Oh Ryland, You Slippery Devil

Published: Fri, 09/17/21

Touring, like any other activity undertaken by a small group of people pursuing a relatively common purpose under less than ideal circumstances, quickly breeds its own internal logic and syntax. This was certainly the case when I spent three weeks in Italy, Germany and Switzerland with folksinger Jack Hardy in the early 1990s. This is no sob story – even when my pal Arti, who I'd roped in to playing bass on the tour, would look at me after another cancellation or re-routing and mutter "I don't think the money's going to work out, man," my response was always a hearty "Hey man – we're in Italy!" And as far as I was concerned, there were more than enough truck stop espressos, pitchers of table wine, wedges of gorgonzola mascarpone and midnight gigs in front of fourteenth-century frescoes (just one of those, but how many do you need?) to make up for any shortage of lire come our flight home from Zurich.

Not surprisingly, the people most interested in hearing American roots music in Italy also turned out to be pretty motivated to learn English, too. As a result, the four of us got plenty of practice talking about songwriters and other musicians in a combination of hand gestures, English and deeply fractured Italian. The threads of these conversations would occasionally get picked up the next morning on the highway out of town, along with a critical appraisal of whatever we'd been served by our hosts. Musicians are always hungry both before and after the gig, and while not much of a breakfast guy, Jack considered any day in Italy involving less than three pastas a wasted opportunity.

Out of all this driving, gigging, eating and talking, we eventually reached a state worthy of the worst impulses on display in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. After one of us mistakenly referred to something by Hank Williams as "That Dylan song,'" we coined the following rule: For incorrectly attributing authorship of a songwriting classic to a more contemporary performer of same, go back three spaces and give up one piece of black clothing. No exceptions.

I was put in mind of this rule when working on this week's Youtube lesson. In the Fingerstyle Five this month we're learning "Crow Black Chicken," an old-time (that's an actual genre, not a put-down) song done by, among other people, Ry Cooder on his third solo LP Boomer's Story. Curiously, I never directly learned any of Cooder's acoustic arrangements until quite recently; along with most Beatles things and the second album by The Band, I just assumed they were too unassailably perfect and complete to ever try and take apart. But as I went sifting through the balance of Boomer's Story I came across the solo introduction to "Comin' In On A Wing And A Prayer," and thought "well, I might have a fighting chance with this one."

It was a little baffling at first: I could hear what I thought were C chord shapes, but then heard some low bass notes. Had he tuned the E string down to C, the A string down to G? I tried that, but quickly ran into some impossible chord voicings. I listened some more, and it finally clicked: it was drop D tuning, but down a whole step from that, so: CGCFAD. About twenty minutes later, I was calling up my long-suffering friend Bret to say "Were you as big a nerd about those early Ry Cooder LPs as I was? Check this out!" and stumbling through what I'd figured out so far.

"That's great," said Bret, and meant it, I'm pretty sure. Then "So you've checked out Joseph Spence, right?" "Well," I admitted, "I've given it a whirl, because I'd heard Ry Cooder talk about him, but I don't really get it yet." "Check out his version of that tune," said Bret. "I'm pretty sure that was where Ry got the idea for that arrangement." He stayed on the line while I pulled up the Spence version on Spotify. "Oh." I said, about three bars in. "Ohhhhhh...." I said, after another eight or nine bars." "Oh..I see. Yes, this certainly does seem to be exactly where Ry Cooder got the idea from."

So I'm gonna have to give up one piece of black clothing, it looks like. But at least I got a cool lesson out of it. For this week's Youtube video, I walk through the tuning, chord voicings and basic layout of Cooder's solo introduction to "Wing and a Prayer." You can find it at the link below:

"Comin' In On A Wing And A Prayer"

To download the notation and tab, click below:

Get The PDF

I'll be going back three spaces too, of course. More soon,

David

P.S. As mentioned above, I'm teaching a drop D arrangement of "Crow Black Chicken" this month in The Fingerstyle Five. To learn more about the membership and sign up, visit www.fretboardconfidential.com