So where did Merle Travis learn Travis picking from?

[drive-south]

Elizabeth Cotton also picks this way left handed on a right handed guitar if I recall correctly.

[tbeltrans]

Interesting stuff comes from a quick google search. Here is just one of many:

http://www.kentuckybluessociety.com/...picking-style/

Tony

[6L6]

I learned Travis picking from Eric Uhrmacher, my roommate in college back in 1964. He was a real pro and took the time to teach me (a slow learner).

I've been grateful ever since!

[srick]

Well let's consider The timeframe of Ike Everly and Mose Rager. It was about twenty years after ragtime was all the rage. Radio sets were also finding common usage and I suspect that some guy sitting in a cabin in Kentucky coal country started playing along on a cold winter night... he could pick up stations playing blues, playing jazz, you name it: "Hmm. I can make the sound of a plucked bass with my thumb, hmmm, and I can play melody with my other fingers."

At least that sounds like a good story to me.

And I'm always amazed to hear Django's influence in Merle Travis' music too. Y'know, we could always e-mail Thom Bresh for a definitive answer.

Best,

Rick

[RP]

Originally Posted by HHP

I've always thought the origin was probably adapting clawhammer banjo to the guitar. Guitar was a kind of recent arrival in the Southern Hills.

I think that Harry has hit the nail on the head. Fingerstyle playing of the guitar is closely associated with the Piedmont Blues style. In Virginia Piedmont Blues, author Barry Lee Pearson makes a strong case for this in that the Woloof and Mandingo slaves brought instruments that resembled the banjo which they played with alternating thumb and first finger similar to the Rev. Gary Davis' playing style. As to why it's called Travis Style probably has little to do with its "invention."

[Eldergreene]

RP, Gary Davis was another name that came to mind when I was musing on this thread - he used that thumb/index-finger style like Travis, & that Greenville area also produced the likes of the ( hugely influential ) Josh White & Willie Walker, & obviously had an established mature 'school' of fingerpickers by c1920, when Merle Travis was but 3 years old - also, mention might be made of Sam McGee, who was another pioneer of syncopated fingerstyle, & was appearing on radio as early as 1926 - & these are just some of the names we know about, how many more are lost in the mists of time?

[RP]

FWIW...

Piedmont or East Coast Blues...

...is characterized by a highly syncopated guitar technique that is comparable in sound to ragtime piano.

Piedmont Blues style originated in the Piedmont region of the United States, the hilly area which lies between the Atlantic Coastal Plain the Appalachian Mountains from central Georgia to central Virginia.

The Piedmont guitar style employs a complex fingerpicking method in which a regular, alternating-thumb bass pattern supports a melody on treble strings. The highly syncopated guitar style connects closely with an earlier string-band tradition integrating ragtime, blues, and country dance songs.

In the early twentieth century, influential artists such as Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Blake , Blind Willie McTell , Rev. Gary Davis , and Sonny Terry made Piedmont blues popular. Women were also masters of Piedmont guitar style, including Etta Baker and Elizabeth Cotten , whose “Freight Train” is one of the best-recognized fingerpicking guitar tunes.

Archie Edwards was one of several extraordinary Piedmont blues musicians from Virginia, including his friend, the late John Jackson . Another friend, Warner Williams, still drops by Archie’s Barbershop now and then to join in the Saturday jams.

[Tico]

What a silly question.

He learned it where everyone learns everything.
... on the Internet.

[RP]

This style [Travis picking] is commonly played on steel string acoustic guitars. Pattern picking is the use of "preset right-hand pattern[s]" while fingerpicking, with the left hand fingering standard chords. The most common pattern, sometimes broadly (and incorrectly) referred to as Travis picking after Merle Travis, and popularized by Chet Atkins, Marcel Dadi, James Taylor and Tommy Emmanuel, is as follows:

The thumb (T) alternates between bass notes, often on two different strings, while the index (I) and middle (M) fingers alternate between two treble notes, usually on two different strings, most often the second and first.
However, Travis' own playing was often much more complicated than this example. He often referred to his style of playing as "thumb picking", possibly because the only pick he used when playing was a banjo thumb pick, or "Muhlenberg picking", after his native Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, where he learned this approach to playing from Mose Rager and Ike Everly. Travis' style did not involve a defined, alternating bass string pattern; it was more of an alternating "bass strum" pattern, resulting in an accompanying rhythm reminiscent of ragtime piano.

