Guild Siting '65 - Dave Von Ronk, Joni Anderson (Mitchell), Harry Chapin

Christopher Cozad

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Stumbling upon this video was like opening a surprise package (as I had never seen this, before)!

Joni Anderson (pre Joni Mitchell days) performs Born to Take the Highway on Oscar Brandt's Hootenanny show, Let's Sing Out. To her left is Dave Van Ronk with his Guild, and to her right are the Chapin brothers.

 

12 string

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Sorry that program wasn't shown south of the border back in the day.
 

walrus

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What a great clip! Thanks for posting that, enjoyed it!

walrus
 

Westerly Wood

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Was Joni not a pioneer in alternate tuning? I hear she taught them to Crosby.
 

Bill Ashton

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Not sure I have the exact story right, but I heard/read that she had illness as a child (polio?) that made it hard for her to do standard fingerings on guitar...so she made up her own tunings.

Slight vere, but with a purpose...during Steve Kaufman's Acoustic Kamp last June, Clive Carroll showed us how he comes up with the alternate tunings for his work, and it made a lot of sense...I guess...need this note, stretch is too far, tune string up or down...OK, have to remember G chord is now played like this...hmmm, Am chord to hard, detune this string...OK now try it...and so on. I suppose necessity is the mother of invention?
 

davismanLV

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That's absolutely true, Bill!! On both counts. Joni had polio as a young teenager and it affected her left hand. She had trouble with the shapes of the chords so she started retuning. She left "standard tuning-land" and never looked back. It gave her some great sounds and really reinvented the guitar for her own use. I remember trying to figure out how to play G in drop D. The old pattern didn't work so I picked the notes and transposed them in a range on the fretboard and voila!! I had a 3rd fret easy and beautiful version of G. I'm sure someone had done it before me, but this was back in the old days, before internet and all that! Possibly necessity is a mother....... But it works sometimes.
 

gjmalcyon

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Was Joni not a pioneer in alternate tuning? I hear she taught them to Crosby.

Here's what Tom Rush says in his FAQ:

Q: When I last saw Tom, I saw him use a guitar technique I've never seen with any other artist, consisting of moving his fingering hand from under the neck to a position over the neck and fingering notes and chords from there.

A: Back in ‘66 or ‘67 I showed Joni open tunings. (Now, David Crosby claims that HE taught Joni open tunings, but no matter – I taught HIM open tunings in Coconut Grove in ‘62 or thereabouts.) She took what I showed her and blasted off the planet with it. She used the over-the-neck trick for Circle Game, and I’ve also found it useful for Drift Away. It’s basically a simple way of making a bar chord while leaving the top 2 strings open. The “proper” way of accomplishing this involves bending the finger in ways that are anatomically improbable and downright uncomfortable.
 
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