This edition commemorates the 40th anniversary of two folk classics from Oak Publications: "Fingerpicking Styles for Guitar" and "Traditional and Contemporary Fingerpicking," presented here in one revised and updated volume. These landmark transcriptions represent the playing of some of the greatest country, folk and blues musicians, ranging from the mountains of Virginia, the Piedmont of North Carolina, the coal mining country of Kentucky, and places as distant as the Bahamas, England and Africa.
This book includes basic instruction in fingerpicking and accurate transcriptions from the playing of twenty-two artists, including Mance Lipscomb, Mississippi John Hurt, Mike Seeger, Elizabeth Cotten, Etta Baker, Joseph Spence, Merle Travis, Dave Van Ronk, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Doc Watson and more.
A note from Happy Traum:
It is astonishing to me that forty years have passed since I first walked into the offices of Oak Publications on West 46th Street with a proposal for a new kind of guitar instruction book. My idea at the time was simply to transcribe, as accurately as I could, some solos of my favorite fingerstyle players, and organize the pieces according to the method that I had developed as a guitar teacher during the previous decade or so. I knew that at that time there was nothing in print that documented the styles of these seminal players, so I set myself the painstaking task of turning heartfelt and often improvisational recordings into the black-and-white notations of music and tablature.
There must have been a need for this type of publication, because Fingerpicking Styles for Guitar went through three printings in its first year, and it has been selling continuously ever since.