| Delta
Strings
BY JEREMY SEGEL-MOSS  Blues
lovers do all sorts of strange things in search of the authentic sound
of the blues. They horde old records, seek out the remaining original
blues men and even go looking for the infamous "crossroads."
One thing they rarely do, however, is search for the authentic blues instruments
that the early bluesmen used. There are only a few places in the world
that specialize in old blues instruments and luckily one of those places
is here in St. Louis. It's called Delta Strings. Owner Mike King and his partner Saliem Watt restore and repair the overlooked and underestimated instruments that hold the key to the sounds of early blues guitarists. Delta Strings is a one-room guitar shop on a no-name corner in University City. Brian Melching, better know as Pennsylvania Slim of the Pennsylvania Slim Blues Band, calls Delta Strings "a strange, but wonderful place. A heaven for cheap old blues guitar players." The shop is jam-packed with guitars. There is barely enough room to walk and no place to sit down. The floor is littered with guitars in and out of their cases. Guitars hang everywhere and lean, sometimes three and four deep, against every wall. At first glance the shop looks crowded, but not unlike any other small repair shops. A second glance, however, reveals guitars without strings, cracked necks, no frets and damaged pickups. The wood is chipped, paint faded, and pick guards missing. And here's the clincher...there are no recognizable name brands. No Fenders. No Gibsons. No Martins. And oh my god, no Telecasters or Stratocasters. Don't freak out. King is right there with the answers. He'll pluck a guitar from the wall. Maybe a Silvertone. Maybe a Harmony. Maybe a Kay. He'll plug into an Airline or a Magnatone. He'll start picking some old Jimmy Reed or Son House and everything will come into focus. Everything will make sense, because what you hear is real blues -- Real Authentic Blues -- and it's not coming from a Fender or a Gibson. Authentic blues comes from authentic blues instruments and authentic blues instruments are, as King will explain, old cheap sticks. "When someone tries to replicate that [blues] sound, they go buy the most expensive Martin they can find. Wrong tool! These are the right tools, because this is what the original bluesmen used," said King. King is a bluesman. He and Watt spend all day listening to blues, playing blues, and most importantly teaching anyone with an open ear the secret to the fingerstyle blues they love. "Bottom line," explains King, "old African-American dudes, number one, came off plantations and didn't have great jobs so they couldn't afford a great guitar. And two, lived in rural areas and had to buy their stuff by mail order from catalogs like Sears & Roebuck. So when they played that stuff they used what they could get: Silvertones, Harmonys and Kays." "If you listen to some of the sidemen, like Hubert Sumlin (who played with Howlin' Wolf), you hear that broken up sound. A lot of guitarists today take it for distortion, but its actually natural tube-amp break up and one of these cheap sticks," added Watt. Many musicians in the St. Louis area look for a "fat-warm sound" or "brown sound." No matter what they call it, there is no disputing where it comes from. "Those guitars have a hollow sound. A very clean and clear, but broken up dirty sound...all in the same sound. It's a blues player's dream and delight to pick one of them up," said Melching. King calls it the "correct sound. These old guitars were made from Birch wood. Birch wood is a solid wood and was the most inexpensive wood you could use. But it was flexible and easy to work with, which made it an ideal wood to make guitars inexpensively. It would flex easily so you didn't have to go through a whole lot of time and trouble to get it to bend. "The other thing is that it has a sort of tight choked off sound, so it gives off more definition and that's what you hear in the old fingerstyle stuff. A kind of mid range, short attack on the high end with a good bottom end. "Robert Johnson used an inexpensive guitar. So when you pick up one of these you can get close to that really fast, as opposed to going out and buying the most expensive Ovation or Martin that someone says is the best guitar in the world today. Its just not there." One of the first local acts to catch-on to King's insight was Melching, who plays 50's style jump blues. King had actually never heard the Pennsylvania Slim Blues Band when he saw Melching's picture in the Riverfront Times. "I always saw that cat in the RFT and knew I had to meet him, because every time I saw him he had the coolest guitars," said King. Since then Slim and King have become partners in crime. "We talk blues everyday. They come to see me and I go to see them. Mike knows blues and blues sticks like no one else in St. Louis," said Slim. Melching is not the only local act using these guitars. Larry Griffin from Mojo Syndrome, John Logan from Hudson and the Hoodoo Cats, Bennie Smith and Tommy Bankhead are just a few musicians who have