Phillip Henry

I grew up in Lancashire. And like a lot of kids who grew up in Lancashire, the Beatles were impossible to avoid. Even in the nineties, decades after they'd split up, they were still part of the air you breathed up there. You grew up knowing every song.

But it wasn't the early Beatles that got under my skin. It was what happened when George Harrison started bringing the sitar in. That sound - the drone, the microtonal quality, those notes that didn't fit neatly into Western tuning - lodged in my head and never quite left.

I didn't know it at the time but that was the beginning of a twenty year journey that would eventually take me to Calcutta.

The plan

By the mid 2000s I'd been playing slide guitar seriously for years and I'd been listening to Debashish Bhattacharya for almost as long. If you don't know his work, go and find it. Grammy nominated, BBC award winner, the man widely regarded as the greatest living Hindustani slide guitarist. His recordings stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard them.

I found out he taught. He'd opened a School of Universal Music in Kolkata and he accepted international students. There was an application process. I applied.

I also applied to the Arts Council for funding. They said yes.

In 2008 I flew to Calcutta.

90 days

I was there for three months. Which is something I think about every time I talk to students about the 90-day coaching programme — because 90 days is exactly enough time to transform your relationship with an instrument, if you approach it right.

I studied in Debashish's home. One to one sessions and group sessions, in the Indian guru-student tradition that goes back centuries. He taught technique, repertoire, the Indian classical approach to the instrument. But the thing that changed me most wasn't any of that.

It was the ear training.

In Indian classical music you sing before you play. Always. The melody lives in the voice first and the instrument follows — trying to reproduce what the voice can do, trying to match that human, vocal quality. Every session started with singing. Every phrase was sung before it was played.

As a slide guitar player that concept hit me like a thunderbolt. Because that's exactly what the slide should be doing — following the voice, imitating the voice, reaching for the kind of expressiveness that only the human voice has. The connection between the slide technique and the voice that I'd been groping toward for years suddenly had a framework. A tradition. A thousand years of thinking behind it.

Sing it first. Then play it. If you can't sing it you can't play it.

That's something I pass on to my students now. It sounds simple. It isn't. But it changes everything.

The instrument

I also went to Calcutta to get a Chaturangui.

The Chaturangui is Debashish's own custom instrument — designed and built by him, patented, unlike anything else in the world. The name breaks down as Chatur meaning four, ang meaning colour — four colours, four voices within one instrument. It's a lap slide guitar with 24 strings — six principal strings in Open D tuning, plus drone strings and fourteen sympathetic resonating strings that ring in response to the notes you play, like the strings on a sitar.

The design was partly inspired by the Weissenborn — the hollow-necked Hawaiian slide guitar. Which tells you something about how all these traditions keep finding each other. Hawaii, India, the Delta blues — all reaching for the same thing from different directions.

I practised on the Chaturangui I brought home. It's still one of the most extraordinary instruments I've ever played.

An eastern flavour — try this on your slide

One of the surprising things about the Chaturangui is that it's tuned to Open D — the same tuning you already know. The Indian classical tradition and the Delta blues arriving at the same starting point.

Here's something I discovered when I got to Calcutta. Before I went I'd already been experimenting with a particular sound on the slide — raising the 4th of the scale slightly to give it a floating, luminous quality. I'd written a piece using it called Reverence, drawn to that sound without quite knowing why.

When I got to Calcutta, Debashish pointed out that I was playing in the Kalyan thaat — the great parent mode of Hindustani classical music, the scale family that contains Yaman, one of the most important ragas a student learns. In the West we call it the Lydian mode. I'd arrived at it by instinct and it turned out to have a thousand years of tradition behind it.

In Open D the raised 4th sits just above fret 5 on the top string. Try this — play slowly up the scale on the top string, one fret at a time. When you reach fret 5 keep going. Skip over it to fret 6. Feel what happens. That's the moment the scale opens up — the familiar major sound suddenly has something else in it. A shimmer. A sense of space. That one extra semitone is the difference between the major scale you already know and the Kalyan sound — a scale that has been fundamental to Indian classical music for thousands of years, and as it happens was once just as common in the West. But that's a story for another newsletter.

