The Guitar Players I Love

My pal Mark Saleski posted a blog about his ten favorite guitar players. It was a great list, mostly not what I'd have chosen, but it was a great and imaginative list. He asked would I do the same. So here you go, in no order.

Chamin Correa (of Los Tres Caballeros)


In the last three or four years, Chamin has become the guitar player I listen to most often. To me, he's like a more interesting version of Django Reinhardt. He was Django's harmonic sense and attack, but his rhythms are less static and more imaginative. Even abrupt. Where more of the great Mexican trio guitarists -- most notably the wonderful Alfredo Gil of Los Panchos -- veered to a lyrical style with faux flemenco flourishes, Chamin went for the jugulay, kind of juxtaposing this slashing thing across the sides of those great harmonies. If you told me Johnny Guitar Watson dug him, I'd totally believe you.

Al Anderson


Generally, I wouldn't walk across the street to see some guy (or girl) spew out 12 bar blues on electric guitar. In the case of Al, I'd walk across town to show you where he played in 1992. I must have seen NRBQ thirty times (not counting the shows I played as a member), probably twenty with Al on guitar. I saw him play songs he'd been playing for decades, and he rarely repeated himself. No guitarist could more represent what I thought was the best aspects of our art and craft nearly this well. The depth of his lines, the richness of his harmonies, his endless well of melody, and the fact that -- Big Sandy excluded -- he's the best live singer I've ever seen/heard, and one of the best songwriters. He is a best-case scenario. All the stuff people think they "have down" -- Big Al is beyond it and back.

Hank Snow


After I hung up my electric guitar, Hank Snow became my role model. I've been a fan of him all my life (my grandmother had a few singles, which I loved) for a lot of reasons. I love the way his voice and guitar are clearly of the same musical mind. His solos are really smart, efficient, and sharp. And -- big one -- he doesn't make that stupid fucking guitar face. The idea of his singing and guitar style being the focal point that leads the band, the idea that songs speak for themselves -- big deal to me. He's up there with Mose Allison for me as a human "how to".

Curtis Mayfield


If you want a course of how to play less, make every note warm and meaningful, and be the mortar of a rhythm section whether funky, lyrical, whatever, Curtis is the all-time. The Bill Evans of rhythm'n'blues, his chord voicings have a full, deep, rich quality, his rhythms just drop right in deep, and his sound is both fat and minimal. A best of all worlds musician. And his songs, singing, production, arranging made him one of the most important rhythm'n'blues figure of the sixties and seventies, alongside James Brown, Issac Hayes, and Stevie Wonder.

Doc Watson


Doc is how bluegrass guitar went from just rhythm to a soloing instrument. I can't say enough about this wonderful man and the scope, quality, and dignity of his playing. None of what he does is tricks -- these are honest notes. There is no posturing, nor gratuitous moves, no guitaristic affectation whatsoever. Instead, there's tone, swing, impeccable time, phrasing, and drive. And a bottomless well of songs. He's cut "Black Mountain Rag" several times over the last five decades, and he seems to pare it down, distill it, find ore to leave out. With anything he's cut several times over decades, his growth tends toward how to do less with notes and more with nuance. A true great, as irrefutable as anyone who ever played this instrument, right up with Segovia, Christian, Van Halen, and Blake (Norman and/or Blind).

James Honeyman Scott


Product of the new wave 1980s that I was, I loved a great many of the guitarists. A lot of guys (and a few gals) played a few solos I loved, but there were relatively few guys who swung for the fences and delivered grand slams as a rule. Elliot Easton (who has become a friend) was sure one, as were Glen Tilbrook (Squeeze) and Andy Partridge (XTC) were among the heaviest hitters of a generation. But if I had to pick one solo of the genre, James Honeyman-Scott's solo on "Kid" is it. He was always perfect anyway, but every note of guitar playing on this is primo, and, when the solo enters, it lifts an already great song (with one of Chrissie Hynde's best vocals)to a whole next place, followed by the rentry of the vocal over almost no guitar (just muscular drums and bass. The rolling, open string entry of the solo was one of the guitar highlights of my high school record buying days.

