HOMESPUNTaught By Steve James.
Level 2
60 Minute DVD or VHS, includes chord diagrams, music and tab.
With John Sebastian, guitar and 6-string banjo
In the early days of the last century, the mandolin gained popularity both as a blues instrument and as the backbone of the early African American string bands. Several of these groups added mandolin to guitars, banjos, fiddles, jugs and kazoos to play energetic and heart-felt renditions of blues and ragtime songs. Bluegrass players, from Bill Monroe onward, incorporated blues licks into their playing. Steve James knows this music and its history well, and he brings it clearly into focus on this fun and funky lesson.
Mandolin novices will start out by learning a basic G scale and how to alter it to create a blues scale. After demonstrating his pick strokes and tremolo technique, Steve dives right into Divin’ Duck Blues by the great Yank Rachell. Steve and John Sebastian, another jug band and blues enthusiast, perform the tune, and then Steve takes it apart, note-by-note.
Steve lays out some of the primary blues chords on the mandolin, showing how it can become a wonderful accompanying instrument with the use of partial chords for rhythm comping. Turnarounds, double stops and variations on a walking boogie-woogie line are all essential parts of a blues repertoire, and Steve shows several of these, including a variation he learned directly from the legendary Howard Armstrong.
From there he launches into some powerful and challenging songs, each one
of which shows you something new on the instrument. The Lonesome Train That Carried
My Gal Away, from the recordings of Charlie McCoy and the Mississippi Sheiks,
is a good-time tune that Steve plays on banjo-mandolin while John accompanies
him on 6-string banjo. Big Joe Williams’ Juanita Stomp is played on a “high-strung”
mandolin (the lower strings are tuned to octaves) and features a rockin’ blues
riff in A. Steve’s raucous original, Saturday Night in Jail, contains double
stops, chord comps, blues licks and scales and, as Steve puts it, “fun-lovin’
high-jinks.” Steve and John close the lesson with a performance of Shotgun Blues,
which Steve plays on an electric mandolin that once belonged to Yank Rachell.
Steve
James has long been a favorite performer on the contemporary acoustic blues circuit,
playing a dynamic combination of fingerpicking and slide guitar, mandolin and
six-string banjo. His deep knowledge of blues style has been honed through his
long associations with traditional masters such as Yank Rachell, Furry Lewis,
Sam McGee and Howard Armstrong. A busy international touring schedule has brought
his talents as a powerful singer and instrumentalist to enthusiastic audiences,
and he has made recent appearances on A Prairie Home Companion and Mountain Stage
radio shows. He has had two books published by String Letter Press as well as
over one hundred articles he’s made as contributing editor of Acoustic
Guitar Magazine. Steve now lives Austin, Texas where he is actively performing,
recording and teaching American blues and roots musical styles. His CD releases
are on Burnside Records ("Boom Chang") and well as his own Settlement
Records label. www.stevejames.com