Defining American Primitive
Dan Lambert

All of this seems like such a long time ago… a lifetime really. The 60s had become the 70s, and John Fahey’s Takoma Records was setting the standard for a style known as American Primitive guitar. I always cringed at that tag. Like any other name given to an artistic school, it was a bit too much of a “once-over-lightly” description, with a tendency to restrict rather than include. And this genre certainly included… everything. But the name has stuck around, and it defines an era, like the terms impressionism or surrealism, so we’ll go with it.

American Primitive had its roots in the solo guitar technique of the blues and hillbilly players of the 1920s. In the 1970s you could check out all the country blues recordings initially released on 78s and now re-released on labels like Yazoo, Biograph and Arhoolie. That’s where you would hear Blind Arthur Blake, Blind Willie Johnson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, as well as Barbecue Bob and Bo Weavil Jackson.

On the hillbilly side there was County Records with their Old Time Mountain Guitar album featuring 78s recorded between 1926 and 1930. County seemed to have that side of the market cornered, although there was a great Frank Hutchinson reissue on Rounder, and RCA had reissued the Jimmy Rodgers material with Cliff Carlisle on slide guitar. If you wanted to hear old Sam McGee 78s or Riley Puckett tearing it up behind Uncle Dave Macon in the Skillet Lickers, County Records was the place to go.

Between the influence of black blues and white hillbilly, you get the “American” of American Primitive. Most of these cats were playing fingerstyle, although enough of the hillbilly guys used flat picks. What fingerstyle technique allowed you to do was get the bass, chords, and melody going at the same time. It’s a variation on that technique where the “Primitive” comes in. Instead of approaching it like a classical guitar player, fitting the right-hand picking to the individual piece, the player approaches it almost backwards, getting a right-hand picking pattern or “roll” going, then fitting the piece to that roll. Banjo players do that all the time, getting patterns going, and you hear it in the alternating bass ragtime type playing of the country blues players. It’s why the rhythm is so strong.

But what set American Primitive players apart? The answer to this question is what makes the genre so hard to define. Sure, it included blues and hillbilly influences, but anything was fair game. It was this “kitchen sink” mentality that made the genre so interesting. [Ken, I hate how he does "made the genre so..." twice in one paragraph, but if you're cool with it...] If you had perfected a little melody from a Brahms orchestrated piece, you threw it in, or what about some of those John Coltrane things you’d been messing with? There were some nice ideas in all that Ravi Shankar sitar stuff you’d been listening to, why not try to arrange some of it for guitar? Besides, the Indian music idea of melodies against a droning background lent itself perfectly to open tunings and right-hand rolls.

The twelve string guitars used on several of the pieces in this compilation also fit the open tunings and rolls, as does the use of slide guitar. A few well-placed chords, open strings ringing out, can sound pretty good on a twelve string. Get a little melody going on the upper strings while keeping that bass going, and you’ve damn near got an orchestra in your lap. Add slide guitar to the mix, and you have Robert Johnson meets Julian Bream meets some acoustic guitar wall of sound.

I think that’s what made the music so exciting and so mind-blowing. Everyone had their different little take on it, it was world music before that term came into vogue, tied together by the fascinating sound of that uniquely American instrument, the steel string guitar.

Defining Fingerstyle
Jim Ohlschmidt

It’s been said that radio was a “theater of the mind” when, in the 1940s and 50s, a small cast of actors and an organist would gather around a microphone and whisk listeners off to a world of drama, comedy, or science fiction using only their voices, music, and a few sound effects. In this sense, solo fingerpicking is like an “orchestra of the mind” in that a player can conjure a vast musical landscape with just a guitar and some imagination.

Fingerpicking differs from other guitar styles because it simultaneously combines bass, chords, and melody—like a miniature trio of bass, rhythm, and lead guitars on one instrument. Typically, the right-hand thumb plays the low strings to create a rhythm and play bass notes and chords, while the right-hand fingers play the melody and other notes that harmonize with the melody (piano players use both hands and all their fingers to do this) [Ken, is that piano parenthetical necessary?]. In many cases, the tuning of the guitar is altered to expand the natural sonority of the instrument and its harmonic possibilities.