Cliff Gallup (Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps)


I discovered Gallup when I was in ninth grade via a Gene comp called The Bop That Just Won't Stop, and it really broke me up. Although he was only in Gene's band for 1956, he thew down a full-on body of guitar liteature that has set the standard for rockabilly since, even though the stuff he's on sold less well than Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Elvis/Scotty Moore etc, he and Paul Burlison (on the Johnny Bunette records) are cornerstone players. Without Gallup, Brian Setzer's style becomes inexplicable. I learned every Gallup solo by the time I was in tenth grade, and I can still pull them out of my back pocket at will. He meant the world to me.

Roy Nichols (Merle Haggard and the Strangers)


Haggard's body of work might well be the greatest in country music history, both for quality and sheer volume of recordings. Hag's voice, songs, and band (he recorded with his own bands, not session guys) conspired to make canonical music. Guitarist Roy Nichols was the ad hoc music director for the Strangers through from the late sixties to the eighties, and had a sure a hand as Hag himself in shaping together this unimpeachable body of music. His guitar playing, whether on acoustic or electric, was always perfect. He never did obvious stuff, but what he played sounded inevitable. "Always Wanting You" has always been a favorite of mine. Hag wrote it about Dolly Parton. The opening has a longing, unsentimental tone that sets the scene for a great lyric about a love that can't be. Nichols' nylon string opening -- spare and straight -- is met by a twangy bass string response that says, "This is a man speaking, not a Hallmark card."

Nichols is one of the most well-rounded and multi-dimensional guitarists I know of. He's a great western swing jazzbo, a virtuoso of fake steel parts, a chicken picker nonpareil, and a rhythm section anchor without equal. The bluegrass banjo player Sonny Osborne told me once "If you heard Roy Nichols do it, you heard it done right." Yessir.

Lowman Pauling (5 Royales)


Another guy I discovered around ninth grade. The 5 Royales were one of the great rhythm'n'blues acts of the early fifties. The two hits for which they are best known -- "Think" and "Dedicated To The One I Love" -- have been covered by all kinds of different acts fom James Brown to the Mamas And The Papas. Lowman Pauling wrote those (and the bulk of the band's material) and sang lead. He was truly great. As a singer and songwriter, he was a staggering talent, and as a guitarist, he was one of the champions of doing more with less. His snarling, swaggering short bursts or shrapnel guitar never fall short of their mark, and his barbed-wire tone as delivery system... Yeah. He's one of the pinnacles. Unfortunately, despite his writing songs and making records that other people drove to the bank, Pauling wound up woking as a janitor at a synagogue. He died with a mop in his hand, age 47. Heart attack.

The Beatles


Where saying "the greatest" or "the best" is generally cheap hyperbole, The Beatles are worthy. As a guitarist, I look at their work with awe. I spent the summerbetween sixth and seventh grade learning this song (not knowing it was George and Paul playing together at once, not George playing both parts in real time on one guitar). John, Paul, and George each and together are so intensely embedded into the tradition of guitar that we can't really estimate pop music without looking to them the way oceanographers look to water. I don't trust any musician (or listener) who dismisses them. Or for that matter prefers the Stones. The Beatles were did something almost no other card-carrying rockabilly act ever got to do (the Everly's being the notable and astonishing exception) -- they grew up on record. They formed a style that starts in Sun rockabilly, and moves through country, rhythm'n'blues, early ska, music hall, and into psyche, world music, folk, and more... only to find its way back to Chuck Berry and Elmore James. They might not have done it all fist, but they did it all and did it great.

box set year

It has been a year of extravagant packages. Hell, the damn Beach Boys SMiLE box lights up, literally. It anthologizes every sound syllable of a legendary work, and thank you very much. I still think it would have been less good than Pet Sounds. And all the Pet ounds box really told me was that I could listen to every inch of tape, learn what was done, and that you'd have to be Brian Wilson to have the ideas in the first place.



