own Time, earning a cult following for her

jazz-inflected interpretations.

Her own lyrics and poetry didn’t see the light of day until 2012, when Walker—who cared for the troubled folksinger before her death from AIDS and currently manages Dal-ton’s estate—compiled and self-published them as Karen Dalton: Songs, Poems, and Writings.

The book inspired Tompkins Square label owner Josh Rosenthal, who had helped resurrect Walker’s career (see sidebar, “Rediscovering

Remembering

Karen Dalton

A new album brings the late folksinger’s

unfinished songs to life

BY WHITNEY PHANEUF

16

The Beat Iris DeMent’s new muse

16

The Beat Leon Redbone retires

17

News Spotlight Indigo Girls return

THE BEAT

REDISCOVERING

PETER WALKER

In the late ’60s, Peter Walker was considered one of the most talented guitarists of his generation, alongside John

Fahey, Sandy Bull, and Robbie Basho. An innovator of the

American folk-raga, which combined American Primitive guitar with Indian raga traditions, Walker released two acclaimed albums on Vanguard Records—

Rainy Day Raga and Second Poem—before heading to Spain

to master fl amenco and, soon after, retreating into family life.

Decades later, Tompkins Square label owner Josh Rosenthal came knocking. “In the pre-social-media environment of 2005, when I started Tompkins Square, fi nding someone named ‘Peter Walker’ was challenging. After many dead ends, I contacted a publisher who gave me Peter’s Woodstock, New York, address in ‘I’m-really-not-supposed-to-do-this’ fashion,” Rosenthal recalls.

His persistence paid off. By 2008, Walker was back in the spotlight and releasing new music—his fi rst recordings in nearly 40 years. A Raga for Peter

Walker paired four new Walker

cuts in his signature folk-raga style with musical tributes from younger admirers, including Jack

Rose, Thurston Moore, James Blackshaw, and Steffen Basho-Junghans. That same year,

Walker also released Echo of My

Soul, an album of entirely new

material devoted to Spanish guitar styles. In 2009, Tompkins Square released Long Lost Tapes

1970, sessions recorded in

Levon Helm’s living room that Rosenthal discovered in an old box at Walker’s home. —W.P.

Peter Walker”), to ask his favorite female musi-cians to put music to Dalton’s lost lyrics. “I decided that the material should be covered by female artists, as the feelings and expressions in the lyrics seem to come from a decidedly femi-n i femi-n e p e r s p e c t i v e , ” Ro s e femi-n t h a l w r i t e s i femi-n a statement.

The new 11-song collection Remembering

Mountains: Unheard Songs by Karen Dalton

fea-tures Lucinda Williams, Patty Griffin, Sharon Van Etten, and more. It captures Dalton’s

bluesy spirit and bittersweet sentiment, similar to how Wilco and Billy Bragg, and more

recently Del McCoury, brought Woody Guth-rie’s unfinished songs to life.

“Some of the lyrics were probably intended as poems, not as lyrics to be set to music. Some of the songs, like ‘Remembering Mountains,’ for instance, actually have chords assigned to them,” Rosenthal notes. “Whatever her intent, we find a gifted lyricist whose talents as a song-writer and poet have never been known to the public . . . until now.” AG

Karen Dalton

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The enigmatic roots artist Leon Redbone (real

name alleged to be Dickran Gobalian), who gained a following in the mid-’70s from appear-ances on Saturday Night Live and such famous fans as Bob Dylan, has announced his

retire-ment from both stage and studio. In a state-ment, Redbone’s management writes that “his health has been a matter of concern for some time” and “it has become too challenging for him to continue the full range of professional activities.”

The 65-year-old retro singer-songwriter— characterized by his gravelly baritone, nimble guitar work, old-time shtick, fedora, and sun-glasses—specialized in early 20th-century music, including jazz and blues standards and Tin Pan Alley classics. To commemorate Red-bone’s retirement, Jack White’s Third Man Records will press a vinyl reissue of his 1975 debut album, On the Track, and issue a double-album collection of never-before-released live and studio recordings from 1972, titled Long

Way Home. Check thirdmanrecords.com for

official release dates. —W.P.

LEON REDBONE

RETIRES

THE BEAT

F r o m h e r c u r r e n t home in rural Iowa,

Iris DeMent found

an unlikely muse in a 20th-century Russian p o e t . T h e s i n g e r -s o n g w r i t e r ’ -s n e w album, The Trackless

Woods, is a

collabora-tion of sorts with the Russian writer and activist Anna Akhmatova. DeMent started reading Akhmatova’s work and quickly began penning melodies around her words. “My experience with and connection to poetry has primarily been through songs, so it probably shouldn’t be surprising to me that most, if not all, of these poems weren’t fully known to me, or under-stood on that deeper emotional level, until the melodies arrived,” DeMent told NPR. DeMent s a y s t h e a l b u m w a s a l s o i n s p i r e d b y h e r daughter, whom she and her husband, singer-songwriter Greg Brown, adopted from Siberia

in 2005. DeMent is currently on tour; check irisdement.com for dates. —W.P.

