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dhanners623

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Posts posted by dhanners623

  1. I have difficulty with the overbroad assumption behind the question, “Why do Epiphones sound so bad?” Some do, some don’t. I know players who think that about Gibsons. Taylors. Even Martins. I had an Epiphone “IB’64” Texan that sounded pretty darn good. Didn’t sound like a vintage Texan, but I liked it. I accepted it for what it was.

    I’ve got a Farida OT-22, which is more or less copied from an LG-2. It sounds good, is well built, stays in tune and I’ve no reservation gigging with it. But does it sound like a vintage LG-2? No. Close, but for the $423 I paid for it, it is very nice.

    Some people have spent most of their playing lives playing the guitar equivalent of fast food. If you took them to a restaurant with Michelin stars, the subtleties and nuances of the tastes would be lost on them. That’s not a knock on them. I spent years playing budget guitars that, looking back, weren’t that good.

    What I tire of is people thinking their budget guitar sounds as good as — or even better — a pricier guitar. I’m a member of the Takamine and Sigma owner groups on Facebook (owned one of each decades ago) and I swear, at least three times a week, some Sigma owner posts photos of his guitar and says, “I’ve played D-28s and D-45s, and my Sigma sounds better.” No, it doesn’t. It may sound good. But sound better than a D-45? No way. And it’s not going to sound better than a D-28, either. If you have indeed played D-45s and D-28s that don’t sound as good as your Sigma, then you either played a rare bad one or you have no idea how a great guitar is supposed to sound.

    That said, I wouldn’t mind one of those Sigma 12-fret dreads….

     

    • Like 2
  2. 2 hours ago, Dave F said:

    Comments like that could get you banned. 

    I live in fear of that….

    But seriously, how many guitars does a person really  need? I think of all the blues greats who made lasting music that has inspired generations, and they didn’t have rooms full of high-end guitars.  They were lucky to get their hands on a Gibson and they made iconic music with Stellas and the like. Or other genres…. I wonder how many guitars Tony Rice actually owned. (I’m willing to bet he owned more Bulova Accutron watches than guitars….)

    Yeah, I know people can do what they want with their money, but jeez, when is enough enough? I like a nice guitar as much as the next player, but justifying the expense gets harder to do. So if I get a guitar, it has to be versatile and be able to do a bit of everything. I can only play one at a time. And 99% of the audience doesn’t care if you’re playing a Banner Gibson or a pre-war Martin or a Takamine or, God forbid, a Taylor.

  3. I dunno. I think people are overthinking the issue, again. Any guitar can be played fingerstyle or fingerpicked or what have you. What if you only have one guitar? Are their styles you’re not supposed to play because it’s the “wrong” guitar? Not everybody is fortunate enough (or obsessed enough) to own scads of guitars. I own four guitars and most days I think that’s three guitars too many.

    • Like 2
  4. Everyone seems to want to define what “traditional” bluegrass is. The music Bill and Charlie played was bluegrass — it had that “high lonesome sound” that’s a prerequisite — even if the name didn’t come along until late ‘45 after Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs joined the band. So, yeah, thanks for that.

    • Like 1
  5. The J-45’s relative scarcity in bluegrass has more to do with the didactic herd mentality of bluegrass musicians than with actual sound. Charlie Monroe was perfectly content to play Gibson slopes, and since he was present at the creation of bluegrass (accompanying brother Bill Monroe) then his choice of instruments can’t be discounted. Even Cleo Davis, who succeeded Charlie on guitar, played Gibson slopes. By the time Lester Flatt joined the band in ‘46, Martins were in vogue. If Lester had played a J-45, people today would consider a D-18 or D-28 too boomy for bluegrass.

    There’s no reason a J-45 can’t be fingerpicked, and fingerpicked well. Are there “better” guitars for fingerpicking? Maybe. But you play what you got….

    • Like 3
  6. J-45s always seemed ok for fingerpicking for me. I will say, though, that I find my J-35 is better at it than the two J-45s I used to own. To me, the J-35 is more versatile than the J-45, but that’s just me….

