This photo of Yola with her replica of Sister Rosetta’s 1961 SG Custom was taken just hours before she hit the red carpet for the 64th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony on April 3, 2022. Yola was nominated for Best Americana Album (Stand for Myself) and Best American Roots Song (“Diamond Studded Shoes”).
“I have this love affair with the ’70s—this gray area of music where one genre talks to another,” proclaims six-time Grammy nominee Yola. “That gave rise to loads of bands we would find hard to place nowadays, like Parliament-Funkadelic, Minnie Riperton, and Rotary Connection. They show how everything has been influenced by something else in the music sphere. It gets us away from this idea of genres, you know? And so that’s something that I consciously want to do. It’s like a mission.”
If Yola’s goal on her most recent release, Stand for Myself, was to meld her musical influences and life experiences into a cohesive, singular approach that craftily defies categorization, then mission accomplished. Songs like “Starlight,” “Diamond Studded Shoes,” and the title track, draw equally on the aforementioned seminal artists that Yola discovered via her mother’s ’70s record collection, as well as the mixtapes she created from listening to the British radio of her youth, which featured everything from ’90s neo-soul to R&B to Britpop. In any given song on Stand for Myself, you can likely identify familiar sonic themes, but when channeled through the lens of Yola’s personal experience, the result is an album that assimilates decades of music with a refreshingly contemporary point of view.
“I needed to take this concept of inaccessibility and patriarchy and whitewashing that were bestowed upon the legacy of rock ’n’ roll post-Sister Rosetta and undo that process.”
Yola was born Yolanda Claire Quartey in 1983 in Bristol, England. She first cut her teeth in the U.K. as a lead vocalist and songwriter with bands like Phantom Limb, Massive Attack, and Bugz in the Attic. She subsequently worked as a top-line writer, creating lyrics and melodies for artists like Will Young, Chase & Status, and Katy Perry. Her powerhouse vocals have even been sampled by the Chemical Brothers and Iggy Azalea. Her 2019 debut, Walk Through Fire, received widespread acclaim from Rolling Stone and The New York Times, which praised her “genre-fluid” blending of sounds, from “vintage Southern soul” to the “early-1960s pop melodramas of the Righteous Brothers and Roy Orbison.” That album earned Yola four Grammy award nominations, including Best New Artist. With Stand for Myself, she earned two more Grammy nominations, for Best Americana Album and for Best American Roots Song for “Diamond Studded Shoes.”
Sonically, Yola arrived at the musical medley that is Stand for Myself through what she calls a “process of metabolizing your influences.” She describes it as bringing oneself to the artistic table. “No one’s going to be able to replicate your perception of reality,” explains Yola. “Honestly, the only new thing that really exists in that matrix of your experience is you. And what’s really important to do in music as an artist is to find how you interject yourself into the process of being artistic, so by the time you bring your influences back out into the world, they aren’t what they were when they went in. They’ve been changed by being seen, and heard, and appreciated by you.”
Yola - "Stand For Myself" [Official Music Video]
To that point, Yola’s songs on Stand for Myself lyrically explore deeply personal themes that are often informed by her own research on the paradigm of supremacy, and instances of bigotry and racism that have deeply impacted her life and career. She now finds herself poised to help fulfill part of an incomplete narrative that includes what she calls “the whitewashing of the influence of Black women in the birth of rock and roll” via her portrayal of Sister Rosetta Tharpe in Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming Elvis biopic. “You don’t get a whole rounded story of Elvis without telling the actual truth,” she asserts. “And the truth is way more interesting and complicated than the narrative that is thrown at us by white male rockdom.”
The soundtrack for Elvis was recorded at RCA Studio A with producer Dave Cobb (Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton, Slash) in Nashville. “Principally, they recognized that I had experience doing voiceover for music sample replay for about 15 years, which was exactly the skill set that was required,” Yola explains. Combined with burgeoning guitar chops, she was essentially a shoo-in for the role of Tharpe, except that she’d never soloed before. “I had to do my first solos ever on camera, which is just ridiculous to think,” she laughs. The audio production team on Elvis sent her slowed down versions of the songs so she could learn Sister Rosetta’s solos by ear. “Everything I do is by ear,” Yola says. She would sing the melody of the solo, and then the production team would let her know “where they thought it was on the neck” that Sister Rosetta was playing. For the film, Gibson sent her a replica of Sister Rosetta’s 1961 SG Custom.
