When I was a kid, my dad played acoustic guitar and sang around the house, and he played everything from bluegrass to old folk and gospel songs. I was fascinated watching one man do that. It was just a guy and his guitar doing a troubadour kind of thing.
This really informed my initial understanding that music could be just a person and a guitar. He could hold my attention for as long as he wanted to! He could do it with just the combination of rhythm, musicality, melody and lyrics. He liked to sing a song to me called The Wreck of the Old 97, which was about a train crash. It had adventure, speed, death, and there’s a woman involved too. Everything that you need in one song!
As I got older, I realized that what I really wanted to do, other than to play the guitar, was to create songs: to get an acoustic guitar and do exactly what my dad did. I ended up falling in love with the music of Hank Williams, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Billy Joe Shaver, Steve Earle – so many masters of this craft. These are all guys that could put a guitar on their back, drive from town to town and stand on the sidewalk and entertain you.
This can be said for Barbeque Bob – Robert Hicks – Curly Weaver, Buddy Moss and Blind Willie McTell, who played in front of a barbeque place in Atlanta called Pig n’ Chick. The list goes on and on.
Fast-forward to me writing my own songs and having writing sessions with others. It was awkward at first, but one day I met Travis Meadows, and within two days we wrote two songs, Pretty Little Lie and One Horse Town, which has gone on to be a big song for my band, Blackberry Smoke.
Figure 1 illustrates the verse section of Pretty Little Lie. While strumming in a steady eighth-note rhythm, the progression is a stream of nice minor-to-major chordal resolutions, one that I was able to weave a story around with some very direct lyrics.
I realized I could take that kind of feeling, with just an acoustic guitar and my voice, and play and sing that to anybody for the rest of my life. And then you have the enjoyable option to take it to four other musicians, turn it up to 10, hit the drums really hard and put background and harmony vocals on it, to make it a big production. But when you boil it all down, it goes back to one guitar and one voice.
Figure 2 shows the chorus section, which combines different minor-to-major resolutions with lyrics that move the story forward.
The very next day, we were back in a minor mood, and, as shown in Figure 3, the intro features a single-note line and then moves from Am to C. Travis and I are both from very small southeastern towns, and this is how One Horse Town was born.
For the verse, what better place to go than another minor chord! So, as illustrated in Figure 4, the verse starts on Dm and then weaves its way through to F/C, C then G. This is a perfect example of a lyrical idea carrying and inspiring the day.
The possibilities are endless when it comes to strumming chords and singing a melody. It’s a beautiful thing to create songs and make other people happy, just like my dad did.
- This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.
