The
March 2015 issue of Acoustic Guitar will feature an excerpt from Bruce
Cockburn’s new memoir, Rumours of Glory, in which the Canadian singer,
songwriter, and guitarist talks about why, at 23, he left ’60s-era
folk-rock to focus on solo acoustic music. He’d met fingerstyle
guitarist Fox Watson, who taught Cockburn how to play in alternate
tunings.
“I was sort of disdainful of open tunings back then
because I didn’t like most of what people did with them—playing the same
four chord formations in different tunings, trying for a specious
variety in their sound without going to the trouble of actually learning
their instrument,” Cockburn writes. “But when Fox played in any of
several tunings he used, what came out was fluid as a mountain creek and
agile as a gull.”
That was more than four decades ago. Since
then, Cockburn has returned to playing electric guitar in rock bands,
but he never left an acoustic guitar far behind, and he’s developed a
style that is unmistakably his. In this special half-hour edition of
Acoustic Guitar Sessions, senior editor Marc Greilsamer talks at length
with Cockburn about his love of acoustic guitars and the
singer-songwriter performs three tunes: the instrumental “Bohemian
3-Step,” “Waiting for a Miracle” and his most famous song, the
politically fierce “If I Had a Rocket Launcher.”
- See more at:
http://www.acousticguitar.com/Sessions/
©Martin Puddy
Cormorant fishermen in Li River
