Reviving Historical Guitar Music

Just when you thought you had heard everything the guitar had to say, a modern swashbuckler uncovers a plan for reviving historical guitar music. Los Angeles-based guitarist and folk music historian Lucas Gonze uses the Internet to travel back in time to the pre-recording era of American popular music. Gonze visits the dusty corners of virtual libraries to rediscover the compositions of the 19th century. He's on a mission to both subvert stifling Internet copyright laws and to bring life to forgotten musical artifacts that have been silenced for over 100 years. LTK Guitar sat down with Gonze to discuss the origins of his unique project and to learn how he adeptly brings this compelling music to life on the guitar.

Lucas Gonze

I wanted to make music and put it on free and legal sites like my own site and CCMixter.org. Music online is usually electronic music, but I am a guitarist and I wanted to keep doing that. So I decided to record instrumental songs.

Because writing my own songs felt self-indulgent, I decided to do cover songs. When I looked around for songs to cover, I realized that it would be impossible to do free and legal versions of compositions under copyright. I always loved old blues and folk and decided to cover songs that were so old they were in the public domain, which in the US ends in about 1928.

When I looked closer at the copyrights, I found that even songs from 1927 often had some form of copyright still attached, and it was impossible to know whether the song was in the clear without doing a lot of research on each song. For example Happy Birthday was written in 1893 and is still not in the public domain. Since that amount of research isn't practical, I decided to go so far back that there was no need to do research. That took me all the way back to the 19th century.

The way I work is like this. I start by surfing around in online archives of digitized historical sheet music. Usually I just poke around until something catches my eye. This happened, for example, with "Dodworth's Five Step," a waltz in 5/4 instead of the usual 3/4 time. When I see something interesting, I'll print it out and give myself time to get to know it. This can take me a long time because I'm not very proficient at sight reading. "Dodworth's Five Step" was piano music, so a lot of the action was in bass clef, and that forced me to spell out the notes one by one. It took about six months to learn, understand and master.

The Library of Congress site is the best, but there are lots of smaller troves at universities and even from private parties. This music is there mainly for musicologists and sometimes for classical musicians. I have also found signs of a few people like me who love the junk.

Rough on Rats Sheet Music

Lately, I'm getting a kick out of an 1882 jingle for rat poison. It was a brand called "Rough on Rats." If you read the last page of the sheet music you'll find about ten ads for seemingly unrelated products like "Wells' Throat and Lung Balsam". For example, there's a tiny blurb that looks like a classified ad and reads "THAT HUSBAND OF MINE is three times the man he was before he began using Wells' Health Renewer. $1". Read those ads closer and you'll find that they're all from the same company that was just incredibly industrious and unscrupulous about promoting their products. Hence, the dodge to hire a songwriter and publish a song starring their rat poison. They even had the chutzpa to charge money for the sheet music.

During the week, I practice in the morning between about 7:30 and 9:30 a.m. On the weekend, I'll do a bit more, although I have carpal tunnel syndrome and have to be careful about not practicing too much.

This isn't improvisational music, so I don't do fundamentals like scales and arpeggios. What I do instead is drill down into the composition bit by bit. First, I get a general grasp of the parts, and then I understand the identity of the song. Next, I get it under my fingers well enough to give it a strong, chunky rhythm, and then I master the weak sections by breaking them down into tiny issues like the angle of my fretting fingers. Eventually, I'll play it live for the first time and find out how far I have to go. Sometimes I'll get to a plateau on a new song that I can only get over by not playing it for a while.

Gonze's Simple Practice Space

Another factor in the amount of time is that there are so few clues about how the music is supposed to sound. There are few recordings to get style hints from, and virtually never any recordings of the specific song I'm interested in. However, sometimes I'll find recordings from the early 20th century that aren't all that far removed. In one case, I found a 1962 recording by a very old man who had learned the song when he was young. In the end, I'll piece together a concept for the song by reading between the lines and factoring in what I've learned about similar songs.

I know this sounds like a crazy amount of work, but I enjoy the concentration and peace of mind that comes with it, and I feel great when a song finally comes to life. As long as the results are good, I'm okay with the process.

The L3 was stuffed behind a console in an video encoding lab at the Internet music company where I work. It was badly trashed and far from playable. I bought it for $300 and spent $700 having it restored. The sticker inside the body says that it was made in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where Orville Gibson lived and where the first Gibson plant was located. The guy I bought it from said that his parents got it at a garage sale in Michigan.

Gonze's Parlor Guitar

The parlor guitar is a 1930s reproduction of an 1890-ish instrument. You can tell it's not original because the tuning heads are too smooth to be ivory when you lick them; they must be an early kind of plastic. It's no newer than the 1930s because the frets date to that time.

These are solo instrumentals on acoustic guitar, and it's historical music from long before electronic effects. The medium is completely bare. Everything left in the recording is exposed.

The down side is that this rules out a lot of things that would reduce the amount of labor. Effects that would color the sound are out. Multi-tracking is out. You can hear a splice a mile away.

The up side is that you can really hear the guitar. Rather than beefing up a section with tom tom, you move your picking hand over the sound hole. Rather than making something more airy with flanger, you use open strings instead of fretted strings so the notes can ring longer. This kind of solution is the same thing they did back in the day, pretty much. All you have is your body, an instrument and patience.

There's a historical pop zeitgeist that Madame Pamita (Los Angeles-based performer, American-Folk Culture historian, and "Seer of the Highest Order") and I are both part of. It includes ragtime, boogie woogie and early jazz, as well as some bluegrass and folk. A lot of people are aware of or influenced by the Charlie Poole box set. There seems to be a militant anti-amplification vibe sometimes.

I think that what's happening is that the Internet is giving ordinary people access to primary historical materials for the first time. You used to have to be a college professor to get to hang around in the archives. Now anybody can do it.

If you're interested in learning more about reviving historical guitar music, please visit Lucas Gonze's blog. There you can hear samples of Gonze playing this incredible music and learn more about this fascinating artist.

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