Sometimes all the strings are tuned to play a chord such as G, D, or C when strummed. Known as “open tuning,“ this technique has been in use for more than a hundred years and is heard all over the musical map—from early parlor guitar pieces and Hawaiian lap steel guitar to Delta blues and contemporary folk. Solo fingerpickers like the deep, low bass notes that open tunings provide, and while open tunings can simplify left hand fingerings, creative players use open tunings to explore new chord voices and harmonies that standard tuning doesn’t always allow. Just about everyone who plays slide guitar uses open tunings.

The acoustic guitar of choice for most solo fingerpickers is the steel-string flat top, whether it be a large, boisterous dreadnaught, a demure orchestra model (OM), or a diminutive parlor guitar. Unlike its nylon-stringed classical brethren, the acoustic flat top (as opposed to an arch top) with the deep, punchy bass and crisp, articulate treble of steel strings produces a wide range of sounds, from delicate, bell-like harmonics to thundering open chords. Some players prefer the sound and feel of bare fingers or fingernails for picking the strings, where others use a plastic thumbpick to get more “thump” out of the bass notes. And there’s still another subset of players who use a thumbpick and metal fingerpicks to maximize their volume and the intensity of their attack on the strings.

Finally, there is the six-string versus the twelve-string guitar for the solo fingerpicker to consider. You could think of a twelve-string guitar as a six-string on steroids. With six pairs of strings, the twelve-string is a formidable beast in terms of tuning, maintenance, and playability. But with each of the four bass strings paired with a string tuned one octave higher, and the two treble strings paired in unison, the gush of sound and the instant harmonization that springs from the nimble hands of a 12-string virtuoso such as Leo Kottke is stunning. It’s a daunting instrument that many struggle to master.

Whatever one’s choice of instrument, a solo fingerpicker can create all manner of music fully and completely, without the necessity of other musicians. It is a solitary pursuit well-suited to those guitarists who desire to create something all their own, by their own hands, entirely of their own direction, that expresses without the limitations of words what they hear in their head and feel in their heart and soul. Guitar Soli is the sound of imagination, invention, and a lot of practice.

Dana Westover
Beginning

“I can't really remember how I came across steel finger picks, but I immediately loved the way I could get these lovely bell sounds from my guitar with them, and also little rhythmic patterns to sing with.”

One of the challenges of modern acoustic guitar music was the question of how to best integrate the big city’s sensibility into a fundamentally country sound. Born in New York City but raised all over rural America, Dana Westover first started playing guitar in Whitesburg, Kentucky at the age of nine. He began on a little plywood guitar, banging and playing by ear along with Duane Eddy and Everly Brothers tunes he heard on the radio. He took influence from everything around him: bird songs he heard while walking in the woods; Ravel and Satie; a copy of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue he received as a gift from his older brother. At ten he took up the trumpet, which he excelled at and would later study at Montreal’s Schulich School of Music at McGill University. Oddly, he never sought training for the guitar, although over the years he learned to wield it deftly.

Westover’s first album, Memorial To Fear, is a delicate impressionistic masterpiece of song craft, but the introductory symphony, the aptly titled “Beginning,” is a summary of his vision: abstract and dark but undeniably melodic. The 1971 Wolf Music release features both six and twelve string guitars, but on “Beginning” Westover plays an Epiphone Texan model—essentially a Gibson J45 with an Epiphone neck and a bolt-on bridge. Nearly 40 years later it is still his primary guitar.

Though the album fell short of making Westover a household name, for the last 20 years his voice has been heard on Boston’s WUMB as host of the Folk Odyssey program. His two 1990s albums, Music For The Inside Eye and Hieroglyphs, both every bit as striking as his debut, ruminate on themes Westover has been championing since he struck his very first chord.

