My Beginning Is the Country Blues
When you go back to the beginning, you have to figure out what beginning you go back to, so if you're looking for the beginning of rock ’n’ roll, where do you go?
There’s the old quote by Carl Sagan: 'if want to bake an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.'
So where do you start?
I think you must start with the old blues guys, the old Allan Lomax kind of stuff. And there’s a misconception out there that the British guys rediscovered them, which I certainly think they did, and they did figure it out and hand it to the Americans and popularized it one way, but I think it was the folk guys, the Bob Dylans of the world and that whole crew, who were talking about the country blues in the ’50s before these rock ’n’ rollers came out.
Jerry Silverman’s got a book that was published at the end of the ’50s, which seems to be one of the first collections of anything anywhere. And if you’re familiar with secondhand bookstores and guitar books, you certainly have run across plenty of Jerry Silverman books. They’re ingenious.
He never quite takes the hanger out of his shirt, but it’s part of the charm, and if you listen to him sing, it’s just super endearing. And he’s a great teacher.
So one of the things I’d like to do this month is actually 100% go through one of his books, so I’m picking The Art of the Folk-Blues Guitar.
Anyway, that is my chosen beginning, country blues as collected by Jerry Silverman. Notably, I feel like his book (Folk Blues) may have been even some kind of dissertation, collegiate project. He was very academic, very New York City, which is good for me, because I have absolutely no big, urban city in me.