Back in the late '50s and early '60s, acoustic guitarists began adding folk tunes, bluegrass, and country blues to their repertoire. A few guitar players began adapting smatterings of classical ragtime - a musical style that had its birth in the Gay '90s with the sprightly compositions of Scott Joplin, James Scott, and other pianists and began its decline with the outbreak of the First World War. In the early '70s, the Popular movie The Sting was responsible for introducing ragtime to a whole new generation of listeners. But it is ragtime guitarist Dave Laibman's [see GP, Mar. '76] and Eric Schoenberg's 1969 release, The New Ragtime Guitar, that is generally credited with having generated the first widespread interest among pickers in the adaptation of classic ragtime. Included in the LP is their arrangement of the often-copied "Dill Pickle Rag," with Eric flatpicking the melody while Dave fingerpicks the harmony and bass.

Although he is still counted among the best classic ragtime guitarists, 33-year old Eric Schoenberg has progressed in many musical directions over the last decade. His most recent album, Acoustic Guitar, contains a couple of difficult Joplin Rags, as well as arrangements of the Beatles' "Lady Madonna" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," Paul Simon's "The Boxer," and country singer Jimmie Rodgers's "Miss The Mississippi And You." Also included are a couple of reels and "Planxty Irwin," a harp tune written in the early 1700s by Irish composer Turlough O'Carolan. This may seem like quite an undertaking for one album, but as Dave Laibman wrote in the LP's liner notes, "In Rick's hands, it works. Without posturing about 'authenticity,' it says, 'All this is my musical birthright, and I'm using it to make my statement.' I can't imagine any other guitarist bending a string in an Irish reel, working throaty bass slides into a staid Joplin composition, or planting lilting harmonics into frolicking Beatles tunes without raising eyebrows. But that is the guitar of Eric Schoenberg."

Today Eric frequently tours the U.S. and Europe as a solo act, and he participates in numerous guitar workshops. When he's not on the road, he can usually be found at the Music Emporium, a new and vintage acoustic stringed instrument shop that he co-owns. Among those who have carried Eric's techniques and knowledge through their careers is one of the first ladies of the fingerpicking-style guitar, Phoebe Snow [see GP, Nov. '77], who began studying with Schoenberg when she was a teenager. Says Phoebe: "There is so much I could say about Ricky - I really love him very much. He's my favorite person. First of all, I was a very belligerent student, not fun to teach at all. He kept giving me tablature to take home and study from, and I wanted to do it all by ear. We had some big fights about that. So then we switched to chord charts, which he said was the most elementary way possible; I couldn't even do that. Mainly I would just have him play the song over about ten times and I would see if I could memorize it.

"The thing that I found most instructive about Rick was the fact that at the time he was taking Scott Joplin pieces and transcribing them for the guitar. It was some of the most beautiful music I had ever heard, especially transcribed for the guitar. It had a kind of delicacy about it that it didn't have on the old player piano rolls. That was something I always wanted him to teach me, but I was easily frustrated. Unfortunately my lessons didn't last as long with him as they should have, because he's brilliant and has a lot to offer. He taught me just about everything I do on guitar, and he was very patient.

For Schoenberg, teaching the guitar has always involved more than the imparting of fundamental and advanced techniques; he views the instrument as being intricately connected to the spirit of the person holding it. ""earning on the guitar is like learning about yourself," he says. "To improve your playing, you have to improve your personality. You can tell a lot of the underlying characteristics of a person's personality by his or her works."

Eric was born on March 26, 1946, in Somerville, Massachusetts. He began playing guitar when he was 13, with an old $15.00 Silvertone. That same year he attended a summer camp where he met Winnie Winston, a musician equally adept on bluegrass guitar, banjo, and pedal steel, and Josh Rifkin, who at the time was teaching guitar (he later achieved a considerable following as a ragtime pianist). "I first became interested in music in the '50s, listening to the New Lost City Ramblers and bluegrass," says Eric. "Then Winnie Winston and Josh Rifkin taught me folk-style playing. They started to break it down to where you were playing the bass with your thumb and the treble parts with your fingers, sort of like the Carter Family Style [see GP, Mar. '79]. Then you'd find out you could get your thumb to do the Carter lick all by itself - bass, chord, bass, chord - and your fingers could play the melody. It's a very natural and clear evolution of a guitar style; all my students learn this way.

"Back then, when the whole folk guitar thing got started, even the simplest fingerpicking tunes were amazing feats of virtuosity. 'Buckdancer's Choice' was the big thing, and now it's maybe the second lesson you teach someone if they're into fingerpicking. the world is progressing."