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Tried & True

Emily Saliers—one half of the Indigo Girls—

always returns to the guitar for songwriting

BY WHITNEY PHANEUF

to the easiest chord. Sometimes the easiest chord is absolutely perfect, sometimes it’s not.

How does guitar play into your songwriting process? Walk us through one of the songs on One Lost Day.

The guitar has been the vehicle that has driven my songs from the very beginning of my song-writing. While I have stretched a bit with writing songs on banjo, uke, and even piano, guitar is my tried and true. I love all guitars: acoustic, electric, high-strung, 12-string, nylon-string. I wrote a song called “Findlay, Ohio, 1968” for our new record, One Lost Day. I was just messing around in an open-D tuning and landed upon this chord progression that I had never used before, even though I write a lot in open-D tuning. So, this chord progression immediately felt spooky to me, and spooky made me think of childhood memo-ries, some that actually happened to me and some that were a dreamy imagining of myste-rious things that kids try to interpret. Suddenly, all of these images poured out, and only because I happened to land on that particular chord progression in that tuning on my acoustic guitar. The song belonged to that chord pattern. It wouldn’t have materialized without it. AG

NEWS SPOTLIGHT

E

mily Saliers and Amy Ray met in elemen-tary school, started playing together in high school, and, 30 years later, are still making music as the Grammy-winning Indigo Girls. When the duo recently stopped by the AG office to record an Acoustic Guitar Session, they shared that the chemistry they felt when they began harmonizing and playing guitar together as teens has never waned.

The Indigo Girls’ new album, One Lost Day (Vanguard), finds the women writing songs from very different lives than when they last recorded four years ago: Both Saliers and Ray became mothers, Ray’s father died, and Saliers went into rehab. Those themes imbue the 13-track album, which ranges in style from new-wave guitar rock, on “Happy in the Sorrow Key,” to their classic folk sound, on “Spread the Pain Around,” which recalls their 1989 break-through hit “Closer to Fine.” The one constant, Saliers says, is her lifelong passion for guitar.

How did you start playing guitar so young?

Music saturated my family experience. My sisters and I were all encouraged to learn and play any instrument or instruments of our choice.

I started to play guitar when I was in third grade. I saw a flyer posted in the schoolroom about lessons at the YMCA. I just remember thinking I would like to try guitar. As soon as I held one in my hands, I became completely obsessed with it. I played it incessantly and began to write songs with it. My first guitar was a ¾-size nylon-string that my parents bought me for $24. I still have it.

Who were your favorite acoustic

guitarists? What did you learn from them?

Early on, I loved John Denver—his songs were so acoustic-guitar-focused and they inspired me to write my own songs. In high school, I loved Ann Wilson [of Heart] because she taught me that women could play guitar well and that acoustic guitar could rock. When I studied classical guitar at age 11, I listened to Andrés Segovia and Christopher Parkening. Later on, some of my very favorite acoustic guitarists played with artists I knew and loved, l i k e J o h n J e n n i n g s w i t h M a r y C h a p i n Carpenter, and Val McCallum with Vonda Shepard. I love the way my friends Adam Hoffman and Scott Schwartz from the Shadow-boxers play acoustic guitar—they never resort

Indigo Girls

One Lost Day Vanguard Amy Ray and

Emily Saliers

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Otis Taylor on

‘Hey Joe’ and exploring

the dark side of songs

BY KENNY BERKOWITZ

DEEP

BLUES

EV AN S IM O N E 018-021_273_Taylor.indd 18 7/2/15 11:41 AM

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5 ESSENTIAL

OTIS TAYLOR

ALBUMS

“Otis Taylor is among the most mercurial of bluesmen,” Thom Jurek wrote in the AllMusic

Guide. “While his signature vocal

phrasing and playing—whether it be on guitar, mandolin, or banjo—is rooted in several blues traditions—his music almost never strictly conforms.” Since emerging from retirement in 1995, after careers as a musi-cian, professional bicycling coach, and an antique dealer, the Chicago-born Taylor has recorded 14 albums, steeped in blues, often dealing with social injustice, and incorporating a mix of acoustic and electric guitars, resonators, banjos, trumpets, drums, and other instruments. Here are five essential Otis Taylor albums:

When Negroes Walked the Earth

1997

Truth Is Not Fiction

2003

Recapturing the Banjo

2008

Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs

2009

My World Is Gone

2013

very time he records an album, Otis Taylor endeavors to do something different. On Hey Joe Opus/Red Meat (Trance Blues Records), he’s created a ten-part suite around the ’60s chestnut “Hey Joe,” about a man who’s on the run after shooting his lover. It’s a song he’s been performing for close to 20 years, and has recorded twice before, but unlike Jimi Hendrix—or the hundreds of others who’ve covered the song, including the Byrds, the Leaves, and Love—Taylor is less interested in Joe himself than he is in Joe’s questionable decision to kill the woman he loves.

Taylor uses “Hey Joe”—penned in 1962 by South Carolinian Billy Roberts Jr., a member of the San Francisco-based folk trio the Driftwood Singers—as the moral foundation of an album that explores “the decisions that we make and how they affect us.” Taylor focuses on the tragic consequences—the two lives ruined by jealousy. In the sadness of Taylor’s voice, you can hear the regret underlying Anne Harris’ violin, the porten-tous echo of Ron Miles’ cornet.

