Fingerboard Stories
Louis Armstrong once famously said, “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” Some will say that talking about music is like dancing about architecture. Jazz has undergone several phases over the years, from big band to bebop to fusion to fuzak (though the less said about that one, the better). Many common elements exist in these styles that help define them as jazz.
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One of the most popular, if not the most popular, songs of the holiday season, Silent Night, originated in 1818 in the Austrian village of Oberndorf. Joseph Mohr, the local parish priest, approached Franz Xaver Gruber, a school teacher and organist, with a poem he had written. On Christmas Eve, faced with a malfunctioning organ, Gruber composed a simple melody to accompany Mohr's verses (with a guitar, no less! How fitting for this blog!). The song was first performed on Christmas Eve in 1818 at the St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf
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A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece for this blog called “Down That Stream Without A Paddle.” It was a bit of a grim tale about how streaming is making it harder for musicians and songwriters to earn any decent amount of money from their work. Compared to radio and physical sales, the amounts the streamers (even the well-paying ones) are dishing out per spin almost seemed like a joke.
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Rather than the traditional bar used by lap and pedal steel players, he has three differing ball-ended slides on his fingers, one on his ring finger and two smaller ones on his index finger and thumb. He began working on a technique around 2014 when he was gifted a lap steel guitar.
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Austin’s Hippie scene was likely what Nelson needed to get his creativity going again. He went back to performing and writing, combining his songwriting style with elements of country, folk, jazz, and rock and roll into a new sound (creating the blueprint for what would be known as Outlaw Country).
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