Blind Willie McTell - 12 String Guitar King
Willie McTell was another one of those blues men that survived until he was middle aged and making records up into the late forties. His style was called Piedmont ragtime guitar, but it was a peculiar style all of his own. Like many blues guitarists, his timing was special to himself and the number of bars didn't have a lot of meaning for him. As a young man he traveled around making a living as a musician, as he was blind from birth there were not too many options in those days for a blind young negro. It was either play a musical instrument for a few pennies, or beg on the street.
Later on in his career, he played with wife and they produced several records of the 'call and answer' variety, which was very popular in traveling carnival type shows in the early twenties. Often, these 'songs' were little more than very suggestive ditties meant to entertain an audience by titillating them. For example, in one song she sings 'hit me with your chocolate stick', which doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to guess what she's talking about!He favored the 12 string guitar with a jumbo body which produced a big and rich sound for being heard in noisy streets and bars. He probably played with a thumb pic,k and bare fingers, unlike Gary Davis, who used a finger pick also to make his ragtime guitar sound. McTell could of course play in any key, and also open tuning, but he preferred the more varied chord progressions of the ragtime syncopated sound than the predominantly Delta keys of E or A. His best and most memorable work was done in dropped D, where the bass E string is lowered two steps from E to D. This produced a deep bass note and generally meant that it didn't need fretting, which frees up a finger for other work on the treble strings.