You also hear that wistfulness in the writing of three new songs, including “Peggy Lee,” about a decision to change genders, and “Red Meat,” about falling in love, for better or worse. It’s in the guitar-playing, which is for the most part electric, as Taylor weaves his “trance blues” with help from Warren Haynes, Bill Nershi of the String Cheese Incident, and Taylor Scott, repeating the same riffs over and over for maximum effect. And it’s in the four instrumen-tals that tie these stories together into 48 con-tinuous minutes of music, arguably the most powerful he’s ever recorded.

Do you remember the first time you heard ‘Hey Joe’?

It was Love [who covered the song on their 1966 debut album]. I was a kid living in Denver, with no hip people around, and I thought Love was just too cool. Two black guys in a band had a little process, long hair like the Beatles’ style. I wanted to be like Love, have all the mod clothes. So when I heard Hendrix do it [on the 1967 US single], I didn’t like it as much, because I liked the fast version. Then, becoming a Hendrix fan and trying to deal with the Hendrix thing, it just sort of morphed.

We did “Hey Joe” on my first album,

Blue-Eyed Monster, just bass and electric guitar, no

drums. I didn’t even play guitar, just sang. So when I wanted to start playing it on guitar, I went to the [Denver] Folklore Center and said, “Teach me the chords of ‘Hey Joe.’” But I forgot to go to the A, so I’ve been doing “Hey Joe” without the A forever.

E

Why has it stayed with you for so long?When I do a concert, I play all my songs, which a lot of people don’t know, and as soon as I start “Hey Joe,” everybody starts clapping. Because they know it, like, “OK, here’s something I can relate to.” And it helps suck in the crowd. We usually do it for about 15, 20 minutes. In Europe, we do it for about half an hour. Now, on the album, I have eight of my other songs on there, but you can’t really tell, because it feels like you’re in “Hey Joe” the whole time.

When did you know the music on this album would be continuous?

When I first thought about it. See, this is my 14th album, and every time I do one, it gets harder, not easier. It’s like a riddle: How can you be different, but yet the same? Because if I do something the way I always do it, people will say, “He’s already done that. Why bother?” If I do something too different, they’ll go, “Well, that’s not very Otis.” So as a singer-songwriter, I thought if I created the illusion I was making a cover song the title of my album, it would be different. I decided to make the album a journey, where you start listening to “Hey Joe,” but end up listening to Otis.

CONT. ON PG. 21

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20 September 2015 OTIS TAYLOR

THE MINIMALIST

Ask Otis Taylor to name his Top 5 acoustic blues albums, and the question falls flat. “I don’t listen to albums like some people do,” says Taylor, whose 14-fret H model signa-ture Santa Cruz guitar is a main-stay of that company’s product line. “I just hear songs.”

So I ask: How about five songs? “I don’t even know songs,” says Taylor, who then names “Death Letter Blues” by Son House, who he’d seen perform in 1966. Instead, Taylor paraphrases his favorite blues line, taken from “Hellhound on My Trail” by Robert Johnson. “‘If

today was Christmas Eve, if today was Christmas Eve, then tomorrow would be Christmas Day,’” he says. “That blows me away. I don’t know why.”

He’s stopped before the second half of the couplet—“All I would need is my little sweet rider just to pass the time away,

to pass the time away”—which resolves the first, so I ask if there’s more.

“No, just that line,” he says. “It’s so profound. If you’re still alive, it’ll be Christmas Day.” —K.B.

Son House is one of Taylor’s favorite artists

EV AN S IM O N E 018-021_273_Taylor.indd 20 7/8/15 2:02 PM

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‘I’M A MINIMALIST

MUSICIAN. IT ISN’T

HOW MANY NOTES

YOU PLAY, IT’S

HOW YOU PLAY

THAT ONE NOTE.’

OTIS TAYLOR

What made it so hard?

Usually, when you do an album, you record all t h e s o n g s , r i g h t ? T h e n y o u p i c k o u t t h e sequence. Well, I couldn’t do it that way. I had to have “Hey Joe” at the beginning, “Hey Joe” at the end, and bring everything into the middle. So I changed the lyrics to a song I’d written a long time ago, “Cold at Midnight,” and wrote some new songs: “The Heart Is a Muscle,” “Peggy Lee,” “Red Meat.”

What’s behind the song ‘Red Meat’?

Sometimes you eat the meat and sometimes the meat eats you. Sometimes you fall in love and it’s good. Sometimes you fall in love and it’s bad. That’s “Red Meat.” It’s about how deci-sions make us. Every decision affects the world, affects us, affects our family. You get married, you get divorced: “I loved you, but now I don’t love you.” Every second, we make a decision that changes our life, or somebody else makes a decision that changes our life. Is that too profound?

What do you teach people on guitar?

How to play one note. How to feel one note. And how to get into the groove. That’s all I teach them. I’m a minimalist musician. It isn’t how many notes you play, it’s how you play that one note.

Are you thinking about that when you write?

