The upside-down lefty: lonely and listening.

I just became aware this week of Gurrumul, a blind aboriginal singer from Australia who is touring the US in June and July.

Growing up on a remote island, isolated from the larger society, Gurrumul learned to play on a right-handed guitar without turning the strings around. While this way of playing is rare, it is not unheard of, though less frequently today, with the ready availability of guitars worldwide.  Gurrumul's playing style is a gentle fingerpick, though with a less regimented pattern than American folk fingerpicking.

I can only think of two guitarists that I've seen that play 'upside-down' lefty - Elizabeth Cotten and Albert King.  Albert King is best known as a sixties/seventies urban bluesman, playing highly expressive, bent-string-laden blues licks, but pulling down the thin strings, which are at the top of the neck:



There's a close up of King's hands at 1:07, and I have to say that it's strange to watch, as someone who's been intently watching people play guitar in the regular way for 28 years.  Even odder to watch, for me, is Elizabeth Cotten, who played a version of Travis picking upside-down, with the thumb playing the melody and the fingers playing alternating bass notes.


I'm not sure why Albert King played the way he did, but Elizabeth Cotten learned to play on a guitar borrowed from her brother, and she was not allowed to rearrange the strings.  I would guess that Gurrumul was borrowing the guitar from a family member, or perhaps the guitar was just around and nobody knew to 'correct' the strings. Cultural isolation cuts off this kind of information, which can sometimes fuel innovation.  Jeff Healey, another blind guitarist who played in an unusual way, said that nobody corrected him when he began to play the guitar overhand on his lap as a child.

Was upside-down left-handed playing more prevalent in the past, when communities were more isolated and guitars were less common? I really don't know, though I'd like to. I can't say that I've personally known anyone who played that way.  I, like Jeff, started playing guitar lap-style, because it was easier to see what I was doing.  My first guitar lesson took care of that.  Did guitar lessons kill this particular mutation of guitar culture?

I think that in the cases of Gurrumul, Elizabeth Cotten, and Jeff Healey, playing 'the wrong way' came mostly out of social isolation. For Gurrumul and Jeff, I would speculate that it was blindness that set them outside of the larger guitar community.  So much of guitar knowledge is traded through the eyes - look at the YouTube guitar community.  For Elizabeth Cotten, it was being a young African-American woman at the turn of the century - there were strictures on the behaviour of young black women at that time that would have limited Elizabeth's inclusion in the local musical discourse.

This is not to say that these musicians were isolated from oral and aural culture.  Gurrumul's favorite band is Dire Straits. Albert King must have grown up with blues recordings to study, based on his sure knowledge of the conventions of blues improvisation and stage performance.  I'm not sure how many recordings Elizabeth Cotten was exposed to growing up, but her playing style is very much a piece with southern musicians who recorded in the 1920s, including Mississippi John Hurt, Bayless Rose and Geeshie Wiley.

An unusual technique can put a fresh spin on traditional styles like blues, folk and Australian aboriginal.  All of the musicians that I've mentioned here play in traditional styles but have something different - a strange turn of phrase, an oddly quick string bend - that give them a distinctive musical identity.  I submit that their 'wrong' ways of playing, borne of social isolation, form a large part of what makes these musicians distinctive and intriguing in their own ways.

Article first published as Gurrumul: the Upside-down Lefty, Lonely, Listening. on Technorati.