my guitar is kicking my butt

Maya vs. the guitar, round 3.

So, I’ve gotten to the part of learning guitar where one attempts to learn barre chords. You know, the ones where you use your index finger to fret, or press down, all six strings at once, what a freaking nightmare. Steel strings, under upwards of 200 lbs of pressure….. Pressing them down is painful and largely hopeless, as I get this plunk plunk sound from at least one string on every barre chord attempt and more usually two or three. Plunk plunk plunk. What’s wrong with my piano, so full of levers and hammers and a brilliant steel frame to hold all 88 strings cut to the appropriate length, why in the world would anyone want to adjust the steel string length with their bare fingertips??!?

I’m determined though. I can play a bunch of open string chords, and those used to hurt like crazy and seem hopeless, so maybe barre chords may also yield to my determination. The guitar may be winning at the moment, but I will prevail. You know. Maybe.

While I practice those, a few minutes at a time, ouch ouch, I’m also reading a very entertaining book, “Guitar: An American Life,” by Tim Brookes. It’s simultaneously the history of the guitar in this country in the last three hundred, or so, years, and the story of Brookes having a guitar made for himself, to replace a long beloved guitar destroyed by baggage handlers. I’m enjoying it, meandering as it does all over the place. Recommend.

Anyway, the part I’m reading right now is about the birth of the blues, that is, African-Americans of deep poverty creating guitars out of cigar boxes and random bits of wire and broom handles and inventing their own music out of nothing.

Here’s a quote. He’s talking about the outsider, disenfranchised, black guitar music of the twenties, thirties, and forties.

“African-American blues guitarists, starting from no more than bits of wood and wire, reinvented the guitar. In doing so they created a body of radical and original music from beginnings so rudimentary that it was often described as primitive, and in some respects not even music. The blues, as a lyric form and a loose group of musical stylings interpreted by white musicians, was almost immediately popular, but the American public wanted little to do with the actual sources of the music.”

and a bit further on…

“This was the biggest difference between Hawaiian [steel guitar] music and blues: Kekuku [the inventor of steel slide guitar] traveled widely, entertained royalty, became a respected teacher. Is it surprising, then that Hawaiian music and its instruments were assimilated with amazing speed? Compare him with Eddie “Son” House, a great teacher of the blues. When the folklorist Alan Lomax tracked House down in 1941, he was living in a shack behind the home of a farmer who promptly called the local sheriff. The lawman arrested Lomax on suspicion of being an enemy spy, sent to stir up unrest among “our niggers.” Is it surprising, then that the blues and its playing techniques remained unassimilated and largely unchanged for decades, and as such, becoming steadily richer and more complex?”

These blues guitarists were seen as distasteful for quite a while, even by other black musicians, as Brookes describes. Which reminded me of the wild, impoverished, ‘mad men’ wandering yogis described in Mark Singleton’s book “Yoga Body.” The ‘real’ yogis, the ones that wandered India, wearing only the ashes of burned bodies, doing ‘bizarre’ ‘primitive’ ‘repulsive’ (descriptions made at the time) practices, and also associated with magic and maybe something sinister… They were rejected for a long time by other more ‘civilized’ Indians such as Vivikenanda, who saw those hatha yogis as distasteful in the extreme.

…But they also created something rich and complex that was later cleaned up for ‘civilized’ culture where their work became hugely popular.

An interesting resonance.