Ted Lucas
Raga In “D”

In 1968, Ted Lucas returned to Detroit following a stint in Los Angeles that saw the release of Reprise singles with his psych-rock acts Spike Drivers and Misty Wizards. A new father at the time, he paid the bills by working as Motown’s in-house Indian instruments specialist, playing sitar on tracks by the Temptations and the Supremes. At home he focused on his acoustic guitar technique, lending most of his attention to the raga form and studying with Harihar Rao and, later, Ravi Shankar. A manic perfectionist, Lucas spent days at home recording miles of raga guitar tracks, more than likely on a Gibson J-45. “Raga in ‘D’,” the track that opens The Detroit Folk Scene, Volume 1 compilation (Volume 2 never surfaced), may or may not be a transcription of an Indian raga that had come before it.

Lucas was known as a rambunctious spirit and practical joker. Around this time he founded an eclectic blues/modal/Middle Eastern/folk band called the Horny Toads. An omnivorous listener and a night owl, Lucas could rock out with the best of them, but left to his own devices, his heart seems to have been with the quiet, mysterious chords exemplified by this recording. He belongs to that very small circle of solo guitarists whose work can reasonably be described as “psychedelic.”

On Detroit Folk Scene, Volume 1, Ted Lucas’s name on the cover is twice as large as any other. As liner notes author Mike Gormley told Numero, “If [Ted] played, he was the headliner,” and not just because of his bit of national exposure with Spike Drivers. Lucas’s masterpiece, sometimes referred to as The Om Album but actually a self-titled record, would follow in 1974 (with a little-known stealth remix appearing in 1976). Lucas continued to play guitar but never released another record. He died in 1992.

Scott Witte
Sailor’s Dream

The most raucous of all the compositions here comes courtesy of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin’s Scott Witte. Beginning in 1966 at the age of eight on a mahogany Epiphone, Witte was taken under the wing of an asteroid on the local bar rock scene and given private guitar lessons on the side. High school saw Witte go electric and form a group called the Seventh Circle, but his approach to guitar was permanently altered after he picked up a copy of the Fahey/Kottke/Lang album. Intent on learning complex finger style arrangements, he enrolled at the Milwaukee Conservatory under the auspices of studying flamenco guitar.

Witte gigged inconsistently through the latter half of the 70s, accumulating ten original songs along the way. Using money from his father and his job at a factory that made outboard motor fuel, Scott Witte recorded his debut album in 1980. No small fan of Lang and Kottke, Witte chose Minneapolis’s Sound 80 studio for recording, mixing, and mastering Sailor’s Dream. The album features an eclectic variety of compositions and includes different combinations of instruments, but the title track displays Witte’s most accomplished finger work, building and billowing at a rapid-fire pace on a flat top Mossman Tennessee 12 string.

Witte was aware of the self-determination of Fahey and his peers, but he also knew that there was little chance a label would release his recordings. Without a reputation or even a local following, he pressed up Sailor’s Dream on his own Piggy Rooster label. The cover art, done by a friend of Witte’s father, was made by pouring ink over glass and then etching away the image with a knife. Sold live from the stage and on consignment to a handful of Milwaukee record shops, the album was just barely available in Witte’s home state.

Shortly after the record was pressed, Witte moved to Santa Monica, California in hopes of attaching himself to the state’s burgeoning interest in New Age. He wound up as a disc jockey for a community radio show and frequently used copies of his own failed album as promotional giveaways. Scott Witte continues to write and play, recently recording his sophomore album after a brief 27-year break.

George Cromarty
Flight

George Cromarty’s introduction to the world was on the cover of Here They Are by a clean-cut folk duo called the Gold Coast Singers. Cromarty sits back-to-back with his lifelong friend Ed Rush, the latter’s smile is wide, the former’s more reserved, more thoughtful. Prior to investigation, it appears to be your standard Kingston Trio-inspired pop-folk, but even a cursory examination reveals something much more interesting. The record is humorous, even novelty, dare we say it, and would later receive support from Dr. Demento. The standout cut was “Plastic Jesus,” a fan favorite in the group’s native California for its playful yet surprisingly dark treatment of Bible-belt fundamentalism. Proof of its odd appeal and influence is the fact that “Plastic Jesus” has been covered by such divergent artists as Billy Idol, Lalo Schifrin, the Flaming Lips, and Paul Newman’s character Cool Hand Luke…and that’s in just the first four decades of the song’s existence.