That piece eventually became Reverence Revisited and Kalyan Variations on my album True North. Worth a listen if you want to hear the mode in context.

https://open.spotify.com/track/6SKWRtwnAB2uwWs1w3LyET?si=9619b10169274832

https://open.spotify.com/track/4QRrtXDRuAdZvH0Vwx3sE1?si=7626e8a8ecd24f7e

What it did to my playing

The whole three months made me re-evaluate everything. Not just technique — the whole approach. The economy. The intention behind every note. The relationship between the slide and the voice.

Indian classical music can tell a story with just a few notes. The raga is a framework — a set of notes, a mood, a time of day — and within that framework the musician finds their own path. What you leave out is as important as what you put in. The space between notes carries as much meaning as the notes themselves.

Sound familiar? It should. We talked a few weeks ago about Dark Was The Night — Blind Willie Johnson telling a complete emotional story with no words, just a slide and a voice. And how Ry Cooder took that spirit and built the Paris Texas soundtrack from it — one of the most celebrated film scores ever made, telling everything with just a handful of notes.

That's the same discipline. The same understanding that what you leave out is as important as what you put in. Debashish Bhattacharya in Calcutta and Blind Willie Johnson in 1927 were reaching for exactly the same thing. They just had different names for it.

This week, I recommend:

Debashish Bhattacharya — 3: Calcutta Slide Guitar — find it on Spotify or YouTube. Don't try to analyse it. Just listen to the relationship between the slide and the voice — how the instrument seems to breathe and sing.

Try singing before you play — pick a simple phrase on the top string in Open D. Sing it first. Then play it. If the guitar version sounds more mechanical than the sung version — that gap is exactly where the work is.

Fred McDowell — You Gotta Move — find it on YouTube and listen before next week's newsletter. The slide and the voice are almost indistinguishable in this recording. The slide follows the vocal melody so closely it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. That's exactly what we've been talking about today — and next week we're going to look at it in detail. It's a piece I teach and one of the great examples of the slide as a voice. Get it in your ears first.

The vocal quality of the slide — making the instrument sing rather than just play notes — is something I work on with every student in the Slide Success programme. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, you can see my courses here or pick up your free Get Going with Slide Guide here.

See you on the back porch!

We're off our tour again in the Autumn, and we're looking forward to some great gigs with the Gigspanner Big Band. 

If you haven't got tickets yet, there's still time to book and we'd love to see you there! You'll find the dates and venues below and you can pick up tickets from the Gigspanner Big Band website here. 

The Gigspanner Big Band tour dates are: 

23/10/26 Southampton Turner Sims

24/10/26 Cranbrook St Dunstan's Church

25/10/26 Hertford St Andrews

26/10/26 Bury St Edmunds The Apex

28/10/26 Didcot Cornerstone Arts

29/10/26 Worcester Huntingdon Hall

30/10/26 Trowbridge Town Hall

31/10/26 Teignmouth Pavilion

01/11/26 St Austell Keay Theatre 

Grab your tickets now from the Gigspanner Big Band website

Happy sliding!

The diddley bow gave you one string and a groove. Those kids in West Africa beating it with a stick weren't playing melodies, they were finding rhythm, pulse, the hypnotic repetition that sits at the heart of all blues. One string, beaten and slid, can lock into a groove that makes your body move.

But one string has its limits. You can groove on it. You can find the notes between the notes. What you can't do is riff across strings, build a chord, move from one harmonic colour to another.

The cigar box guitar changed that.

The story starts — as so many blues stories do — in hard times. During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln imposed a tax on consumer goods including cigars, which at the time were packed in large crates of a hundred or more. To accommodate the new tax stamps, manufacturers switched to smaller cedar boxes holding twenty five cigars. Those boxes were cheap, lightweight, resonant, and when the cigars were gone, they got thrown away.

Somebody picked one up, nailed a broom handle to it, strung a couple of wires across it, and the cigar box guitar was born.

The earliest documented image is from 1876 — an etching by Edwin Forbes, official artist for the Union Army, showing two soldiers at a campfire. One of them is playing a cigar box fiddle. Whatever he was playing, it wasn't a factory instrument.

