Skip to main content

Seat Of Pity - Knife In The Water

The blues appeal to the emotions and also make listeners want to dance or move their body in time to the music. The music usually has an underlying feeling of sadness, yet it can be a positive, happy experience as well. In Mississippi blues guitar players often use a knife held in the left hand or bottleneck worn on a left hand finger. As the player slides up and down the strings, he simulates the sound of a human voice crying. In Piedmont blues the guitar is intended to highlight the party and dance feeling of the song. In other instances the guitar is played in a style called fingerpicking, where the guitarist keeps the rhythm and plays the melody at the same time. The first time that a listener hears this style of playing, it sounds as though two guitars are playing at the same time. Most of the early folk blues artists accompanied themselves by playing finger style guitar. Later many of the musicians started to wear fingerpicks, which are worn over the fingernails of the right hand. Fingerpicks allow a musician to play louder and faster, but they usually produce very little variation in sound. Playing with the right hand fingers enables the player to play with more variations in tone, but the volume is softer. As the electric guitar developed, many musicians started to use a flat pick held in the right hand between the thumb and the index finger. Using the flat pick enables the player to play rapid single note passages, or to play rhythm without much effort. The disadvantage of a flat pick is that guitarists can play only one note at a time. It is possible to use the flat pick together with the right hand fingers, but this is a difficult technique.

Blues are usually sung by a single vocalist, although in a number of instances there are two voices. When two voices perform a song, usually they do not sing in harmony, but one voice answers the other, or offers spoken comments to the first verse. When rhythm and blues began, the instrumentation changed. The harmonica and guitar were amplified, and bass and drums were added. As R&B, developed, the acoustic bass was often replaced by an electric bass, and piano became more common. The piano mostly played rhythm parts, with the occasional solo. Saxophone solos were also featured on many R&B records. In soul records the guitar often became reduced to a rhythmic role, although sometimes, as in the records of such artists as James Brown, the rhythm guitar was prominent.


Seat Of Pity - Knife In The Water
  • From: Plays One Sound and Others album
  • Written by: Aaron Blount
  • Released: 1997

"Aaron Blunt is the band's primary songwriter and lead gutarist, along with Laura Krause who plays organ and often provides back-up vocals. Their line-up also include steel pedal player Bill McCullough and John Brewington on Bass."

See previous Song of the Day

Labels:
Location: United States

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jackson Browne - Kisses Sweeter than Wine

Europe has a rich history of embracing blues and jazz music. In the early 20th century, American jazz musicians began touring Europe, introducing the continent to a new sound that was unlike anything they had ever heard before. Jazz became an instant hit among European audiences, and many European musicians began incorporating jazz elements into their music. Today, jazz festivals are held all over Europe, attracting thousands of fans from all over the world. In addition, many European cities have thriving blues scenes, with local bands and musicians performing regularly. Blues and jazz have also made their way to Asia, where they have found a devoted fan base. Japan, in particular, has a thriving jazz scene, with many Japanese musicians achieving international recognition. In addition, China has also seen a rise in the popularity of jazz music in recent years. Jazz festivals are now held in major Asian cities such as Tokyo, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, attracting jazz lovers from all over ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Veronica Swift - A Little Taste

There has always been an uncomfortable tension between rhythm and blues and rock and roll, a cyclical influence that vacillates between inspiration, appropriation and separation. Popular music has broken off into categories of rock, pop, country, and R&B, each with their own origin stories. But R&B and rock, usually codified as vastly different, Black and white styles, have long been intertwined in ways our historical memory may have us forget.  Despite the innovation that comes from separation, rock and R&B always find their way back to each other. In recent years, rock veterans have turned to the genre’s classics for inspiration. Queens of the Stone Age veered from their typical hard rock with 2017’s Villains, a dance y album inspired by frontman Josh Homme’s love of 1920s jazz and swing, other Black genres that laid the groundwork for the popular music of today. The whitewashing of rock’s history has oversimplified music’s malleability and silenced the voices of Amer...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cannonball Adderley - Willow Weep for Me

The positivity and uplifting effect of the musical product is more likely to mean the musician is cheering themselves and everybody up rather than that the musician is telling us they are happy. This can largely be applied to attitudes to the performance of jazz and other Black cultures in the Western world. Whilst some of the aforementioned jazz pioneers, like Ella Fitzgerald, stayed clean, several had a history of drug abuse... which often resulted in premature deaths. Louis Armstrong, who used the infinitely safer drug marijuana throughout his 69 years... Whilst drug use was not uncommon among musicians in general, this pattern that many of the greats of jazz died young due to addictions speaks of a consistent level of turmoil, and alludes to their common experience of racism as a depressive factor in 20th Century America. Source: A Soft Reminder of Where Jazz Came From by Tom Platts Cannonball Adderley - Willow Weep for Me Released in: September 1955 Genre: Jazz Label: Savoy "...
Post a Comment
Read more