The Art World

Published: Fri, 04/29/22

I saw a lot of Texas musicians play when I lived in New York. I've never been able to work out what direction the vibrational magnetism was working in – if I found myself at so many shows by Texas musicians because I was going to ultimately wind up in Austin, or if hearing all those musicians somehow made the relocation inevitable. Either way, I remember going one night to hear the songwriter Darden Smith around the time his first record had just come out, the one with backing vocals by some friend of his named Lyle Lovett. The Bottom Line in Greenwich Village used to have two shows a night, and it was probably the late show I went to, because the room was half full, if that, and Darden and his trio were struggling to maintain the energy late on a weekday night far from home.

Like many songwriters, Darden was well equipped with what my friend Paul Yutzy once referred to as "a quality line of jive," and over the course of the show, a between-songs riff began to emerge about "the art world." "It's tough," Darden would sigh with mock gravity, looking out over the half-filled room, "out here...in the art world." It was funny because of course roots music isn't "art," right? Sure, musicians are routinely referred to as "artists," but everyone knows art is what happens in museums and concert halls and galleries, not nightclubs and coffeehouses and bars.

Except of course, it is, or at least has the potential to be. If you're taking something that already exists, developing the craft to reproduce it yourself, then taking the time to figure out what you're going to do with – that's pretty much the artistic process right there. Maybe you still find the craft a struggle, maybe you'd be gratified just to reproduce what already is, maybe you can't imagine – yet – being fluent enough with the language to make your own sentences with it. But if all that exists on a continuum from craft to creativity, then even as you're working through the basics, you're taking part in a stage of the artistic process, and how cool is that?

Over the past week on my Youtube channel, I've been laying out a series of tools and practices for getting good at fingerstyle blues guitar, from learning new tunes, to turning those tunes into complete songs, to creating licks and solos to include in those songs. Those tools and practices are the foundation of my Fingerstyle Five membership, and if you're looking for a more organized, ongoing way to learn new tunes, build a repertoire of complete songs and learn to improvise on them, today's video is a short but thorough explanation of just how the membership works and how you can use it to change your playing. You can find it at the link below:

How To Get Good At Fingerstyle Blues – What To Do Next

Registration is currently open for the Fingerstyle Five, and if you sign up now, we'll be starting our next tune this coming Thursday, May 7th.

More soon,

David