Guitar Books

These are the books that taught me to play guitar. They came new with my first guitar in 1965.

Actually, books can't teach you to play a musical instrument. You have to motivate and do it yourself, and if you've got it you'll get there, and if not you won't. It is hard-earned. I remember so many whose desire exceeted their application.

'Tune A Day' was helpful by starting me off with two-chord songs such as 'Some Folks Like To Fret And Scold', played just on three strings, but I had to keep trying over and over again before it sounded anything like it should. Most find that being able to change between chords is the most difficult bit. It can also be hard to know when the guitar is out of tune.

You then struggle to master more chords using more strings, and pehaps after a few months you begin to realise you can do it. But as a guitar teacher in Hull (Tim Keech) told me, "it takes you ten years before you realise how crap you are" (which is true of so many other things too). 

Once I could play a bit, there was another book that did in fact teach be quite a lot, Hal White's 'Leeds Guitar Method' from the nineteen-fifties. It explained things clearly, such as on this page about Augmented Chords, and followed up with contempory songs that used them; in this case Dickie Valentine's 'The Finger Of Suspicion Points At You'. My copy of the book came from a long-forgotten school friend whose  name and address I am disturbed to see written in the front. I wonder what became of him. 

Play regularly for ten years and you become reasonably competent. When I lived in a shared house we often bought a big bottle of cider each and played through the Beatles' Songbook.

Here are a couble of multi-track recordings I made in the severties: a J.S.Bach two-part invention, or if that's not your thing, you might recognise the other piece as an improvisation around the Beatlers' song 'You're Gonna Lose That Girl'. You don't have to tell me now how messy it is, but I was making much of the improvisation up as I went along. I wish I could still do it as well as that now. 

If you can't see the videos they are at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1li2a1TfDo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK71bqVVIFk

Family Photographs

My vision issues make reading and participating in comment quite challenging just now, but I continue to enjoy your blog posts which the computer reads for me. 

A similar sequence in families throught the Western world, labelled in albums if they are lucky.

Early in mine, among the various family lines, are my great-grandparents around 1908. My great-grandfather is resplendant in is uniform, a newly qualified Master Mariner.

Later there are lots of weddings. Don't they all look well!

Now a very faded picture of his son, my grandfather, with his new wife, on holiday with friends and cousins at Mablethorpe Lincolnshire after the Great War. Along comes a son, my father, then a daughter, my aunty. They begin to look more prosperous and go on days out to the Yorkshire coast. My grandfather sits on the beach in his hat and suit looking uncomfortable.

The children grow older and get married. My father and mother help tend the family allotment. Then I appear as a baby and begin to grow. Dad plays and entertains me for hours, carrying me around town on his bicycle crossbar seat, and then does it all over again six years later with my brother. Wasn't he fantastic! Again we take holidays on the Yorkshire coast, and further afield too.

We even have audio recordings and bits of digitised cine film from the nineteen-sixties.

I look at it all over and over again obsessively, and digitise it, and add pictures of my own family. I leave everything well-organised for the future.

And in that future, my children have little more than passing interest in the earlies pictures of people they never knew. And their children even less.

"So who was he? Is that some kind of seaman's uniform?"  

I suppose I might be the same if there were photographs of relatives I never knew from 1800, who lived such unimaginably different lives through unimaginably different times. It is too difficult to connect with them.

The whole lot might survive another century at best before being deleted, becoming inaccessible or simply thrown out.