The instrument that built the blues

By the late 1800s cigar box guitars were everywhere in the rural South. Three strings, sometimes four. A piece of wood for a neck. A glass bottle or a knife blade for a slide. Open tuning so you could bar the strings with one finger and get a chord. No formal training required. No music shop needed. Just whatever came to hand.

The players who would go on to define the blues learned on these instruments. Lightnin' Hopkins started as a child on a cigar box guitar. Big Bill Broonzy said his first guitar was a cigar box. Blind Willie Johnson, whose Dark Was The Night we talked about a few weeks ago, developed his slide technique on a cigar box before he ever touched a proper guitar.

That's not a coincidence. The cigar box guitar, strung in an open tuning with a slide, strips everything back to what matters. Rhythm. Groove. The riff. The feel of the note under the glass.

The engine room

Three strings in an open tuning with a slide and suddenly you've got everything. The drone underneath, the riff moving across the strings, the grunt and churn of a full blues groove. Not just rhythm, harmony and rhythm together. The engine room, fully assembled.

This is where the riff was born. The one chord groove that just keeps rolling. The shuffle that drives everything forward. The kind of playing that makes your foot move before your brain has caught up.

And here's the thing, that same simplicity is exactly what makes slide guitar so powerful on a full six string guitar, too. The players who learned on three strings never forgot what three strings taught them. Strip it back. Find the groove. Let the riff breathe.

It never went away

By the 1960s, cheap mass-produced guitars had made the cigar box guitar look like a relic. But it never really disappeared.

Seasick Steve brought it roaring back into public consciousness in the 2000s — a weathered blues musician who appeared on Later with Jools Holland playing a three-string cigar box guitar and stopped the room. The rawness of it, the simplicity, the pure groove: it was the same thing that Lightnin' Hopkins had in the 1930s. Nothing had changed except the audience.

There's a reason people keep coming back to the cigar box guitar. It reminds you what the music is actually about. Not technique. Not complexity. Just the groove and the feel and the note under the slide.

The cigar box guitar is hiding inside your guitar

In Open D tuning, the bottom three strings — strings 4, 5 and 6 — behave exactly like a three string cigar box guitar in open tuning. Same drone. Same riffing potential. Same groove. And the same is true in Open G — strings 3, 4 and 5 give you that identical cigar box feel in that tuning.

That's the engine room. You've already got it. You don't need a broom handle and a Figaro cigar box.

Here's a taste of what that sounds like. This is the Swamp Slide Groove from my Backporch Blues Riffs course — inspired by Slim Harpo's I'm A King Bee, one of the defining recordings of swamp blues. That hypnotic, mid-tempo groove, that trance-like repetition — that's the cigar box spirit right there on strings 4, 5 and 6.

Homework…

Before you pick up the guitar — go and listen to Slim Harpo's I'm A King Bee. Let that hypnotic groove sink in. Then come back to the tab above and see if you can find that same feeling.

Lightnin' Hopkins — Mojo Hand — three strings, open tuning, pure groove. Listen to how much he gets out of so little.

Seasick Steve — Dog House Boogie — raw, driving, impossible not to move to. Same impulse as Lightnin' Hopkins, seventy years later.

A quick one before I go

I've just finished updating Backporch Blues Riffs — five essential slide riffs in Open D, built exactly on this cigar box guitar philosophy. Strip it back, find the groove, get playing straight away.

Check out all of my courses on my website, including: 

Backporch Blues Riffs — five riffs, full tab and video lessons (normally $11)

Riff Builder Extension — a system for building your own riffs, plus two more riffs to get you started (normally $19)

Riff to Song Blueprint — how to take your riffs and turn them into a full 12-bar blues (normally $19)

Or head over to the Learn Slide Guitar Facebook Group and join the community…

Happy sliding!

This week I want to talk about an instrument that isn't the slide guitar. Bear with me, because it's probably the most useful thing a slide player can listen to, and the connection between the two runs deeper than most people realise.

I'm talking about the harmonica. And specifically what the great harmonica players can teach us about how to approach the slide.

The man who named the Grand Ole Opry

It's 1927. Nashville radio station WSM has just finished broadcasting an hour of classical music and grand opera. Very formal, very European.