Yola’s Stand for Myself was released in 2021 and recorded at Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound Studio in Nashville. The album was nominated for Best Americana Album at the 2022 Grammy Awards.
Yola says the bigger challenge, however, was singing counter to the rhythm of what her fingers were doing with the guitar. “She [Sister Rosetta] was always kind of dovetailing a solo while she was singing, and then she’d stop singing and do another solo,” explains Yola. “But she’d already been noodling right across her vocals. So, I had to get good at rubbing my tummy and patting my head.” It took time, and it took “some tuition,” she says, with help from composer Elliott Wheeler, production designer Catherine Martin, and movement coach Polly Bennett—all of whom “pretty much ferried me from this rhythm player who sings and writes songs to this kind of shredder.”
“The idea is to disable my prefrontal cortex—that excessive analytical thinking that one might believe is what we write with.”
Apparently, the production team did have the option for a hand double, but Yola says it was important that she play the actual guitar solos herself. “I needed to take this concept of inaccessibility and patriarchy and whitewashing that were bestowed upon the legacy of rock ’n’ roll post-Sister Rosetta and undo that process,” she declares. “The programming is absolute—it’s very effective and it doesn’t help tell the truth at all.” Yola calls the absence of Sister Rosetta in most rock ’n’ roll history books “problematic,” and that it became important for her to present to the world the context in which they understand the legacy of rock ’n’ roll. “She was the first person to distort the guitar and to bend the strings in the way that we now recognize as the blueprint for rock and roll music,” Yola contends. “Without distorting the amp, without the shred, without the tempo and the swing with which she delivered her solos, rock ’n’ roll doesn’t exist.” She hopes her portrayal of Sister Rosetta helps to set the record straight, but perhaps more importantly she’d like her performance to help dismantle the idea of being disenfranchised from the guitar, which is something she says plagued her. “I was told all the time when I was in England that I shouldn’t be anywhere near a guitar.”
Yola’s Gear
On her current headlining tour, Yola plays a Telecaster at Birmingham, Alabama’s Saturn venue on March 20, 2022. Her other go-to electric is a fiesta red Fender Noventa Jazzmaster.
Photo by Josh Weichman
Guitars
- Fender Paramount Series PM-1 Limited Adirondack Dreadnought
- Fender Noventa Jazzmaster
- Fender Custom Shop American Classic Telecaster
- Gibson 1961 SG Custom Reissue (for Sister Rosetta role in Elvis)
- Martin (000-size body)
As for picking up the guitar for her own music, Yola describes her initial impulse, originally by way of a Martin 000-series, as a “low-lift” way of being able to bring fully formed songwriting ideas to the table. “When I was a top-line writer, I’d have an idea, and it would be relatively full and complete in my head, but then I’d try to explain that to somebody and it would become changed unrecognizably, because you don’t know how to do anything other than suggest something. And so [playing guitar] is just the freedom to be able to finish a thought process.” She says it also makes collaboration more straightforward. “You’re able to say, ‘Here’s a bit of an idea. I have a verse and a chorus, but I don’t have a bridge, can you do me one? Here’s the context.’ You’re able to bring something full to the table.” She cites “Stand for Myself” as an example. “I knew that I wanted it to have a bit more of a sus4 feeling,” she recalls. “But I wasn’t quite sure if I wanted it to be repetitive or if I wanted there to be a movement of Dsus4, so I called my friend, Hannah V, and we figured it out.”
Yola generates her own light, posing onstage with her Fender PM-1 electro-acoustic at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium.
Photo by Joseph Ross Smith
Yola says playing guitar became even more essential during the pandemic, when intimate settings, requiring fewer musicians, like her NPR Tiny Desk appearances, started becoming the norm. “If it can hold together relatively stripped down, then it’s probably a good song,” she asserts. “Production is important, but the melodic hooks that are important to the song have to be able to be told on a couple of instruments.” Yola often wields a Fender Paramount Series acoustic guitar during such performances.