  7. The meme makes no sense. If you’re trying to reduce energy usage, it would seem acoustic guitars would be preferable to electrics. Then again, I guess some folks will dig up any excuse to belittle a young Swedish woman with autism who cares about the environment.

    I suppose if she were “rolling coal” in a diesel pickup and running Priuses off the road, folks would be cheering her on….

  8. 2 hours ago, PrairieSchooner said:

    Just a joke, friend.

    Humor is often relative. Given the derision habitues of the forum have heaped upon relic’d guitars — and the people who buy them— one can never tell when a jape is afoot.

  9. 3 hours ago, PrairieSchooner said:

    Hey, some folks pay big money to have their new guitars look like that 😀.  Perfect guitar for the urban roots singer/songwriter who wants the image of having lugged it around the country  while living on hobo stew. 

    Not sure anyone pays to have their new guitars look like that. Yeah, some may go for a level of “relic’ing,” but I’ve  ever seen faux aging to that extent. If you have, maybe provide photos?

    That said, it seems the guitar came by its aging naturally. So if some “urban roots singer/songwriter” and “hobo stew”  connoisseur buys it, will he/she not have a guitar that came by its wear naturally? And I’m still trying to figure out why people care what another player’s guitar looks like or how they spend their guitar money.

  10. 8 hours ago, Red 333 said:

    Gibson tops and backs are almost never flat. They are radiused, usually 28' for the tops and 18' (I think--some one fact check me) for the backs. This has been more or less true since the days of Orville hisself.  A straight edge should always rock when put on either the front or back. But sunken or bellied areas are concerning, of course 

    Red 333

    I believe in lutherie it is referred to as a “loaded” top — a curvature is built into the top. At least that’s what they told me at St. Paul Guitar Repair, and they would certainly know. I’ve noticed it on my Gibsons.

  11. I had an early ‘60s LG-1. By the time I bought it (at Elderly’s in ‘92 or so) the plastic bridge had been professionally replaced with a wood one. I liked it — ladder bracing and all — but at the time, I didn’t really appreciate smaller-body guitars the way I do now. I traded it in in ‘95 or so for a ‘66 J-45.

    Of the guitars I’ve owned and gotten rid of (including an early ‘70s Martin D-35S with Brazilian rosewood) the LG-1 is the one I miss.

  12. I always meant to write this sooner, but didn’t. It is unfortunate that the OP couldn’t get into the book, because it is an excellent history not only of something that fascinates us — Gibson guitars — but about how life went on on the American homefront during wartime.

    John’s book is no small feat. I was a newspaper reporter for close to four decades and I can tell you that tracking down business and government records from the 1940s is hard work. Tracking down and interviewing the workers still living was also a big task, and John came up with innovative approaches for doing that.

    If you’re reading those remembrances and oral histories for slam-bang action or some great epiphany about Gibson then, yeah, you’re probably not going to be enthusiastic about their stories. But any historian will tell you the magic is in telling how normal people carried on in times of national stress. That is, in large part, why people love reading Shelby Foote or Howard Zinn.

    It is amazing to think that a bunch of women not formally schooled in lutherie turned out guitars that would one day become iconic and much sought-after because of their sound, which is what we mainly prize in guitars. Add to that the company’s sexist inability to admit women made up most of the factory and it is a great story. I mean, Jeezamae. Rosie the Riveter was building bombers that American airmen trusted with their lives, but musicians’ egos were too fragile to play a guitar built by Lucy the Luthier?

    I found it fascinating to learn that a trait many of the women shared was that they were good seamstresses. Surely the attention to detail required for sewing helped them build wonderful instruments.
     

    John covered a lot of ground and covered it well. It is narrow thinking to believe it’s a book only for guitar fanatics in general and Gibson fanatics in particular. It is also an interesting history of the how a corporation behaved during wartime, and the subterfuge it decided to employ to meet a demand.

