silences

I never was a strummer. The beauty of an acoustic guitar, to my mind, is that it’s not only a melodic but percussive instrument. In fact, I might even say it’s a percussion instrument first. A hollow box with strings running across it is like a drum with the supernatural ability to feed tone and color into rhythm. Though many people seem to catch all the fun they desire in its melodic waters, I believe an acoustic guitar’s ability to make sound and silence sit right next to each other is at the core of its power. As with any rhythm instrument, the spaces are essential. Strumming an acoustic guitar erases the beginnings and the ends of its sounds and eliminates the spaces. It ignores the instrument’s potential to produce intense dynamic contrast. To put it opinionatedly, strumming an acoustic guitar is akin to scratching on the surface of a drum: antithetical to its nature.

 This was not some sort of idea that came to me but more a feeling in my torso that came alive when the instrument that I had been holding against it really began to speak. For one thing, Michael showed me a fingerpicking pattern wherein you hold a chord with your left hand and use the individual fingers on your right hand to pluck a single string at a time in a repeating pattern. I was captivated. I practiced that fingerpicking pattern over and over until I could make the rhythm of the pattern flow seamlessly from my right hand and then I practiced it some more until I could manipulate the feel of the syncopations at will. The spaces between the notes gave a shape to each sound. Feeling the instrument breathe against my body made me turn subconsciously away from the world of strumming and never look back.

 Michael’s style was more sloppy and strummy and he showed me the finger picking pattern more as a useful exercise (like a boxer working a speed bag) than something meant to be an actual part of the game of music. But I also had my father’s John Fahey records playing through my dreams and, thanks to Michael, I had Suzanne Vega coming in and out of my waking life. They weren’t strummers. Suzanne was something of a new breed when she appeared on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the late seventies. Her songs were female and urban (not urban like Black, urban like some folk shit that ain’t “Jimmy Crack Corn” or “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”). Her style of playing was different from the boys and something about her presence provided me with subliminal proof of my own difference. Her playing told me I could find my own way with the acoustic guitar.

 I have been asked steadily since the early days about my musical influences and I have never been good at answering, which has always made me feel like a jerk. Like I’m shirking, instead of availing myself of opportunities to pay my respects. But the truth is, I’ve always been somewhat sincerely stumped by the question. For one thing, who stops and examines themselves in the middle of the journey? What made me take that step?! Hmmmm. And that one? Plus, when growing up is a difficult time, forgetting becomes an important ingredient to moving forward. It’s a survival mechanism. I was not able to compartmentalize my forgetting, I guess. It was an all or nothing deal. There’s a lot that only seems clear to me now, after months of sitting here, staring off into space, stepping gingerly back across the threshold of memory.

This is the answer I was never able to give: I began my musical journey at the intersection of Suzanne Vega and John Martyn with the drunken ghost of John Fahey flyin’ around overhead. Joan Armatrading was somewhere up ahead of me and Michael was walking by my side carrying the Beatles Complete Songbook and holding my hand. My next evolutionary leap would come a good decade later when my ear suddenly stretched wider and I heard jazz music, I mean really heard it, for the first time. Also, coincidentally, around that time I started smoking pot. Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis were the melodic and harmonic masters (not to mention arresting players) that shifted my whole sense of things. Betty Carter, the singer, changed the way I sing.

All through my twenties and thirties, I was also on a steady diet of groove music. From groovy African guitar and kora players like Ali Farka Touré, Baaba Maal, and Mansour Seck (all of whom I got to see live) to American groovemasters like James Brown and the Meters (who I didn’t). Maceo Parker (Brown’s left-hand man for three decades) became a musical comrade and teacher to me towards the end of my formative years. And then, of course, there was Sekou and Utah…but I will tell you about all of them later.

 As a teenager, having drifted from Michael’s side and embarked on playing my own gigs, I was faced with the task of holding my own in bars full of drunk people who had no intrinsic interest in listening to the girl in the corner with the acoustic. They had no reason to stop trying to seduce or argue with the person next to them. It was my job to give them a reason. My dive into dynamics became more extreme then. I started grabbing and spanking the strings of my guitar harder and I expanded the silences in between the sounds. I learned that extreme dynamics (a loud sound, a pencil line, silence) could leave an oblivious person’s talk suddenly hanging out there, naked in the air. At that moment, they would simultaneously become aware of themselves and of me and they would turn. In that moment lay an opportunity. I would look them in the eyes then and sing directly into them. In that way, I believe my biggest influence may have been just playing solo in bars. By introducing silences, I called attention to the music. By manipulating the silences, I created my sound.

“Silences” is an excerpt from No Walls and the Recurring Dream, a memoir written by  celebrated songwriter and social activist Ani DiFranco (anidifranco.com) and published in 2019 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC (penguin.com).

in print discover issue twenty one