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Star Spangled Blues
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My slide guitar take on the Star Spangled Banner, offered as a 9/11 memorial and a tribute to all US servicemen and women.
blues slide slide guitar lap steel lap slide 911 memorial tribute to servicemen
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Solo acoustic, resonator, lap slide, electric guitar, blues
Hi! My name's John Culp. I live in Bristol, Tennessee, "The Birthplace of Country Music." (Too bad I'm really not much into country music!) Some of you know me as "Ricochet" from various blues and guitar related boards. (I'm sure I'm not the only one out there with that handle.) I play for fun, mostly by myself. I've been into music of various sorts for most of my life, but I just took up guitar in 2001 at the age of 45, a year after nearly tearing my right arm off in a motorcycle accident. I was getting enough function back that I thought I could do it, my teenage son had started taking guitar lessons, I'd long wanted to play guitar, and decided to go for it. My kid's a lot better than I am, but I have fun! I play nearly entirely slide stuff in open tunings. That just "clicked" with me, which standard tuning fretted playing never has for some reason. I think the open slide stuff is reminiscent of keyboard, and I started off with piano as a kid. I'm learning to play a 1967 Hammond H-182 organ that I recently acquired. I've just gotten a lap steel and am learning to play it. I like to do silly stuff like record blues songs for my answering machine messages. It's all for fun!
Song Info
Genre
Blues Blues General
Charts
Peak #94
Peak in subgenre #38
Author
John Culp
Rights
2001-2005 John Culp
Uploaded
July 02, 2005
Track Files
MP3
MP3 6.0 MB 128 kbps 0:00
Story behind the song
I'd just started working on figuring out the Star Spangled Banner on slide guitar in September 2001. When the World Trade Center attack occurred, it took on special meaning. I performed my first version, similar to the first verse of this recording, at our church's 9/11 remembrance service in 2002. In 2003 I came up with a minor key version that's basically the second verse of this. (I originally did it in Open D minor tuning, but now I do it in Open D or Open E, fretting behind the slide for the minor chords.) In 2004 I came up with the idea of making the tune "tell a story," with the traditional-sounding verse interrupted by two big crashes, followed by the mournful minor key second verse, finally morphing into an upbeat boogie version symbolizing triumph over tragedy and terror. I performed a rendition of it on my resonator guitar for our church choir's patriotic musical program last July 3-4, and plan to do it on electric guitar for a similar program this September 11. I thank my guitar teacher Jason Lloyd, who's helped me at every step. The final version's my own, largely because I couldn't play a lot of the pretty stuff he came up with, so I had to come up with my own licks that I could do! :-)
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