Cedell Big G Davis – Slide Blues in Boston 1983
Back in the days you actually went to a store to buy music, probably as much as 20% of my favorite LPs & CDs came from the bargain bin. 1993’s “Feel like doin’ something wrong” by Cedell Davis was one of those, an incredible album if you tune in to it which, BTW, you can still get over at Fat Possum Records!
Cedell’s guitar sound is raw and some might say “out of tune”. I say that because over the years I have played it for enough blues loving friends to know what reaction this album often gets; rare are those that actually seem to hear it.
That notion of “out of tune” guitarists that you hear people comment about and read often enough concerning old bluesmen, what is it really? Who is really out of tune here, the musician or the listener?
Although our western society and culture have decided the norm when it come to being in tune (and for most other things too), the fact remains that there are worlds of notes and tonalities that we mostly ignore but which can be used and which have been used often enough. Great music has been and will be made with other musical scales.
There is a certain sound in Cedell’s guitar tuning that you can find in the playing of other guitarists of the same generation, T Model Ford (mentioned in the post below) comes to mind. You don’t get that sound if you tune your guitar “correctly”.
And it’s fantastic!