[Harp-L] Any pro's got insight on Little Walters harmonies?

["sam blancato" <samblancato@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm not a pro so maybe my contribution to this thread will be pretty weak
but I think it's too interesting to not chime in.  As much as I love LW I
agree with what Winslow says about the diatonic tuning determining what he's
doing; maybe it is Young who plays over chords like LW not the other way
around.  And yet a lot of his stuff does have a really distinctive feel.  

I've always thought LW's unique sound could be attributed a lot of the time
to the Meyer's brothers.  Those guys had some experience in swing and jazz
bands and brought some of that into the music.  They injected just enough
support to be interesting without detracting from the forward voice of the
harp and often did really cool chord work that I don't' really hear
elsewhere.  I can't be sure exactly what material had the Meyers brothers on
it but I know they were on a whole lot of LW's Chess stuff. Just a couple of
songs that come to mind are the shuffle version of "Going down Slow" (my all
time Favorite LW number BTW), "High Temperature", "You Don't Know".  "Going
down Slow," for instance, has an incredibly simple guitar riff over another,
even simpler riff and the V chord resolves in a really unusual chord; I've
tried to get guys on several occasions to do this little thing and they
always make it to fancy.  If you want to get a sound like LW you have to
have that kind of guitar work under what you're doing or it won't matter how
good you do it; that's how important it is (IMHO). 

So maybe what you should be looking at isn't what Walter's doing so much as
what he's doing it over - or not.    

Winslow, you know a lot more about chords than I do.  If you read this I'd
really like to know the name of the chord the front guitar uses to resolve
the V chord on "Going down Slow".  This is on the "Blues with A Feeling"
double CD and it is track 16 on the 2nd disc.  I know of one other version
of this song LW does so I don't want to confuse them; the other one's
nothing special. 

Sam Blancato, Pittsburgh