Western Union Blues

I've been playing guitar for a long time, but there are periods within that for me. I started back in 2007, when my Guitar Hero 2 save got wiped, my progress was lost, and I figured, _if I'm going to do this, why not play the actual guitar?_ A weird but ultimately very big decision in my life. I started off on electric, on a terrible Strat copy, then started to learn classical. Did both side-by-side for a while. Tried to convince my partner and some friends to start a band, but we couldn't really get it going (I suspect it was only ever my dream). So I started to play electric less, classical more. Eventually I stopped playing electric. A year became a decade, and then more. This year, I finally got back into electric again.

Before I stopped, I was back in my hometown for Christmas, visiting family. Near where I used to live, there was a record shop on the second floor of a building that had a music shop, a Birkenstock shop, and other places I've forgotten. It was wonderful. Dark and full of CDs (and some records, too), most of them $5-10. I was getting in to blues, as so many white guys often do, and was thumbing through their tiny blues section. A lot of the usual. B.B. King, some John Lee Hooker, plus a bunch of the white British 60s guys. And then there was this CD, "My First Recordings", by Lowell Fulson. I'd never heard it, or of him.

Fulson is (I know now) one of the great west coast blues guitarists, considered second only to T-Bone Walker. But while his later work would be in the traditional blues band style, and often including piano and horns, his earliest pieces are striking: just two guitars, with Lowell playing lead, and his brother Martin playing half-chunked chords underneath. Maybe my favourite piece is his "Western Union Blues".

At the time I was also listening to a lot of Little Miss Higgins, a contemporary American/Canadian roots artist. Her early work, too, is typically two guitars, with her playing lead, and her then-partner Foy Taylor playing M. Fulson-like chords underneath. There's something about that style. And though both Lowell Fulson and Little Miss Higgins moved away from the bare-bones, two-guitar orchestration, they both brought something magical to it. When there's fewer instruments, and fewer sounds, what gets played gets enhanced. Higgins' leads sing like forgotten early blues, and Fulson's own playing would later go on to influence B.B. King, Elvis, and others. Two guitars has a lot of space, and a lot of overlap, but there's a lot of potential there, too.

I've been thinking about Martin Fulson, and Foy Taylor, as I've been getting back into electric guitar this year. When people chase certain blues tones, there are a lot of names that come up - SRV, Clapton, Duane Allman for sure, B.B. King. But I find myself drawn to the background a lot, to players like Martin Fulson and Taylor, who make nobody's best-of lists, who have little-to-no web presence whatsoever, but whose rhythmic work lurks in the background of a lot of great blues tracks. Nobody remembers them, but I do.