National Reso-phonic Instruments in the Blue Ridge
The following article is an unabridged version of one published in shorter form in “Americana Rhythm Music Magazine.”
The spectacle of the street corner, sidewalk and back alley jamming in the streets of Floyd, Virginia on Friday nights attracts thousands of musicians and music lovers every summer. While the Friday Night Jamboree stage at the Floyd Country Store schedules a gospel set followed by old time bands that cater to the flatfoot dancers, the street picking is more representative of the breadth of the music of this region.
Here, in addition to old time ballads and fiddle tunes, you can hear bluegrass, country and blues and even more contemporary styles. When I’m able to join the jamming, I pack up my nickel plated steel guitar and search the streets for fellow reso-phonic enthusiast Carlton Harmon.
Carlton Harmon is a talented multi-instrumentalist with wide ranging musical interests. In addition to his reso-phonic instruments, banjo and square neck lap steel guitar, Carlton also plays guitar, mandolin and fiddle. Carlton’s street corner jams host the best street pickers and singers and are open to playing just about any style other than rap. While picking with Carlton I’m often asked about my “shiny guitar.” While National Reso-phonic guitars like my Style O are rarely seen elsewhere on the streets of Floyd, these guitars have historically been a part of the music of the Blue Ridge.
Geographically, the Blue Ridge Mountain region runs from Northern Georgia to Southern Pennsylvania. These mountains touch or traverse the states in-between, including North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina and West Virginia. However, the cultural reach of this region spilled over to the neighboring states that are part of the greater Appalachian Mountain chain. The largest cultural export of this region was music, including blues, bluegrass old time and gospel which could be heard throughout the South and beyond thanks to the rise of radio and phonograph records.
Although they are acoustic instruments, the distinctive feature of a reso-phonic guitar is that the sound is produced by one or more metal cones instead of the wooden soundboard (guitar top), of conventional acoustic guitars. The first reso-phonic (also called resonator), guitars were designed in 1925 by Czechoslovakian immigrant John Dopyera who constructed the first tri-cone instrument at the request of a vaudevillian musician named George Beauchamp. Beauchamp wanted a guitar that would not be overwhelmed by horns and percussion instruments in dance orchestras. For a brief time before the advent of electric instruments, reso-phonic guitars manufactured by Dopyera and Beauchamp’s National String Instrument Corporation (formed in 1927), became a staple in jazz and other dance bands. Even after they were displaced by electric guitars, they remained prized for their distinctive sound, and continued to be popular choices among bluegrass and blues players.
Reso-phonic guitars come in two basic varieties; square necked guitars designed to be played in a lap or steel guitar style and round necked guitars played in the conventional guitar style. Further, there are three main resonator designs: “tricones” with three metal cones/resonators like the design of the first National resonator guitars, single cone “biscuit” design of other National instruments and the single inverted-cone with spider bridge designed by the Dopyera brothers after leaving National and creating the Dobro imprint.
Of the blues musicians who employed the tri-cone, one of the most influential was Hudson Whittaker, better known as Tampa Red. His precise single string slide guitar playing was as silky and sophisticated as his songs were racy and raunchy while he recorded with Georgia Tom Dorsey (who later gained wider fame as “the father of gospel music”), as “the Hokum Boys.” Tampa Red later moved to Chicago and helped the blues graduate from its rough and tumble country origins to a more jazzy and polished urban style. He was an enormous influence on the early Chicago guitar players such as Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, and Elmore James.
Born in the Piedmont region, just below the Blue Ridge Mountain region, was Wadesboro, NC native, Fulton Allen, who became a recording star on race label releases as Blind Boy Fuller. Like Tampa Red, Fuller released many double entendre hokum numbers, but recorded on a single-cone National Duolian guitar in a finger-picked style known as Piedmont blues. Fuller was influenced by the recordings of Blind Blake and his contemporary Blind Gary Davis (later Reverend Gary Davis), and his playing was marked by ragtime rhythms and jazzy chord progressions. Playing on the streets of Durham and Winston-Salem, NC, Fuller influenced several generations of rural guitar players in this area including Brownie McGhee who made his recording debut with “The Death of Blind Boy Fuller” for the Okeh label.
Another blind guitarist, the national tri-cone toting Riley Pucket of Alpharetta, Georgia, was a white guitarist of enormous influence. Puckett performed and recorded as a solo act and with the influential old-time fiddler Gid Tanner. The 200-plus sides Puckett recorded as a solo artist and with Gid Tanner and His Skillet lickers are among the most influential in American music. His repertoire included novelty songs, religious songs, traditional folk songs, cowboy songs, blues and ballads. Echoes of Puckett’s dynamic single-string guitar playing and dramatic bass runs can be heard in the playing of early bluegrass and country guitar players and his vocal approach included the earliest example of the Blue Yodel popularized by “the Singing Brakeman,” Jimmie Rodgers who is often called “the Blue Yodeler” and “the Father of Country Music.”
A final National tri-cone enthusiast whose repertoire was similar in style to Puckett’s but whose playing was closer to the finger-picked style of the Piedmont bluesmen was Sam McGee. Born in Franklin County Tenessee, Sam and his brother Kirk were proficient on several stringed instruments and performed as a duo, with Uncle Dave Macon’s “Fruit Jar Drinkers” on record and with “Fiddlin’” Arthur Smith as the “Dixieliners” on record and on the Grand Old Opry. McGee’s classics “Buck Dancer’s Choice, “Railroad Blues” and “Franklin Blues” are a staple of many finger-style and flat-pick players today.
Square neck reso-phonic guitars dominate the bluegrass sound. Josh Graves from Monroe County, Tennessee is credited with introducing the dobro to bluegrass music shortly after joining Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys in 1955. Graves originally joined the Foggy Mountain Boys as a bass player ,but quickly shifted to the dobro and developed a new style of picking that drew on Earl’s defining three-finger syncopated banjo style. Graves’ playing ignited the Foggy Mountain Boys sound when playing energetic, fast and loud, but he would also alter the mood and provide sympathetic backing to bluesy ballads and slower gospel numbers. In country music Beecher Ray Kirby, better known as Bashful Brother Oswald, enlarged the popularity of the dobro while playing with Roy Acuff’s Smoky Mountain Boys and as a staple on the Grand Old Opry.
The reso-phonic guitar has a look and sound that is distinctively American, although their construction relied heavily on the craftsmanship and ingenuity of their immigrant inventor. The music made on these instruments, blues, old-time, bluegrass and country, shares these characteristics of sounding new yet familiar at the same time. Bold, brash, evocative and idiosyncratic; reso-phonic guitars and the musicians who used them were central to the rise of America roots music in the Blue Ridge.
