Back in the 20s,
as many of you are probably familiar with,
there were two major elements of guitar playing that came out.
Victor Record people came to hear A.P.
Carter tell this story.
It was very interesting because he said it
with a great deal of pride.
There were so many people that came to the Crystal Hotel
to interview for the Ralph Peer and Victor Records.
There were signs out all along through Gate City
and through the various backwoods sections of Virginia
saying that there was going to be a town scout there.
He said they arrived and they had these
old beat up instruments,
Sears Roebuck guitars and so forth.
They were a little bit ashamed
because they had all the rest of the people
arrived all dressed up in costumes and the
way they performed and so forth.
The Carter family had never performed except locally
around home.
They went up the fire escape so they
wouldn't have to go through the main
lobby.
What they produced was the most unique
sound that had been produced for records to
that time.
Jimmy Rogers incidentally was the other
talent that was given the opportunity
to record at that time.
His guitar style was still different.
Maybel Carter's guitar is
more than one guitar.
It's several guitars.
I'm going to ask her to do several different
types of songs.
She plays a roll style in three quarter time and various things which
I find extremely difficult to even imagine how it's done.
We can fire questions at her
as we go along.
They started in the 20's as I say and
her guitar style probably has been
the most unique inventive method of guitar playing,
flat pick style as well as the finger
roll style that has come out of the 30's,
20's,
30's and the 40's in fact to date.
Many
of us including myself were influenced very strongly
by this guitar and I had nobody to teach guitar where
I lived and there was nobody that played a guitar.
I stayed home listening to Carter family records until
I could figure out something about what was going on.
Let's ask Maybel Carter to come up and show us something.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.