(But it lights up and has an impressive book.)

You wanna know what made my knees freeze and my bladder spatter?

(Sorry, it's Little Richard's birthday.)



I'd never heard of Rev Johnny L. Jones. Philly had enough local and near-local gospel that I never had to look for much. It wasn't my primary focus, and you couldn't knock over a dead cat in a thrift store without knocking over records by the Famous Ward singers, Shirley Caesar, Clarence Fountain etc etc etc. Jones put out a few albums for the Jewel label, out of Shreveport, LA (as did Fountain and quite a few other great gospel artists). But he recorded all his church services from 1957, and Dust To Digital went through a heroic amount of music, coming across with The Hurricane That Hit Atlanta, a set that collects sermons, songs, and even commercials into a kind of document of the life of this performer and his congregation. This is true music. It was not made with any sort of eye to a marketplace. This is social music in its element. This is really the true vine.



There's no video expressly for Songs For he Jewish American Jetset: The Tikva Records Story 1950-73, which anthologizes a low budget Jewish music label who put out more really good records than you might imagine. The label had never been given the benefit of a formal discography. Nobody who made records for Tikva gave interviews to speak of. Yiddish music as a rule went into a black hole until Henry Sapoznik's pioneering scholarship in the 1970's. And even those years back, much had been lost and many of the great musicians of the boom period had passed away, most notably Naftule Brandwine and Abe Schwartz. Researching the labels themselves was no easy task, and we've been left with a whole new diaspora to where the recorded history of Jewish music is spread to the four winds. The Idelsohn Society seeks to correct this by making a life study of Jewish records, and their anthologies and reissues have been a mitzvah to anyone seeking to know more about a type of roots music the Blasters might not have covered. This and their Jewface volume are staggering.



The Tompkins Square label has gotten most of its recent accolades for putting out Frank Fairfield's records, but they've put out so much of the best underground roots music that I am immediately curious about stuff I never before considered just because they put out a two disc set of it, and there's never a bad cut. To What Strange Place : The Music of the Ottoman-American Diaspora, 1916-1929 covers a subculture that is even more in the past than Yiddish. This stuff fascinates me.



For those less internationalist, the label's two antho's of postwar indie underground gospel singles is truly staggering. Fire In My Bones and This May Be My Last Time Singing have each spent weeks at a time in my CD player. They're comprehensive but not academic, and liner notes literally open us up to a music world here in our country that most of us never bother to ask about.




Elder Roma Wilson is intense.



Soundman Shots: The Downbeat/Caribou Story was an impulse buy. I'm a sucker for that transitional time in Jamaican music. These two Jamaican labels were owned by the same guy, and he licensed rhythm'n'blues and some jazz for the downbeat label, and late mento-into-ska on Caribou, Which means that we get more mento-era Lord Tanamo than has ever been issued in one place before (which is a very good thing). Thing is, as you can hear, he had fantastic taste, so both discs ran by faster than a scared rabbit.

So I don't really have a Top Ten for the year. Big Sandy is still my favorite singer, Nick Lowe's The Old Magic and Randy Newman's Songbook Vol 2 were my two favorite albums of the year, and Allison Anders' Don't Knock The Rock rock on film series at the Silent Movie Museum was my favorite fall-back every week, and I saw more good music on film -- everything from the Seattle funk of the 70s capped by Wheedle's Groove to Elvis On Tour. Aside from LA, my home, Tucson was kind of my favorite city, not least of Al because of Al Perry, songwriter/performer/genius local treasure and musicologist whose hospitality has opened the town to me. Favorite new movies I saw was the George Harrison doc, and Errol Morris' Tabloid.

This year was more fun than last, but there's room for growth. Here's hoping...