I just play. I just write the songs, and they’re gone. Songs for me are like dreams—I do it,

and then it’s out of my head, I don’t think about it anymore. I’m not that deep. See, I don’t really feel like I’m a dark person. Sometimes I have to talk about my songs, and I say, “I’m just dark. If I had to sing ‘Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O,’ I’d add ‘and the cow died.’” I can see the dark side of a song in a millionth of a second. And go there. Intensely. It’s nothing I con-sciously do, it’s just in my instincts. Michael Jordan can fly. I can get dark. AG

What’s the most important decision you made in designing a signature guitar with Santa Cruz?

I only wanted 14 frets. No frets over the body. Because I’m not a very technical player, I can’t even barre, so I’m not going to go way up the neck. I thought that made it way prettier. I have a theory that the smaller the guitar, the better the sound. Like a violin is very small, but the sound is so intense. And they made it deeper, so I could get more bass, because I need to have the balance of sounds.

What does trance blues mean to you?

Trance blues is trance music, but it’s blues. Like voodoo music is trance music. Mississippi Hill Country music, Malian music, Ravi Shankar is trance. Anything that’s repetitive, with no chord changes. When we first started the band, we’d play a song and people would go, “Oh, that’s a nice hook.” Five minutes later, they’d get bored, wonder where the chord changes are. But by ten minutes, they’ve forgotten completely, they’re just lost in it. You have to bore people with trance before you can suck them in.

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22 September 2015 B R IAN G LA S S 022-028_273_Haynes.indd 22 7/2/15 11:47 AM

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INTO THE MYSTIC

_{Southern-rock iconoclast Warren Haynes hitches a ride}

with Railroad Earth on his new acoustic-driven solo album

By Pat Moran

arren Haynes says the first take of a brand-new song is like a first date. “You’re hyper-aware. You’re on your best behavior. But when the song is fresh, your ideas are also fresh. You’re rolling with the flow and whatever happens at the moment—if it’s good—is carved in time.”

In casual T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, the guitar adept, Gov’t Mule founder, and Allman Brothers alumnus seems down to earth and com-fortable anywhere—even in the elegant upper sitting room of Charleston’s Francis Marion Hotel, an ornate 90-year-old establishment around the corner from the music hall where Gov’t Mule will play later this evening. He leans forward as he describes the recording process and genesis of Ashes & Dust (Provogue), his new acoustic-accented solo album.

Throughout his career Haynes has compiled dozens of songs he composed on acoustic guitar. A few are current, but some go back 30 years. “They all fit together,” Haynes says. “They didn’t belong on a Gov’t Mule project, an Allman Brothers project, or even my last solo record [2011’s Man in Motion]. They come from an Appalachian and Celtic folk direction— singer/songwriter-type songs.”

One of those songs, the country- and Latin-tinged “Spots of Time,” was bookmarked for an Allman Brothers project. “It would have been on the final Allman Brothers record, had we made that record,” he explains. “One of the reasons I wanted to record ‘Spots of Time’ for [Ashes & Dust] was to take advantage of the arrangement we’d worked up onstage.”

Many of the titles on the new album’s track-list are of similar vintage, dating back to 2010. “Before I recorded Man in Motion, I was going to cut a record with Levon Helm, Leon Russell, and [Hall and Oates and session bassist] T-Bone Wolk.” Though written on acoustic guitar, the songs “would have been a little more electric, more soul and R&B influenced,” Haynes says. However, when Wolk, and then Helm, passed away, “the project just disintegrated.”

Yet the songs remained. Haynes started playing those soulful numbers in a different manner—dusky acoustic arrangements that harked back to the roots and mountain music he heard growing up in Asheville, North Caro-lina. It took the involvement of Railroad Earth to give Haynes’ orphaned tunes a new life. The newgrass-influenced Americana sextet first caught Haynes’ ear in 2009 when they opened for the Allman Brothers at Red Rocks.

“I’m not sure what I expected,” Haynes says, but Railroad Earth defied his preconceptions, and he became a fan of the Stillwater, New Jersey, band. When Haynes and the combo found themselves sharing a bill at DelFest in 2011, Haynes invited the band onstage to flesh out his acoustic set. “The gig was really cool, very loose, but it had a vibe,” he says.

In 2012, the vibe intensified at two solo shows at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, where Railroad Earth joined Haynes onstage again. “We were better prepared, but it was still spontaneous. The chemistry was there, and I started thinking, ‘Maybe this is the way I should do the next record.’”

ast December, at Barber Shop Studios i n L a k e H o p a t c o n g , N e w J e r s e y, Haynes and Railroad Earth started recording songs with an acoustic/Americana approach.

Lashings of soaring fiddle, shimmering man-dolin, and percolating banjo gave old songs, like “Is It Me or You,” a fresh lease on life. Haynes, who originally composed the tune on acoustic guitar, felt that “playing [the song] that way made sense.” It also made sense to apply the recording method used on “Is It Me or You” to the rest of the sessions.