     

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    • Thanks 2
  13. I dunno…. From the perspective of somebody who is retired, I think most guitars out there are “luxury” and I’ve accepted that my days of buying high-end instruments are over. (Unless I win the lottery, then I might splurge on a “‘34 Special” dread by Pre-War Guitars. But I don’t play the lottery.)

    I’m not sure I’m out much, though, because a) you can only play one guitar at a time and b) you can buy some very good instruments for not a lot of money these days.

    i currently have four guitars: a ‘16 J-35, a D-18 clone built for me in 2011 by Minneapolis luthier Kevin Schwab, a Farida OT-22 and a 1949 Stella H929. (The Stella is currently in the shop, being converted from a floating bridge to a pinned bridge.) I love the J-35 and the Schwab dearly, but when I’m honest, the OT-22 and the Stella are at present more fun to play. I bought the Farida from Elderly in 2019 for $423. When plugged in (I use a Baggs M1) it sounds great. Sounds really nice unplugged, too. It is well-built (in China) and hasn’t given me a moment’s trouble. Is it an LG-2? Nope. I just checked Sweetwater’s website and the cheapest LG-2 is $2,599.

    There is the consideration of buying American-made guitars, and three of mine fit that bill. And I console myself that plenty of Americans were involved in the OT-22; folks at Elderly helped design it and I’m sure union longshoremen unloaded it from the boat and loaded it into trucks driven by American truckers to Michigan. It was sold to me by an American salesperson and shipped to me via an American carrier.

    Play what you got….

  14. Excellent job! I always thought some Motown songs get cast in a whole different light solo acoustic, and you’ve nailed that vibe here. And, yeah, the guitar sounds really good.

  15. 8 hours ago, Murph said:

    Pretty slick there, David.

    I dig the story songs, have only written a few but have many decades of experience........

    Oh, story songs are like walking. Just stick one word in front of the other.

    When you get into the weeds of the Reed case, all the weird factoids are kind of interesting. I made my protagonist an unnamed local. I gave some thought to trying to tell the story from the viewpoint of the minister who spoke at the hanging. He had befriended Reed some weeks before because she said she wanted to become a better Christian. He began visiting her in jail. Betsey said she wanted to be baptized, so the minister talked the sheriff into letting Betsey out — with a deputy as guard — the night before the hanging. They went down to the Embarras that night and he baptized her in the river. Then the next day, he gave his sermon and Betsey sat atop her coffin waiting and shouted “Amen!” at numerous points during his sermon.

    Another weird point was Betsey was wearing a white “Ascension” gown. In the early 1800s, there was a religious sect (mostly in the Northeastern U.S.) called the Millerites, after their leader, Baptist lay minister William Miller. He claimed his study of the Bible told him the world was going to end in 1843 or 1844. He said it had to end so there could be the second coming of Jesus.

    While Miller wasn’t specific about a date, one of his followers was.  He did some biblical computations and determined the world would end Oct. 22, 1844, and the idea caught on among the Millerites. Followers were told to be ready. Some dug graves on their property and spent the night of Oct. 22 in them, waiting for the end to come. There are even reports of some families dying by murder-suicide, figuring they’d just get the death part out of the way so they could be resurrected sooner.

    One enterprising businessman decided that the well-dressed Millerite awaiting the end of the world should be wearing pure white garments, so he produced them and sold them as “Ascension gowns.”

    Oct. 23 rolled around and the world was still there. It became known as the “Great Disappointment” (seriously) and aside from having to return to their normal lives, one guy had a big inventory of unsold “Ascension gowns” on his hands. He started selling them cheap, and the sheriff in Lawrenceville thought he’d buy a few for when he had female prisoners. So the gown Betsey wore when she was executed had originally been made for people waiting for the end of the world.

  16.  

    Went back into the archives to rewrite another one, and it’s another true story from my part of East Central Illinois — the 1845 hanging of Elizabeth “Betsey” Reed. She was the first woman executed in Illinois.