Then a man climbs up onto a Coca-Cola crate to reach the microphone. Four foot eleven. Impeccably dressed in a suit. He raises a harmonica to his mouth and plays Pan American Blues — a piece designed to sound exactly like a steam locomotive. The chug, the whistle, the rhythm of the rails.

The contrast is so extreme it's almost comic. Grand opera to train harmonica in thirty seconds. So the announcer makes a joke.

“For the past hour we have been listening to music taken largely from grand opera — but from now on we will present The Grand Ole Opry.”

Grand Ole — a mock-grand, playful corruption of Grand Opera. The name stuck. The longest continuous radio broadcast in American history was named on an off-the-cuff wisecrack inspired by a Black harmonica player imitating a train.

That man was DeFord Bailey. He went on to become the most popular act on the Opry. Roy Acuff said: "I was unknown when I began touring with DeFord. He could draw a crowd. Not me."

In 1941 Bailey was fired. WSM refused to pay licensing fees, meaning he couldn't play his best known songs on the radio. The most popular act on the show spent the rest of his life running a shoeshine parlour. When he toured with the other Opry stars he couldn't stay in the same hotels or eat in the same restaurants.

Worth knowing.

Two instruments, one tradition

The harmonica and the slide guitar grew up together. Same places, same people, same porches and juke joints.

The harmonica arrived in America from German factories in the 1840s — cheap, pocket-sized, fits in your shirt. Meanwhile in the rural South the African string instrument tradition was evolving — from the diddley bow nailed to a wall, through the cigar box guitar, and eventually to the guitar itself. We'll look at the cigar box guitar in the next newsletter — it's a story worth telling on its own.

But by the early 1900s the harmonica and the guitar had become the two portable instruments of the travelling bluesman — both cheap, both expressive, both small enough to carry when riding the rails.

And they developed side by side, shaped by the same musical culture, the same search for the notes between the notes.

The harmonica bends to find them. The slide glides and squeezes to find them. Same destination, different route.

I play and teach both. And playing both has taught me more about each of them than studying either one alone.

What the harmonica teaches you

Here's the thing about the harmonica that makes it so useful as a reference point. It's tuned to a key — just like your open tuning on the guitar. Which is great news if you're playing a straightforward major tune, because the harmonica was designed exactly for that. Every note is right there waiting for you.

But if you want something darker and more bluesy — which of course we do — you have to make the harmonica do something it wasn't designed to do. Bend the notes using tongue and throat movements to find the blue notes, the minor feel, the emotion that lives between the major notes the instrument naturally wants to play.

And that's where we can learn so much from the great harp players. Because the instrument forces a kind of discipline. You're working in a limited sweet spot — a few key holes, a handful of bends. So economy and note choice become everything. You can't hide behind runs and fills. Every note has to mean something.

That discipline is exactly what slide guitar needs.

Sonny Boy Williamson II is my go-to example for this. Nine Below Zero is a masterclass in economy — and what's fascinating is how much mileage he gets out of a single hole on the harmonica. The 3 hole is the key to the whole piece, but he uses it three different ways across the three chords.

Over the I chord he's in major territory — the 3 hole is the key note, bright and settled, but he's squeezing it up toward the blue note on his way to the next phrase. Always moving, always a question rather than a statement.

Over the IV chord he shifts to the darker feel — a half step bend on that same 3 hole, emphasising the minor third. He's squeezing and moving through the blue note zone again, but this time landing in a darker place. And that repeated darker lick builds the intensity over the four chord beautifully — you feel the harmony change without him doing anything dramatic.

Over the V chord it's a full whole tone bend down on the 3 hole — with that signature Sonny Boy vibrato — that marks the change so effectively. Three chords, three different uses of the same hole. That's economy.

On the slide guitar in Open D the parallel is right there in that same area of the neck. The 4th fret on the top string is your major third — the bright feel over the I chord. The 3rd fret is your minor third — the darker feel that colours the IV chord. And the 2nd fret is your tension note over the V chord, the same whole tone step down that Sonny Boy does with that 3 hole bend.

