The Left-Handed Guitar Players That Changed Music By John Engel
DON JONES


guitar
Plays Guitar Left Handed Upside/Down.


Don Jones is what is known as a fingerstyle guitarist – a genre one might more easily associate with ragtime-influenced country-boogie instrumentalists like Merle Travis and Chet Atkins. However, Jones uses the technique to interpret and create a soft jazzy pop music that crosses boundaries in muted shades, but whose compositional roots are found in classic jazz.

Jones’s songs breeze along, uncluttered by their inherent sophistication, borrowing with ingenuity from master tunesmiths like George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Burt Bacharach, and Henry Mancini. One also spots the influences of Brazilian bossa nova, swing, and even occasional shades of traditional folk.

Surely one of the rarest of all guitar techniques – because it runs so contrary to the actual physiognomy of the fingers – fingerpicking on a guitar that is strung upside down happens to be Jones’s specialty. Nearly all his work is done in this style and it is highly doubtful that any jury even pondered the oddity when Jones won not one but three fingerpicking contests – out of the three he ever entered!

© LFV / John Engel all rights reserved.

Read more about Don Jones's life and wonderful guitar music in John Engel's Uncommon Sound book.