Each of these short, unpretentious works for guitar solo are based on either a style or a particular work of “non-western” or “American Vernacular” music.
(i) “Rebetiko” is based on 1920s acoustic recordings of Greek Rebetiko music.
(ii) “Old Joe Clarke” is an African American folk song, and I transcribed it from a field recording found on a Smithsonian-Folkways album, although I can’t remember which one (there are several versions).
(iii) “Mr. Dowland’s Nightmare” is a short series of genre variations based on the beginning of John Dowland’s lute work, “Mr. Dowland’s Midnight”.
(iv) “Washington Avenue” is a short “ragtime-waltz” written in the style of ragtime composers from the early 20th century. Washington Ave., Sedalia, Missouri, is where Scott Joplin might have lived around 1900.
(v) “Taqsim” is inspired by Turkish Oud music.
(vi) is a variation on an American folk tune, “Lights in the Alley,” which I originally heard on a Smithsonian-Folkways album (“Masters of Old-Time Country Autoharp”) as played by Neriah and Kenneth Banfield. The song is an old mountain gospel song popularized in the 1930s by “J. E. Mainer’s Mountaineers”.
Performance note: all notes sound one octave below that which is written, except for natural harmonics which sound “at pitch”.
