| Author |
 Topic  |
|
|
Reid
Ha`aha`a
Andorra
1526 Posts |
 Posted - 07/12/2003 : 5:24:51 PM
|
Listen to this NPR clip about how guitars got to the country. They were Upper Class instruments in the Northeast US and were mostly a woman's instrument - "parlor guitar" used as a musical style, not a guitar type. It was a big thing here in the late 1800's (1865-). The music sounds an awful lot like slack key and was the basis for Travis picking (alternating bass styles). This also means that Slack Key in Hawai`i was *lots* earlier than country music in the southeast and southwest, and guess where the Hawaiian missionaries came from? Probably style influences as well.
http://discover.npr.org/rundowns/rundown.jhtml?prgDate=7/11/2003&prgId=3
(this URL format may have funny wraparound)
Click on:
'Honky Tonks, Hymns and the Blues'
Have fun,
Reid
|
|
|
duke
Lokahi
USA
163 Posts |
Posted - 07/12/2003 : 5:42:34 PM
|
Excellent!!!! Thanks for sharing this link, Reid. How 'bout that Etta Baker playing "Dewdrop"? 90-something years old! The similarities to kiho'alu throughout this program are amazing.
Duke
PS Did you catch that short filler (about half a scroll down before you reach Honky Tonks, Hymns, etc...entitled "Keanae, Hawaii" by Ben Verdery, an excellent guitarist, btw. I'm going to try to find out more about this piece. Very slack key, Keola style. |
Edited by - duke on 07/12/2003 5:46:49 PM |
 |
|
|
Pauline Leland
`Olu`olu
USA
783 Posts |
Posted - 07/12/2003 : 6:08:54 PM
|
| Reid, thanks! There is so much alternating bass music that I'd thought it was just sort of a natural outgrowth of the way a guitar is constructed. Now I see they were all just progressions and outgrowths from parlor style. Now, rhetorical question, where did parlor style come from? |
Pauline |
|
|
|
Fran Guidry
Ha`aha`a
USA
1579 Posts |
Posted - 07/13/2003 : 12:37:35 PM
|
Pauline, from the little bit I've read and researched, parlor style was a branch of the pop music of the day. Pianos were too expensive for most people, so many people turned to the guitar for their home (parlor) instrument. Composers wrote pieces that were fairly easy but attractive, and scordatura (altered tunings) were commonly used. Here's a link to "Chief" Noda's page of tab and discussion of "Spanish Fandango," one of the better known parlor pieces: http://www.chiefnoda.com/tab/fand.html
Fran
|
E ho`okani pila kakou ma Kaleponi
Slack Key Guitar in California - www.kaleponi.com
Slack Key on YouTube
Homebrewed Music Blog |
|
|
|
Pauline Leland
`Olu`olu
USA
783 Posts |
Posted - 07/13/2003 : 2:09:50 PM
|
Thanks Fran, that looks like a piece to have fun with. Is the rest of his site that interesting? Must check.
My question should have said, "where did the alternating bass in parlor style come from?" If this piece is typical, the answer must be that it wasn't necessarily there. |
Pauline |
|
|
|
Lawrence
Ha`aha`a
USA
1597 Posts |
Posted - 07/13/2003 : 2:53:43 PM
|
Wahines and kanes, Yo!...
It is good that "Spanish Fandango" was already mentioned. Of couse this is an entire Musical Dance Form (like Tango) but in the US was primarily represented by one or a few very similar melodies. Peak popularity of this "tune" in the US was around 1865, however, more importantly, it was most popular in New Spain (California) some 20 to 30 years earlier. This is the same time when the Vaqueros left for Hawaii to help with the cattle. It must be considered that, without broacast equipment, music deseminated much more slowly and remained popular for a much longer time as well. I am convinced that Spanish Fandango was the tune that was heard by the Hawaiians most often when the Paniolos were performing. The most popular tuning of the time in New Spain was open G (which is why it is called Old Spanish Tuning), and Spanish Fandango is almost always played in G.
