[Bob Womack]

Technically, "fingerstyle" used to refer to playing with alternating bass notes supplied by the thumb and melody and the remaining accompaniment played with the fingers. It's Chet Atkins style.

Eventually, the practice and the genre became a bragging point, aka, "if it doesn't have alternating bass it isn't fingerstyle." There is an audience out there that loves alternating bass arrangements to the exclusion of all other. They love to relegate the rest of finger plucked guitar music to a lower story, a ghetto, that they call, "just fingerpicking," inferring that without the alternating bass it is inferior.

However, there is a lot of really good music that doesn't feature alternating bass. In fact, there are a lot of people who don't like the rolling, alternating bass genre at all. Classical is one of those styles. There are a lot of steel string compositions that more resemble classical guitar music than technical fingerstyle, and players in those genres get it from two sides: they are eschewed by both classical players and fingerstyle players. And then there is the fact that "fingerpicking" was for years a country practice, and describing a piece as "fingerpicking" was lumping it in with "chicken picking."

If we want to go with modern etymological practice, it might be wise to let the snobbery die and realize that the common tongue no longer differentiates between "fingerstyle," "fingerpicked," and "finger plucked." They are now largely used interchangeably to refer to the practice of plucking with the dominant hand's fingers rather than a plectrum. Philosopher Alfred Korzybski posited that, "A difference that makes no difference, is no difference." Chew on that for a while.

And by the way Ed Gerhard does both classic fingerstyle and whatever that other stuff is called. My favorite work by him is his arrangement of "The Water is Wide," which is way far from classic fingerstyle and closer to classical guitar.

Bob