We all have musical roots. The first music you ever heard. Your parent or favorite aunt singing you to sleep. Your best friend’s dad sitting down to the piano after dinner. Top 40 radio stations playing the background music for your summers.
That was mine – summers at the municipal swimming pool or in my cousins’ backyard. Folk, Motown, pop – Beach Boys, Otis Redding, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Creedence, Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and on …
In addition to my musical roots – the music of my family and environment, I believe I unconsciously slipped into a musical lineage – I became a part of a musical heritage – the moment I got my first guitar. It’s time I honored my musical ancestry.
When I took up guitar in 6th grade it was because I wanted to BE Joan Baez. I learned everything I could about her. I taught myself what I could of her signature bass runs and fingerpicking, learned all the traditional ballads about midnight murders and lost love that she mixed among the protests songs she helped to make ubiquitous.
I have learned that the musical traditions in my lineage have roots intertwined like a banyan tree. And those roots are as alive as the music itself.
At the time, I would have denied any relationship to country music. But my guitar style carries the indelible signature of those who came before Joan Baez.
The ancestor who received deserved credit as the Mother of, among other things, lead guitar, is Maybelle Carter, or “Mother Maybelle.” June Carter was one of her daughters, and Johnny Cash her son-in-law.
Her guitar style developed into a sound that carried bass runs, rhythm strums, and melodic leads, all from her one guitar. With thumb she would carry bass runs and with fingerpick she would “scratch” along the higher strings, a method that became known as the “Carter scratch.” You guitar players can almost hear and feel it – dragging your index finger across the strings after striking a bass note or run with your thumb.
Now, a lot of people honor Mother Maybelle, but they stop too soon.
Maybelle’s father, AP Carter was a “song-catcher.” He combed the Appalachian Hills for Anglo and African-rooted songs, and found Lesley Riddle, an African American man born in 1905 in Burnsville, North Carolina. He died in 1980. Please, please follow the links at the end of this blog to learn more about Mr. Riddle and his relationship with the Carter family.
He took up guitar while recuperating from losing a leg in a factory accident, and after losing a couple of fingers a few years later, developed an incredibly distinctive style of playing guitar. AP Carter teamed up with him in the late 1920’s and helped him capture and document the songs they found in the Appalachians along the North Carolina/Tennessee line. Many of those songs were then recorded and credited to the Carters.
Now that we know about Mr. Riddle, we can return to Mother Maybelle, who incorporated Mr. Riddle’s style into her own as she and the Carters carried that music out into the world. Her playing can be heard in the guitars of bluegrass, country, folk, rhythm and blues, rock – it shows up in almost every kind of American music. And it clearly lives in the Joan Baez style at the root of my own.
I didn’t know it for a long time, but that’s where I come from. And now, I can tell the story.
If you know more about this than I do, please, let me know!
Biography of Lesley (Esley) Riddle: https://traditionalvoicesgroup.com/biography/?_gl=1*99b1cl*_gcl_au*MTk2NzQ3MjcxNi4xNzg1MDkyODg0
Black in Appalachia: Lesley Riddle: https://www.google.com/search?q=esley+riddle+video&rlz=1C1JJTC_enUS1185US1185&oq=esley+riddle+video&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIHCAIQIRigATIHCAMQIRigATIHCAQQIRigATIHCAUQIRiPAtIBCDQzOTlqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&source=chrome.ob&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:1e24c7c4,vid:UdL6WvtCcwo,st:0
Lesley Riddle performing John Henry (Folkways): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C4VBvr_yVE