Language of the Blues - Edmonton Blues Society

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around the end of World War II, its influence was huge and lasting. Where would Jerry
Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry have been without it?
Songs:
- Pinetop Smith (Clarence Smith)
- Big Bill Broonzy (Willie Lee Conley Broonzy)
- Little Walter (Marion Walter Jacobs)
B O T T L E N E C K
Although early slide guitar players used knives and polished bones as slides, by the
Depression era blues guitarists were breaking the necks off of bottles and polishing the
edges over campfires to create bottleneck slides. The first blues ever documented in
writing, though, was played by a guitarist using a knife, as described by William
Christopher (W.C.) Handy.
Handy had fallen asleep while waiting for a train in Tutwiler, Mississippi in 1895 when
he was awakened by a strange, haunting melody.
rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages.
As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularised [sic]
he singer repeated the line three times,
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A traveling minstrel musician at the time, Handy was so inspired by the sound that he
dedicated the rest of his life to exposing the blues to the world. In addition to composing
-related songs, Handy worked tirelessly transcribing
authentic blues songs, which he published in Blues: An Anthology (1926).
st to take a bone or a polished stone and
slide it along a gut string. Since African slaves brought the technique with them to the
American colonies, it likely originated in Africa. Then again, modern North Indian
guitarists, such as Debashis Battacharya, use slides, too. So did the Hawaiian guitarists
that W.C. Handy mentioned.
American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan in 1995. With his wide-bodied guitar
flat on his lap, braced by the heel of his bare foot, Battacharya moved a solid metal slide
in his left hand in quick flourishes, pulling out microtonal melodies anchored by the
steady bass rhythms he drummed with the pick on his right thumb. Battacharya encored
with a simple North Indian folk song so undeniably bluesy that it would have sounded
like an American blues instrumental if the other performer on the bill, John Hammond,
had played it on his Dobro.
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