Please read the following paragraph out loud (with apologies to AUTHOR Howard L. Chace).
...
Wants pawn term, dare lift disc yawn glad hoe plate bee youthful mew sick whiff history pest France—Pole,
Please read the following paragraph out loud (with apologies to AUTHOR Howard L. Chace).
Wants pawn term, dare lift disc yawn glad hoe plate bee youthful mew sick whiff history pest France—Pole, Gorge, end Raincoat. Win tease buoys flute dew Andy yeah end non tween sexy ate, June Lemon matte Dawn Oven, hoe thought hymn howl two fling her peck. End arrest assist hurry.
Whew! I wish I could conduct this entire investigation in “Anguish Languish”-style Lennon-speak—read In His Own Write or A Spaniard in the Works, and check out Chace’s Ladle Rat Rotten Hut—but my brain already hurts!
Our Donovan interview (GP 8/14) revealed how, during their famous trip to India in 1968, the singer/songwriter/guitarist taught John Lennon and Paul McCartney “the clawhammer technique that became ‘Dear Prudence’ and ‘Blackbird.’” McCartney adapted a looser version of this one-bar fingerpicking pattern by incorporating brush strokes across two or more strings (think “Blackbird” and “Mother Nature’s Son”), but Lennon’s take on it was much more disciplined and rarely deviated from its strictly arpeggiated single-note approach. The first recorded examples of the pattern emerged on The Beatles (a.k.a. the White Album), prompting George Harrison to later remark that Donovan “is all over the White Album.”
John Lennon made a lot of beautiful music with only a handful of chords and this simple, one-bar fingerpicking pattern. (And, of course, those melodies, but that’s another story!) Let’s investigate how he was able to do so much with so little.
“CLAWHAMMER” VS. “TRAVIS-STYLE”
Using an open E chord and notated with traditional opposing stemming, Ex. 1 demonstrates the basic one-bar, 4/4 picking pattern, which incorporates all six strings and features alternating four-on-the-floor bass notes played on the bottom three strings interspersed