brought their guitars to King. Nationally the list is not restricted to blues musicians. Artists like Sara McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, Juliana Hatfield and Jimmy Vavino from the Conan O'Brian show all play cheap guitars, as do bluesmen like Keb' 'Mo, Corey Harris, Rusty Zinn and Alvin Youngblood Hart. Hart just recently released a CD called Start With the Soul, in which he used an Airline amp and featured guitars like his Harmony Electric hollow body on tunes like A Prophet's Mission. "It felt good playing that song on that guitar," said Hart, "because it lends itself so well to the electric finger picking." However, there are still very few musicians willing to give these guitars a chance. "Once I did a gig in France," said Hart "I had my 1915 twelve-string and my 1930 Stella six string. This French guy came up and told me that the guitars were junk. I think it is funny that people like Telecasters and Stratocasters because that is what is marketed to them, but they think these are junk because they don't really know anything about them." King knows something about them though. He admittidly loves them a little too. A customer once brought in an old Silvertone with a bridge that needed to be replaced. The customer asked for a new bridge, but King took the time to fix the original piece instead. "This bridge came with this guitar. Now, this is some cheap-ass wood, but if I had put on a new bridge it might or might not have sounded the same. This way I knew it would sound the same and on top of that, the guitar was not compromised. People look at [the guitar] and say...'thats a piece of shit. Why'd you go through putting a nice bridge on a piece of shit like that?' Well, its not a piece of shit and that bridge was not a piece of shit and it didn't need to be discarded. It was the bridge that came with the guitar. I knew it fit. The holes lined up. The intonation was already set. I figured if I put it back together it would keep me from having to do a lot of extra work. Now, you can't even tell that bridge was split in two pieces. If someone had walked in here with a Martin, they'd want the original bridge, so why shouldn't this one have it's original bridge." It is this kind of patience and dedication that attracts guitarists and their guitars from all over the country to Delta Strings. "Mike treats you well," said Larry Griffin of Mojo Syndrome. "When you play a lot you have to have someone like Mike who knows the technical side of the sound. He is the kind of guy who can get your guitar fixed, have it ready for a gig the same night, and charge you a fair price for the whole thing." "These guys find one of the guitars in a closet somewhere that has been strung up forever and needs a new neck set," said King. "An average fret job costs about $125. That's more than what the guitar is worth. I make it affordable for guys to get the job done and make the stick playable." To help promote and preserve his favorite guitars, King is publishing a new book called The Encyclopedia of Cheap Guitars. The book will feature over 100 guitars and is due out sometime next year. He will also feature one guitar from the book in each of the upcoming issues of the Bluesletter. "This is a book that has never been done," said King. "You can pick up books on Gibsons, Fenders or Gretches, but there is no book on Kays, Harmonys, Silvertones, Airlines, or Custom Crafts. I think it is important for everyone to know what's up with these guitars too." King is also planning on expanding his store in the next few months. "I want a larger shop area to work on these things. I want to have more than one going at once and I want to be able to wind pickups in an area with less dust. I also want to separate myself from the people who stop by so I can get more work done. When guys stop by, it's like a barber shop, they run their mouths forever. I'd also like more room to display these sticks, because you can go anywhere in St. Louis, but you won't see this many of these sticks in one place." King was also just awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant to study with Tommy Bankhead. He will meet weekly for the next year to learn Bankhead's style and at the end of the year the two of them will cut an album together. The grant is one of many efforts spearheaded by the St. Louis Blues Society to continue the tradition of St. Louis Blues. Mostly, King is planning to continue the education of an art form he loves, but sees disappearing quickly. "I can easily see blues, as we know it today, completely disappearing in the next 20-30 years. It is good to see young black men like Corey Harris and Alvin Youngblood Hart playing the old fingerstlye stuff. I call them the new Rootsters. I'm a Rootster in that I am about Rootster equipment. I'm the guy out there supplying the Rootster players with their Rootster equipment. And I have one mission: to preserve what I dig. If everybody would find something to dig and preserve it, we'd be cool. This is just what I'm doing."
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