Hey, Jayto. I was thinking of you when I thought to mention "thumbpicking."

Once in a while, a very simple, unadorned, and repetitive "pattern" or arpeggio can be quite effective:

I recently rented a DVD called "Judy Collins Wildflower Festival," which shows highlights of an outdoor concert in San Diego in 2002 featuring Arlo Guthrie, Tom Rush, and Eric Anderson along with the headliner Judy Collins. (Great DVD by the way ~ I highly recommend that you put in on your Netflix queue!)

Arlo (who is great one for storytelling) goes off on a long rant about playing a huge festival in Denmark shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall several years earlier. Thousands of Eastern Europeans were in the audience, presumably exhilarated at their newfound freedom to travel (and to attend festivals).

Pete Seeger gets the crowd singing along with just about every peace-and-freedom anthem in his repertoire, then calls Arlo to the stage. Arlo wants to continue in the same vein, but he can't think of a single number that Pete hasn't already just sung that would be appropriate to the occasion, and also readily sing-along-able. Then he has a stroke of inspiration and introduces a song made famous by "the King of folk music, Elvis!" and proceeds to do "Can't Help Falling in Love."

The Euros all love it, they know the song and everyone sings along. Pete approaches the mike ~ Arlo wonders if he's going to scolded for introducing heretical non-folk material ~ but all is well; Pete knows the song, too, and starts playing along on his banjo.

End of story, and then Arlo stats to play and sing. The crowd in San Diego is, of course, well prepared to approve and enjoy, and to sing along themselves just like those Czechs and Poles and Hungarians, etc., of Arlo's story.

Arlo plays a straight 6/8 arpeggio on EVERY measure. No walking bass from one chord to the next, no brushing more than one string at a time, no variation at all except for the chord changes. It's probably quite helpful, of course, that there's a chord change on every measure of this particular song, and that it's such a pretty melody. There's enough opportunity for Arlo (and for the crowd) to express emotion by singing; the bare-bones instrumental part is really very effective.

I've been working this up myself. I find it difficult NOT to throw in an occasional extra bass note, or to strum an occasional extra eighth-note on the treble strings, or to pluck two or three strings at a time here and there. The absolutely plain approach requires a bit of discipline, and when I'm able to observe that discipline, I'm rewarded with an effective bit of accompaniment.

Now, this only works, I suppose, for a player who is able to play in a more complex manner, and who exhibits that ability on other selections. Listening to a whole set played by a novice unable to play anything except the most simple pattern-picking would not be so great an experience.

It's possible, too, I think, that the listener somehow perceives a bit of tension in the playing of someone who may be able to thrown in various variations and flourishes, but who quite deliberately plays one particular number with the utmost degree of simplicity.

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Critics of fingerpicking would do well to check out Tom Rush's performance on that same video. Tom is a member of the plastic-thumbpick-plus-two-metal-fingerpicks school, and uses them to great effect on three very different numbers: two cute/humorous new compositions, and finally his slide-guitar tour-de-force "Panama Limited," which I've heard countless times over the past 40+ years, but had never seen performed. Nice!