"Ragtime" and "ragtime guitar" are really two different things. Prewar alternating-thumb pickers with vivid chord vocabularies and a sprightly right hand – people like Blind Blake and Reverend Gary Davis – are impressive in their own right, but you'd never mistake them for the six-string second coming of Scott Joplin and company.

Which is in no way a dismissal of said guitarists; the two things are just apples and oranges, is all. According to Elijah Wald – if I'm remembering correctly; as of going to press I can't seem to locate my copy of Escaping The Delta among the sprawl of music books perpetually infesting Casa Fretboard – blues guitar players of the 1920s used "ragtime" as a term of dismissal for anything they deemed corny or old-fashioned. Which may be how certain alternating-thumb styles picked up such a tag, despite their almost total disconnection from the formally elaborate, consciously syncopated yet thoroughly composed piano music that had swept the nation more than two decades earlier.

While Reverend Davis, by all accounts, considered himself an advanced and accomplished musician of many musical virtues, and certainly not old-fashioned, his chops and repertoire did cause him to be classed generally as "ragtime" by the folk revivalists. And Davis did pass along a significant degree of ragtime guitar skill to those who studied with him. Despite being, in his own words, "definitely the Rev's worst student," Roy Book Binder is a case in point, though the Book also learned from hanging out with Georgia guitarist Pink Anderson and, closer to home, checking out Dave Van Ronk.

And I in turn picked up a good share of what I know about ragtime guitar from listening to Roy. Of course, I tried my best to trace it back to the source, too, but since Roy was the one I could actually sit and watch up close, that's who had the most impact on my own playing, especially all the little nuances – the rakes, the snaps, the bass lines and so on.

Roy is no more a ragtime guitarist per se than I am – he is, and always has been, as much a songwriter, an interpreter and, above all, a raconteur of the highest order. But since we're playing a show together next Wednesday, I thought I would make today's Youtube lesson about a couple of my favorite ragtime guitar bass lines – moves that I've internalized over the years, and find myself playing whenever I do wind up in a ragtime guitar vein.

You can find it at the link below:

My Favorite Ragtime Guitar Bass Runs

And if you're anywhere in the Austin vicinity next Wednesday, October 23rd, come see Roy in action. You won't regret it:

Roy Book Binder In Austin

More soon,

David