[MUSIC] Well, we call it a one strand on the wall. We take a broom mop, took a nail in each end of the you know, up and down and then tied from one nail to the other one, put a rock, something under it. Then, I always take a nail and put it next to the rock between the wire and the rock so it'd make a keen sound to it. You know? And if I wanted to make it with a low tone I'd slide my rock up. And if I want a high tone I'm sliding the rock down. You know? Put a kind of large rock at the bottom and a small one at the top. [MUSIC] Take me a bottle for sliding up, that's another way. [MUSIC] >> I was in the middle of a light two-step, well they had some sort of little old dance, they called it snake hip, they did a dance to it. Boy would be playing and things, we'd have a good tune up here. [MUSIC] The One Strand on the Wall, played by Louis Dotson in Lorman, Mississippi, is a window into the roots of the blues that goes back to one-stringed instruments in Africa that are played today in the South. Virtually every blues singer, including B.B. King, learned to play on a one strand guitar nailed to the wall. It was a free instrument. You simply took the wire from the handle of an old broom that had been discarded and stretched it along the wall, and tightened it to the right pitch, and then plucked it on one end, and ran a bottle up and down the other to change the pitch. And therein is the beginning of blues, and of what later became known as bottleneck blues performance. And instead of one strand, if you have six strands on a guitar, and they're tuned to open tuning, you have very similar powerful sounds of music as the bottle or the bottleneck is run up and down those six-strings. So Louis Dotson, living in rural Mississippi, helps us see the deep roots of blues that link us to music, and musical roots in Africa. And also link us to very contemporary styles of guitar playing, by groups like the Rolling Stones. So, blues is a bridge. And, the one strand is our way across that bridge. If we are looking at roots music from Europe, the sound that is most important in the South, is the ballad. The song that tells a story. From the British Isles, we can find ballads were brought to the worlds of the South. And, they were sung there. And, new ballads like John Henry, and the Wreck of the Old 97, and Casey Jones were created. The ballad became the foundation for country music in the same way that the one-strand guitar was the foundation for blues. And these two great Southern musics, from the British Isles and Africa, are the foundation of modern southern music and of much music all over the world.
