I LIKE ALL SORTS of finger-style acoustic guitar music, but particularly blues and ragtime. Although 'ragtime' suggests Scott Joplin to most people, it´s also generally used to describe any kind of syncopated guitar music, particularly in the traditional styles of players such as Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller and Reverend Gary Davis.

Traditional ragtime guitar rarely approaches the sophistication of classical ragtime piano arrangements, since it's almost impossible on the guitar. A few people have recorded convincing classical ragtime on the guitar, notably Dave Van Ronk (The Entertainer) and John James (Black and White Rag).

I learned a lot of my guitar playing by listening to old records from Stefan Grossman and Ed Denson's 'Kicking Mule' label. My guitar heroes include Dale Miller, Woody Mann, George Gritzbach, Nick Katzman, Rory Block, Stefan Grossman, Dave Van Ronk, Isaac Guillory, Eddie Walker, Guy Van Duser, Pat Donohue, Adrian Legg, John James and John Renbourn. There are so many more that I can't possibly list them all here. 

THIS IS THE BUSINESS END of my Harmony Sovereign, built sometime before 1970 by the Harmony Corporation of Chicago, Illinois. It's a small guitar with a very distinctive muted kind of sound. Okay, it's hard to describe a guitar's sound accurately without sounding like some pretentious wine taster, but let's say there's something vaguely Dobro-like in this guitar's tone. It's also got a very shallow profile and a relatively wide fingerboard, which help a lot with playability.

Sovereigns were built with classical bridges, but at some time mine was modified to take pegs. This has contributed to the extremely low action, and may have been a response to serious fret wear! The guitar's also had its neck broken at least three times (my fault TWICE) and at some point the nasty Harmony machine heads were replaced.

I want to hear your Sovereign
I´ll even watch a cheesy video of the same thing
more video
I´m a glutton for punishment!

I've also recently acquired a Yamaha FG-433S, which is a really nice-sounding guitar, but a bit harder to play than the Harmony. Here's a taster...

Yamaha!
West Coast Blues

Famous Harmony user: Mance Lipscomb.

THE GUITAR I'm cradling at the top of the page is my Yairi DY72 twelve-string, the most beautiful sounding guitar I've owned. This guitar showed me that twelve-strings don't have to be torture to play!

I wanna hear this too!
I want more!
Too Tite