{"id":1611,"date":"2016-07-01T07:00:40","date_gmt":"2016-07-01T11:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=1611"},"modified":"2017-01-29T11:29:34","modified_gmt":"2017-01-29T16:29:34","slug":"aint-she-sweet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/aint-she-sweet\/","title":{"rendered":"Ain&#8217;t She Sweet\/ Five Foot Two (Guy Van Duser)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/b2rLOfqYG7M\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>For a year or so before I went to New York, I spent every Friday and Saturday evening at the Nameless Coffeehouse, a free-of-charge, multi-act folk music showcase in the <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-1613\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Nameless-LP-297x300.jpg?resize=282%2C285\" alt=\"Nameless LP\" width=\"282\" height=\"285\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Nameless-LP.jpg?resize=297%2C300&amp;ssl=1 297w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Nameless-LP.jpg?w=298&amp;ssl=1 298w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 282px) 100vw, 282px\" \/>Unitarian church on the corner of Church Street in Harvard Square. They even had free coffee, cider, and cookies, and I auditioned to play there but didn&#8217;t make the grade, so I worked my way into the inner circle by washing dishes in the kitchen when I wasn&#8217;t interested in the musician who happened to be playing.<\/p>\n<p>There were plenty of musicians who did interest me: Amy Cohen (who introduced me to Dave Van Ronk) did Pentangle songs with her boyfriend Bob Harmon, who could play all the John Renbourn parts; Paul Cole, the one man band; Eliot Kenin doing comedy and music; Cathy Winter, a compelling singer of everything from Irish ballads to ragtime blues; and Guy Van Duser, whose first album came out as I was settling in New York, with a live Nameless performance of &#8220;The Stars and Stripes Forever.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I played that record for Dave, who grumbled, &#8220;Do we really need another Chet Atkins?&#8221; His lady, Joanne, happening to wander through the room, murmured, &#8220;Do I detect a note of envy?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>As it turned out, I was in college with Guy&#8217;s brother-in-law, John Hu, and\u00a0 he lent me a cassette Guy had made for him as a Christmas present, of Guy and Billy Novick jamming on Christmas carols. I played that for Dave as well, and this time he was impressed. &#8220;That&#8217;s first-rate second-rate jazz,&#8221; he said, approvingly, and when I looked nonplussed, added: &#8220;That&#8217;s where I put the Venuti-Lang duets, as well.&#8221; I would learn that this was one of Dave&#8217;s favorite categories, and meant as a compliment &#8212; the point being it wasn&#8217;t Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington, but was very good for what it was.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1614 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/guy-van-duser-lp.jpg?resize=298%2C296\" alt=\"guy van duser lp\" width=\"298\" height=\"296\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/guy-van-duser-lp.jpg?w=298&amp;ssl=1 298w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/guy-van-duser-lp.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 298px) 100vw, 298px\" \/>Since my year with Dave had primed me to play more swing standards, Guy seemed like the obvious next stop, and when I got to Cambridge I set up a lesson with him. The first thing he said was, &#8220;Name any standard, name any key.&#8221; I called &#8220;Sweet Georgia Brown&#8221; in Eb, and he ripped off a bunch of improvised choruses. That was the goal: to be able to improvise fully-formed fingerstyle arrangements freely, in any key, on any tune, like a jazz pianist &#8212; and he&#8217;d made it.<\/p>\n<p>Then he had me play for him, and I played Dave&#8217;s arrangement of &#8220;The Pearls,&#8221; and he asked if I&#8217;d heard Eric Schoenberg&#8217;s arrangement, which I hadn&#8217;t. Then he asked me to play Dave&#8217;s arrangement of &#8220;St. Louis Tickle,&#8221; which had been the first ragtime piece he&#8217;d learned, and he played a nice second part with me. Then he gave me a sheet of music notation with his arrangement of &#8220;Swanee,&#8221; as homework for next week.<\/p>\n<p>I fought with that arrangement for a few days, then called Guy and told him I had hoped to come to him for pointers, not to learn his arrangements note for note, and he said, &#8220;Well, my students tend to end up sounding like me.&#8221; So we agreed it was not a good fit, and I went my way&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;but I did cop one lick from his record: he played the first measure of &#8220;Ain&#8217;t She Sweet&#8221; with an ascending chromatic figure starting on the one paralleling the descending figure in the melody, and I figured out how to do something similar in the key of C. As Dave would say, it ain&#8217;t so such much, but you take what you can get.<\/p>\n<p>This medley became one of my hot-shot pieces for a while, and I recently heard a recording of myself playing it at the Nameless a half-dozen years later. It sounded pretty clunky, frankly, but boy could my fingers move a lot faster when I was 23.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The only lick I ever copped from the astonishing Guy Van Duser, with reminiscences of Guy and the Nameless Coffeehouse, and, yet again, Dave Van Ronk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Ain&#039;t She Sweet\/ Five Foot Two (Guy Van Duser) - 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Dave Laibman, Eric Schoenberg, Ton Von Bergeyk, Leo Wijnkamp, Guy Van Duser... they all started out with \"St. Louis Tickle.\" Dave had been singing and playing the second section since the\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"ragtime jug stompers - front cover","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ragtime-jug-stompers-front-cover-293x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1531,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/miss-brown-to-you\/","url_meta":{"origin":1611,"position":1},"title":"Miss Brown to You (Judy Roderick)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 2, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"When I began delving into old-time pop material, I was particularly attracted by musicians who had found ways to play that stuff using normal folk-blues guitar techniques. I was blown away by Guy Van Duser, who was playing guitar like a cross between Chet Atkins and a swing pianist, but\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Judy-Roderick3.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4552,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/somebody-stole\/","url_meta":{"origin":1611,"position":2},"title":"Somebody Stole My Gal\/All of Me","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"December 5, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"I've written before about my father, who was an indefatigable singer of pop songs from his youth in the 1920s, and also about Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band, who were my source for \"Somebody Stole My Gal\" and over a dozen other songs. I learned this by ear off\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/somebody-stole-my-gal-230x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1585,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/porters-love-song\/","url_meta":{"origin":1611,"position":3},"title":"Porter&#8217;s Love Song to a Chambermaid (Andy Razaf)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 3, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"When I was seventeen, in the summer of 1976, I spent a month or so staying with my half-brother Dave in Moraga, California, and heard Fats Waller for the first time. As a teenager, I was naturally entranced, and Dave helped me work out the chords to \"You're Not the\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Fats Waller double LP","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Fats-Waller-double-LP.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":128,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/ninety-nine\/","url_meta":{"origin":1611,"position":4},"title":"Ninety-Nine Year Blues (Lee K. Riethmiller)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"February 26, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"A hard-time song that served as my introduction to fingerstyle blues, thanks to Lee Riethmiller at Harvard Divinity School and a Canadian hippie in France.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Lee Riethmiller","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Lee-Riethmiller.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1272,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/the-pearls\/","url_meta":{"origin":1611,"position":5},"title":"The Pearls (Jelly Roll Morton\/Dave Van Ronk)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 13, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I arrived on Dave Van Ronk's doorstep just as he reached the high-water mark of his interest in ragtime guitar, so I emerged from my year of study with \"St. Louis Tickle,\" \"Maple Leaf Rag,\" \"The Entertainer\" (which was so overdone that I quickly forgot it), and Jelly Roll Morton's\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Davis-Van-Ronk 11","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Davis-Van-Ronk-11.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1611"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2468,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1611\/revisions\/2468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}