• How Simple Folk Guitar Accompaniment Really Works

    In this video, Folk-blues artist Mokai performs “Poor Lazurus” from the repertoire of 1960s folk-icon, Dave Van Ronk, demonstrating how a simple folk guitar accompaniment works to enhance the drama ...

Inside Dave Van Ronk – Fixin’ to Die and the Art of the Folk Guitar

By on December 6, 2013 in Acoustic Guitar, Country Blues, Dave Van Ronk, Fingerpicking, Fingerstyle Blues, Fingerstyle Guitar, Fingerstyle Guitar Videos, Folk Blues, Folk Music, Great Folk-Blues Players, Guitar Technique, Piedmont Blues, Ragtime Guitar

In the spring of 1962, Prestige Records produced sessions with Dave Van Ronk, singing and accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. It was prestigious enough, for a scruffy denizen of the cafés of Greenwich Village’s MacDougal  Street, to be recorded by the label that released the work of Miles, Monk, Coltrane and many others. But the […]

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Saint Louis Tickle – Ragtime Guitar and Dave Van Ronk

By on March 27, 2013 in Acoustic Guitar, Dave Van Ronk, Fingerpicking, Fingerstyle Guitar, Fingerstyle Guitar Videos, Guitar Technique, Piedmont Blues, Ragtime Guitar

It is the early 1960s, in New York City’s Greenwich Village, a burly yet underfed guitarist fusses over a record player, the smoke from a lit cigarette curling around his head. He drops the needle again and again on a scratchy 78rpm record. As the strains of a turn-of-the-century piano rag Saint Louis Tickle warble forth, he is creating one of the first guitar arrangements for a classic ragtime piano piece. Once other musicians hear it, it will kick off what will become a movement of ragtime guitarists.

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Coen Brothers Take on 60s Greenwich Village Folk Scene

By on February 17, 2013 in Dave Van Ronk, Folk Blues, Folk Music

Mokai is a devotee of the music and the persona of Dave Van Ronk, hotly anticipating this Coen Brothers’ film “Inside Llyewn Davis” since it was announced a few years ago. The film is loosely based on Van Ronk’s autobiography “The Mayor of MacDougal Street”.

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Jorma Acoustic Live on the M-30 Custom Martin Guitar

By on February 13, 2013 in Acoustic Guitar, Best Fingerstyle Guitar, Country Blues, Fingerpicking, Fingerstyle Blues, Fingerstyle Guitar, Folk Blues, Great Folk-Blues Players, Guitar Obsession, Guitar Technique, Jorma Kaukonen, Piedmont Blues, Ragtime Guitar

I guess every aficionado of folk-blues has a story about where they were when they realized that Jorma Kaukonen existed. For many, the original Hot Tuna album was the crack in the pavement that showed us there was something outside electric music. The roots of the music, roots which went deep down to someplace true […]

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Shaun Cromwell-The Rise and the Fall of It All

By on February 25, 2010 in Acoustic Guitar, Best Fingerstyle Guitar, Fingerpicking, Fingerstyle Guitar, Fingerstyle Guitar Videos, Folk Music, Guitar Technique, Modern Fingerstyle Players

One of the guitarists I was lucky enough to meet at the Folk Alliance Region West (FAR-West) conference is Shaun Cromwell. I’ve posted the clip of Shaun playing his very cool song “The Rise and the Fall of It All” to my YouTube page.

Shaun was a featured performer at the FAR-West conference, and his show proved to be one of the most enjoyable for someone like me, who loves good songwriting combined with great fingerpicking.

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Fingerstyle at FARwest 2009–Six Approaches

By on January 31, 2010 in Acoustic Guitar, Fingerpicking, Fingerstyle Guitar, Fingerstyle Guitar Videos, Folk Music, Guitar Technique

Fingerstyle guitarist Mokai took video of several Fingerstyle Guitarists for the annual Folk Alliance Region West (FAR-West), presenting them together in a half-hour video “Fingerstyle at FARwest 2009”. The video includes songs by six different performers playing their original material, including Walter Strauss, Shaun Cromwell, Ernest Troost and Garrin Benfield.

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