I think in the U.S. if one admires traditional forms of music and didn't grow up in an environemt where one form or another was played, you wind up wanting to play something from each form. At least I always have. How could one listen to folk and not also want to play country blues? How do you listen to country blues and not want to try electric blues? I have played acoustic guitar, five-string banjo, fiddle, electric guitar and most recently resophonic guitar. The acoustic guitar has always been the main thing but the others are there when I wish to make music appropriate to those instruments.

For this discussion, is the resophonic guitar in the same category as electric ones? They are acoustic but the sound isn't at all wooden. They were devised in order to make the guitarist heard over other instruments or in a loud room. Are they to be eschewed as well?

The odd thing is that the sort of loud electric guitar playing that many of us prefer not to hear wasn't how these instruments were first used. An early electric player was Charlie Christian. Surely his solos fit better with Benny Goodman's quintet and the bebop jams at Minton's than even Django's acoustic brilliance might have. Christian's contemporary and friend Aaron (T-Bone) Walker, also an early electric player, surely treated the music gently. I just can't imagine the music of these giants played on an acoustic instrument.

But, speaking of loud electric guitars, it's hard to beat Jorma Kaukonen and Papa John Creach as Hot Tuna trading licks in front of a fifty-foot wall of amps in Chicago's Auditorium Theater. Talk about a seismic event! “Good though.”

      - Mark