     

    Reed was convicted of killing her husband, Leonard, by poisoning him with arsenic. They lived in Purgatory Swamp, just south of Palestine. (Palestine is about a 40-minute drive southeast of my hometown.) She was tried at Lawrenceville, and that’s where she was hanged. It is a case filled with odd footnotes and peculiarities.

     

    One of the key points is that some reliable estimates put the crowd at her hanging at nearly 20,000. It was covered by papers far and wide. Keep in mind that at that time, that part of Illinois was still largely frontier; Chicago (a couple of hundred miles to the north) had a population of around 5,000 or so. But hangings were big events, and Betsey had generated a lot of interest. They had invited a minister to speak before the hanging and I imagine he looked out at the crowd and figured he was never going to get an audience that big again, so he preached for 90 minutes.

     

    Fast forward to a few years ago and a local author wrote an “historical fiction” novel about her case. The local historical society invited him to speak at one of their meetings and were so aghast at all his embellishments (and outright historical inaccuracies) that they decided to launch an actual historical review of the case.

     

    They dug through court records and genealogies and other records and came up with an intriguing possibility: Betsey was innocent. Among the things they found was that Leonard had been sickly for some time, and a doctor had prescribed him antimony. As we know now, antimony is toxic — and the effects of its toxicity mimic (you guessed it) arsenic poisoning.

     

    A local ghost-hunter group claims Betsey’s ghost haunts an end zone of the local high school’s football field; that is where her gallows were built.

     

    (One note on the song: The Embarras is a tributary of the Wabash that runs by Lawrenceville. It is pronounced, AM-braw.)

     

    Betsey Reed

    © 2024 by David Hanners

     

    They built the gallows near a sugar maple grove

    How many come to watch ain’t nobody knows

    The condemned waited atop her own coffin

    Her gown white as Egyptian cotton

     

    They claim she killed her husband, a horrible crime

    Down at Purgatory Swamp, south of Palestine

    Judge Wilson’s gavel like thunder rang

    Said justice demands Betsey Reed hang

     

    Women cursed her, children strained to see

    A men’s chorus sang, “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me”

    Some preacher rambled on a full hour and a half

    For Betsey Reed, one hell of an epitaph

     

    I’ve heard folks say maybe she was innocent

    Sentenced to die on not much evidence

    Night before the hanging I swear that I saw

    Betsey being baptized in the Embarras

     

    Purgatory Swamp is gone, today it is farmland

    Sculpted by time and the Wabash

    There’s still a question years ain’t laid to rest

    Did they hang a woman who was innocent?

     

    Women cursed her, children strained to see

    A men’s chorus sang, “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me”

    Some preacher rambled on a full hour and a half

    For Betsey Reed, one hell of an epitaph

     

     

     

  17. 58 minutes ago, PrairieDog said:

    Right on! First time I ever came across McMurtry was an Austin City Limits that came on with the TV.  He was doing Choctaw Bingo.  I was agape.  Nearly monotone, but just the right inflection here and there, and pretty basic chucking along. The thing was way too long, but I still didn’t want that effing song to end 😂  20 years later we still throw random quotes from it into conversations, “Tried to miss him, but didn’t quite,” lol.  That “mmhHHmmm” he throws in at the right moment is a stroke of lyric genius, talk about saying everything by saying nothing at all.  An American musical legend.  

    “Choctaw Bingo” clocks in at 664 words. And over 8 minutes. Ordinarily, I’d say, “Whoa there, Hoss,” but he gets going on the story and it’s quite a yarn. Not too many people can pull that off, and even those who can don’t try and pull it off that often.

    The longest song I have is 507 words (in 11 verses) and it’s been years since I’ve performed it live. I’m certainly no McMurtry, although he is an inspiration.

    I don’t know what it is, but I get self-conscious if I write long.

  18. 5 hours ago, MissouriPicker said:

    God, good job, David!  You and Ben are killin’ me with these songs about “real” people.  It’s great to dig-out an old song you wern’t quite satisfied with and turn it into a winner.  Keep’ em coming!  You guys are inspiring me.

