My dad plays guitar (of the acoustic variety), and pretty much the only kind of music he ever played, at least when I was growing up, involved fingerpicking. I think he taught himself — both guitar generally and fingerpicking specifically — by listening to records, including Mississippi John Hurt, Doc/Merle Watson, and Jerry Jeff Walker (the good late 60s/early 70s version, not the crappy cheesedick version he morphed into), among many others that I was too young/stupid to take notice of.
Interesting side note: my dad never sang when he played –- he’d just get into a total fingerpicking groove where each pluck, upper-body sway, and foot tap was deliberate and intense. His face would be basically expressionless, and he’d stare right at you while he played, impervious to any attempt to communicate with him. I felt like Admiral Benson in Hot Shots: “Dad… DAD… Bah. Been ignoring me all day.”
As a direct result of my dad’s enthusiasm for the genre, fingerpicking was among the first things I learned to do on the guitar, and while I never got really good at it, I was good enough to play a couple tunes pretty solidly and my memories of learning to play guitar are dominated by the frustration invariably associated with learning the technique (I just… can’t… get it… fuck this, this sucks, I’m going to watch Darkwing Duck).
Whether it was because I wasn’t exposed to all that much fingerpicking music or because I wasn’t paying enough attention, it wasn’t until much later that I started really noticing fingerpicking in other songs, like Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright,” which simultaneously rekindled my interest in fingerpicking and revived all those old memories of frustration.
I recently had just such a moment when I was listening to an album by a band I only came to recently, The Dodos. From where I sit, their most recent album, Visiter (buy it on eMusic), is one of the best of 2008, but it was an older album that I recently downloaded called Beware Of The Maniacs that really brought the old fingerpicking sauce back to a simmer (which admittedly sounds disgusting –- I apologize).
A good number of songs on the album, including two or three in a row down the home stretch, are stripped-down acoustic-and-vocal tracks, and one in particular really got the old fingerpicking motor running, out on the old fingerpicking highway, and headed straight for the old fingerpicking mountains (which, in case you were curious, are basically just piles of disembodied hands and guitar strings).
Now that I’ve sufficiently ruined the nostalgic mood I was sort of trying to set, here’s the song in question, along with one of my favorite old fingerpicking tunes that I learned from my dad.
“Bob” by The Dodos (from Beware Of The Maniacs)
“Janet Says” by Jerry Jeff Walker (from Five Years Gone)
Very nice!!