Gold Coast Singers disbanded when Cromarty was drafted into the army in 1963. Upon his release, he returned to California but found that none of the familiar folkies he’d known in college were still hanging around; Cromarty settled instead into a quieter life in Morro Bay. Perhaps under the influence of the peaceful Pacific, he began to write in a softer, somewhat bereaved style, though not quite that of American Primitive. He had absorbed the same American roots as Fahey and had Robbie Basho’s delicate touch, but his virtuoso technique was at the root of the modernist approach that would later take hold of William Ackerman and his Windham Hill acolytes. Cromarty would, however, follow in Fahey’s footsteps, starting the Thistle label and, through the help of his friend George Winston, would wind up being distributed by Takoma. Thistle’s first album, 1973’s Grassroots Guitar, is without a doubt Cromarty’s masterwork, as evidenced by “Flight,” a song with so much color and movement, it achieves almost an instrumental narrative. It couldn’t have more voice even if he’d sung on it.

Gripped by depression and struggling with alcoholism, Cromarty stayed out of the studio for the rest of the decade but continued to write, practice, and perform. Finally, in 1983, he would record another album at the behest of Winston and his Dancing Cat label. A few years later he would marry and return to Fresno, California to put down roots and start a family. The last few years of his life were filled with peaks, but the valleys were much deeper. On February 12, 1992, George Cromarty took his own life.

Richard Crandell
Diagonal

After following a certain woman west in the early 1970s, Richard Crandell found himself living in a rooming house in Berkeley, California with little more than a Martin D28. Having no job and no prospects for paying work, he spent his time buying Fahey and Kottke LPs at Moe’s Records on Telegraph Avenue for $2, learning and transcribing them note for note before returning them for a full refund the next day. That same certain woman led him north to Eugene, Oregon, where she was living with Mark Zorn—John’s older brother—who actually owned the bulk of the albums Crandell had been buying and returning, allowing him to spend days, not hours, getting all the difficult parts down.

Oregon suited him well, and soon Crandell found himself living in a cut-rate apartment within shouting distance of Bill Bartells, a phenomenal Virginia-born guitar player. Bartells was extraordinarily proficient at an obscure method of playing called architectonics, a methodology that emphasized moving fingers about the frets in repetitive, tactile patterns regardless of harmony. Their collaborations pushed Crandell to another level, resulting in 1974’s “Rebecca.” Through an odd set of circumstances, he found himself backstage at a concert playing the tune for Mimi Farina. Leo Kottke overheard it, introduced himself, and asked for Crandell’s phone number. Later that night Crandell’s phone rang, and an invitation was tendered by Kottke to join him in his room at the Ramada. They stayed up all night exchanging songs and stories, and a few months later Kottke’s flawless version of “Rebecca” appeared on Kottke’s next LP, Chewing Pine.

In The Flower Of Our Youth was recorded in 1980 and pressed with the help of a loan from Crandell’s sister. The album was a long overdue recording that captured a decade’s worth of compositions. Many of the copies were sold at the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee where Crandell had landed a gig playing for several hours every single day of the event. This minor success lead to the Oregon Hill LP, a duet with his old friend Bartells.

In the late 1990s, Crandell found himself working as the tour bus driver for Thomas Mapfumo and managed to pick up the mbira while spending time with the band. He has since gained more national notoriety than he ever had for his guitar playing by cutting two discs of layered mbira music for old friend John Zorn’s envelope-pushing Tzadik label.

Daniel Hecht
Baba Dream Songs

“I listened to Segovia’s Masters Of The Guitar album until it wore so thin I could hear the tunes in the grooves on the other side.”

The second of our three Wisconsin players, Daniel Hecht was a conservatory-trained classical guitarist who spent his post-collegiate years living in chicken coops, writing songs at demolition derbies, and playing for grazing cows. Hecht did more than embrace the American Primitive aesthetic; he lived it.

