One of the innovators of the guitar, Leo Kottke (b. 1945), developed a highly personal blend of folk with ragtime and blues, creating dense sheets of sound. His groundbreaking album, Leo Kottke & His 6 & 12 String Guitar (1969), has a rumbustious energy which can be heard on "The Driving of The Year Nail," in which his 12-string guitar displays rattling strings and low-tuned notes. His bouncing fingerstyle has bluesy runs, slides, and harmonics and a fast tempo and attack, while retaining a loose feeling. The melody on "Ojo" turns round rhythmically and has a country flavor, using reflective arpeggios, low-tuned strings, and pairs of resonating notes at the same pitch. Using a 6-string guitar, the number "Vaseline Machine Gun" starts with an atmospheric slide quoting "The Last Post" with whirring notes, before breaking into surging arpeggios. Figures pushing and sliding against pivotal notes are followed by slide with a metallic wire sound. On the following album, Mudlark (1971), Kottke is supported by a rhythm section that sounds almost superfluous alongside his full sound. His arrangements are full of character; they include "Cripple Creek," in which his tangled arpeggios and rhythmic sounds combine folk, country, and ambient music, and his arrangement of Bach's Bouree, which he plays on steel-string guitar with a hard-edged rigidity. Kottke's electric playing is more concise on "Bean Time" (1972), which has jazzy strumming, and he develops chordal ideas with bouncing musical rhythms, creating a high-register electric bass-like sound.

Jhon Martyn

Scottish songwriter John Martyn (b. 1948) uses hauntingly beautiful dark modal voicings with a powerful acoustic guitar tone. On his album Bless the Weather (1971), the title track and "Go Easy" show deep resonant harmonies, while "Back down the River" reveals close voicings over a low pedal tone. Martyn uses a percussive attack on "Walk to The Water" and "Just Now," which has a tough sound with strumming near the bridge. On "Head and Heart" he plays linear fills, snapping the strings against the fingerboard.


Richard Thompson (b. 1949) has one of the most distinctive electric-guitar voices in folk, and on the album I want to see the bright lights tonight (1974), with his wife Linda, he continued to hone and develop his sound. He creates a strong sustain and finger vibrato, and his inventive ideas are underlined by strummed chords with a trebly, breaking sound. "When I get to the border" has a variety of sinuous linear fills, and "Calvary Cross" opens with his typically distinctive threading metallic lines.

Martin Carthy develops stark, imaginative, almost primitive-sounding guitar parts for a wide range of traditional material. On "The Cottage in the Wood," (1974) he beats out a rhythmic version of the melody with an indeterminate - sounding bass and basic harmonies that have a static quality, enabling the tune to retain its evocative power on the album Right Of Passage (1989). "Eggs in her basket" has him playing a rough yet magical guitar part with idiosyncratic timing, melodic voicings and a low pedal tone. "The Banks of the Nile" has a scratchy sound with reverb and out-of-kilter guitar loosely following the voice and conveying a melismatic sadness.

Carthy uses various well-chosen colors for different material a light tone on "Bill Norrie," with its distinctive fills and melodic strummed figures, and strong morris-dance rhythms, with tough cutting stacatto, on the instrumental "Swaggering Boney."

Nic Jones

Working within a traditional English framework, Nic Jones (b. 1947) developed a guitar style that has a cutting rhythmic clarity and resonant low drones. On "Canadee-i-o", from his album Penguin Eggs (1980), he produces bright snappy percussiveness and a lilting feel. He builds his guitar parts around an open-string tuning on the plaintive "Humpback Whale," which has a pulsating energy with a grainy strummed texture, strings buzzing against the frets to create a sitar like sound. Jones' trebly sound and dry and sweet tones can be heard on "Courting Is a Pleasure," in which upper parts ride over low strings.