“I was told all the time when I was in England that I shouldn’t be anywhere near a guitar.”
As for the actual act of songwriting itself, Yola gravitates towards “motor-skill-forward” activities, like vacuuming, showering, and walking to get into a “hypnotic state.” She also stays up late, watching TV and strumming the guitar idly, going through chord changes. “The idea is to disable my prefrontal cortex—that excessive analytical thinking that one might believe is what we write with.” The “most elegant connections,” she professes, are made without using that part of the brain. “So, I’d try to distract it—the guitar being the thing that jogs the inspiration into the rest of my brain, once I’ve got the prefrontal cortex taken care of.”
Yola says playing guitar is “the freedom to be able to finish a thought process.”
Photo by Katie LaRocca
Circling back around to the Elvis biopic, she again emphasizes the importance of putting Sister Rosetta’s legacy into the context of what we know about the development of rock ’n’ roll. “It’s so people can better understand where the thing they love comes from,” she explains. “Take her discovery of Little Richard. It makes sense that a guy in drag, singing rock ’n’ roll, would be discovered by a queer Black woman, as opposed to a buttoned-up white guy from the ’50s. All of a sudden you go, ‘Well, of course. Now that makes sense [laughter]. How the hell does he survive, otherwise?’ And so, once things start making sense, it then becomes my duty, to the history of rock ’n’ roll, to the history of guitar playing, to the history of women in music, to do the homework, learn the guitar, understand Sister Rosetta’s importance, and hold the guitar aloft as this thing that gives, so much more than it takes, for every human that touches it.”
Yola - Stand For Myself (Live From Easy Eye Sound)
Yola sings her empowering anthem “Stand for Myself” with assistance from her Fender Paramount PM-1 Limited in an intimate performance at Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound Studio in Nashville.
Shout, Sister, Shout! Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Here’s Gibson’s short documentary on the life of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, with a power assist from Celisse Henderson and Amythyst Kiah.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe guitar solos (in motion picture)
Check out this collection of outstanding Rosetta Tharpe guitar solos on film.
Onstage, Tommy Emmanuel executes a move that is not from the playbook of his hero, Chet Atkins.
“My biggest decision every day on tour is, ‘What do I want to start with? How do I want to come out of the gate?’” Emmanuel explains to me over a video call. “A good opener has to have everything. It has to be full of surprise, it has to have lots of good ideas, lots of light and shade, and then, hit it again,” he says, illustrating each phrase with his hands and ending with a punch.“You lift off straightaway with the first song, you get airborne, you start reaching, and then it’s time to level out and take people on a journey.”
In May 2023, Emmanuel played two shows at the Sydney Opera House, the best performances from which have been combined on his new release, Live at the Sydney Opera House. The venue’s Concert Hall, which has a capacity of 2,679, is a familiar room for Emmanuel, but I think at this point in his career he wouldn’t bring a setlist if he was playing Wembley Stadium. On the recording, Emmanuel’s mind-blowingly dexterous chops, distinctive attack and flair, and knack for culturally resonant compositions are on full display. His opening song for the shows? An original, “Countrywide,” with a segue into Chet Atkins’ “El Vaquero.”
“When I was going to high school in the ’60s, I heard ‘El Vaquero’ on Chet Atkins’ record, [1964’s My Favorite Guitars],” Emmanuel shares. “And when I wrote ‘Countrywide’ in around ’76 or ’77, I suddenly realized, ‘Ah! It’s a bit like “El Vaquero!”’ So I then worked out ‘El Vaquero’ as a solo piece, because it wasn’t recorded like that [by Atkins originally].
“The co-writer of ‘El Vaquero’ is Wayne Moss, who’s a famous Nashville session guy who played ‘da da da’ [sings the guitar riff from Roy Orbison’s ‘Pretty Woman’]. And he played on a lot of Chet’s records as a rhythm guy. So once when I played ‘El Vaquero’ live, Wayne Moss came up to me and said, ‘You know, you did my part and Chet’s at the same time. That’s not fair!’” Emmanuel says, laughing.