“Baba Dream Songs” was written while Hecht was living in a commune near Madison, an environment that contributed heavily to the introspection that marks Hecht’s first compositions. Although Fahey was interested in issuing Hecht’s recordings on Takoma, it was his friendship with the modern classical composer Moondog, that influenced Hecht to go it alone and issue them privately. Dragon’s Egg Productions was founded to record and issue his first album, 1973’s Guitar, and it was a truly primitive affair. Pooling resources from his friends and family, Hecht pressed 1000 copies of the album and even conjured the crude but charming cover art, while his wife provided the pastoral sketch of their home on Old Sauk Road for the reverse side.

With a limited run and even more limited distribution, Guitar made little impact beyond the disciples of American Primitive. Jim Ohlschmidt, George Winston, and John Stropes proudly proclaim that it holds a spot in their record collection to this day, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a copy out in the world. A few years later, Fireheart/Fireriver, his second album, exceeded expectations, managing to sell several thousand copies and attract the attention of Ackerman and his then-infant Windham Hill label. Hecht and Winston would sign to the label in a matter of months, with the latter’s monumental success pushing Windham Hill’s stock in the marketplace way up. Daniel Hecht’s third and final album, Willow, benefited wildly from the label’s newfound success.

Sadly, Hecht’s guitar career was forced into decline due to a terrible bout with psoriasis that would take the skin of his hands when he played. At the end of a performance or recording session, his guitar was often a gory mess. Hecht was forced to stop playing through the mid-1980s, but after his psoriasis went into remission he staged one final six-week tour of auditoriums in China and was greeted by overwhelming crowds. After returning home, he tucked away his guitar and enrolled in an MFA program at the University of Iowa. While writing his six best-selling mystery novels, Daniel Hecht hasn’t had much time to play guitar anyway.

Jim Ohlschmidt
Delta Freeze

“I was mesmerized by all that music coming from just one instrument.”

Better known for its bratwurst than its thriving 60s garage rock scene, Sheboygan, Wisconsin is an out-of-the-way burg perfect for that teenage rite of passage: starting a band. Jim Ohlschmidt was one of hundreds, if not thousands, of Badger youth who caught the fuzz bug, plopping down $21 to rent an electric guitar and amp for three months and an extra $2 a week for lessons in the store’s basement. Ohlschmidt’s teacher, Rick Gustafson, played in the popular local band Loyal Opposition, automatically making his tutelage desirable.

Ohlschmidt’s introduction to fingerstyle was via Mason Williams’s platinum single, “Classical Gas,” which featured extraordinarily nimble guitar work amidst an abrasively bombastic pop-classical fusion. His attempts at mastering snippets of the theme started Ohlschmidt down the path towards finger style enlightenment. During high school in the early 1970s, he studied music in Madison, Wisconsin; there he witnessed a street musician play a Martin flat top using thumb and finger picks. His ears were opened, and before long Ohlschmidt was buying Fahey and Kottke LPs, as well as even more complicated material by Segovia and Chet Atkins. The American Primitive approach rang the loudest, prompting him to begin the long process of mastering the style.

Following a path blazed by Kottke, the Lang brothers, and, a few months later, Scott Witte, Ohlschmidt recorded his debut album, 1979’s Behind The Eye at Sound 80 in Minneapolis. George Hanson of Symposium Records helped supervise the operation, but his production style was very freewheeling, limited primarily to loving encouragement. On “Delta Freeze,” Ohlschmidt played a Gibson B-45 12 string with a fixed bridge. It was purchased in Manitowoc, Wisconsin after Ohlschmidt read that Kottke had played the same model on 6- And 12-String Guitar. While completing the album’s mix, Ohlschmidt was introduced to Kottke. Leo fell in love with the guitar and not only purchased it for a generous sum but also supplied Jim with a high-end replacement he had used on a previous album.

Stephen Cohen
No More School

“I always have played with my bare hands, and never have used a pick.”

The Newport Folk Festival converted endless hordes to the religion of folk music, and not the least among them was Stephen Cohen, who has spent a lifetime writing songs and living thoughtfully. A native Rhode Islander, he had better access than most to the annual festival, and he drank in every ounce of bent Americana that George Wein and Albert Grossman thought fit for the program.

The acoustic guitar had become the rank and file’s instrument, unrivalled at the time to play and compose with. And although Cohen had basic music training for the trombone, his approach to guitar was idiosyncratic from the beginning, though he sought no formal education for it. His natural inclination was fingerstyle, and because there was no one to lead him in any other direction, he went.

