PAUL
VERNON CHESTER
Manouche Maestro
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Manouche Maestro |
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John Melville Pearse, Guitarist 1939-2008
The programmes were sold to many other countries, and in a
follow-up series, Hold Down a Chord: Fingerpicking, first
broadcast in 1969, Pearse taught a variety of melody-picking styles from
American guitarists such as Mississippi John Hurt, Big Bill Broonzy
and Reverend Gary Davis. The accompanying book went through four reprints in its
first year. Pearse had learned his fingerpicking style from from Big Bill
Broonzy during Broonzy's 1957 European tour. It was referred to by the
musicologist Alan Lomax as the Piedmont style.
The melody line is fingerpicked in a syncopated style while the thumb plays a
rocking bass line. He refined this technique, with the thumb-playing bass line
providing a complex counterpoint to the melody. Pearse was born in Hook, near Goole, in the
East Riding of Yorkshire, but grew up in Prestatyn, North
Wales, where his father ran a hotel. He became a professional musician when only
17 years old and moved to London. He established a reputation in the capital's
small number of folk clubs and, by 1960, was teaching weekly guitar classes at
Cecil Sharp House, headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. He
was soon a resident at the folk club there and wrote reviews for the house
magazine, English Dance and Song. He wrote his first guitar tutorial,
Teach Yourself Folk Guitar, at the age of 19.
A medical accident in 1983 left Pearse paralysed, with little
chance that he would play the guitar again. A cataclysmic myelogram procedure that paralysed him from the neck down and threatened to put an end to
his performing career. Unwilling to accept the doctors' gloomy prognosis he
determined that he would both walk and work again. Within a year he had returned
to performing, and in the mid-1980s hosted another guitar tuition programme for
American television called String Along. The business prospered, however,
especially after the American folk guitarist Doc Watson
endorsed his strings. Within 18 months, Pearse was walking again, and after
years of painful rehabilitation and with the business well established, he was
able to resume his performing career in 2002. He later released a CD, Live in
Kutztown.
Pearse was a familiar figure at the NAMM music products
industry trade fairs, where he was highly regarded as a creative, generous,
larger-than-life character. His marriage to Rhoads was dissolved, although they
remained business partners, and he married Linda Gibbard in 1994. Both survive
him. • John Melville Pearse, guitarist and folk musician, born 12
September 1939; died 31 October 2008 |
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John
Pearse, who has died aged 69, was responsible for teaching a generation of
British Folk and Blues enthusiasts how to play the guitar. He scripted and
presented a highly successful series for BBC2, Hold Down a Chord,
which was first broadcast in 1967 - a time when Folk Music had been making
inroads into the world of popular music through the protest songs of Bob Dylan. 
Among
the guitarists he influenced in those early days was the British folk singer
Martin Carthy. He showed Carthy how to play Elizabeth Cotten's
accompaniment for her song Freight Train and encouraged him to work seriously on
his guitar playing.
Aside from his
music, he presented a television cookery series in the US, Cooking With Wine,
made wildlife films in Africa and published a collection of short stories as
well as a book on fly-fishing. 