“It’s all live. [Railroad Earth] and I set up in the big room—myself, Andy Goessling [acoustic guitar] and John Skehan [mandolin]. Tim Carbone played fiddle and Carey Harmon played drums in isolated rooms that we could see. Andrew Altman, on upright bass, was the farthest away,” but still in view of his fellow players. That way, Haynes and Railroad Earth c a p t u r e d t h e e n e r g y o f e v e r y o n e p l a y i n g together in the same space. It had a practical application, too. Since Haynes likes to switch up arrangements and chords on the fly, band members needed to see him when he cued or called out changes.

“We got a chemistry working and went with it,” Haynes says. “That’s my favorite way to record.”

That chemistry gelled three days into the recording process with “Hallelujah Boulevard,” an epic reverie that wraps echoing guitar and silvery mandolin in a violin sirocco. “It’s a nar-rative, so there’s not a lot of room for soloing.

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WARREN HAYNES

Railroad Earth

(Rear L to R) John Skehan, Carey Harmon, Andrew Altman, Andy Goessling ERIN MIL LS (Front) Todd Sheaffer, Tim Carbone Below Warren Haynes D AN NY C LI N C H

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It’s more of a conversational piece,” Haynes says. “I thought it would benefit from recording around midnight. I said to the guys, ‘Let’s wait until the end of the night and capture whatever happens.’ They all agreed not to listen to the playback until the next morning.”

Haynes played the song solo for Railroad Earth, and then gave the group three words of instruction: “Think Astral Weeks,” Haynes said, referring to Van Morrison’s magisterial, mystic 1968 masterpiece, “and everybody knew what I was talking about.”

Haynes feels “Hallelujah Boulevard,” like most of the other cuts recorded, benefited from his “three take” rule. “I like to do things in threes. Once you get past that third take you’re trying to re-create something you’ve already done, usually to no avail. The early takes are better because you’re not thinking, you’re responding.”

That intuitive approach informed much of the material on Ashes & Dust. “Blue Maiden’s Tale,” a gossamer Celtic ballad, “has this surreal dreamlike interlude. It’s psychedelic with acoustic instrumentation—‘Psyche-Celtic,’” Haynes says, laughing. “That was impromptu. Every take was different and we really liked the one with the interlude.”

The album’s title also came unbidden in a late-night epiphany—“I was listening to one of the playbacks of ‘Spots of Time’ and the line, ‘Memories that to me are everything, but to someone else might be only ashes and dust,’ jumped out. I realized there were all these ref-erences to ashes and dust throughout the record.” Noting that the album title “conjures up a folksy image,” Haynes says the songs “are very personal. They represent important memo-ries in my life.”

To capture those memories, Haynes and Railroad Earth relied on a delicate acoustic weave of fiddle, banjo, mandolin, and guitar. “I played three different [custom] Rockbridge acoustic guitars on the record [including a dreadnought] and I played my Washburn signa-ture model acoustic.” Haynes also played a 1964 Epiphone acoustic, and he used his 1974 Guild acoustic to provide the ghostly slide guitar on “Glory Road,” the album’s eerie high-desert lament.

“I played a lot of Martins on that record,” Railroad Earth guitarist Andy Goessling adds by phone a week later at Brothers Music Shop in Wind Gap, Pennsylvania. The shop is restoring a few of Andy’s guitars, including the 1980 Martin M-38 he played on Ashes & Dust. “I was playing the M-38 and putting it on the seventh-fret capo. I wanted the Martin’s tone, but I didn’t want to take over the track. So I had [the M-38] in open D. That way I could play in a

tuning that was a little lighter, a little airier, than what Warren was doing with full-on rhythm.”

“There were tunes where Warren played the whole track on electric. When he wasn’t on acoustic, I played rhythm with a ’42 Gibson Southern Jumbo.”

Goessling also laid down rhythm tracks with his 1968 Guild D-44. “I don’t use it a lot live, b u t i n t h e s t u d i o i t h a s g r e a t s e p a r a t i o n between the strings,” he says. “It’s a pearwood model, and something about the wood gives it this transparent sound.” The Guild lays down a solid rhythm, “but still leaves plenty of room for all the other instruments, like the mandolin and bass,” he says.

hile Haynes played and was sur-rounded by acoustics on the album, he just as often played electrics. “Much of the time I tracked with an electric, [while] Andy tracked with an acoustic,” he says. The exceptions are the all-acoustic “Glory Road,” “Blue Maiden’s Tale,” and Haynes’ con-temporary Woody Guthrie tribute, “Beat Down the Dust.” For the hardscrabble Appalachian ballad “Company Man,” he tracked with an acoustic, then overdubbed slide.

Haynes feels that, despite the use of elec-trics, an acoustic vibe remains ingrained in the album, in part because of the electric guitar he played throughout the project. His D’Angelico hollow-body “is more like an acoustic instru-ment,” he says, “because it has a wooden bridge like an acoustic. You can’t play the blues on it. It’s not designed for bending strings and vibrato.

“I keep flatwound strings on that guitar, so it has an old-school sort of sound.” The guitar is also versatile: “I can set it where it’s on the verge of being dirty and you can’t tell that it’s a D’Angelico. But if I turn it down, it cleans up nicely and has this fat, warm sound that I love.”

