My first guitar

#2 - Dobro Guitar (Mp3)

I got my dobro-style resonator guitar* when we moved to the Lower East Side of New York City. Across the 2nd Street and down a ways towards Avenue B, Sammy Blank had a little hallway of a store. It was long and narrow, an Aladdin's cave of stringed instruments. Guitars, mandolins, zithers, violins and banjos hung from the ceiling like musical fruit. That's where I picked up a Dobro-style guitar with very high action and the rusted steel strings - at a bargain price. I took that thing home and started to woodshed. (High action means the strings are further from the frets and it takes more force to push them down and play)

I was used to the unchallenging gut strings of a ukulele but I liked that steel sound but "Oh my goodness!" pushing those dobro strings down was something else. I worked at it day by day until the tips of my fingers literally turned blue. I made myself practice every day, even if was for only 5 minutes, every day! Learn this chord - play it. Learn the next chord - play it. After a while the ends of the fingers on my left hand became almost like wood. I could tap them on the plaster wall and it sounded like wood tapping on a plaster wall
I started to play some of the blues numbers I had learned then and they helped make the load easier. Somehow or other the blues made it easier to deal with the things that were going down.

" Trouble in mind I'm blue,
But I won't be blue always,
That old sun's going to shine on my back door someday"

*the term "dobro" has come to refer to any acoustic guitar with a metal resonator set into the body (also known as resonator guitars or resophonic guitars).The bridge of a resophonic guitar over which the strings pass is attached to a metal resonator which produces and amplifies the sound; the body of the guitar does not play a significant role in sound amplification.

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