On Cohen’s 1979 debut The Tree People, he played a Gibson B25, acquired as a young man and strapped to his back as he rambled about the country for the lion’s share of the 1970s. The guitar featured one crucial alteration: its factory-standard metal bridge had been expertly replaced with a permanent wooden one. After settling in Eugene, Oregon, Cohen formed an acoustic ensemble also known as The Tree People that focused on instrumental composition and improvisation. They borrowed heavily from the concepts of both American Primitives and British Traditionalists on their two self-produced albums, but “No More School” is clearly an ode to the former, a flurry of fingers and thumb picking and strumming all over the drop D tuning. Issued in a one-time pressing of 1000 copies, the album pierced more than a few ears, allowing the group to become something of a go-to opener for Fahey and Pentangle whenever they rambled through Oregon.

William Eaton
Untitled

Of all the guitars heard on this collection, the one played by William Eaton is by far the most unique. Eaton is one of the few authentic geniuses in the world of guitar design and construction. On his untitled composition, he plays the first guitar he ever made, six strings and shimmering like the dry Sonoran sun that inspired it. In 1977, Eaton had been living off the desert soil, spending his days building instruments in the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery, a guitar-making school he helped establish in 1975, while gathering wild food and sustenance from his natural surroundings. Eaton rarely slept in the same place twice…until he was drawn to a guesthouse at a mansion near Camelback Mountain.

The guesthouse was surrounded on one side by a quiet and colorful botanical garden; the other side faced the desert. As Eaton settled into his inspiring new locale, the concept of a recorded document of his workmanship began to take shape in his mind. He selected three flawless fruits of his craft, a six string, a twelve string, and a twenty-six string triumph he called the Elesion Harmonium. The concept was straightforward: an eleven song album of unadorned tone poems without titles, some of them entirely improvised, others based on previously composed chord structures. Drawn again from Eaton’s surroundings, the cover of the meekly titled Music By William Eaton depicts the desert, with the backside representing the nearly tropical setting of the gardens outside his window.

Eaton’s approach to fingerstyle is unconventional and puts on display his acute understanding of the range of notes he has access to in any given tuning. He eschews a structured, repetitive pattern in favor of picking a melody and using the other fingers of his right hand to embellish, augment, or color that melody. Many of the songs on the album were played once with the tape rolling and never again. The selection featured here resonated particularly with Eaton, evolving over the years into “A Bazaar Of Subtle Desires,” a song he still performs.

Mark Lang
Strawberry Man

Minnesota had already provided the world with its share of acoustic guitar champions in the form of Bob Dylan by the time brothers Peter and Mark Lang were coming of age. They too were haunted by the blues and picked up the guitar at a young age, though the eldest, Peter, was the more austere player. Mark, however, wasn’t obsessed with it in his youth, and it was only out of sibling rivalry that he began to take a more serious approach to the instrument.

The two moved to California in 1968, chasing the dream to the barrios of Venice Beach, where “Strawberry Man” was written about a guy who cruised the neighborhood selling fruits and vegetables out of the back of his pick-up truck. The brothers were both becoming earnest about guitar and seeking out labels to release their material. Peter impressed Fahey in the early 1970s, hiring and issuing the eldest Lang’s 1973 Takoma debut The Thing At The Bedroom Window. Mark sent out demos and had interest from Takoma as well, but Peter’s experience there, though not necessarily bad, led Mark in a different direction. George Hanson at Symposium Records back home had raised his profile by issuing Kottke’s second album, Circle Around The Sun, which led to Kottke’s Takoma deal. Mark sent a demo to Hanson, and they quickly made an agreement to issue Mark’s first album, Texas John Boscoe, in 1976. Mark moved back home to record the sessions at Sound 80, recently used to record large chunks of Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks. The sessions were a success, the LP superb. It did well enough but ultimately failed to catapult him to the level of fame that Kottke’s Symposium recordings had.