Atkins is the reason Emmanuel got into performing. His mother had been teaching him rhythm guitar for a couple years when he heard Atkins on the radio and, at 6, was able to immediately mimic his fingerpicking technique. His father recognized Emmanuel’s prodigious talent and got him on the road that year, which kicked off his professional career. He says, “By the time I was 6, I was already sleep-deprived, working too hard, and being forced to be educated. Because all I was interested in was playing music.”
Emmanuel talks about Atkins as if the way he viewed him as a boy hasn’t changed. The title Atkins bestowed upon him, C.G.P. (Certified Guitar Player), appears on Emmanuel’s album covers, in his record label (C.G.P. Sounds), and is inlaid at the 12th fret on his Maton Custom Shop TE Personal signature acoustic. (Atkins named only five guitarists C.G.P.s. The others are John Knowles, Steve Wariner, Jerry Reed, and Atkins himself.) For Emmanuel, even today most roads lead to Atkins.
When I ask Emmanuel about his approach to arranging for solo acoustic guitar, he says, “It was really hit home for me by my hero, Chet Atkins, when I read an interview with him a long time ago and he said, ‘Make your arrangement interesting.’ And I thought, ‘Wow!’ Because I was so keen to be true to the composer and play the song as everyone knows it. But then again, I’m recreating it like everyone else has, and I might as well get in line with the rest of them and jump off the cliff into nowhere. So it struck me: ‘How can I make my arrangements interesting?’ Well, make them full of surprises.”
When Emmanuel was invited to contribute to 2015’s Burt Bacharach: This Guitar’s in Love with You, featuring acoustic-guitar tributes to Bacharach’s classic compositions by various artists, Emmanuel expresses that nobody wanted to take “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” due to its “syrupy” nature. But for Emmanuel, this presented an entertaining challenge.
He explains, “I thought, ‘Okay, how can I reboot “Close to You?’ So even the most jaded listener will say, ‘Holy fuck—I didn’t expect that! Wow, I really like that; that is a good melody!’ So I found a good key to play the song in, which allowed me to get some open notes that sustain while I move the chords. Then what I did is, in every phrase, I made the chord unresolve, then resolve.
Tommy Emmanuel's Gear
“I’m writing music for the film that’s in my head,” Emmanuel says. “So, I don’t think, ‘I’m just the guitar,’ ever.”
Photo by Simone Cecchetti
Guitars
- Three Maton Custom Shop TE Personals, each with an AP5 PRO pickup system
Amps
- Udo Roesner Da Capo 75
Effects
- AER Pocket Tools preamp
Strings & Picks
- Martin TE Signature Phosphor Bronze (.012–.054)
- Martin SP strings
- Ernie Ball Paradigm strings
- D’Andrea Pro Plec 1.5 mm
- Dunlop medium thumbpicks
“And then to really put the nail in the coffin, at the end, ‘Close to you’ [sings melody]. I finished on a major 9 chord which had that note in it, but it wasn’t the key the song was in, which is a typical Stevie Wonder trick. All the tricks I know, the wonderful ideas that I’ve stolen, are from Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie, James Taylor, Carole King, Neil Diamond. All of the people who wrote really incredibly great pop songs and R&B music—I stole every idea I could, and I tried to make my little two-and-a -half minutes as interesting and entertaining as possible. Because entertainment equals: Surprise me.”
I share with Emmanuel that the performances on Live at the Sydney Opera House, which include his popular “Beatles Medley,” reminded me of another possible arrangement trick. In Harpo Marx’s autobiography, Harpo Speaks, I preface, Marx writes of a lesson he learned as a performer—to “answer the audience’s questions.” (Emmanuel says he’s a big fan of the book and read it in the early ’70s.) That happened for me while listening to the medley, when, after sampling melodies from “She’s a Woman” and “Please Please Me,” Emmanuel suddenly lands on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”
I say, “I’m waiting for something that hits more recognizably to me, and when ‘While My Guitar’ comes in, that’s like answering my question.”
