Since then, it's been Sean's guitar, through his high-school bands, his college year-abroad strumming over breakbeats in Florence, and his Boston singer-songwriter collaborations with Ryan Read (below).
In March 2008, Sean and his guitar crossed the Atlantic to record a flamenco/arab hip-hop album here in Granada. The first part of the process involves building the album's rhythmic skeleton using a turntable, an Akai MPC, ProTools and a pair of Rode NT2-A mics. When we're ready, we'll head into a full-studio to re-record the songs with live instrumentation. For now, the home studio set-up is ideal for experimentation, though the process produces a unruly mess of clothes, cords, and instruments:
Mi abuela tried to teach me to keep my room organized, to always put everything in its place, but that's just not how I work. My tempests of creativity devolve into material chaos, until I hit a tipping point that forces me to stop everything and completely clean the studio. Yesterday we hit that point, and then today it was too late.
Oww. It pains me to tell the story, but en breve: Due to lack of space, the guitar was perched overnight on a side-table. I woke up early to record with Castillo, a Granada MC who's renting our studio to record his demo. After grabando his last verse, he opens the window, and then CLANG!!! I turn around and the guitar's lying on the ground across the room. The air pressure change from opening the window somehow pulled the guitar off the table, sending it crashing on its neck, which cracked right at the masthead.
Introduced in 1942 with a list price of $45, the no-frills Gibson J-45 was known as "The Workhorse". Handcrafted in Bozeman (Montana USA), the J-45 is constructed of solid spruce wood for the top and solid mahogany for the neck, back and sides. Since wood was in short supply during World War II, the Gibson J-45 was made with imperfect raw materials and, as a result, was only offered with a sunburst finish that covered flaws in the timber.
John Jackson was born February 25, 1924, in Rappahannock County, Virginia. His father Suttee Jackson was a tenant farmer on what had been a slave plantation prior to the Civil War. Raised in a house peppered with 13 siblings, a mandolin, ukylele, homemade fife and banjo, Jackson started playing his father's $4.98 flat-top guitar when he was four years old.When he was six, his mother Hattie Roberta Haneya, also a singer, bought a second-hand Victrola from a man who traveled door-to-door in a horse&buggy selling 78rpm records: blues, country, gospel, ragtime, and country hymns.
Later that year, Jackson got his own guitar, a $3.75 mail-order National Steel guitar his sister Mary "Tee" Jackson bought him with money earned "taking in washing". Unfortunately, the instrument suffered a premature dath: “My brother went out with it on Saturday night to play somewhere at a dance and he got into a fight and broke the guitar up and throwed it in the river, and I never did get that guitar back no more."
After his guitar was destroyed, Jackson was forced to learn new instruments, which included lessons from his mother's sister's new husband, an Indian (Native American) musician who played the banjo. Jackson didnt get another guitar again until 1960, when a friend sold him an old Gibson. "I never did make money at playing," Jackson said, "I just done it for my own pleasure, playing for parties and dances, some social gatherings, things like that."
Though he liked playing for free, Jackson had that old-school passion for working hard for his money. He found manual labor profoundly rewarding, and spent years working as a successful grave digger, a job he called his "holy calling". He was adamantly opposed to the common money-saving practice of other gravediggers: four foot trenches. "A man's entitled to his six feet," affirmed Jackson, who personally dug his mother's final resting place.
In 1964, Jackson was playing his Gibson guitar with a friend, the attendant at a Fairfax Amoco gas station, when he caught the attention of someone stopping in for gas. As Jackson tells it: "Hell, I don't know who he was, and he come running around the back of the station, wanting to know what we was playing. I told him, 'Nothing.' And he kept asking me, so I played him Mississippi John Hurt's 'Candy Man.' He asked me where did I learn that, and I said off a 78 record."
The man at the gas station turned out to be folklorist Charles Perdue, who took Jackson the very next night to see Mississippi John Hurt playing at a folk club nearby. Perdue went on to establish Jackson as a professional musician., started with an 11-hour recording session on April 19, 1965 that produced Jackson's debut record Blues And Country Dance Tunes From Virginia (Arhoolie Records) -- which was then followed by more than a dozen more records over the next 30 years.
In 1978, Jackson's son (John Jr.) was killed when accidentally shot by the police . On Labor Day 1980, Jackson performed on the White House lawn for President Carter, an ardent fan of his. In 1986 the National Endowment for the Arts gave John its National Heritage Fellowship, a "living treasure" award, the highest honor the nation offers a traditional artist. Jackson joined Bob Dylan's band on tour during the 90s, and appeared on Dylan's 1995 live album MTV Unplugged.
On the afternoon of January 20, 2002, John Jackson died of kidney failure in his Virginia home. (Obituary)
"An absolute master of the dauntingly intricate Piedmont style of finger picking, John could simultaneously supply a bass pattern (with his thumb), maintain rhythmical accompaniment, and select individual notes to carry the melody--all within a tight harmonic structure" Larry Benicewicz
"The most gentle and good hearted of men, John tends to become embarrassed when paid a compliment. He loves children and talks to them with an unwavering attention and focus that leads them to instantly accept him as a friend who should be taken into their confidence. He remembers names, hugs, friends, and is a careful listener." Imeem biography
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