...is characterized by a highly syncopated guitar technique that is comparable in sound to ragtime piano.
The style originated in the Piedmont region of the United States, the hilly area which lies between the Atlantic Coastal Plain the Appalachian Mountains from central Georgia to central Virginia.
The Piedmont guitar style employs a complex fingerpicking method in which a regular, alternating-thumb bass pattern supports a melody on treble strings. The highly syncopated guitar style connects closely with an earlier string-band tradition integrating ragtime, blues, and country dance songs.
In the early twentieth century, influential artists such as Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Blake , Blind Willie McTell , Rev. Gary Davis , and Sonny Terry made Piedmont blues popular. Women were also masters of Piedmont guitar style, including Etta Baker and Elizabeth Cotten , whose “Freight Train” is one of the best-recognized fingerpicking guitar tunes.
Archie Edwards was one of several extraordinary Piedmont blues musicians from Virginia, including his friend, the late John Jackson . Another friend, Warner Williams, still drops by Archie’s Barbershop now and then to join in the Saturday jams.
Piedmont Blues . University of North Carolina Asheville students enrolled in the Liberal Studies Introductory Colloquia "The Art of the Blues" and "Jazz and Blues in American Culture." Online resource that includes information about Piedmont blues and biographies, recordings, and photographs of many individual musicians.
Center for Southern African-American Music. University of South Carolina School of Music. An online archive including print, audio-visual, and primary source materials related to African-American music of the south. The blues section includes biographies and recordings of many Piedmont blues musicians.
Digital Library of America. Online resources includes non-commercial sound recordings that document much of Appalachian music's geographic, ethnic, vocal, and instrumental diversity. Many blues musicians from the region are represented in the collection, including Archie Edwards
East Coast Blues. Barry Pearson and Cub Kota. Blues Foundation website. Brief discussion of Piedmont and jump blues.
Shades of Blue. Juke FM. Overview of different styles of blues, including Piedmont, and the people who helped make them popular.
The modern blues guitarist faces a quandary. To enter the tradition with force, you’ve got to keep it simple, while simultaneously avoiding clichés—as even the best of the best can end up in 12-bar purgatory, their flight to pentatonic hell already booked. But for blues picker Sue Foley, the riddle’s answer springs from one eternal fount. “I always go back to Memphis Minnie,” she says . “She is far and away my favorite musician of all time, and her approach to the blues is always inspiring and never clichéd.”
Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition of the Southeast. Bastin, Bruce. The University of Illinois Press, 1986.
Encyclopedia of the Blues. Herzhaft, Gerard. The University of Arkansas Press, 1992 (ISBN 1-55728-253-6).
Virginia Piedmont Blues: The Lives and Art of Two Virginia Bluesmen. Pearson, Barry Lee. The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990.
The Archie Edwards Blues Heritage Foundation is keeping East coast acoustic folk blues alive. Through weekly Saturday jams, performances, workshops, exhibits, and lectures, AEBHF carries on the educational tradition of celebrated Piedmont blues artist Archie Edwards.