Now comes my connection to this. I was born and raised in Florida and have had heavy exposure to Appalachian music. One of my favorite players (for more than 30 years) has been Norman Blake from Georgia. He is well known as a virtuoso flatpicker but he does some fingerstyle as well. One of his most pleasing and reachable fingerstyle tunes is.... Spanish Fandango! (which he learned from his great grandmother).
...Lawrence
|
Mahope Kākou...
...El Lorenzo de Ondas Sonoras |
Edited by - Lawrence on 07/27/2003 8:40:17 PM |
|
|
|
Reid
Ha`aha`a
Andorra
1526 Posts |
Posted - 07/13/2003 : 3:18:01 PM
|
Hi Duke,
Ben Verdery is kinda local, New Haven. He lives in NY, but commutes up here to Yale during term time, because he is the head of the Guitar Program at the School of Music. He is known for being very eclectic and plays more styles than I knew existed. We have attended his recitals, which are free, and he is amazing to watch - *never* looks at fretboard or picking hand, always looks at music or closes his eyes. I don't always like what he plays, or chooses to play, rather, but every piece is always interesting, at least. I am sure he knows lots about slack key.
malama pono,
Reid |
|
|
|
duke
Lokahi
USA
163 Posts |
Posted - 07/14/2003 : 1:10:40 PM
|
Reid: Yeah, I saw Ben, oh, a long time ago when I was in college in South Carolina. I remember being impressed about him not looking at his hands. I found out that the music excerpt at the NPR site called "Keanae, Hawaii" is from an album by Ben called "Some Cities and Towns." It is currently out of print but there was an indication that it will be available on CD soon.
Duke |
|
|
|
Reid
Ha`aha`a
Andorra
1526 Posts |
Posted - 07/14/2003 : 3:03:31 PM
|
Thanks so much, Fran and Lawrence, for the lead to, and info about, Spanish Fandango. Chief's transcription is pretty in its simple way. *Must* have been pretty enough to attract so much attention over the years. A friend who lurks here, John Thomas plays a version of Elizabeth Cotten's version (in both 3/4 and his warp speed 2/2), that I never even recognised it as the original. I experimented with it for about 1/2 an hour today and found it sooooo easy (even for me) to concoct variations on it - put in alternating bass, parallel 6ths or thirds where they were appropriate to the dead simple melody (which is only a declining scale E, A, G, D, with drone g, b, changing, for D bass, to drone a, c - 1 note up), or D7-G vamps in the D-G measures. And, you can do all the standard slack key stuff on the barre chords. (BTW, the B chord barre is sooo Ozzie:-) I think this piece must serve as some kind of universal scaffolding on which you can hang pretty much what you want to. I can well believe it was the template for *lots* of stuff around the world.
Do either of you know any more about its history - its career? Maybe this is a PhD thesis for a musicologist :-)
...Reid |
|
|
|
cpatch
Ahonui
USA
2187 Posts |
Posted - 07/14/2003 : 3:17:47 PM
|
| There's a slightly more elaborate arrangement of Spanish Fandango by Vincent Sadovsky available in PDF format here. It's also in Open G/Taro Patch tuning and, although I haven't tried playing it yet, looks from the tab like it will have more of a slack key sound to it. |
Craig
My goal is to be able to play as well as people think I can. |
|
|
|
Mark
Ha`aha`a
USA
1628 Posts |
Posted - 07/23/2003 : 2:47:46 PM
|
Peak popularity of this "tune" in the US was around 1865, however, more importantly, it was most popular in New Spain (California) some 20 to 30 years earlier, and was also one of the "theme songs" of the Spanish Revolution.
That's very interesting, Lawrence. I'd love to know where you came by this info. Everything I'd found points to the tune having been composed in the 1860s. But it's easy to get confused on this stuff -- all I have to go on is what I can find in my library, and I know a lot of the sources are suspect.