Eric began visiting Artie Traum [see GP, Jan. '76] and his brother Happy [see GP, Nov. '78], who were teaching guitar above a music store in Manhattan. "I used to go there every Saturday during the late '50s," he remembers. "Friends of mine took lessons from them, but I didn't have the money. They let me sit in, though, and I learned things like 'Railroad Blues.' My friends and I would also go to Greenwich Village on Sundays and listen to the pickers. I also learned a lot from Tom Paley's picking on the New Lost City Ramblers albums - that was very influential! It was a fingerpicking style that came from the old styles of [bluesman/songsters] Sam McGee and John Hurt; that was before Hurt was rediscovered. Paley got his stuff off of the old 78s. Those guys were ragtime pickers, the alternating-thumb pickers. I also got a lot from listening to [ragtime pianist] Jelly Roll Morton."

Schoenberg began playing banjo, and during the 1960s he became the banjo teacher at the Fretted Instruments Folklore Center. "I was the banjo teacher because they had too many guitar teachers," Eric explains. "I just wanted to be around there because that's where all the good music on the East Coast was happening. All the good players would come through that store and hang out, and I met many guitarists that way. Also there was a guy around named David Cohen, who later was the piano player with Country Joe And The Fish [see GP, Sept. '78]. He was a good Travis picker back then. We hadn't heard much of what Chet Atkins [see GP, Feb. and Mar. '72] was doing in those years; it wasn't until much later that people became aware of him in the North. And Marc Silber, who ran Fretted Instruments, was a really good player. He was a big influence."

By 1964 Schoenberg had begun arranging rags for the guitar, spurred in part by the work of his cousin, Dave Laibman. "I think I got to the point where I was tired of playing 'Freight Train' and simple melodies," he says, "and I started looking for something that would go beyond this. A little folk tune that a lot of people were playing was 'Georgia Camp Meeting,' and I sort of took it and changed the key and found out that it worked into a much more complete arrangement in the ragtime style. I eventually learned that the tune had three parts and you could really expand it into becoming a whole instrumental, and then I started looking for more tunes like that. A lot of people were going in the other direction - they were getting into folk, bluegrass, and traditional music. It was just a few people who turned to ragtime, and this music really worked on guitar. Ragtime guitar sort of centered around Dave Laibman, who was way ahead of everybody else at the time. I got together very early with him, being that he was my cousin, and we started playing together a lot."

Laibman, four years Eric's senior and currently an economics teacher at Brooklyn College, remembers young Eric's explorations into the then-new field of classic piano ragtime adapted for the guitar: "During the years when he and I were working together in the demanding and highly structured ragtime style, our discipline would break down after an hour of work, at most. In the freeform jam session that followed, Rick would come alive. His was the ability to lose himself in the pure experience of generating musical sound, studying and enjoying any unexpected twist - say, two bass strings in unison that resonate deeply - arising from the random human-guitar interaction. Then he would care deeply about that twist and seek to share it; the next time we were together it would appear in something we were working on, played with great care, and Rick's eyes would twinkle, not with a 'Hey, look what I can do,' but in a quiet affirmation: 'Yes, it is there, it is good.'"

By 1966 Laibman had arranged many rags that he felt were too difficult for one guitarist to play, and he and Eric began working out duets. With Sam Charters as their producer, they recorded for Folkways Records in 1969. The resulting The New Ragtime Guitar was hailed as a milestone recording of ragtime. "The thing about classic ragtime is that each piece is composed with a beginning, a middle, and an end - it's a unified work," Schoenberg says. "The writer of ragtime presented a single piece that was very interesting and very related to folk-style playing. When you go back to the sources, you learn that fingerpicking derived from ragtime piano because it came out of imitating the alternating rhythm of the left-hand bass chord and a syncopated melody."

One of the things a guitarist has to be careful of when transcribing piano music to guitar is that the arrangements remain as faithful as possible to the composer's original work. "If you are doing a Scott Joplin piece," Eric says, "it's like transcribing a Bach harpsichord piece. You are preserving the music. Each one of those notes is precious, and you should be interested in saving each note because it was composed by a genius, and you can't improve on it. The whole idea is that the composer created a piece that has lasted, and you should have a sense of responsibility to remain faithful to that piece. You add or take away notes only because of the nature of the guitar... you need to preserve the feel of the original piano piece.

"The guitar has limitations compared to the piano; the creativity of the arranger is important in getting the range of the piano onto the guitar. The piano is more extended, more available. This is challenging; it leaves the field open to the knowledge and ingenuity of the guitarist. With a piano, you can play ten notes at one time. It takes two fingers to play one note on the guitar. The thumb does all the work of the pianist's left hand, filling in the chord. And the fingers can play a melody and a countermelody. Also, and as important, the piece you transcribed has to be playable.

"I have arranged maybe a dozen rags that I play, as well as a few others I've arranged completely but are too hard to play comfortable. They don't come out smoothly. That's one of the problems guitarists face - ragtime wasn't written for the guitar. And most guitarists haven't gotten to the point where they can recreate the feeling of the music."

