July 17th, 2006
Son House: Death Letter Blues
I don’t hear people talk about Son House, but then maybe I don’t hang out enough in blues circles. I grew up with an album by Son House that had this song on it (”Death Letter Blues”). The rhythmic language of the guitar and his voice is amazingly slippery. There are places in the song I can’t tell where the downbeat is, or whether what I’m actually hearing is the offbeat. You’ll see that he has a slide around one of his fingers which gives it that Delta blues feel. He uses both fingers and his thumb in his left hand (classical guitarists don’t use their thumbs), and his right hand gracefully switches between plucked, strummed.
Behind the bizarre guitar figuration is a simple blues progression, but it is beautifully smudged and obscured by the various accompanimental vamps. The mode in the guitar in minor pentatonic which clashes when the voice sings the major third. Son House’s voice refuses to sit still: it is constantly active. Listen to it: nowhere will you hear long “beautiful” tones like a “trained” singer executes. (I imagine if we could look at it graphically, it would look like an earthquake graph!). The instrument House plays is called a resonator guitar. The metal resonator over the sound hole gives the instrument its distinctive sound. The instrument is used primarily in blues and bluegrass.
July 17th, 2006 at 10:07 am
That’s a great, great performance, Roger, but you should know that nobody actually calls that thing a “resonator guitar” — it’s a dobro.
July 17th, 2006 at 10:24 am
Thanks DJ,
Funny, that’s what I would have called it right off the bat, but I looked it up in online and an item that was identical was called a resonator guitar. I defer to someone who knows better.
I know there are metal guitars and basses, and then there are wooden guitars with metal resonators on top. I’ll let you know if I can shed any light on it.
July 17th, 2006 at 10:36 am
If it has a single-cone resonator, it’s a dobro, regardless of whether the body is metal or wooden.
However, I hadn’t realized this, but “dobro” is apparently now a trade name owned by Gibson. So dobros made by other manufacturers have to advertise themselves using the generic term “resonator guitar.”
July 17th, 2006 at 10:36 am
Willy of Uncle Phil’s forum enlightens us on this issue:
Back in the ’20’s, John Dopyera invented the resonator or resophonic guitar and he and his brothers sold them. They called their company Dobro, from a contraction of Dopyera Brothers. Dobro also means “good” in the Slavic languages. It was and is a brand name. Over time, people began calling all resonator guitars dobros. Now, Gibson owns the name Dobro, so no one else can call theirs a “dobro”. Most of the time, when you see the word Dobro with a capital D, it refers to an actual Dobro brand reso, and when you see dobro with a small d, it refers to a reso of any brand.