Fingerpicking, an English guitar player named Nic Jones, YouTube and "virtual oral tradition" thread on Mudcat Cafe

onecanmadman (user name) - demonstrates Nic Jones' style of finger-picking - on his http://www.youtube.com/user/onecanmadman#p/a YouTube channel - he's a guitar player in the U.K. - onecanmadman also has a clip of a Martin Carthy tune



Nic Jones was an influential English folk guitar player of the 70s and 80s, badly injured in a car accident ca. 1980, has just returned to performing in the past couple of years ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nic_Jones Wikipedia

He played a Fylde Oberon acoustic guitar with a plastic thumb pick and "bare" fingers. Jones plucked the strings with some force causing the strings to lift up and rebound against the fingerboard - accounting for the "spitting", slapping sound characteristic of Jones' guitar accompaniments. Another important feature was a regular percussive sound made by striking downwards with the middle and ring fingers of the right hand on damped bass strings close to or above the bridge of the guitar. This is akin to the technique used by banjo players called frailing.

Instructional video --
Advice on playing Canadee-i-o by Nic Jones. See my videos for a performance of the song. www.myspace.com/samjohncarter www.samcartermusic.co.uk



Nic Jones "Canadee-I-O"



http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=125952#2798846 Mudcat Cafe

Interesting, quotable thread - I liked guest "Shimrod"

Whether or not it's a "Virtual Oral Tradition" or not, CS, is a very hard question. I suppose if you really wanted to know you'd have to find out if others are using it the way you do and then consider the fact that the medium is not very old ... although a lot of the material it's carrying is old and some of it has already been re-interpreted by post-war revivalists - etc., etc.

On the other hand I don't suppose that it matters all that much. What probably matters the most is that you are using the medium in a creative way for creative purposes ... and why not?