“It’s also Paul and John, Paul and John, George,” Emmanuel replies. “You think, ‘That’s great, that’s great pop music,’ then, ‘Wow! Look at the depth of this.’”
Often Emmanuel’s flights on his acoustic guitar are seemingly superhuman—as well as supremely entertaining.
Photo by Ekaterina Gorbacheva
A trick I like to employ as a writer, I say to Emmanuel, is that when I’m describing something, I’ll provide the reader with just enough context so that they can complete the thought on their own.
“You can do that musically as well,” says Emmanuel. He explains how, in his arrangement of “What a Wonderful World,” he’ll play only the vocal melody. “When people are asking me at a workshop, ‘How come you don’t put chords behind that part?’ I say, ‘I’m drawing the melody and you’re putting in all the background in your head. I don’t need to tell you what the chords are. You already know what the chords are.’”
“Wayne Moss came up to me and said, ‘You know, you did my part and Chet’s at the same time. That’s not fair!’”
Another track featured on Live at the Sydney Opera House is a cover of Paul Simon’s “American Tune” (which Emmanuel then jumps into an adaptation of the Australian bush ballad, “Waltzing Matilda”). It’s been a while since I really spent time with There GoesRhymin’ Simon (on which “American Tune” was first released), and yet it sounded so familiar to me. A little digging revealed that its melody is based on the 17th-century Christian hymn, “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” which was arranged and repurposed by Bach in a few of the composer’s works. The cross-chronological and genre-lackadaisical intersections that come up in popular music sometimes is fascinating.
“I think the principle right there,” Emmanuel muses, “is people like Bach and Beethoven and Mozart found the right language to touch the heart of a human being through their ears and through their senses ... that really did something to them deep in their soul. They found a way with the right chords and the right notes, somehow. It could be as primitive as that.
Tommy Emmanuel has been on the road as a performing guitarist for 64 years. Eat your heart out, Bob Dylan.
Photo by Jan Anderson
“It’s like when you’re a young composer and someone tells you, ‘Have a listen to Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind,”’ he continues. “‘Listen to how those notes work with those chords.’ And every time you hear it, you go, ‘Why does it touch me like that? Why do I feel this way when I hear those chords—those notes against those chords?’ I say, it’s just human nature. Then you wanna go, ‘How can I do that!’” he concludes with a grin.
“You draw from such a variety of genres in your arrangements,” I posit. “Do you try to lean into the side of converting those songs to solo acoustic guitar, or the side of bridging the genre’s culture to that of your audience?”
“I stole every idea I could, and I tried to make my little two-and-a-half minutes as interesting and entertaining as possible. Because entertainment equals: Surprise me.”
“If I was a method actor,” Emmanuel explains, “what I’m doing is—I’m writing music for the film that’s in my head. So, I don’t think, ‘I’m just the guitar,’ ever. I always think it has to have that kind of orchestral, not grandeur, but … palette to it. Because of the influence of Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, and Elton John, especially—the piano guys—I try to use piano ideas, like putting the third in the low bass a lot, because guitar players don’t necessarily do that. And I try to always do something that makes what I do different.
“I want to be different and recognizable,” he continues. “I remember when people talked about how some players—you just hear one note and you go, ‘Oh, that’s Chet Atkins.’ And it hit me like a train, the reason why a guy like Hank Marvin, the lead guitar player from the Shadows.... I can tell you: He had a tone that I hear in other players now. Everyone copied him—they just don’t know it—including Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, all those people. I got him up to play with me a few times when he moved to Australia, and even playing acoustic, he still had that sound. I don’t know how he did it, but it was him. He invented himself.”
YouTube It
Emmanuel performs his arrangement of “What a Wonderful World,” illustrating how omitting a harmonic backdrop can have a more powerful effect, especially when playing such a well-known melody.
The Rickenbacker 481’s body style was based on the 4001 bass, popularly played by Paul McCartney. Even with that, the guitar was too experimental to reach its full potential.
By the early 1970s, the great interest the lads had sparked in 6- and 12-string Ricks had waned. But thankfully for the company, there was still high demand for yet another Beatles-played instrument: the 4001 bass.