By the time Eric released Acoustic Guitar in 1973, he had arranged and adapted many musical styles besides ragtime, including Beatles tunes, and country songs by Jimmie Rodgers and the Delmore Brothers. "I didn't have any qualms about using recording techniques to fill up the sound," he says. "We used compression on that record. A natural-sounding recording contrasts too much with the sound of records done today to be successful.

"One of the reasons for getting away from ragtime is that the music was getting stiff. I'm not just interested in being a transcriber; I like to fill things in my own way. It is very important to fill in the proper setting for yourself, and the limiting factor is taste. Without that factor you lose a sense of enjoyment. The idea is to try to create within a framework of proper taste for your own musical sense. When I choose a piece for a performance, I use one I like. If you like the piece, it is going to exist in your head in a form, and you'll have an intimate relationship with that melody, so it will all fall into place. You have to always listen to what your fingers are doing, and your mind will automatically give directions to your fingers. Your sense of taste is going to direct those fingers in the right direction. I don't play any piece the same way twice."

One of the ways Eric has turned for new sources is traditional Irish music, or as he prefers to call it, Celtic music: "My influences in this were [guitarists] Martin Carthy and Pierre Bensusan, who are both from Europe. Carthy was the first one to take jigs and reels and put them into a special tuning. Some of the tunings I use are variations of open G tunings - going from low to high, D, A, D, G, A, D; F, G, D, G, C, D; and mountain modal, which is D, G, D, G, C, D, a tuning that works both for the guitar and banjo. Traditional music such as a Celtic piece is based on a whole different approach than Western music. American pop music comes out of a blues sense, using diminished chords. I try to use a middle voice in the traditional pieces, like regulators on bagpipes. I also try to voice the bass so not to use it as a drone. It can be kept very simple, but it has to make sense.

"The way I play it, the melody is more developed than it would be on, say, just a fiddle. The fiddle uses a single line, and I'm looking for something that relates more to fingerpicking, something that has a fuller texture. Fiddle players tend to do things too fast, and some could give the music new feeling by playing it slow. A lot of the music coming out of Ireland today is more full and intricate than just fiddle and guitar. I very much like a contemporary group called Planxty, with their textured and contrapuntal approach."

Schoenberg's main guitar these days is made for him by the Martin company. "We have had a few of these made for our store," he says. "They are exact copies of the OM-45 made during the '30s; they have wider, long-scale necks and 000-scale bodies. Mine has a great tone and the greatest broadcast frequency range of any guitar I know of. I like very low action, so I flow on the fingerboard. I don't like the feeling of having to fight a guitar - all the effort should be musical, not muscular. Also, I prefer a light guitar - they have good response. On a heavy guitar, you frequently have to use fingerpicks or flatpicks; these guitars are not that responsive. I like that light touch and a full response."

Schoenberg also owns an Epiphone Recording model guitar that was made in the '20s, as well as a Maccaferri guitar, "the same model used by Django Reinhardt, with 14 frets to the upper bout." Eric used his Epiphone Recording for the taping of Acoustic Guitar.

He strings his instruments with light-gauge bronze strings of various makes. "String makers are always changing, and you have to continually experiment," he says. "Right now I like Darco strings, a standard light-gauge set. I change them as often as I have to; it depends on how many other people have been playing my guitar. If their hands sweat, sometimes it will kill the strings; when this happens I have to change them within days. Strings are often too brittle if I change them right before a concert."

Although he used no fingernails for the recording of Acoustic Guitar, Eric has recently gone to using his nails for fingerpicking. "I use them for a natural sound, which means getting the nails the right shape and as smooth as possible because any fault scratches on the strings. I use a Revlon two-sided file on the finishing side, as well as 500 grit open-coat sandpaper. I think that one thing that gets ignored by guitar players a lot is tone. For good tone you have to have the guitar set up right and take care of your nails.

"When I play I use my thumb and three fingers, and I try to fill in the texture of the music by using this many fingers. The more I play, the less and less organized I get, so I don't use a Travis-picking style. But my style does come from an alternating bass. Lately I've been using my little finger, too. Normally I anchor the heel of my right hand on the bass strings to get a muffled-sounding bass, and sometimes I'll use a thumbpick."

Eric finds reading music helpful for guitarists. He also stresses the necessity of keeping an open mind: "I've found reading music a big help. In folk, if you can ready music you can get beyond what everybody else is doing just by going off to whatever books you find and seeing what there is to learn. By playing tunes and figuring out the chords from fake books you can get a lot of interesting stuff. And try to get some kind of variety, too. Pick up as many different influences as you can. I think it's wrong to just say, 'Well, I like bluegrass, and that's it - that's all I'm going to play.'

"I think arranging is important, too, because it's a way of exploring whole new styles of guitar playing, of music, and there's no composer who has done anything on guitar for fingerpickers that I like. There's nothing written for guitar now that's as good as the music being written for other instruments. The guitar is very popular, but subtler touches need to be reached. There's lot of room and places to go for the steel-string guitar."

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