The Guitar of Furry Lewis

Walter Furry Lewis (1893-1981) was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, but lived virtually his entire adult life in Memphis, Tennessee. He recorded 25 sides between April of 1927 and September of 1929, and several albums in the 1960s for Folkways, Prestige, and other labels after being rediscovered by Country Blues researcher Samuel Charters. A period spent performing with a medicine show as a young man provided Furry with on-the-job training as a musician and entertainer. Furry was a study in contrasts – he was a stellar showman whose gift for storytelling never altogether made you forget how superb his guitar playing was. He was equally comfortable working in broad strokes or intricate detail, and everything he played shared a rhythmic strength and fluidity of phrasing that was all his own. Furry Lewis was also one of the most improvisatory of bluesmen. He was a two finger picker with an unusually varied repertoire of right hand attacks. In open tunings, he favored big brush strokes with his thumb on the upbeats, while when playing in E, he adopted a very complex, detail-oriented approach.