Calling the D’Angelico “a kind of jazz guitar,” Haynes says it changed the way he played. “Stranded in Self-Pity,” which couples a jaunty Django Reinhardt shuffle with New Orleans swing, reflects the D’Angelico’s acous-tic-jazz influence.

W

‘I’VE GOT TO AIM HIGH

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TO THE GREATEST

MUSIC OF ALL TIME.’

WARREN HAYNES

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More often, however, the sound of each song “was chosen to fit the mood, and then the mood would turn around and influence the sound. It was a snowball effect,” says Haynes. For instance, the sentimental and heartbreaking “New Year’s Eve” benefits from a country-folk a p p r o a c h , a n d t h e d e f i a n t w o r k i n g m a n ’ s anthem “Coal Tattoo” employs rattling mando-lin and bluegrass banjo in a high-country tale of a union vs. mining-company clash.

The latter is one of the album’s political songs, Haynes says, along with “Company Man” and “Beat Down the Dust,” in which he adopts the persona of a heartless oligarch. “I think 99 percent of the people who hear the song are going to realize that’s a character and not a very savory one,” Haynes says, adding that the album started out being much more political. “We recorded more than 30 songs. I picked the 13 that worked together to make the most cohesive statement, while also having a rhyth-mic and melodic arc,” he says.

Whether stating a message or spinning a tale, Haynes often started with an arrangement based on his standpoint as a solo performer, but of course he accepted new ideas from his col-laborators. It was inspiring, he says, “because each new song was getting this fresh treatment of having just been learned, arranged, and per-formed for the first few times.”

At the same time, inspiration and improvisa-tion had to be balanced with structure, and the stories Haynes wanted to tell with his songs. “With the story-songs I usually write the lyrics first because I can figure out what mood the words project and write music accordingly. I find it easier to pair the two that way,” he says. “There have been times when I wrote music that I really liked and then I wrote lyrics to it, but the two didn’t work together. They didn’t sell each other. The beautiful thing about music is that the right music will make the lyric heavier than it already is. If you can capture a lyric and the music that best sells it together, it’s like another dimension. It’s beyond music. It’s beyond poetry.”

With an eclectic solo album that combines folk, acoustic jazz, and traditional story-songs into a cohesive whole, as well as a sympathetic set of collaborators in Railroad Earth, Haynes sees Ashes & Dust as a signpost to his next solo project. “We recorded a lot of material and I think we’re going to go back in and record even more,” he says. “There’s more of this to come.”

Despite his satisfaction and success with acoustic material, Haynes feels a folk approach is not the path Gov’t Mule will take, at least not in the near future. “I think the next Gov’t Mule WARREN HAYNES

record will be like our first two records,” he says, “but with more emphasis on instrumental passages.”

That said, it’s possible that some of the new acoustic-derived material may still show up in a Mule set. “There are a couple of songs that we recorded that aren’t on Ashes & Dust that could become Gov’t Mule songs as well,” Haynes says. One song that did make the album, “Hallelujah Boulevard,” “could be a good Gov’t Mule song because of its psychedelic nature,” he adds. “There are times [onstage] when we go into a trancelike vibe as a release from harder rocking material we did earlier,” he says.

In many ways, a Mule set is as much a bal-ancing act as his current solo album, Haynes says. It’s all about “striking the midpoint between hitting people over the head and mas-saging them with music, between songs that are stretched to improvisational spaces and songs that tell a story.

“I wouldn’t want to be in a band that just did improv, and I wouldn’t be in a band that only played short songs all night. But it sure is fun to experiment with a balance between the two.”

ater that evening at the Charleston Music Hall, Haynes and Gov’t Mule walk that tightrope with apparent ease. Haynes’ ricocheting bent-note electric blues on “Larger Than Life” flow deftly into Mule keyboardist Danny Louis’ rolling Booker T-style fills on “Flip Wilson.” Loping reggae meets hard-rock crunch on the Bob Marley and the Wailers cover “Lively Up Yourself,” while Haynes snaps up a megaphone to lead the crowd in a call-and-response chant.

Over the course of two energetic sets, Haynes’ and Gov’t Mule’s experiment proves to be a success, balancing angular psychedelic rock with liquid B.B. King guitar fills, free-form percussion-driven freak-out with ominous dark-matter trance.

As the band displays mastery of technique, a telepathic feel for improvisation, and an impressive knowledge of music styles, I recall Haynes telling me the one quality he rates above all: “When you hear music we deem timeless, it’s the honesty that prevails. New technology can make a poor singer sound pretty good, but you’re never going to be able to push a button and make somebody sound like Ray Charles or Otis Redding.

“So I’ve got to aim high and be ready to be compared to the greatest music of all time. But the only way that I can do that is if I’m inspired for the right reason. I can’t dilute my inspira-tion with ambiinspira-tion.” AG

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nce looked upon as country music’s poorer, Appalachian kin, bluegrass has, of late, found an unlikely home in the ivory tower. In fact, 17 US colleges and universities now offer roots-music programs for flatpickers, fiddlers, banjo, and mandolin players, and the like. The burgeoning move-ment has not only given credence to the notion of bluegrass as an art form, it has also helped redefine how music is taught.