[Steel and wood]

Originally Posted by RP

This style [Travis picking] is commonly played on steel string acoustic guitars. Pattern picking is the use of "preset right-hand pattern[s]" while fingerpicking, with the left hand fingering standard chords. The most common pattern, sometimes broadly (and incorrectly) referred to as Travis picking after Merle Travis, and popularized by Chet Atkins, Marcel Dadi, James Taylor and Tommy Emmanuel, is as follows:

The thumb (T) alternates between bass notes, often on two different strings, while the index (I) and middle (M) fingers alternate between two treble notes, usually on two different strings, most often the second and first.
However, Travis' own playing was often much more complicated than this example. He often referred to his style of playing as "thumb picking", possibly because the only pick he used when playing was a banjo thumb pick, or "Muhlenberg picking", after his native Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, where he learned this approach to playing from Mose Rager and Ike Everly. Travis' style did not involve a defined, alternating bass string pattern; it was more of an alternating "bass strum" pattern, resulting in an accompanying rhythm reminiscent of ragtime piano.

Merle Travis normally played and sang at the same time, which meant that most of his playing was done primarily over a 4/4 alternative base note fingerpicking pattern.

Because Chet and others were mostly non singers, they would take it a step further and play the melody notes on the guitar. (And in so doing made this style of guitar his own).

[Fred]

I believe Chet Atkins used to cite Mose Rager and Ike Everly....

[Mr. Jelly]

I never looked at the style of finger picking guitar to be an invention. It's how people played guitar in those times. They learned things from each other. It was a folk tradition. And everyone injected their own personality into the music they made. IMO.

[tpbiii]

Originally Posted by srick

Well let's consider The timeframe of Ike Everly and Mose Rager. It was about twenty years after ragtime was all the rage. Radio sets were also finding common usage and I suspect that some guy sitting in a cabin in Kentucky coal country started playing along on a cold winter night... he could pick up stations playing blues, playing jazz, you name it: "Hmm. I can make the sound of a plucked bass with my thumb, hmmm, and I can play melody with my other fingers."

At least that sounds like a good story to me.

And I'm always amazed to hear Django's influence in Merle Travis' music too. Y'know, we could always e-mail Thom Bresh for a definitive answer.

Best,

Rick

That is a very good point. The history of Southern roots music prior to the 1920s is pretty vague. Also recent academic work out of Duke and UNC seems to show that the rural South was not near so racially/musically divided as it seems to be later. That perception -- and possible reality -- developed by the combined effect of the development of Jim Crow laws in the lowland South and the impact of Tin Pan Alley from the 1920s on in the creations of genres for record sales -- Race Records, Hillbilly Records, etc. Long before records -- starting in the mid 19th century -- hundreds of traveling entertainers road the railroads south and played hundreds of theaters to audiences that were not yet segregated at least in the sense that everyone heard the same shows. That is probably why when Alan Lomax found the most traditional Southern black musician he could find that musician played him FROGGY WENT A COURTIN' -- the oldest children song in the English language.

The culture that created the "Folk Revival," -- the wordy literate decedents of the Puritans of NE -- are hugely biased by their cultural perspective. This is true of all cultures, but because they were so literate and active so early, their perspective has often become the (flawed) national narrative. If for example if you want to understand the actual unbiased history of the Civil War you have a chance because both sides -- the Puritans and Cavaliers -- were pretty literate and you can go back to original sources. Not so for the Scots Irish and African Americans -- neither created much primary texts, so we are stuck with Puritan narratives.

Well for the story of ragtime, I am afraid we are stuck with the Puritan narratives seen through the lens of Minstrel music from Tin Pan Alley.
It has to be wrong, but after 40 years of searching I have found almost no primary sources. What the popular narrative says is that country ragtime was a major folk genre of the late 19th century, and was everywhere. It then led to blues, jazz, etc. -- which were the new musics of the 20th. According to this version, people like Robert Johnson could play ragtime very well, but chose not to.

As to the real history -- I don't think there is anyway to know. But it is clear that ragtime -- which is really what Travis is playing -- has had a very broad impact on American music.

Best,

-Tom

[RP]

According to blues historian Sam Charters, the Piedmont Virginia/Carolinas style of playing is more likely a closer derivation of African styles than Delta (Mississippi) blues because the first African slaves were brought into the coastal and piedmont areas of Virginia and the Carolinas. Perhaps ragtime guitar was a combination of banjo playing and the music of pianos which likely would have been present in plantation homes. For this same reason, Johnson and other black performers may have shied away from ragtime guitar due to an association with "slavery music." (???) However, Johnson and other roving performers would have played any music that was requested because that meant making some money. Supposedly Johnson was at least once requested to play his only hit during his lifetime, Terraplane Blues although not known that it was he who had actually made the recording...

Originally Posted by Toby Walker

And who knows where Jackson may have learned it from.

Why did he have to learn "from" anyone? Maybe he did, but it's entirely possible he worked up the technique on his own. If not him, somebody did.