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Below is a photo of Elizabeth Cotton who, on her own, developed a style of guitar picking that has influenced many Caletic, Country Western, and Pop/Folk guitar players.
Picture

​Roots and Rhythms No. 3
The Guitar

James A. McQuiston
January 2018

The history of the guitar, as it pertains to music related to the Scots, the Irish, or the Scotch-Irish, is fascinating and multi-faceted. It is my instrument of choice, having learned to play while accompanying my Scottish-Irish forefathers at music sessions, over many years.

Purely Celtic music derives from Scotland, Ireland, Nova Scotia, and other parts of Canada and the United States, but really all over the world. Just take a look at the music posted under our Free Music tab.

Appalachian music, particularly Bluegrass, which might be considered the purest form of Scotch-Irish music in the U.S., derives many of its melodies from the old countries. Other influences and original tchniques have been added to the Celtic sound in recent years.

The best example of this is in the playing of the guitar.

Much of the modern finger-picking on the guitar has its roots in banjo playing techniques. One of those responsible for the transfer of these techniques from one instrument to the other is Elizabeth Cotton, an African-American woman shown in the photo above, who, as a young girl, came into the possession of a guitar, with no one around to teach her how to play it except banjo players.



Cotton played the guitar essentially upside-down, fingering or fretting the strings with her right hand instead of the conventional left hand method.

She learned intricate fingering techniques where a string is sounded either by hitting it hard with the fretting finger, or pulling off the string in a percussive manner with a fretting finger.

Another technique she learned is to play the melody on an alternating string so that the previously played string could resonate for awhile, helping the melody to sound fuller and smoother. Some say her style of picking is the source for the expression "cottin pickin'."

Elizabeth Cotton put away the guitar for many years until the parents of the great American folksingers, Mike Seeger, and his half-brother, Pete Seeger, employed her as a maid. Mike discovered and recorded Cotton's playing when she was in her 60s, and her unique style has influenced just about every great country and western guitar player, and has spread into Pop and Celtic music as well.

It has been said that guitar playing in Celtic music is a relatively new phenomenon. The truth is that guitar-like instruments have been written about for a thousand years or more. However, the guitar aways suffered from one problem – its volume could not match that of a banjo, mandolin or fiddle, since its tuning is lower.

In traditional Bluegrass, it is not uncommon to hear all the other instruments quiet down to allow the audience to hear the guitar picking. It is also rare to have the acoustic guitar be the featured instrument, unlike the fiddle that really doesn't need much help to get people dancing.  

Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers introduced many American Celtic music lovers to this ancient music during the folk years of the 60s. It is from this time that the singer/guitar player became an acceptable Celtic alternative to the long-standing percussive fiddle led music.

There is still a distinction made between Celtic folk music and Celtic sessions music.

With the advancement of finger picking styles, new guitar tunings have also been devloped. One called DADGAD is popular and gives a beautiful modal or simplistic sound to folk music.

Today, beyond your Natalie MacMaster and Alasdair Fraser type fiddling acts, many Celtic performers are of the newer folk style – peple like Dougie MacLean, Danny Doyle, Ed Miller and Mary Black.  
Meanwhile, soloist guitar playing has taken on a life of its own with artists like Davy Graham, who invented DADGAD tuning, and Steve Baughmanm who named the Orkney-style tuning, the most recent alternate tuning for Celtic guitar.

Although it has been around for a thousand years of more, the guitar continues to inspire new variations and sounds to blend with age-old Celtic melodies, enriching Celtic music on both sides of the Atlantic.