“More and more schools are incorporating bluegrass into their music programs,” says Andy Carlson, director of the bluegrass program at Denison University, a bucolic liberal arts college in Granville, Ohio. “The attitude is changing nationally, and bluegrass is no longer looked down upon.”

While the rise in the number of college-level bluegrass offerings over the past four decades doesn’t exactly constitute a flood, it does repre-sent a sea change in music education: A tradi-tionally down-home, do-it-yourself genre now SPECIAL FOCUS ACOUSTIC GUITARS IN THE CLASSROOM

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finds itself being embraced by the formal, often exclusionary world of academia.

Traditionally passed down from generation to generation, from ear to ear, bluegrass has endured, not in the form of sheet music, but via memory, where it continues to evolve. In con-trast, university music programs have typically relied on fixed classical notation and tablature, presenting a challenge to educators looking to incorporate bluegrass into the curriculum.

For Carlson, the question of how to teach bluegrass is personal. At age five, he was intro-duced to music by his grandfather, Georgia fiddler Earl Murphy. This organic approach— learning by listening—dovetailed with Carlson’s p o s t - g r a d u a t e w o r k a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f Georgia. “I trained in the Suzuki program. It’s a method of learning classical music much like learning a language,” Carlson says. “Music, like speech, is sound, and the Suzuki method relied on listening instead of reading. It’s teaching music the same way my grandpa taught me.”

After starting as a six-student performance group in the year 2000, Denison’s bluegrass major was formalized a decade later, requiring students to take coursework in music theory and the history of bluegrass, folk, and country music, in addition to mandatory participation in the bluegrass ensemble. Carlson’s modest performance group’s numbers quickly swelled, and the ensemble, which performs regularly, has since become a regional draw.

“We had to move from our 300-seat recital hall because the fire marshal shut us down and the university president couldn’t find a seat,” Carlson says. “Now we play in Swasey Chapel, which seats 900.”

As word spread about the new program, the number of students applying for the major shot up, too. “It got to the point where I couldn’t teach everybody, and the school allowed me to bring in a co-director, Casey Cook, a wonderful flatpicker who has played with the Dappled Grays,” Carlson says.

Given that Cook had never earned a music degree, his addition to the school’s faculty was somewhat controversial, but Carlson argued that Cook’s background as a working musician would bolster the program.

“It’s something the music education world is going to have to wrap themselves around,” Carlson says. “While an instructor might not have a music degree, that’s not the important component here with this music.”

In the classroom, both men rarely use sheet music. “Ninety-five percent of what we do here is learned by ear,” Cook says. “Occasionally, stu-dents are given a piece of music or a tab, but only to get them comfortable. We teach them to read chord charts to get them used to the Nash-ville numbering system, but almost everything is done by live recordings.”

a s t Te n n e s s e e S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y (ETSU) pushes the division between academic and intuitive learning a step further. The school’s Bluegrass, Old Time, and Country Music Studies program—which instructed close to 200 students out of a total population of 15,000 last year—is not even part of the school’s music department. Instead, it falls under the Appalachian studies umbrella.

“The music department wanted us to teach Western classical music,” program director Daniel Boner says. “They said students should learn about tonal counterpoints. Now you can do very well by learning those things and applying it to your music, but that’s not what our students need. We attract fiddlers and banjo players. If the first thing we put in front of them is a Bach choral, they’re not going to be interested in that.”

Founded in 1982, the program has pro-duced such notable graduates as Blue Highway guitarist Tim Stafford, Alison Krauss and Union Station bassist Barry Bales, and country-music star Kenny Chesney, perhaps because it helps prepare students for life on the road. When he was a student at the university, Boner himself toured Japan, England, Scotland, and Belgium with the college’s bluegrass band. “I was just a kid who grew up in rural southern New Jersey in farmland country and never really thought I would get to do things like that,” Boner says.

Still, even though he first learned to play fiddle and guitar as a child by ear, Boner acknowledges that book learning can be a useful part of a bluegrass education. “There might be supplemental material like tablature [in the program],” Boner says. “We might use a Nashville-style chart. Students can take theory classes. We want them to understand standard musical notation, to understand chords, but at no point will they come to a band

E

‘AT NO POINT WILL THEY

COME TO A BAND CLASS

AND PLAY BY SHEET MUSIC.

IT’S NOT WHAT WE DO.

IT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS.’

ETSU’S DANIEL BONER

Left

ETSU’s Bluegrass Pride Band, one of 40 in their program

Below

Guitarist Courtney Hartman of Della Mae is a Berklee grad.

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SPECIAL FOCUS ACOUSTIC GUITARS IN THE CLASSROOM

class and play by sheet music. It’s not what we do. It’s not how it works.”

Similar to Denison’s curriculum, ETSU places students in bands, and performance is required for matriculation. In that way, the uni-versity stresses a cooperative, rather than con-servatory approach.

