Here are some useful guitar licks and playing tips by Homespun owner/instructor Happy Traum and others. Homespun Performances are excerpts from lessons by some of our great artists that are worth listening to just for pleasure. Keep checking back as we'll be adding to them frequently. And take a look at Happy's Blog. He has had a fascinating journey through more than six decades of playing, writing, and studying about American folk music, and he has quite a few stories to tell.
Here's another "Lick of the Day" to keep your fingers and mind busy and productive. This one can be used for a variety of bluesy songs, as a turnaround, an accompaniment pattern, or a harmony for vocals. Learn it and see what you can do with it.
Here;'s another "Lick of the Day" for you to work on. It's a cool blues lick in E that you can use in a number of ways. Check out players like Lightnin' Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, and other traditional blues artists for inspiration.
Hi Everyone. We hope you are all staying healthy and safe. Here's the first of a series of licks and other instructional tidbits that we'll be posting in the coming days and thereafter. We hope they will keep your fingers busy and your thoughts in a musical direction. Keep watching this space for more musical tips, licks and even some songs. Let us know how you like them.
In 1957, I was 19 and already a committed folkie and a frequent participant in the Washington Square jam sessions on fair-weather Sundays. I had heard of a place that was opening on MacDougal Street, just a few blocks away, so I went over there one May afternoon for the Grand Opening. I found myself in a group of fellow folk singers having a jam of our own in the back room of the little shop. Jean Ritchie was there with her dulcimer, as were Carolyn Hester, Roy Berkeley, Cynthia Gooding, Mollie Scott and several others. Jean’s husband, photographer George Pickow, captured this now-iconic photo at that event.
Sometimes odd bits of ephemera show up from your past, as did this poster from a festival in Culpepper, Virginia in 1973, thanks to Fred Robbins. This event was one for the books. It was billed as a "bluegrass folk festival" and it sure had a lot of everything, including much post-hippie craziness.