Last night I watched Folk Rewind on PBS. What a great show. I love John Sebastian!
The show was a fantastic look back to all the songs of peace and social justice, which makes for a nice fund-raiser for pbs. Those were the days! Even had Bobby Darin in a tux and bow tie big enough for Soupy Sales singing his song of peace -- amazing watching him sing it.
But what I kept noticing is that most of the trios (Chad Mitchell, Kingston, Limelighters, the Brothers 3 +1) and groups like the Christie Minstrel Singers, played four-stringed guitars, which they strummed up by the neck. I had never noticed that before.
I guess the tenor guitar was big in those days (I, of course, thought it was an oddly shaped ukulele....)
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It IS a uke. At least it is the way most of the folkies played them.
Tenor guitars were originally tuned like tenor banjos c g d a, but a number of folkies, Nick Reynolds being the first, took to tuning them d g b e, just like a baritone uke, and just like the first four strings on a guitar. Reynolds was essentially a ukulele player.
Now that we're a couple of years into the latest uke craze (the last one was in the 30s) players are finding out about tenor guitars again, and a lot of the 20-somethings are using them in pop music. Neko Case and Jenny Lewis come immediately to mind.
Thanks Rik! I was struck by how most of the groups in that special played a four-stringed guitar. I had never noticed that before. I read that they had been originally tuned so that banjo players could pick it up and play it like a guitar. Since there were also a lot of banjo players in those groups that made sense.
I'm all for another ukulele craze! I keep waiting for the Paradox ukulele orchestra....
sign me up for the Paradox Ukulele Orchestra.......I have been practicing for when I move to Hawaii.
sign me up for the Paradox Ukulele Orchestra.......I have been practicing for when I move to Hawaii.
Diand, the banjo that the tenor guitar replaced, back in the 20s, when they invented them, was the four-string tenor banjo that was used in jazz bands, not the 5-string bluegrass or mountain banjos.
When those 4-string banjos fell out of favor, in the 30s, a lot of the mountain guys bought them (cheap), and had Gibson or one of the other manufacturers put a 5-string neck on them. That was the invention of the resonator-backed banjos that made bluegrass possible.
The five-string that all the folk groups favored was the long-necked, open-backed banjo that Pete Seeger invented.
I knew there was a guitar lesson for me in this.
Not being a musician, I still love stringed instruments and am fascinated by the evolution of all this -- ways to get instruments inexpensively to musicians, ways they can pick up one instrument and then another relatively quickly etc. That there are different kinds of banjos.... that I wouldn't have noticed, although I did notice there were several of them. The Kingston Trio performed with two banjos and a four-string guitar. I guess that was Pete Seeger's influence?
Really appreciate all this history, Rik!
I was hoping to add a link to Pam Polland's ukulele band she plays with in Hawaii, but did find this:
http://www.pamelapolland.com/er.html
Am listening to 17 year old Polland and 15 year old Ry Cooder live at the Ash Grove. (4th album linked at the site) WOW!
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