“It’s more important that students be able to play by ear, improvise, write their own mate-rial, and create their own sound. That’s the way this music has always been,” Boner says. “Everybody comes with their own little touch on their instrument. It’s important to help them expand on that, rather than making everyone sound . . . the same.”

ack in 1975, South Plains College, a two-year school in the tiny west Texas town of Levelland, became the first institution to award diplomas in roots music when it offered a bluegrass minor. The reason it did was simple, students demanded it. “Initially John Hartin was the guy they hired to run our program,” says Joe Carr, associate pro-fessor of commercial music and director of the Bluegrass and Country Music Program at South

Plains. “He started teaching country music. But in between classes, students would start playing bluegrass for fun.”

A program that literally got its start in a converted broom closet now serves 250 country and bluegrass students. Yet there have been growing pains along the way. “The difficulty with this type of program is there’s no estab-lished protocol or curriculum that you could plug into,” says Carr.

Carr stresses that the school’s mission evolved “to prepare our majors for a career in the music industry,” and integrates a trade school approach to teaching.

“Even if you come in as a guitar player, you’ll get a basic mastery of recording tech-niques,” Carr says. “You get to be in the studio and understand how it works.”

Carr, a professional musician who played guitar and mandolin with influential bluegrass combo Country Gazette, joined the faculty in 1984. He advocates an organic approach to teaching that utilizes memory and aural tradi-tion, but only up to a point.

Students also learn tablature, standard notation, and theory before settling on a

primary instrument and being placed into per-f o r m a n c e e n s e m b l e s . P r i v a t e l e s s o n s a r e required, and students are expected to hit per-formance benchmarks set each year by the department.

“It’s probably the most professional setting these students have been in,” says Carr. “The groups work all semester to develop a 30- minute set to play in our performance hall before a live audience.”

If South Plains’ impressive alumni is any indication, their approach seems to be working. Lee Ann Womack, mandolin and banjo prodigy Ron Block (Alison Krauss), and bassist Mike Bub (Del McCoury) have all graduated from the college.

“Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks was here as well,” says Carr, adding that Maines went on to study at the institution that most in the field consider the gold standard of roots-music educa-tion, Boston’s Berklee College of Music.

Matt Glaser, artistic director of Berklee’s American Roots Music Program, characterizes the school in less rarified terms, however. “Berklee has a long tradition as a blue collar, dirt-under-the-fingernails kind of school,” says

B

Hayes Griffin, left, of the April Verch Trio, is an alum of Denison.

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Glaser, who is also the fiddle player for the Wayfaring Strangers.

After 28 years chairing Berklee’s String Department (he has since been replaced), Glaser felt constricted by administrative duties. In 2009, he went to the college president with a proposition. “I said, ‘Why don’t we create a program that is based on the educational needs of these folk-based musicians.’ So we created the American Roots Program.”

Berklee strings instructor Joe Walsh, who has played and recorded with Darol Anger, the Gibson Brothers, and Joy Kills Sorrow, signed on as managing director of the program and helped create the roots-music minor.

“Roots minors, like all Berklee students, are expected to read music,” Walsh says. “In addi-tion to a core curriculum including harmony, ear training, arranging, and private lessons, there is a menu of roots-related classes and ensembles that students can choose from.”

“We bring in visiting professors like Tim O’Brien, Bruce Molsky, and Paul Rishell,” Glaser says. “Students get to study with these people for no credit, for free, and for no grade.”

In that sense, the Roots Music Program teaches bluegrass in the traditional folk manner. “The whole rural idea of master players and teachers just spending time with people is a great model for learning,” Glaser says. “We’re using the physical structure of an academic institution to make that happen.”

To be sure, one unique challenge for these programs is accommodating the full-time stu-dents who are also busy launching their own music careers.

“We work with students, so they can be available when opportunity knocks,” says Carr. “Part of our business is training students to be professional players.”

Guitarist and Berklee alumna Courtney Hartman found juggling work and school tricky at times, particularly after she joined contem-porary Americana quintet Della Mae. “My last year at school, I was touring about seven weeks out of each semester,” Hartman says. “Matt Glaser, in particular, helped me with advice and direction during that time.”

uitarist Hayes Griffin, who currently t o u r s w i t h f i d d l e r a n d B e r k l e e alumna April Verch, found Denison to be equally accommodating when, during his junior year, he began playing in a bluegrass band with former Denison professor Richard Hood. “At that point in my career as a student, gigging out was actually beneficial to my studies,” Griffin says. “It allowed me to put what I had learned into practice. Touring with

April is a fast-paced, on-the-go job.” He credits his college training for making him “musically quick on my feet.”

Fiddler Kenzie Maynard, a recent Denison grad, agrees. “Getting experience playing in front of people is a really important aspect of my performance major,” Maynard says. “In the end, that’s what it all comes down to.”

Maynard believes that Denison’s program has brought her up to speed in four years, allowing her to contend with musicians who have been playing bluegrass all their lives.

Though each school may successfully blend down-home training with book learning in its own way, academic institutions are ultimately way stations for some musicians, rather than a final destination.

“We’re trying to create a model for our stu-dents to spend their entire lives mastering music,” Glaser says, adding that the learning process applies to everyone. “I’ve been into this stuff for 44 years, and I feel that I know nothing. After all this time, I’m just getting

started.” AG

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