Internationally known singer and guitarist Mary Flower is highly regarded for her mastery of Piedmont blues, a syncopated, ragtime-influenced fingerpicking style that originated in the early 20th century in the southeastern United States. She uses the Piedmont style as a starting point for her quirky original compositions, which have earned awards for her performances at the National Finger Style Guitar championships in Winfield, Kansas, in 2000 and 2003. Flower also has a distinctive style of lap-slide playing that utilizes the sweet tone of a 1950’s Gibson acoustic Hawaiian guitar.
Although she recently relocated to Portland, Oregon, Flower spent the early years of her career in Colorado, where she was a member of the Mother Folkers, a group that included many of Denver’s top female artists. She has recorded seven solo albums, the most recent of which, Bridges (Yellow Dog Records), features a mix of her original tunes with blues classics from Bessie Smith and Big Bill Broonzy, with guest appearances by Tim O’Brien, Tony Furtado, and Rebecca Kilgore. She teaches at many workshops and seminars, provides online lessons for jamplay.com, and has released several instructional DVDs, including A Crash Course in Open Tunings for Guitar and Blues Guitar Arrangements for the Intermediate Player on Homespun Tapes.
I sat down with Flower in Seattle, Washington, recently to talk about her approach to writing guitar pieces, her favorite alternate tunings, and how she uses dissonant intervals in her guitar works.
Some of your tunes have a ragtime-era sound. What makes that sound happen for you? FLOWER The funky notes that seem to be colliding, but still make sense somehow. The use of dissonance is a common thread; the element of surprise, the happy stuff, the humor—using some of the same elements the old guys might have used. I don’t know how many new ideas there are. Some of the old-sounding licks seem to be rattling around in there. If I recognize it, though, I won’t use it. You have to always inspect your stuff closely for that because the last thing you want to hear is, “Oh that sounds like John Hurt’s ‘Candy Man,’ ” or whatever.
How do you get a new tune started? FLOWER I’m always looking for something that catches my attention, something that makes me want to keep playing it over and over again without saying, “I’ve heard that before.” If I write something and it doesn’t last for more than a couple of months, then it’s gone. It has to keep my attention.
A lot of your songs use alternate tunings. Can you show us one of your favorites? FLOWER This is one of my favorite open tunings—D G D G B E. It’s the Bo Carter tuning. The chords are easily accessible and you can use positions you already know from standard tuning. It enables you to have the open bass notes available while you move chords up the neck. I’ve written three or four things I really like in it. This one starts with a circusy lick [Example 1 ]. Then it uses octaves on the fourth and sixth strings to walk the bass into the song.
Another one in that tuning is called the “Hudson River Rag.” It has an opening lick that spans the whole neck [Example 2 ]. It starts out low, and by the third measure I’m up to the 12th fret. It’s got a note in there [beat four of the first full measure] some people would play major, but I seem to always go for that bluesy third. I guess it’s that dissonance thing again. I love that. I like surprises. This one is piano-like too, the way it flows from the bottom to the top. And the fingerings [I use] to get there are pretty easy.
What kind of interesting things have you run across in standard tuning? FLOWER This one is a melody in F, which we all avoid like the plague, but there’s actually a lot of nice stuff there. I don’t think people realize that there’s a lot of cool bass movement that’s easy to reach. You can play your Bb7 chord like the A7 shape moved up one fret and the regular C7 is right there for your V7 chord [Example 3 ]. This tune has a chromatic move in it running along the second string [Example 4 ]. It’s kind of syncopated with melody notes coming down ahead of the bass.
Do you write on a regular schedule or just when inspiration strikes? FLOWER I will cancel other things to work on something when I’m loving it. When the muse hits, I want to stick with it. If I have to force myself to work on it then I get to thinking maybe I don’t really like it well enough. But when I’m so sucked into the music that it almost puts me in a spell, it’s really a pleasure to follow through. And that gets easier the more you do it.
Do you hear the melodies in your head and transfer them to the guitar? FLOWER I don’t usually hear them in my head first. It comes from sitting with my guitar and experimenting. Some of it is kind of mindless. I might be looking out the window or noodling with the guitar while I’m watching a movie and some little figure will crop up that just begs for development. Sometimes I’ll get so wrapped up in it that I’ll become blind to the things around me and won’t do anything else until the song is finished. Or, I just work with it until I get a couple of solid parts. I love it when that passion overtakes me and I’m totally unaware of the rest of the world. That’s what it’s all about. That’s when I really love what I’m doing. When I can write an instrumental, that makes me happy.
LICK OF THE MONTH
This lick from the as-yet-unrecorded piece “Dismal Nitch” highlights Flower’s love for the dissonant buzz of close intervals. “It’s got that carnivalesque flavor. It’s not meant to be pretty but just fun and surprising. It’s like a calliope thing.” Notice that the thumb moves straight across the four bottom strings while the chord fingering incorporates the fretted F# against the open G and D# against the open E.
Photo credit, top, Sydney Smith, Absolute Images.
