.................................the blog nobody reads: CLARENCE GATEMOUTH BROWN :: Let It Roll! The Essential Blues Sessions by Jas Obrecht

Fess and Gatemouth!

Well I posted the track above from Fess' Rock N Roll Gumbo album being one of the earliest Professor Longhair albums I own (in the sense of second or third after buying Crawfish Fiesta) and really just to show the boys played together because I found this what I thought was an extraordinary excerpt here -

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown:

“See, I don’t play guitar like guitar,” he explained. “I play my guitar like a horn. I play horn parts—actually, tenor parts. I can play trumpet parts, make it sound the way trumpet would sound, or a tenor. I know how a trumpet’s supposed to sound. I know how a tenor is supposed to sound. That’s why I say I can head-arrange a whole entire orchestra. It’s just something I can do. Just a gift I can do. If you ever heard any of my records, then you can understand it.”

To conjure a horn-like sound on his Gibson L-5, Brown relied on a fingers-only approach: “I never used a guitar pick in my life. I use my hand. I can’t use no pick. I only use a pick for mandolin. [On guitar] I play overtone rhythm with my thumb and I use my middle finger a lot of time for picking. I got control of my mind with my fingers. I got control of the guitar with my fingers. I can let them ring, or I can smother my strings in a snap and cut it just like a horn would do when your breath run out. The circle of breathing—I can do that by using my fingers. And, of course, another secret of mine, I pick with both hands. A lot of people don’t understand that, and it’s hard to explain.”

Asked which fingers he used to accomplish this, Gate replied, “Depends on what I’m playing. I might use ’em all, and I might use a thumb. I may use an index finger. I might use my ring finger. It’s unexplainable. People ask, ‘How you do that?’ I say, ‘Magic.’ When they say, ‘Show me how to do that,’ I say, ‘I show no one nothing.’”

Let It Roll! The Essential Blues Sessions by Jas Obrecht - Living Blues Magazine