Nine-Pound Hammer
Guitar Styles of Western Kentucky

Muhlenberg County, Kentucky is one of the great wellsprings of American music. Near the beginning of this century, a handful of local guitarists such as Kennedy Jones, Arnold Schultz and Amos Johnson began playing the guitar in a picking style that utilized the right hand thumb to play a heavy four-beat rhythm on the bass strings while the first finger played melody. Mose Rager and Ike Everly, father of Don and Phil Everly, further developed the style - eventually known as "thumbpicking" - into a highly polished method of playing everything from folk songs to blues to Tin Pan Alley tunes. Rager and Everly were mentors to dozens of guitarists in and around Drakesboro, Kentucky, including a young Merle Travis, who brought his own genius to the style and popularized it throughout the world as a Capitol Records recording artist and Hollywood film star.

Travis's fame and the continued influence of Mose Rager cemented thumbpicking as a well-established musical genre that continues to attract a growing number of guitarists from Kentucky and elsewhere. The performances compiled for this DVD by guitarist Pat Kirtley represent the best of today's Kentucky thumbpickers. Players such as Bob Saxton, Maurice Jones and Moon Mullins have been playing the style since Travis first became a star, while others such as Paul Moseley, Steve Rector and Kirtley are a new generation of thumbpickers putting a subtle, new spin on the music while remaining true to the original sound. Like bluegrass, country music and zydeco, thumbpicking is unique to America's cultural landscape and it is the musical pride and joy of the place where it all began - Muhlenberg County.

Running time 52 minutes

DVD is region 0, playable worldwide