The history of fingerstyle guitar in America is most often told as a story that begins with a phonograph needle dropping into a wax disc somewhere in the early 1920s, when record companies first began dispatching talent scouts into the rural South in search of musicians whose music might sell. From that moment forward, names, sounds, and styles became fixed, cataloged, and distributed. The story had, at last, a record. But the music itself was not born there. What the microphones captured was the surface of something deep and long in the making – the culmination of several decades of active, inventive, and extraordinarily diverse guitar culture that flourished largely without documentation, without commercial incentive, and, for the most part, without an audience beyond the immediate community in which it was made.

This collection is an attempt to tell that fuller story using the guitar playing of William Moore, Sylvester Weaver, Mississippi John Hurt, Elizabeth Cotten, Rev. Gary Davis, Mance Lipscomb, Furry Lewis, Big Bill Broonzy, Bayless Rose and Rabbit Brown to trace the development of fingerstyle guitar in America from its roots in the European parlour tradition, through the tumultuous cross-pollinations of the minstrel stage, the Hawaiian craze, the ragtime revolution, and the rural songster tradition, and into the recorded era when the blues emerged as the dominant framework through which American guitar would be heard and understood for the century that followed.