Cajun-influenced blues guitarist rocks Virginia with his unique style

By MICHAEL HAMNER
Observer Staff

Even though the Friday night crowd at the State Theatre in Falls Church didn’t quite fill half of the 800-seat auditorium, Sonny Landreth’s enthusiastic fans couldn’t get enough of the blues guitarist’s withering slide guitar attacks. The faithful continued stomping and whistling, hoping for a second encore.

Sonny Landreth, June 2004 (Photo: Bob Gottlieb, courtesy of Brad Hunt, WNS Group)

That didn’t happen, but a few of the fans streaming out had broad smiles and were swept up in the nostalgia of their youth.

Landreth’s music does hark back to legendary `70s guitarists such as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan, all of whom could fill an auditorium with a wall of sound, using only two sidemen, a bassist and a drummer.

Landreth and his two bandmates, David Ransom, on bass, and drummer Mike Organ, launched into the show with the instrumental “Port of Calling,” from the group’s most recent CD, “Grant Street.” They played virtually non-stop for an hour and a half, covering both old and new tunes, including one from an upcoming, unnamed CD due to be released in April 2008.

Landreth is not a showman. His bow-legged guitar stance and head-down concentration on the frets is well known to his fans. But he dazzles even experienced guitarists with two styles that set him apart in the blues genre: behind-the-slide fingering and the infusion of South Louisiana folk music into his blues tunes.

Only one or two modern guitarists have developed an entirely new technique of playing the instrument, including jazz-fusion guitarist Stanley Jordan. His two-handed tapping technique, where he uses all fingers of both hands on the frets of the guitar, as if hammering a dulcimer, wowed fans in the mid `80s.

Landreth has devised a method of playing notes, chords and chord fragments behind the slide, or bottleneck, taking slide guitar technique to a new level. This requires an abnormal string height above the fret board, so much so that the guitar manufacturer Fender is designing a special Sonny Landreth model Stratocaster with input from the slide-meister himself.

Much of Landreth’s music also incorporates Cajun and zydeco influences, unusual for blues.  However, he did cut his teeth in legendary Clifton Chenier’s zydeco band, the reason the zydeco accordion rhythms and syncopated phrasing permeate many of his compositions.

The trio is continuing on their tour, ping-ponging between New York and Texas, before returning to Louisiana in mid-December for a well-deserved Christmas break.