And the blue note zones we talked about a few weeks ago sit right in the middle of all of this. Between frets 3 and 4 — squeezing through that zone is the same move as Sonny Boy's half step bend. Between frets 2 and 3 — that's the zone you move through on the way to the V chord tension note. The same musical language, the same geography, just on a different instrument.

That's the Nine Below Zero move. And it works every time.

Two players worth your time this week:

Sonny Boy Williamson II — Nine Below Zero — the economy masterclass. Count how few notes he plays. Find it on YouTube and just listen to the space between the notes.

DeFord Bailey — Pan American Blues (1927) — the train imitation that named the Grand Ole Opry. Four foot eleven on a Coca-Cola crate, and he stopped America in its tracks.

Then pick up your slide in Open D and try playing like a harmonica player. One note at a time. Try moving slowly through the 4th fret, 3rd fret and 2nd fret on the top string over a slow 12-bar - one note per chord, plenty of space between them - and notice how each one marks a different harmony. Don't rush. Don't fill.

Less notes. More feel. That's the whole lesson.

If you'd like to find out about my Slide Success Membership, you'll find more details here. 

I've had a great time with the summer gigs and festivals, but it's been a little bit hot out there! It's been lovely to have a long, hot summer, but I'm feeling ready for some cooler gigs this autumn, and luckily there are some exciting things in the pipeline. 

I'm delighted to be heading back out with my duo, Edgelarks, in November. I'm very lucky to be able to tour and play with my wife, Hannah, and we're looking forward to some beautiful gig venues this year. 

If you can, come and join us for one of the following gigs:

Check out my courses here. Whether you've been playing with slide for years and want to brush up your technique or you've never picked up a guitar before, I've got you covered. 

Happy sliding!

Learning a musical instrument at home can be a rewarding experience, but some people worry that the online learning experience will not work for them. One of the potential problems when learning an instrument is staying motivated, and this can be especially challenging when you are learning on your own. Without a teacher physically present, many people worry that they may lose focus or skip practice. 

The good news is that Slide Success offers a totally different approach, in which you get all the benefits of a face to face teacher combined with the convenience of online learning. 

Let's take a look at a few simple habits that can help you stay motivated on your musical journey.

Set Small, Achievable Goals

One of the best ways to stay motivated is to set realistic goals. Instead of trying to become an expert quickly, focus on smaller achievements. In Slide Success, we might break it down so that you learn three new chords, or explore part of a classic Blues song. Reaching these smaller goals gives you a sense of progress and encourages you to keep going. 

Create a Regular Practice Routine

Consistency is often more important than practising for hours at a time. Try to choose a specific time each day for practising. Even 15–20 minutes can make a difference if you practise regularly. Keeping your instrument somewhere visible and easily accessible can also remind you to practise.

Learn Music You Enjoy

Practising exercises can sometimes feel repetitive, so make sure you spend time playing music you actually enjoy. Learning a favourite song can make practice feel less like homework and more like something you look forward to. Choose songs that match your current ability and gradually work towards more challenging pieces. 

Track Your Progress

It can be difficult to notice improvement from one day to the next. Recording yourself occasionally can help you hear how much you have developed over time - and you can even share your progress in the Learn Slide Guitar Facebook group. Looking back at your progress can provide a powerful motivation boost.

Don't Be Afraid of Mistakes

Making mistakes is a normal part of learning an instrument. Instead of becoming frustrated, treat mistakes as opportunities to improve. Everyone struggles when learning something new, and progress rarely happens in a perfectly straight line.

Most importantly, Slide Success is designed to ensure that you enjoy the process of learning slide guitar. It takes patience, but every practice session brings you one step closer to becoming the musician you want to be. Set achievable goals, practise consistently, play music you love, and celebrate your progress along the way.

Find out more about Slide Success here, or head over to join us on Facebook!

It's not going to come as a surprise to anyone that we loved Sidmouth Folk Week - it's one of our family favourites every year and there's always something new to discover. 

It's always intense doing a festival with children, and this time, Hannah and I ended up taking it in turns to go in to the festival or stay in the park outside! 

Our festival highlights included:

Martin Simpson - an absolute masterclass in everything, as usual. Fantastic bottleneck playing, beautiful songs. A treat.