Unlike Peter, who has continued to release his recordings privately or with small labels since those first days at Takoma, the younger Lang felt that the right direction for him was to secure a deal with a major label. He found an agent, recorded demos, met with A&R reps, and ultimately signed a deal with Capitol Records in 1980. While signing to one of the big six was vindication for his incredible skill, the deal ultimately led nowhere. Mark Lang’s Capital debut never materialized, and with this final disappointment, he latched his guitar case for good and moved on.

Tom Smith
Quidate Quierda

Nestled on the northern tip of Santa Clara County, Palo Alto, California has generated more than its fair share of fingerstyle guitar players. In the 1970s, three friends, drunk on a combination of Fahey, Kottke, and Sandy Bull, began a fierce personal competition to see who could outplay the rest. Michael Hedges obviously triumphed in terms of popularity, but his two compatriots, Tuck Andress and Tom Smith, were part of that process, each fantastic guitar players in his own right. Hedges’ success is well documented, and Andress would go on to become the Steve Vai of jazz-folk, but Smith’s path, though marked by plenty of milestones, was somewhat quieter.

At age 19 and compelled by Sandy Bull’s Fantasias For Guitar And Banjo, Tom Smith picked up a guitar and did his best to imitate the sounds squeaking out. An impossible task, Smith set his sites on Dylan, Baez, and Paxton but quickly discovered that he was a singer-songwriter who could not sing. Fingerstyle became a logical next step.

A decade later he was laying down tracks for his first album, 1977’s Still Lifes, at a friend’s studio in San Francisco. Tommy Heath of Tommy Tutone was bribed with quality marijuana into engineering the sessions, though no traces of “867-5309/Jenny” can be heard. The recording process was extraordinarily stressful, as was the mastering, but after several months it was completed. Smith’s vicinity to the Windham Hill office unfortunately wasn’t enough for Ackerman to sing him, forcing Smith to self-release the album on his Lone Oak imprint. As he still didn’t have a stable residence, he put a friend’s address on the album to handle mail order and communication and set out on the road armed with a few hundred records, moving copies hand-to-hand or trading them with other musicians. Smith managed to move the entire pressing over the next few years, attracting the attention of Rounder Records who intended to issue his next LP, but left it at that.

Smith finally settled down in Los Angeles in 1984, his touring schedule slowed, and his focus shifted to an arts and literacy program. Today he resides in Nashville and makes his living repairing stringed instruments. Five albums have followed Still Lifes on Lone Oak, though Smith puts his own address on the back cover these days.

Dan Lambert
Charleytown

“Hearing what you could do with one guitar was a revelation, like classical guitar, only bluesy, nasty.”

At 19, Dan Lambert bought a fifteen-dollar guitar from a friend and just started playing. With the Champaign-Urbana, Illinois music scene in full swing, generating major label talents Dan Fogelberg and REO Speedwagon, Lambert was in with a crowd that would play a few songs and then listen to country-blues 78s on the radio until the sun came up. He may have been surrounded by the future of Adult Contemporary, but it was the style of playing on those 78s that astounded him.

It wasn’t until Lambert moved to Kent, Ohio that he had the time to focus on the instrument enough to learn the complicated fingerstyle playing that he’d heard wafting in those late nights. Encouraged by local jazz guitarist Brad Bolton, Lambert listened to everything he could get his hands on and began building a large collection of music, an approach he would later understand was a central notion of American Primitive.

After relocating to El Paso, Texas, Lambert got serious about playing professionally and recording. Without much disposable income, he began assembling an arsenal of six and twelve string guitars by seeking out used and broken instruments and restoring and reinforcing them. By the time Hot Time In The Old Town Tonight was recorded, he had several Stella twelve strings, a Gibson J45, a Gibson LGO, and one unique sounding Frankenstein he had assembled from various discarded pieces.

Lambert recalls meeting Peter Lang in Minnesota, who had worked on a loading dock at a bottling factory to pay for his own productions. Lang was a strong advocate of forgoing the record label route and going it alone; he inspired Lambert to set up a makeshift studio in his garage and record his first album in 1977 for his own Houndstooth imprint. One of the most prolific artists on this compilation, Lambert continuously self-released recordings, issuing four LPs and several CDs. “Charley Town,” a tribute to his midwestern upbringing, is named after the town of St. Charles, Illinois, near Aurora, in the western suburbs of Chicago.

