The Irish Guitar Blog: Introduction to Celtic Guitar

by Steve

The guitar is an instrument older than the instruments typical of the Celtic tradition, such as the uilleann pipes, the Celtic harp, the whistle and the fiddle: it's instead the most important instrument of Spanish traditional music, and its ancestor, called the "oud" (in Arabic language "al'ud", and from there the word "lute") is widely played in classic and traditional music of Middle East (2). Until a few decades ago, the guitar was an unusual instrument in Celtic music, and this probably more for social and historical rather than musical reasons. In the years since guitar appeared in the Irish musical scene, Irish music (which had absorbed the accordion and thus evolved in its musical style) wasn't in good health. A culture in decay tends to become more conservative, and the guitar, too often connected to the rock'n'roll culture, had a strong smell of revolutionary modernism. In spite of the growing popularity of the guitar in the sixties and seventies (or maybe because of it...) the gap between guitar and Irish traditional music stood still (3). The first use of a guitar in Irish music dates to the 1930s, when some Irish musicians in the USA began recording their music with a rhythm guitar backup which, however, didn't add much to the music. Probably the most important guitar player of those years was Martin Christi whose "jazz-oriented" style can be heard on fiddler James Morison's recordings(4). Some years later, an interesting accompaniment style was developed by the guitarist Willie Johnson in the Shetland Isles. He, too, was influenced by the 78 recordings of the great American jazz guitarists Eddie Lang, Eddie Durham and Lonnie Johnson. Willie Johnson adapted their swing style to the accompaniment of the traditional fiddle music of the Shetland Isles: the resulting "Shetland swing" remains an important part of the musical tradition of these islands, and is rich in the typical elements of jazz music, i.e., syncopated rhythm and passing chords, and often rich...

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