Artist description Right here in San Diego we have a musician who paled round in New York City with the likes of Woody Guthrie, and Cisco Houston, and Pete Seeger, and Big Bill Broonzy in those good old hard old days of the McCarthy era. Fred's apartment was the place where everyone came to pick on a Saturday night and one of the prime pickers was Fred on the Leadbelly style 12 String Guitar. In the late 50's & early 60's Fred wandered out to San Diego and played in a few of those old San Diego coffee houses like The Upper Cellar or Circe's Cup. The 12-string guitar in the style of Huddie Ledbetter influenced Fred. Fred goes back to the era of the early 50's in New York city where he played and partied with the likes of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Big Bill Broonzy & Gary Davis. He drifted out to California in the late 50's, played San Diego coffee houses in those early days and eventually settled here. Fred has been a more or less regular at Adams Ave. Festivals where his virtuoso guitar playing never fails to amaze his listeners. In 1912 a man named Huddie Ledbetter, who was proficient on the 6-string guitar, the double-bass, the mandolin, the accordion, the piano and the harmonica, wandered into a circus in Dallas. There he heard a man play the 12-string guitar, and then he decided to give up his other instruments and master the difficult 12-stringer. His mastery was complete, and in the next 37 years, until his death in New York in 1949, Leadbelly, as he was called, reigned alone as the "King of the 12-String Guitar". He made countless appearances all over the country and hundreds of phonograph records, achieving immense popularity as a man and as a performer.Leadbelly's identification with the beguiling sound of the 12-string guitar was so complete that he seemed almost to discourage any others who would play it. And after Leadbelly's death there was no one to carry on, until the emergence of Fred Gerlach, who is undoubtedly the finest 12-string guitar player today. Fred was born of immigrant Yugoslav parents in Detroit in 1925. He fought in Germany and the Philippines as a GI, and after the war he settled in New York City's civilian life as a top-flight draftsman, and a boogie-woogie and blues pianist, with a powerful left hand rolling out the bass runs. Caught up in the vast post-war revival of interest in American folk music, Fred heard somewhere the sound of a 12-stringer and, like Leadbelly almost four decades before him, gave up everything else to master the instrument. With a respect bordering on reverence, he is now carrying on the rich, full tradition of Leadbelly, meanwhile adding new technical dimensions to the instrument.The transition from boogie-woogie piano to 12-string guitar is a logical one. The rolling bass possible on the lower guitar strings is strikingly reminiscent of key, board instruments. In fact, the double-string octave tuning arrangement gives the 12-stringer a quality decidedly like the harpsichord. There is an apt description of the 12-string guitar in the book Folk Blues, by Jerry Silverman: "In size it is somewhat larger than the familiar 6-string guitar; its twelve strings…six pairs tuned in octaves and unisons…are proportionately longer and heavier, and are generally tunes lower in absolute pitch, though maintaining the same general intervallic arrangement between strings as on the "six". The reinforced vibrations by the double strings, their greater length and heaviness, and larger sounding box all give the 12-string guitar a richer, more complex, louder and more resonant quality than its 6-string cousin."A 12-string guitar is hard to come by, Fred Gerlach wrote recently: "I went into one of the largest musical instrument stores in the country, and the manager assured me that no such instrument existed. On another occasion a maker of fine 12-string lutes (nylon strings) pictured for me a nightmare of explosive force required to hold twelve steel strings in proper tension. He envisioned bits of guitar and guitarist flying asunder. I have combed New York City pawnshops and music stores and have received a variety of comments ranging' from ‘Sorry; we're out of them now. Won't a six-string guitar do? to 'Have you got rocks in your head, buddy?' In fact, it took me about a year after I had first decided to play a twelve-string before I found one. It wasn't a concentrated search, but it nevertheless indicates the general unavailability of the instrument."In discussing the songs on this record, Fred expressed his profound indebtedness to the music of the Negro people: "…Now we come upon a larger truth…the music of the Negro people. It is my attempt to perform this music and, of course, to alter it to conform to my own condition of expression. Not all these songs are blues, as there are other musical influences in my life. In any case, my aim is to examine the world we live in…to grasp reality".

Music Style 12 String Guitar

Musical Influences Fred Gerlach is a Pioneer in the 12 String Blues Genre

Group Members Fred Gerlach

Instruments 12 String Acoustic Guitar, 6 String Acoustic Guitar

Albums Twelve-String Guitar, Songs My Mother Never Sang, Easy Rider, V.A.: The Twelve-String Story, Vol. 1, V.A.: The Twelve-String Story, Vol. 2, V.A.: The Guitar Greats, V.A.: The Guitar Greats, Vol. 2, V.A.: Golden Guitars, V.A.: Takoma Eclectic Sampler, Vol. 2

Location san diego, california - USA

Copyright notice. All material on MP3.com is protected by copyright law and by international treaties. You may download this material and make reasonable number of copies of this material only for your own personal use. You may not otherwise reproduce, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, or create derivative works of this material, unless authorized by the appropriate copyright owner(s).