Brad Chequer
Warm River

“I’m just too lazy to retune the guitar.”

The most improbable discovery on this collection is Brad Chequer, who, as evidenced by the cassette on the left, never had a proper release. Drawn to the guitar after sneaking into a Cream concert at the age of 12 in his home state of New Jersey, Chequer persuaded his mother to buy him a cheap plastic Premier guitar; unfortunately, its makeshift construction nearly electrocuted the boy. With money from his paper route, Chequer bought a Fender Stratocaster, leading him to spend the better part of the1970s in and out of other people’s bands, never really finding the right scene or sound. It wasn’t until he relocated to Palo Alto, California during high school that he stumbled onto the acoustic guitar while hanging out at Gryphon’s Stringed Instruments. A bit of a loner, Chequer was drawn to the American Primitive style because it required no collaboration. Inspired by the scene’s DIY conviction, he picked up a Martin D35 and began to learn fingerstyle. Too lazy to retune his guitar, Chequer took advantage of his large hands, using unusual fingerings and chords in unusual keys.

It was impossible to live in northern California at that time and not be influenced by William Ackerman’s Windham Hill label. Chequer had heard Ackerman and Alex de Grassi in a bookstore in 1977, and their albums quickly became an obsession. A few years later he and his girlfriend saw Ackerman, De Grassi, and Robbie Basho in concert. Convinced that Chequer was as good, or better, she pushed Brad to record a demo. Recorded in a friend’s living room on a TEAC cassette deck with a few low-cost Radio Shack microphones, “Warm River” was one of a dozen songs that eventually made its way to Windham Hill’s demo pile. The label sent a nice letter back, but no commitment to release anything was tendered. A few months later, Chequer was introduced to Windham Hill poster boy George Winston, prompting the rural folk pianist to remark, “You’re the fellow that plays in all the strange keys.” Twenty-five years after Windham Hill’s rejection, Winston still had that demo and gladly turned it over to Numero for possible inclusion.

Brad Chequer asked us to report that everything he ever learned about music he owes to his music theory teacher at Palo Alto High School, Miss Marjorie Klein. He dedicates his performance here to her memory.

Dwayne Cannan
One Forty Eight

“I was living downtown at the time, around the hookers, drug dealers, and that life.”

From the titles on the back cover, “The Gutter Man,” “Spare Change,” and “Cocaine Katie,” Dwayne Cannan comes across as something of a down-and-out drifter. While Spare Change won’t give Iceberg Slim a run for its money, Cannan’s debut is nowhere near the tepid fretless bass washes on Michael Hedges’ Breakfast In The Field. Rather, we find the rural Alberta native exploring a diverse swath of folk and blues traditions via the sights and sounds of low-life Edmonton. It isn’t until we get to Side 2 that Cannan even hints at the American Primitive sound.

Cannan picked up his first guitar at ten but set it down again, concentrating instead on an odd combination of bull riding and boxing. His interests were renewed at 17 when a friend from his youth, who had moved away, returned to the area having developed incredible talent at the guitar during his absence. The two hitchhiked around the United States for a year before returning home to Canada to form a band that featured Cannan on drums. The guitar, however, kept calling his name. Scraping together money from his construction job, Cannan entered Edmonton’s Homestead Recorders in June of 1980, with his newly-bought Gibson acoustic in hand. The resulting ten-song album was pressed in a quantity of 300, all of those sold hand-to-hand from the stage. The album was never broadcast and never reviewed, prompting Cannan to take a 25-year break from recording.

“One Forty Eight” owes its succinctness to two factors: there was only room enough on the master reel for a very short song and Cannan had held back a few instrumentals he could tailor to the necessary length. Partly composed, partly improvised, the song wraps up the end of his album as perfectly as it closes this compilation.

For Cannan, learning fingerstyle guitar was merely one small project in developing an extensive repertoire of techniques. He was disconnected from the movement of guitar players who followed in the footsteps of John Fahey, but he shared with them a spirit of independence, rigorous discipline, and love of the guitar.