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| Martin Carthy in Bakersfield, CA... |
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| ...with Ursula Lloyd and David Nigel Lloyd |
The Threefold Pulse of Martin Carthy's Guitar
This essay wrestles with the idea of an indigenous English style of steel-string guitar playing and that Martin Carthy exemplifies
it best and why. The essay is in need (and will receive) pruning. However, several people had asked me about Martin's music,
so I decided to birth this piece prematurly. —DNL
Martin Carthy was the first English folk musician to receive an MBE, which stands for Member of the British Empire. It is
an honor of a type specifically banned for Americans by the US Constitution. Like the more lofty honor of knighthood, the
MBE must be bestowed personally by the monarch.
I have observed that many Americans are afflicted with a deep nostalgia for royalty. When traveling with Martin Carthy here
in the States, I have been asked more than once if he is to be addressed as Sir Martin. There is a wistful disappointment
when the petitioner learns that the answer is 'no.'
Martin Carthy received his MBE for services to English folk music. Just what were these services?
Forty years ago, Carthy taught a song to Paul Simon called "Scarborough Fair." Simon's name was affixed to the song as author
and it brought him (or his publisher, as I understand Simon claims) a great deal of money. At about that time Carthy also
taught Bob Dylan a few traditional songs one of which , "Lord Franklin," Dylan used as the melody for "Bob Dylan's Dream."
Dylan correctly attributed his source for the melody, however.
Early on, Martin Carthy developed a style of guitar playing which makes the guitar sound like, as one astute reviewer wrote,
an indigenous British folk instrument of centuries' standing. This important development is, I feel, Carthy's primary service
to English folk music. Nobody plays guitar like Martin Carthy unless they are imitating him.
At the heart of his innovation is his tuning. Bearing in mind that guitars are standardly tuned E A D G B E, Martin drops
the bass string of his guitar down two whole steps from E to C. The instrument is tuned C G C D G A, which he says is like
a cello if a cello had two strings added between its first and second strings. This yields a very resonant earthy sound and
encourages vertical playing, that is to say melodies are mostly found by moving up and down the length of the string as opposed
to crossing from one string to another. Vertical playing more closely approximates singing. In Martin's playing this vertical
technique seems to be accomplished on two strings in tandem with occasional 'assists' from neighboring strings.
As for his singing, Martin has long been associated with England's premier folk vocalist family, the Watersons. In fact he
married Norma Waterson of the group which has now evolved into a band called Waterson:Carthy. Not surprisingly, the Waterson's
technique is, like most folk music, heterophonic: the singers sound like themselves rather than striving to produce an ideal
voice, as in classical music.
[What's wrong with the Ideal Voice? The ideal voice blends into one voice in order to better facilitate the needs of the discrete
arranger or composer whose creation takes place on paper abstracted from particular singers. This singing of the ideal voice,
homophony, dominates the Euro-American aesthetic of music and gives rise to ideas of musical purity. Several questions come
to mind: Is there in homophonic purity an overtone of racism — pure sound? pure race? Heterophony and homophony need
not be in opposition but I believe that they are. Is their opposition an aspect of the age old opposition of Dionysian and
Apollonian art? For the sake of THIS discussion, these questions must remain unanswered. Let's get back on topic!]
| Martin Carthy with Lou Berryman |
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| of Lou and Peter Berryman |
| SIGNS OF LIFE Carthy's 1999 CD |
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| click to read DNL's review |
| Martin Carthy at the beach in Florence, OR with... |
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| ... David Leger-Jeffrey of the Oregon Coast Folk Circle |
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Like Carthy's guitar playing, the Waterson's harmonic technique seems to date back to very early English choral singing. It
in fact does not unless by oddest coincidence. This, from my conversations with Martin, is my underestanding: The Watersons'
harmonic schematic is not plotted out like an electrician's blueprint. Instead, all singers sing in unison until one gets
to a note that he or she cannot hit. That singer then chooses another note, thus the first harmony. This harmony along with
whatever others were born of the other singers' inadequacies will suggest harmonic if not contrapuntal parts. Such parts will
then be developed. The singing evolves organically from its own imperfections. [Also, it's worth noting that most rock bands
arange their music in a similar organic fashion.]
The Waterson style of singing is rarely found on Martin Carthy's own albums for the simple reason he sings solo. However,
I think it is fair to say that this casual and organic approach to harmony underlies his musical thinking in general so that,
stretching our definitions, we might hear a trio if not a quartet in his music. The guitar itself sings two or three parts
to Martin's one part.
