I can't stop watching this lovely back up. I'm just in the beginning stages of learning to play swing chords and I would love it if someone could really break down all the chord shapes in this video and help me get a grip on the bass line. Really nice stuff. Does this fellow teach? I'd love an hour or two with him.
Man - This is the STUFF! Thanks to the 2020 Covid 19 lockdown (which you will read about in your history books), I have diagrammed the first 64 measures, a little less than half the tune. Royce only repeats one 8-bar section in those 68. He constantly mixes and modifies four-bar patterns in interesting ways. Thanks for posting this! If he’s still alive I’d love to meet Royce Franklin and shake his hand - in fact BOTH hands!
Thanks. Royce played guitar backup reacting to what he heard the fiddle doing. His stuff changed accordingly. During one of my Weisers I spent the whole week learning to play one of his variations in Say Old Man. Toward the end of fiddle week when I played for Royce what I'd been working on he said, "Where'd you learn that? Show that to me again!" Both Royce and brother Ray were wonderful human beings, always generous with their talents in music and always tolerated my questions to them. When I asked Royce where he came up with his accompaniment lines he told me he started playing string bass for his father, Major Franklin, at dances in Texas. When Royce picked up the guitar he applied those bass lines to guitar and came up with chords on top of the bass notes. My favorite Ray Franklin story is him asking me to help backup a young fiddler during her eight AM contest round. By 8:06 we were finished playing and Ray invited me out to the Weiser High School's back parking lot for a little refreshment. When Ray opened the trunk there were six half-gallons of Jim Beam. We had a good visit and talked a lot about fiddle tunes, fiddlers and all. I'm saddened to report that both Franklin brothers have passed on. I miss them.
Standard in this case is a 1, 4, 1, 5, 1, 4, 5, 1. Of course Royce is connecting each of those chords with a passing chord that either leads your ear to or away from the tonic, subdominant, and dominant chords. In the key of A, you have A, D, and E for the 1, 4, & 5 chords...
What a great version of Grey Eagle. And that guitar! OMG! Tose 1935 - 1938 Gibson Advanced Jumbo guitars sell for about $40 - $50 thousand dollars -- but you can seldom find any for sale -- only 200 AJ's were built --best acoustic guitar ever made IMO
I tabbed out three choruses of Royce Franklin's comping on this (more or less). You cannot put a URL in a RU-vid comment, but if you find the Fiddle Hangout website address, and put /topic/13057 after the .com, it will come up. The title of the thread is "guitar backup" and the tab is on p. 2 of the thread.
Too bad - I'd love to have some one on one time. But I think just from the two videos you have posted if I slow them down and spend a little time I'll be about to figure out what he is doing. He really does make it look easy. I wonder if he knows the tune cold or if he is creating that back up on the fly. Sounds to me as though maybe there are some standard progressions he is using that would fit a lot of different tunes.
When you say "standard A" progression - what do you mean - specifically. My ear is getting better, and my knowledge of the typical progressions and passing chords and such - but I've got a lot to learn and I'm doing my best to teach myself. This is a great video but I can't quite get the progression and all the shapes - close, but not quite.
