The Greatest Strummer

(”Hooker’s Hands,” pen and ink by Roy Newton, quietpond@aol.com)

For several years, I’ve been working on a sequel to my book Guitar: An American Life, to be entitled The Greatest Guitarist in the History of the World. Needless to say, this is the kind of title that gets people leaping to their feet and reaching for blunt instruments, or at least rolled-up copies of Rolling Stone. What I have in mind, though, is to go beyond rabid, name-yelling fanaticism (attractive though that is) and into a variety of unexpected and thought-provoking ways of approaching the issue. Here ’s Unexpected Approach Number Four:

Greatest Strummer in the History of the Guitar

I grew up during the (wait a second. What’s the opposite of a Golden Age? I guess in this case it’s the Overcooked Egg Noodle Age) of strumming. Long-haired folkies of both sexes stroked the pick almost apologetically down across the strings in a grand total of maybe three different rhythmic patterns to go with their song’s four chords. Strumming was, to its fans, a sign of righteous commitment to the serious purpose of the music. To everyone else it was a sign that these dopes could barely play guitar.

So who was the greatest-ever strummer?

In a sense this contest is over before it has even begun. Any decent flamenco guitarist takes the concept of “strumming” out of that brain-absent up-and-down pick motion and expands it into an art form. Flamenco has different names for half-a-dozen different strumming styles, none of which use a pick (though some use an astonishingly grown-out and weirdly angled thumbnail), mostly executed with the backs of the fingernails. Some are short and percussive, some long and continuous, some sustain a drone while the right-hand thumb picks out a melody line, some incorporate nail-attack or thumb-slap on the top or heel of the guitar…. Okay, I’ve convinced myself. Let’s start again.

Greatest Strummer Who is Not a Flamenco Player

In other words, uses a pick. In this light, as soon as you see the word “strummer” you’re probably thinking of the traditional rural blues players, who beat that guitar pretty hard, or Willie Nelson, who wore a hole in the top of his guitar with his pick. Or Richie Havens beating the bejasus out of that thing, the thumb of his left hand holding down not just one string but as many as five. In the footage of him playing at Woodstock, he’s strumming even before he reaches his stool, and once he sits down, his pounding sandal nearly beats a hole through the planking of the stage.

If you’re an American gypsy jazz fan you might well vote for Frank Vignola, who has such a fast wrist he strums in 1/32 notes and can include a melody line by picking out individual notes in the midst of that frenzy of accompaniment.

Or maybe your pitch is for Pete Townshend. After all, Pete strummed with his arm. He took strumming into the realms of some insane ballet. He was the first person—yes, even more than Hendrix—to amplify not only the sound but the physicality of guitar playing to the point of explosion.

But Pete did more than that. In the boy-meets-boy competitiveness of the music scene in mid-Sixties London, he was exquisitely aware, painfully aware, that his chief rivals, Clapton and Hendrix, had an almost insurmountable advantage over him: a rhythm guitarist. A hired sidekick strummer who would keep the company in business while the lead player explored interminable solos or fiddled with feedback. Roger Daltrey had been the band’s second guitarist, but his day job, working in a sheet-metal factory, had cut up his hands so badly he had to give his guitar to Townshend and specialize in singing. So Pete had to figure out how to play both rhythm and lead, thereby inventing a whole bunch of techniques that would later become power-trio standards. The result was accomplishments such as the opening of “Pinball Wizard,” surely one of the most potent rock intros of all time.

My own vote, though, goes to AniDiFranco, whom I saw last night live (at the Ellnora Guitar Festival) for the first time, an experience that changed not only my vote but my entire understanding of strumming.

From the very moment she appeared it became clear that her intentions toward her guitar are so energetic she has a pickguard shaped like a toilet seat that wraps all around the soundhole because she knows that otherwise, not a square inch of the top of her guitar would be safe.

Technically, much of the time she’s actually fingerpicking (using picks taped to the tips of her fingers), but one day she may become the first fingerstyle guitarist in history to put her hand right through the top of her guitar.

Watching her, I remembered that from time to time there has been a debate among guitar theorists as to whether you should strum from the wrist or from the elbow. Ani DiFranco she strums from the backs of her heels. The body has between 640 and 850 muscles, depending on how you count them, but either way, she uses all of them.

More than that, though: she herself is like a vibrating string, an instrument: she is strumming herself.

Guitar-makers talk about the complicated physics of music—that the player striking the string generates energy in the string, which (to oversimplify) passes through the bridge into the trampolining top of the guitar, which in turn activates the air inside the box, where the sound bounces around, strikes the stiff back of the guitar and leaps out through the soundhole. It’s called transduction: the process of energy transfer.

Ani DiFranco shows that this is only part of the process. The guitar, like any musical instrument, is a transducer that converts spiritual or emotional energy into physical energy, physical energy into acoustic energy that charges the air between player and listener, acoustic energy that strikes the ear and is converted into physical energy, then electrical energy passing through the nerves, then finally to emotional or spiritual energy. Even before she was halfway trough the show, everyone in the audience was visible transformed. Charged. Dammit, I’m getting charged just writing this and remembering what happened. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the physics of music.

And as such, strumming illustrates that music is an act of focus: it expresses a whole realm of energies (personal, social, energies of the time and the place) in a coherent, focused act. It’s a way of taking that invisible explosive charge inside the player, and fire it at the audience; it’s the guitar as grenade launcher.

And this is why I found myself thinking of those wimpy early-Sixties strummers. It’s not that they lacked skill—it’s that they lacked courage and commitment. They were singing about ending war and enacting social change, but they didn’t really want to make that much of a fuss, or else the radio/TV show they were on didn’t want a guest who would make that much of a fuss. They were just too damn polite, too worried about what people thought of them. In terms of energy, they were impeding their own output. That’s why Ritchie Havens stands out as such an exception: nobody, but nobody was impeding him.

By the time Ani finished, her energy had become our energy. She left everyone charged up and quivering in their seats, an auditorium full of what the engineers and physicists call sympathetic vibrations. All of us strumming.