Paul McCartney was gifted a 4001 by Rickenbacker in 1965, which he then used prominently throughout the group’s late-’60s recordings and while leading Wings all through the ’70s. Other rising stars of rock also donned 4000 series models, like Yes’Chris Squire, Pink Floyd’sRoger Waters, the Bee Gees’ Maurice Gibb, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Stu Cook, and more.
And like that, a new star was born.
So, what’s a guitar company to do when its basses are selling better than its guitars? Voilà: The Rickenbacker 480. Introduced in 1972, it took the 4000-series body shape and created a standard 6-string out of it, using a bolt-on neck for the first time in the brand’s history.
The 481’s slanted frets predate the modern multi-scale phenomenon by decades. The eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.
“It was like a yo-yo at Rickenbacker sometimes,” factory manager Dick Burke says in Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo. “We got quiet in the late ’60s, but when the bass started taking off in the ’70s, we got real busy again, so making a 6-string version of that was logical, I guess.”
The gambit worked, for a time. Sales of the 480 were strong enough at first that, in 1973, a deluxe model was introduced—the 481—and it’s one of these deluxe versions that we’re showcasing here.
“The 481 features slant frets—pointing ever-so-slightly toward the body of the guitar—and the eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.”
Take a close look and you’ll notice that the body shape isn’t the only remarkable feature. The 481 was Rickenbacker’s first production run to feature humbucker pickups. Here, you can see each humbucker’s 12 pole pieces dotting through the chrome cover, a variant casing only available from 1975 to 1976. (Interestingly enough, the pickups had first been developed for the 490, a prototype that never made it to public release, which would’ve allowed players to substitute different pickups by swapping loaded pickguards in and out of the body.)
The new pickups were also treated with novel electronics. The standard 3-way pickup-selector switch is here, but so is a second small switch that reverses the pickups’ phase when engaged.
The inventive minds at Rickenbacker didn’t stop there: The 481 features slant frets—pointing ever-so-slightly toward the body of the guitar—and the eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.
Long before the fanned fret phenomenon caught on in the modern, progressive guitar landscape, Rickenbacker had been toying around with the slant-fret concept. Originally available from 1970 forward as a custom order on other models, slant frets were all but standard on the 481 (only a small minority of straight-fret 481s were built).
The 481 was the deluxe version of the 480, which preceded it and marked the first time the company used a bolt-on neck.
Dick Burke, speaking separately to writer Tony Bacon in an interview published on Reverb, only half-recalls the genesis and doesn’t remember them selling particularly well: “Some musicians said that’s the way when you hold the neck in your left hand—your hand is slanted. So, we put the slanted frets in a few guitars. I don’t know how many, maybe a hundred or two—I don’t recall.”
Even proponents of the 481 do not necessarily sing the praises of the slanted fretboard. Kasabian’s Serge Pizzorno, a 481 superfan, told Rickenbacker Guitars author Martin Kelly, “I don’t just love the 481, it’s part of me.... The 481’s slanted frets have made my fingers crooked for life, but I don’t care, I’ll take that for it’s given me riff after riff after riff."
Initial 480-series sales were promising, but the models never really took off. Though they were built as late as 1984, the slant-fret experiment of the 481 was called off by 1979. And these slanted models have not, in the minds of most players or collectors, become anywhere near as sought-after as the classic 330s and 360s, or, for that matter, the 4001s.
For that reason, 481s—despite their novelty and their lists of firsts for Rickenbacker—can still be found for relatively cheap. Our Vintage Vault pick, which is being sold by the Leicester, England-based Jordan Guitars Ltd, has an asking price of 3,350 British pounds (or about 4,300 U.S. dollars), which is still well under half the going-rate of early 360s, 660s, and other more famous Ricks. Some lucky buyers have even found 481s on Reverb for less than $2,000, which is unheard of for other vintage models.
With its idiosyncratic charms, the 481 remains more within reach than many other guitars of a similar vintage.
Sources: Martin Kelly’s Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo, Tony Bacon’s"Interview: Dick Burke on the Creation of the Rickenbacker 12-String | Bacon’s Archive" on Reverb, Reverb Price Guide sales data.