I was delighted to discover Adriano Adewale's show Rooted and Rising. This was a beautiful exploration of trees and our relationship to them through music, and it features some of my favourite folk musicians, including Nancy Kerr. I hope this tours at some point!

We loved the Museum of Roadside Magic, curated by Libby Bove, and we particularly enjoyed their Teatime Pageant. This is a witty take on the idea of tradition and what it might mean to create new ones - all wrapped up in some excellent music and theatre with a very Wicker Man vibe. Highly recommended!

The Punch and Judy Show was a great hit with the whole family, too. 

Thanks, Sidmouth, for another fantastic folk week!

Happy days!

When learning guitar, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that better playing means playing more. Faster solos, complicated licks and lots of notes can feel like signs of progress. But slide guitar teaches us a different lesson: sometimes, less really is more.

Slide guitar is at its most powerful when you give each note room to breathe. Because the slide allows you to bend smoothly between pitches, create wide vibrato and sustain a note for longer, even a simple phrase can sound incredibly expressive. You don't need to fill every second with notes. Instead, focus on making the notes you do play count.

Think about the human voice. A great singer doesn't constantly sing. They pause, breathe, hold certain words and change their tone to communicate emotion. Slide guitar can work in exactly the same way. Your slide becomes another voice, and your job is to make it speak clearly.

One of the best exercises for developing this approach is to limit yourself to just three notes. Put on a simple backing track and see how much music you can create using only those notes. Experiment with timing, vibrato, slides and pauses. Play one note and let it ring. Then leave a space before playing the next.

At first, this can feel surprisingly difficult. Your instinct might be to add another lick or move quickly up and down the neck. Resist that temptation. Listen to the backing track and allow the silence to become part of your playing.

Playing fewer notes also improves your phrasing. Instead of thinking about what note comes next, you begin thinking about why you're playing it. Is it answering the previous phrase? Is it building tension? Is it resolving the melody? These questions turn random notes into musical conversation.

This philosophy can be heard in the playing of great slide guitarists such as Derek Trucks and Bonnie Raitt. Their playing isn't impressive simply because of the notes they can play. It's the timing, tone, dynamics and emotion behind those notes that make their performances memorable.

So, the next time you practise slide guitar, try slowing everything down. Choose a small group of notes and explore what you can do with them. Hold notes longer. Leave bigger gaps. Experiment with vibrato. Listen carefully.

Remember: you don't need more notes to become a better guitarist. You need to make the right notes mean more.

In slide guitar, silence isn't the absence of music. It's part of the music and learning to use it may be one of the most important steps you take as a player.

If you want to build your confidence with slide guitar, check out my courses here. 

Happy sliding!

This week, in a live session, Paul Stevenson asked me a question I get a lot: why does an acoustic musician need a pedalboard at all? We play acoustic guitars, not electrics - so what's going on down there at my feet?

I plugged a few different instruments in and showed everyone exactly what's happening, so I thought it was worth writing up properly, because the answer tells you a fair bit about how live acoustic sound actually works.

THE DI SIGNAL DOESN'T SOUND LIKE YOUR GUITAR

The moment you plug an acoustic instrument straight into a PA, something's lost. It's loud, sure, but it's dry, aggressive, a bit abrasive - it doesn't sound like it's got much soul in it. That's the starting point for almost everything on my board.

Most of what I'm doing with pedals isn't chasing some huge transformation, it's making marginal gains. Softening the top end, warming the bottom, taking the edge off. You're not trying to change the world every time you hit a footswitch. You're just making the tone a bit more palatable - to your ears, and hopefully the audience's.

THE MOST IMPORTANT PIECE OF GEAR ON MY BOARD ISN'T ON THE BOARD

Before I even get to the pedals, there's a battered old preamp clipped to my mic stand, made by Orchid Electronics, who I don't think even make them any more. It gives me direct volume control and a simple three-band EQ tuned specifically for acoustic instruments, plus a mute switch for when I'm swapping guitars mid-song (which, let's be honest, is most songs).

If the power to my pedalboard ever dies - and it has, more than once - I can run straight into this and do a whole gig on it alone. Everything the pedals do, this does in real time, with my hand, guitar to guitar.