I've been trying to track down this link (and another, more tantalizing, thread to 19th Century Azores-style guitar playing) for about ten years. All the Californio musicologists I've spoken with say altered tunings were not a part of whatever limited guitar playing there was on the ranchos. Nor have I found any altered tunings used in contemporary Mexican folk music. That doesn't mean they don't exist, just that I haven't heard 'em. I have heard tons of alternating (or at least steady) bass with melodies harmonized in 6ths in Mexican music, tho'.
Admittedly, my sources are quite limited, so I'd appreciate any help on this.
(BTW: "Californio" refers to the culture and people of Alta California prior to the, ummm, overthrow of the government by a small group of American businessmen with the complicity of the US government. Sound familiar?)
Oh, one more thing: G maj tuning is called "Spanish" or "Old Spanish" in reference to the song, not the country. Open D maj is called "Vastapol" by the blues guys in reference to another parlor piece of about the same vintage. Just to make it weirder, I've heard people refer to standard tuning as "Spanish."
Oh, and to make it even weirder, I recently came across the names of those first three paniolo sent from Monterey in the 1830: Loziedo, Ramon and... Kosuth. Last time I checked, Kosuth was a Hungarian name, and a very famous one at that.
What's a boy to do?
yours for fun,
Mark |
|
|
|
cpatch
Ahonui
USA
2187 Posts |
Posted - 07/23/2003 : 3:21:55 PM
|
This link traces it back to at least 1938:
http://www.win.net/mainstring/tunings.html
You might also want to contact Judith Etzion (who may or may not still be at etzionj @ mail.biu.ac.il). She wrote an article titled The Spanish Fandango: from Eighteenth-Century ‘Lasciviousness’ to Nineteenth-Century Exoticism (Anuario Musical 48 [1993]) which obviously implies that the song goes back even farther.
Also, I think it was Lozada, Ramon, and Kosuth.
|
Craig
My goal is to be able to play as well as people think I can. |
Edited by - cpatch on 07/23/2003 3:49:20 PM |
|
|
|
Mark
Ha`aha`a
USA
1628 Posts |
Posted - 07/27/2003 : 2:50:30 PM
|
Also, I think it was Lozada, Ramon, and Kosuth.
Sorta depends which source ya read, don't it? Which would be my point -- at the time something's actually happening, no one's really thinking that it will someday be "history."
I've seen both spellings of "Loziedo-Lozada" - "Loziendo" is another candidate. I'm sure we are dealing with someone's memory here -- and maybe several different people at that.
Somewhere there may be a shipping manifest with the three names. (Not that I'd trust that, either. You think my grandfather's name was "Nelson" before he came to America?)
Wasn't "The Spanish Fandango" a dance (a la Parisienne "Can-Can," etc.) performed on stages in Europe? I think the parlor piece is derived from the dance. So it may be that the guitar piece "Spanish Fandango" w/ open G maj tuning is one thing, while the term "Spanish Fandango" is something else -- and of different vintages. Anyone read Ms Etzion's article yet?
I seem to recall that there were dances in Alta California called "fandangos" -- the term referred to both the activity as a whole and a specific type of dance. (Hey, we all studied Calfornia history in the 4th grade, remember?
Just found this:
" The Fandango evolved from Spain and later came to mean dance generally. The earlier fandangos had a set order with a Dancing Master, or "Tecolero" leading off each dance." -- The Music of Old California, Lee Birch, from "The Musical Repertory of Los Californios," self-published
Boy, I wish I had the time to check this stuff out -- I shouldn't even be taking the time to write in here at Taropatch. Gotta get the Aloha Camp up an running in just two short weeks!
Onward!
Mark |
|
|
|
cpatch
Ahonui
USA
2187 Posts |
|
| |
Topic |
|
|
|
Topic Locked
