The guitarist Jack White said can’t be topped: “You wonder why he would even play it like that”
There are a lot of exciting ways to play the guitar, and Jack White has mastered near enough all of them.
We can’t forget just how romantic an instrument the guitar can truly be. Yes, with the use of great riffs and licks, it can be used to create the backdrop for excellent pieces of music; however, it can achieve a lot more than that. When a musician really taps into his guitar playing, he can create sound that doesn’t just create a foundation for a song, but elevates its themes higher than ever before.
Romanticism is a musical ideology that has been around for hundreds of years. Bach was one of the first composers to write about it, and how if a musician wants to make an emotional piece of music, that emotion should be portrayed in every note that they play.
“A musician cannot move others unless he too is moved,” the composer wrote in his Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (1753, 1762), “In languishing, sad passages, the performer must languish and grow sad… Similarly, in lively, joyous passages, the executant must again put himself into the appropriate mood.”
That mindset, despite being conjured hundreds of years ago, still applies today, and perhaps the genre which exemplifies as much is the one that Jack White wears on his sleeve as his biggest influence: the blues. This kind of music is heartbreak personified, as musicians wouldn’t play the most flamboyant or crazy music, but instead would play something moderate and then inject emotion into every single second.
If you have a good musician, they could play the same notes over and over again, but you would understand what they were trying to convey with those notes. Billy Gibbons once described the genre as one of his favourites because of the way the emotion underneath every track exists in small pockets of sound.
“Well, the blues may only be three chords, but the complexity is fascinating,” he said, “I’ve listened to those old blues records forever. And I can still learn something from these guys. These giants.”
Jack White’s adoration for the genre is similar to Gibbons. He loves the emotion and authenticity that’s contained within it, and has always enjoyed the different ways that various guitarists convey as much. One of the greatest, in his opinion, was Blind Willie Johnson, not just because he was a great guitarist, but because of how effectively he utilises the unique style of slide guitar. This is when a guitarist uses a piece of glass or ceramic to create a sliding sound when they play. It’s pretty common now, but when Johnson started, it was totally innovative. It’s this fearless approach, throwing everything you have into your instrument and how you play it, that stunned White so much.
“His recordings have this otherworldliness,” he said, “And the fact that they even recorded his music is kind of surprising to me. It’s just a beautiful haunting slide guitar. You wonder why he would even play it like that. He can’t really be topped on my list.”