It's also how I stay involved in mixing my own sound. Even a great sound engineer doesn't know your instrument the way you do, so having that control right there on your mic stand means you're doing their job a favour, not fighting them for control of it.

SOME PEDALS FIX PROBLEMS, SOME ADD CHARACTER

Once the basic tone is sorted, the board starts doing a different job — adding interest. A touch of tremolo on a slower piece adds space. A freeze pedal turns a single note into a drone, so when I'm playing solo I get a sense of another player swelling in behind me — running the tremolo over that drone breaks it up so it doesn't sound like a phone dial tone.

A simple analogue echo adds depth without dropping you into a different room the way reverb does. It's a subtler trick, and on the lap steel it gives a bit of a '50s slapback feel.

None of this is essential. It's colour. But this is where the pedal collection starts to grow — and fair warning, it's highly addictive.

DIFFERENT PICKUP, DIFFERENT PROBLEM

I also switched over to my electric lap steel, Little Jeffrey, and the DI tone on that P90 pickup was even rougher than the acoustic — it needed a proper amp simulator (a Boss IR-2) just to come alive, plus a volume pedal for the swells that are such a big part of that pedal-steel sound.

And on a resonator with a Fishman Nashville pickup, I use a Fishman Aura, which applies a modelled "microphone image" to the DI signal — recreating what a real mic on a real Dobro cone actually sounds like. Different pickup, same underlying job: make the direct signal sound like the instrument, not like a wire.

THE POINT OF ALL OF IT

A real microphone will always beat a DI signal for capturing what an instrument actually is. That's true every time, and it's why I always record through one. But live, a microphone gives you the sound of the instrument and nothing else.

Pedals let you shape a DI signal, add some character, and - usefully - dial in a bit more low end than a mic alone will give you, which matters when the audience has just had a fat, modern PA sound in their ears between sets and you don't want to sound thin by comparison.

That's really the whole answer to Paul's question: it's not that acoustic players need to sound electric. It's that the raw acoustic signal on its own needs a hand - and every pedal on my board is there to lend one.

If you're still working on getting your own tone sorted from scratch, Backporch Blues Riffs is still the best place to start — five riffs in Open D, built to get you making a genuinely good sound on your own guitar within the week. Click here to find out more. 

See you on the back porch!

We've been on a bit of a journey these last few weeks - the roots of slide guitar in West Africa, the diddley bow, Tutwiler station, and last week the unexpected Indian thread that runs all the way back through Hawaii to the ancient Vichitra Veena.

This week I want to look at something that changed everything. Not the music itself, but the moment the music got captured. The first recordings. And what happened next.

Before the record

Before recording technology arrived, music only travelled as far as a person could walk or ride. What W.C. Handy heard at Tutwiler station in 1903 had been developing in the Delta for decades, passed from player to player, porch to porch, juke joint to juke joint. Nobody outside that world knew it existed.

The technique, the feeling, the blue notes — all of it completely invisible to the wider world. Extraordinary music going nowhere.

Sheet music and what it couldn't carry

Music had been spreading across America long before the record industry arrived. Sheet music was the dominant medium, and it was big business. W.C. Handy, the same man who woke up at Tutwiler station in 1903, went on to publish St. Louis Blues in 1914 and became one of the most successful music publishers in America. He understood better than most how sheet music could carry a song across the country.

But sheet music could only carry so much. It could capture the notes, the rhythm, the structure. What it couldn't capture was the thing that made slide guitar extraordinary — the blue notes, the squeeze between the frets, the microtonal inflections that lived between the written notes. You could write down the skeleton of a slide guitar piece. You couldn't write down its soul.

Recording changed that. For the first time the actual sound — not an approximation of it, not a skeleton of it, but the real thing — could travel. And when it did, it took everything with it. The feel, the attack, the blue notes, the silence between the notes. All of it preserved exactly as it happened.

Race records — accidental archivists

From the early 1920s, the record industry started targeting Black audiences with what they called "race records" — separate catalogues, separate marketing, often on separate labels. It was a cynical commercial decision. But it had an extraordinary unintended consequence.

It created an archive.