When I first met Martin Carthy in 2000, I considered myself quite familiar with his music. But after a month on the road with
him as his driver, I found my own handling of steel strings to be substantially changed. (I now drop my own alternate tuning
down a step and Martin is my source of the peculiar metal thumb picks which I will get round to shortly.) Nearly all Carthy's
playing has a brisk steady almost mechanical pulse to it. Somewhere on that long ramble from Mexico up into Canada, I realized
that this was the pulse of English music itself: a pulse which had been silenced long ago by a mannered if not frilly tunefulness
that attained the heights of unwitting self-parody with the song "English Country Garden." Rediscovered or reinvented, this
pulse presented me with an England with which I could reconcile myself.
By 'almost mechanical' I seem to be saying almost (as in just before) the Industrial Revolution. Yet with his metal thumb
pick pounding his metal strings with such precise time-keeping, there is something of some fearsome great threshing machine
to this pulse. But such great machines frighten in their ability to simulate the rhythms of the human body, thus suggesting
they are living, monstrous, hungry beings. The pulse in Martin's playing has earlier ancestry in English folk dancing (Martin
usually performs two or three Morris Dance tunes in his concerts) and ultimately with the human heart, for his time-keeping
seems to have a similar tempo and thud.
So I find the great English pulse of Martin Carthy's music to be a triple entendre. For his songs of the Industrial Revolution,
it creates a mechanical ambiance; for songs of older provenance, the physical dream of the dance with its preordained steps
is imposed upon the strange or cruel behavior of of the ballads' characters; and lastly it ordains all with the verity of
the human heart.
If there is one particular aspect of his technique which unearths that pulse, it is his thumb-work. While most finger-style
players wear plastic picks on their thumbs, Martin, as I mentioned, uses metal thumb picks, Swiss zither picks in fact. With
gun-hammer precision, he continuously snaps that thumb pick down onto the bass strings. That creates the pulse. For his finger-work,
he uses his nails as would a classical player.
In Martin Carthy's playing we find a very interesting cross-pollination which results in what I call this rebirth of English
music. For if English music tends to plod predictably, in Martin's playing we find odd rhythmic anomalies and juxtapositions.
The rhythmic anomalies, especially in his phrasing, suggest the syncopation which is the hallmark of African-American blues
and jazz. The vertical playing, however, suggests the music of Britain's most beloved colony: India. It should be noted that
the black Delta Blues player Big Bill Broonzy was very popular in Britain in the late 1950s. Martin Carthy also relates going,
almost on a whim, to sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar's first London concert; Carthy was dressed in his school uniform, he says,
and relates that it was a watershed experience for him.
Martin's genius, however, is not that his playing mixes Indian music with English music with the blues. That is the early
accomplishment of two British bands: The Incredible String Band and the folk baroque band Pentangle. Carthy's genius is that
the vertical playing, the syncopations sound uniquely English and populous as opposed to courtly. It makes me wonder: Did
it take the music of the colonized and the enslaved to liberate the music of the colonizer and the slaver? This question is
implied for me in Martin Carthy's playing.
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| Martin Carthy in 2004 (photo: Ursula Lloyd) |
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| Lilherstahl zither picks from Switzerland |
When I was on tour with Martin in July 2004, I brought up my notion of a very loosely confederated group of late '60s guitarist
poets of which he was a member. Equally loose was their notion that Mississippi Delta Blues, the British ballads, beat poetry,
Zen teaching tales, and (just for example) North Indian classical music, were all expressions of the same thing.
"It was just sort of there," he cautioned. Both the confederacy and the notion were very loose and informal.
I told him this notion, in my opinion, is greatly discounted today and dismissed as quaint hippy ideology and an impediment
to the promotion of a pure and authentic folk music. Clearly Martin did not agree that this dismissal of the the All-One Notion
was as profound and as widespread as I feel it is. "I have never lost that [vision]," he said.
[Martin may have said 'vision.' He may have used another word such as 'idea' or 'notion.' I do not recall. Most of what goes
on on a tour is to my thinking off-the-record. I will occasionally, as here, draw on such personal events and conversations
as illuminate the work.]
Stated briefly, I think his music intrigues with its sense of dance and dream and, with his reintegration of elements like
syncopation, with its resurrection of music which predates the dominance of written notation. He is the most interesting of
his generation because his innovations are wholly English and reconstructed through a prolonged organic act of imagination,
more than research. The wonder of this is that none of the elements of this innovation are English, starting with the steel-strung
guitar itself which is American.
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