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Another Outlaw
from Ladd Smith’s Modern Nashville Guitar
The Drop-D tuning is a very popular thing to use on Outlaw Music. This goes back to it really being about those low frequencies. Another thing to take note of historically is that this whole thing came out of Texas, some out of Tulsa also, but mostly Lubbock and Austin. A lot of guitarists you might not associate with Waylon and Willie– people like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Billy Gibbons– played a lot of the same clubs, festivals and package shows with them, and were actually close friends and advocates of the “Outlaw Movement.” Outlaw Music seemed to cross all genres at the time. What really amazed Willie Nelson about the whole thing was that for the first time in history, there was a cross-pollinated audience of hippies, bikers, cowboys and rednecks. It’s also a music that broke down barriers of social class, race and age. Notice, that there’s a lot of strumming going on here, with articulation on certain strings. This can take some practice to get in—and stay in—the pocket with. A lot of what happens with this style of guitar playing is behind the third and fourth frets—a lot of open string pull-offs and hammer-ons.
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