Record companies sent talent scouts fanning out across the South looking for artists to record. They were looking for a product to sell. What they left behind — without really intending to — was a document of a musical tradition that would otherwise have vanished completely.

We know what Blind Willie Johnson sounded like because someone pointed a microphone at him in 1927. We know what Robert Johnson sounded like because a talent scout tracked him down to a San Antonio hotel room in 1936. Without those sessions, without those commercial decisions made by people who were mostly interested in making money — none of it would exist.

Sylvester Weaver — 1923

The first slide guitar ever captured on record was 1923. A 26 year old guitarist from Kentucky named Sylvester Weaver, recorded in New York City using a knife on the strings.

He recorded two tracks. Guitar Blues and Guitar Rag.

Guitar Rag went on to become a standard. It got picked up, passed around, recorded by others, and eventually became one of the foundational pieces of the slide guitar repertoire. I teach it. If you've spent any time with me you've probably heard me mention it.

And here's the thing — it only exists because of that one recording session in 1923. Without the record, Guitar Rag would have been just another piece that Sylvester Weaver played at juke joints in Kentucky and nobody outside his world ever heard. The recording is the reason it's still being played a hundred years later.

Robert Johnson wasn't trying to be Robert Johnson

Here's something that might change how you think about the Delta blues.

We have this image of Robert Johnson as a Delta primitive — a mysterious figure who sold his soul at the crossroads, playing raw, isolated, deeply traditional music out of nowhere. It's a compelling myth. It's also mostly wrong.

Elijah Wald's book Escaping the Delta makes this case beautifully. Johnson wasn't trying to preserve a tradition. He was trying to escape one. He wanted to sound like Leroy Carr — a smooth, urban, piano-led singer from Indianapolis who was essentially the pop star of the blues world in the early 1930s. Both Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf said the first song they ever learned was a Leroy Carr song.

Johnson had heard Carr on record. That's the point. Without the recording industry, Leroy Carr's influence would never have reached a young man in the Mississippi Delta. Records made it possible for a musician in one place to hear what was happening somewhere completely different — and be changed by it.

Johnson was also listening to Bing Crosby. And Hawaiian guitar. And gospel. And everything else the new technology was putting in front of him. He was a young man with his ears wide open, absorbing everything he could find — not a folk artist trapped in one tradition.

What we hear on his recordings as raw Delta blues was actually Johnson trying to modernise, trying to reach beyond the Delta, trying to sound like the records he'd been listening to. The fact that it sounds like nothing else on earth is what makes him extraordinary. But he wasn't trying to be a primitive. He was trying to be a pop star.

The part that isn't so good

The record industry preserved the music. It also exploited the people who made it.

Most artists signed away their recordings for a flat fee. Robert Johnson sold his masters and saw almost nothing from them. The race records industry extracted enormous commercial value from Black musicians while paying them a fraction of what was fair. Many of the artists whose recordings we treasure today died in poverty.

It's worth knowing. The archive we're so grateful for came at a cost that wasn't paid by the people who benefited from it.

What this means for your playing

I think about all of this every time I teach Guitar Rag. That piece is a direct line from a recording session in New York in 1923 to a student sitting with a slide guitar today. The technology preserved it. The music did the rest.

And the Robert Johnson story matters too. Because he wasn't a purist. He was listening to everything — absorbing influences from every direction the records brought him — and then finding his own voice within all of that.

Which is exactly what you're doing.

That's not so different from what Johnson was doing.

Three things worth your time:

Sylvester Weaver — Guitar Rag (1923) — find it on YouTube. The first slide guitar on record. Rough, barely captured on the equipment of the time, but the technique is right there fully formed.

Leroy Carr — How Long How Long Blues — the song that both Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf said was the first they ever learned. Smooth, urban, piano-led. This is what Robert Johnson was listening to and trying to sound like. Hear it and your image of the Delta blues shifts a little.

Robert Johnson — Cross Road Blues — now listen back to Johnson with fresh ears. Hear him as someone who absorbed everything available to him and made something completely original out of it. That's the goal.

If you want to learn Guitar Rag properly - and understand where it sits in the slide guitar tradition - it's one of the pieces I teach in the Slide Success programme. 

See you on the back porch!