"Whatthehell is Flatpicking?!"
In 1952, when I started trying to play a guitar, the FTSS (flat-top, steel-string) guitar was a very obscure instrument. Very few people played any kind of acoustic guitar seriously as a solo instrument. You virtually never heard one in popular music; in Country music it was almost always a rhythm-only instrument; in classical music there was Segovia (about eight years away from his later celebrity); and the blues players (some of whom, of course, did take acoustic guitar seriously) were ghettoized on the so-called "race" labels and radio stations. The number of players that a blue-eyed white kid like me might hear on mainstream radio who could really play would be fewer than the fingers on one hand ... you know — Hank Snow, Merle Travis, Don Reno, and then the list trails off with a couple of tentative members.
My wife Laree (the "Crary Home Companion") often says that it's hard to see the forest when you are one of the trees. The guitar is so everywhere today and so ordinary a part of our lives, it's hard to imagine a world where it wasn't anywhere very much. But it's a good thing to realize that today's institution of the guitar and the incredible beauty and satisfaction it brings is a fairly new, sorta 45 year-old phenomenon; it's a realization that may make us appreciate it even more. And if the FTSS guitar could be said to have risen from obscurity in four decades, double that for flatpicking.
I can give you a precise estimate of the number of flatpicking instruction books that were available in 1952 when I started: It was zero, always a precise amount. The number of media-relevant flatpickers was scarcely more: It would be Hank Snow, who flatpicked in most of his recorded music, and Don Reno, whose main focus was banjo, but who flatpicked the guitar regularly with Red Smiley. In fact, that's about the time the term "flatpicking" was invented. (In a later DanRant I'll discuss with you some important implications of what we call ourselves, but here we'll look back at the origin of the music itself.)
It seems to me that the impetus for what we now know as flatpicking came from the monumental success of a new guitar design invented by our friends at the C.F. Martin Co. in the early 1930s, called the "dreadnought," especially the Martin D-28. The beauty and power of the instrument made some of the early players want to hear more of it as a lead instrument. So, the best historical definition of flatpicking is: Lead music played with a plectrum ("flatpick") on the FTSS (flat-top, steel-string) guitar in American traditional music.
But hear me on this, my friends: There's danger in excessively precise definitions; the danger is that once defined, somebody will come along who wants the thing to remain that way. They'll form a club with rules, and nominate themselves to preside over your obedience to those rules. With flatpicking, it isn't just what it originally was, it's also what it's becoming. That's the real trip ... stand back and watch it go from an obscure technique practiced in previous years by a bunch of us hairy-armed males with a bluegrassy chip on our shoulders, to become a world music that includes soloists, international demographics, great female flatpickers, new kinds of music, and variations on the FTSS guitar theme. But for god's sake don't draft a bunch of rules for it: It's my guitar and I'll play what I want to.
Dan Crary
2 April 2001 |
