J: Um. Well, lets see. I used to go record collecting with Dick Spotswood and I was just looking for bluegrass records but I found some Blind Blake records, and who else...Oh Sylvester Weaver, kind of an obscure character but they reissued some of his stuff on CD’s now , and Lonnie Johnson even respected Weaver a lot. So one of the first guys I heard was Sylvester Weaver on these old 78’s recorded probably around 1923-28.
S: Which guitar players influenced you? The old blues players or white guitar players? Give me some examples, show me.
J: Well, in my early record collecting days I was only looking for bluegrass but I found a lot of records like Blind Blake, but the guy who really influenced me made a lot of OK records, his name was Sylvester Weaver, and he wrote "Steel Guitar Rag" and Lonnie Johnson gave him a lot of credit for both being a good composer and a good guitarist, great guitarist, in fact as far as I know of all those old guys Lonnie was the only one to respect Sylvester Weaver at all. But anyway here’s one of Weaver’s pieces that I learnt off of one of his records, I don’t remember the name of it, this may be called "Buck town Stomp" but I’m not sure. Very simple, kind of ragtime style, he played very slowly. (PLAYS) . So I learned that song and a few others by Sylvester Weaver and I learned some by Blind Blake and what was interesting was that shortly after I learned a lot of these ragtime pieces I met Elizabeth Cotton, she lived in D.C at the time, and she had a version of the same song that Sylvester Weaver had recorded, and I didn’t realize then that she had learned a lot off of old records like I was, but she played it a lot faster and she left the first part out. So I used to take Elizabeth Cotton to parties and we would trade songs with each other and other people. I didn’t really learn too much from her in terms of technique or songs but on the other hand we had a lot of fun in any case. See by the time I met her I had already become a pretty good guitar player of ragtime style and blues. And of course she played backwards. Oh, the one thing she taught me was, I was trying to learn to play blues with steel in open G, in Spanish tuning. I mean this had been going on for years, it was driving me crazy, I had learned how to do it in D, everybody I met who could play guitar I ‘d ask people how to do that in this tuning, and she knew how, she couldn’t do it anymore but she showed me how, and that was to put the steel all the way across the strings. I’m not in that tuning anymore, but to use the steel all the way, instead of like what you do in open D where you do a lot of melodic work on just one string. And that will be in the forth coming lessons. But that was a very important thing to learn and she did teach me that.
J: Well, I didn’t get into these heavy blues figures until several years later, probably, 58-59. I was in North Carolina, fishing with my father and I went canvassing for old records in the black section and I found Charlie Patton’s record of high water everywhere, part 1 and part 2, and it was so scratched that it sounded to me like the guy was playing in a inner tube or something and I didn’t know what to make of it so I called up a collector friend and he had that record in mint condition and several others by Charlie Patton and pretty soon those guys from the Mississippi Delta really caught into me. I never really learned to play like Charlie Patton he used to flat pick and his fingers and stuff like that. I never got his right hand but I learned quite a bit from him of chords and harmony things, especially dissonances, he uses that a lot.
S: When did you become a record Mogul?
J: A mogul? Goodness it took years and years. And it just fell in my lap when I met Norman Pierce, who lived over in San Francisco. And that was after I moved to Berkeley in 1963, and I made a second record out here and I gave him as a present my record, I didn’t know he was a national distributor, and he said " hey I think I can sell these" and he wanted ten next week, and fifty the week after that, and I was a student at CAL and I didn’t have time for all that stuff so I asked him to take over the record company, I just wanted to make records. That’s how Tacoma records got started.
S: Your music has been called "American Primitive Guitar". Does that mean anything to you?
J: Well, I used that term and all that I meant is what you would call primitive painters, which just means untutored. I didn’t really mean much of anything, I was just trying to come up with a label. Other people took it to mean other things like noise or dissonance or things like that. Which I do but I didn’t actually mean it that way when I used that expression. But everybody started using it.
S: Do you feel that you’re the father of a guitar movement, meaning Leo Kotke, the Windham Hill school, do you feel as if you were the seed for that?
J: Yes to a very large extent but I don’t think ... well what I did was that I was the first one to just go out and just play steel guitar concerts and when I did it I didn’t just do it in the United States, I did it in England, and everybody kept on saying " What are you going to sing?" and I would say "I don’t sing I just play the guitar and so I was the person who made that possible so in that sense I made the steel string guitar concert respectable. As for being the father of these other guitar player in any other sense, especially new age music, I do not want that appellation.
