Customer Reviews

Legends of Traditional Fingerstyle Guitar

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Everything on it is worth the price of admission. If you like this kind of music you will most likely like this DVD. Good footage and sound well produced.

I have spent some considerable effort in this space reviewing various trends in the blues tradition, including country blues. As is fairly well known country blues got its start down in the South during the early part of the 20th century (if not earlier) as a way for blacks (mainly) to cope with the dreaded, deadly work on the plantations (picking that hard to pick cotton). In this volume (and in a couple of other previously reviewed volumes in this series ) Stefan Grossman, the renowned guitar teacher and performer in his own right has taken old film clips and segments from early television and produced an hour of classic performances by the masters of country blues guitar picking and singing.

From the start this is a treat for those interested in finger-picking styles and to witness the legends of this particular pantheon. It starts with a good old Kentucky boy, Merle Travis, doing his mountain version of the classic traditional, "John Henry", and works through the likes of Mance Liscomb, Doc and Merle Watson and the Reverend Gary Davis,the last who should be familiar to those who watched the previous DVDs. No finger-picking film could pretend to be complete without a bow to the genius of Elizabeth Cotten (of the folk super-classic "Freight Train" fame). The documentary conceptually finishes up with Josh White doing his version of "John Henry" to demonstrate some common sources of both black and white acoustic country music. Well done.