    Thanks for the kind words. I’m now down the rabbit hole of experimenting with different versions and trying to figure out which I like best. I’ve got a version with the victims’ names, one without, one that turns the “Prairie winds cut so cold…” verse into a chorus and one edited down to 96 words.

    For the record, here is the 96-word version. I think it needs the verse explaining the “perfect crime” motive, but I was just experimenting.

    Fields of Stubble Straw

    © 2024 by David Hanners         

     

    Jerry Darling and Wesley Hall

    Were honest, good and sound

    Died in a crime that had no reason or rhyme

    On a hog farm south of town

     

    Two half-wits they worked with

    Shot Hall and Darling dead

    Stole 400 bucks and Darling’s pickup truck

    And away they fled

     

    The dime-store Dillingers sped south

    On their flight from the law

    Run out of luck trying to repaint that truck

    Next day down in Oklahoma

     

    Those prairie winds cut so cold

    In winter, they chaff you raw

    Leaves you low and dying

    In a field of stubble straw

     

    • Thanks 1
  19. 5 hours ago, PrairieDog said:

    Sure, that would serve the same purpose to sort of ease your listeners into what they are about to hear….

    Just mentioning “they talk” is a bit passive, it removes your audience from the story a step, (implies they are listening to second hand news)… you want them in there with you.  How ‘bout just, “a crime so grim, it still chills me to this day.” I’m a writer and a long time editor (I know, you wouldn’t know from my posts, chuckle, busman’s holiday).  And I realize I’m just blathering uninvited here, I have no ego invested, so take what helps, brush off the rest… Knock ‘em dead  at the show! 

    I can see what you’re saying re: “They talk…” — up to a point. My aim in using it was to give a nod to the folk tradition of foretelling in the first verse. Plus, it understands the listener is not in the song’s locale, but explains that if he/she were, the murders are  what some people might be talking about. It puts them on the same page as the townsfolk.

    That said, while waiting for my set this afternoon (more on that in a moment) I was thinking about your comment re: Was committing the perfect crime really the motive? It made me think that while that is an important aspect of the case, the song just gives it one line. Plus, the third and fourth lines of that verse — “Like Stupid met Evil and had a child/On that hog farm east of Route 49” — have always bothered me. The third line particularly sounds like just an attempt to be cute, and not a very good one at that.

    So when I got home, I experimented with replacing those two lines with, “They weren’t drunk or high, it was just the way they are/And somebody had to die.”  I’m going to work on it some more to try and develop an internal rhyme in the third line, but I like the concept.

    Anyway, I did the song at the show and it went over really well. I did the version with the “In my hometown….” first verse and the song didn’t seem too long because of it. Plus, that verse eases you into the next verse, whose first line introduces the victims. This way, the listener isn’t confronted with two names of people they don’t know right off the bat. With the “hometown” verse before it, you’re given a sense they’re characters in the crime story.

    It’s getting there….

     

     

    • Like 1
  20. 9 hours ago, PrairieDog said:

    So, I like this revision.  Just wondering, what about bookending the song with your last verse?  it’s a great evocative image.  I’d maybe add that as an intro to suck the audience in, “hey, what’s that now?” then give it a poignant reprise at the end.

    That’s a possibility. The crime happened in January, which is always pretty dismal in that part of Illinois. In fact, in an earlier version of the song, the first verse was “In my hometown of Casey, Illinois/‘Neath a January sky so gray/They talk of a crime so bad/It chills me to this day.” Then it went into the “Jerry Darling and Wesley Hall….” verse.

    While the “In my hometown…” verse served the folk-song purpose of foreshadowing, I cut it out of a concern for length. Maybe it should go back in. Being a folkie, I get self-conscious about length because I’ve heard too many folksingers (and others) drone on for seven or eight verses when a tightly written five would’ve told the story just as well.

    I’m on the bill of a showcase at a tavern in downtown Manchester today; I was going to do the song and maybe I’ll throw the old first verse back on. Also on the bill is an Americana act from Liverpool, of all places. It’ll blow their minds….

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