African Aesthetic in Two Worlds
In 1997, the cultural focus of the Northwest Folklife Festival included a performance production entitled "African Aesthetic in Two Worlds" which explores the evolution of African and African-American string instruments, and acoustic and electric guitar styles from both continents. This event features blues musicians from the U.S. and musicians from Senegal and Madagascar as well.
Here in this online exhibit, we showcase Lonnie Pitchford, a featured performer from this production, and highlight his career as well as his distinct musical cultural legacies.
Poster from the Northwest Folklife Festival, 1997
Featured Performer:
Lonnie Pitchford
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Lonnie Pitchford Archival Preserves
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Lonnie Pitchford Archival Preserves
Lonnie Pitchford was a blues roots guitarist from the Mississippi Delta. The following performance is from a live broadcast of the 1997 Northwest Folklife Festival from KUOW, which occured just a year before his passing in 1998. Lonnie plays the diddley-bow here in the opening song which is a one stringed instrument important to the development of slide guitar technique. In the liner notes to his only solo album All Around Men (1994), he described how he first created his own the diddley-bow saying that,
“When I was five or six, I would make a one-string guitar upside the wall. I would get me some baling wire or wire from a broom that my Mom had discarded, and some old rusty nails – didn’t have new ones – I had to pull them out of the old boards. Then I would pound them into the wall upside the house, wrap the wire at both ends and lay a snuff can under the bottom. Then I’d just go to playing anything that came to mind.”
According to public historian Tyler DeWayne Moore, Black folklorist and activist Worth Westinghouse Long Jr.** learned about Lonnie Pitchford through his connections to Black communities in the Southern states of the U.S. He then worked with Pitchford and introduced him to Robert Lockwood Jr., whose stepfather was the legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson.
Lonnie Pitchford plays his one-string guitar
Video courtesy of the Alan Lomax Archive
Northwest Folklife Performance Recording
**Worth Long served as a professional folklorist that worked to select visual and performing artists for events such as the Festival of American Folklife
Sources:
- Moore, T. D. (2020). Worth Westinghouse Long Jr.: Creating Dangerously in The Land Where the Blues Began. Southern Cultures, 26(1), 54-77,175.
- Associated Press. (1998, Nov 26). LONNIE PITCHFORD, 43, BLUES MUSICIAN: [CHICAGOLAND NORTH EDITION]. Chicago Tribune
- Harper, Patrice. Lonnie Pitchford, Blues Musician from Mississippi. https://www.mswritersandmusici....