Blues in E

As late mid-life crises go, this seems pretty benign. Red sports cars, grisly and deplorable drinking binges, and overly young girlfriends are all landmines with the potential to kill and injure people, sometimes in unimaginably hideous ways.

When I walked into the music store four months ago, I intended to leave with a cheap Japanese or Korean guitar. I strummed the two chords I sort of knew on several of them, and they all seemed fine. Then I picked up the Martin (SWOMGT). The same two inexpertly played chords reverberated deep in the wood and hung in the air around me, dissipating with a long and graceful finish like a sip of top-shelf Barolo. The action, i.e. the complicated interactions between the strings and the fret board, seemed perfect even to my unskilled left hand. The strings were neither so high that pushing them down was painful, nor so low that they buzzed against the metal frets when struck. The relatively small size of the sounding box made it easy to caress and to see what my fumbling fingers were up to. And it was beautiful, with the warm spruce and deep red cherry as pleasing to the eye as the sound was to the ear. So instead of the $150 import I had in mind that afternoon when I walked in, a zero was added to the figure, but I left smiling.

Biology is not in my corner. The muscle memory, flexibility and perceptive agility required for learning a new musical instrument is much diminished in a 50-something. The time to learn to play the guitar is in middle and high school. I was prepared for that, but I was unprepared for a great natural advantage I have over the younger me.

In late middle age, I’ve seen enough frustration to temper my anger substantially. This has been an especially interesting transformation to undergo, because my tolerance for bullshit seems to be declining precipitously with age. Even so, my capacity to not react explosively to it has greatly increased. Who knew!?

What this means for the older aspiring musician is a capacity for patience. I play my guitar for 15 or 20 minutes almost every day. Improvement comes very slowly and in small increments, but it comes, and I am satisfied. If I cannot bend my fingers into an odd shape and nail that new chord today, or this week, or this month, that’s fine. At this point, the long view comes readily, and I understand that simply attempting to make that chord guarantees success if I just keep trying and wait for it. It is inevitable. With due respect to Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendricks, I never feel the urge to smash my guitar.

I chose to learn the guitar for reasons both mundane and aesthetic.

At the simplest level is the instrument’s versatility and simplicity. It has frets, thus if it is properly tuned, depressing the third fret on either E-string will give you a G every time you do it, and all you have to do is pluck the string with a pick or your thumb to get that G. The 20 total frets and 6 strings gives you 120 discreet notes (a piano has 88) and God knows how many chords, and that’s just with the standard tuning. A friend of mine currently struggles with the fiddle. The fiddle has no frets, so where, exactly, is that G???? Worse yet, as an expert fiddle playing friend once explained to me “The violin is very loud, and capable of making a great many sounds, but most of them are displeasing. The most important skill in fiddle playing is simply producing a pleasing sound.” So my poor student friend is reduced to practicing his scales in a woodshed to avoid his wife’s wrath. His efforts, pleasing and otherwise, are reserved for the squirrels.

I suppose I also became interested because I have many close friends and family members who play guitar. For years I have accompanied them on harmonica, an instrument with which I am skilled enough to occasionally play in front of strangers, but the harp’s limited range has always frustrated me. Playing music with others is one of life’s great joys, and given my pair of left feet and general lack of physical grace, the only way I am likely to ever actively appreciate live music is as a musician.

Making music and writing well are both expressions of artful creativity, and I simply can’t live without that. Like the man in the cave at Lascaux all of those millennia ago, I am simply driven to create something beautiful and I’m not sure I can explain why.

I’ll try.

I’m sitting in a wooden chair with my guitar in my lap. I have just run through my scales and a few chords, and I begin a repeated pattern of notes on the high E, B, G and D strings. It’s from a blues sometimes attributed to Big Joe Williams. The blues are the deep tap root of almost all American folk and popular music, a root that extends to West Africa, to the bones and to the heart of what it means to be human. It moves within the dark and light of emotion, and frames a painful entreaty…

Baby please don’t go
Back to New Orleans
You know I love you so.

Yeah, we’ve all been there, haven’t we? Down on one knee. And what will she do, how will she respond? God knows…

I strike the last note on the D string, then come back to the G note on that high E and bend it up ending on the open E. Despite the fact that I’m not yet much of a guitarist, I can feel that last note ring down in the core of my body. I let it fade away into stillness, then stand up, put the guitar back in its case, and close the lid.