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I remember playing at the Grant Street Dance Hall one time down in LaFayette, Louisiana. This was the mid-90′s, and it was my first time hanging out in the Deep South… it was a particular thrill for me to be playing in Cajun country, and I managed to sit in at a juke joint where some local bluesmen were doing their thing after hours. Someone was talking about Sonny Landreth, and I asked the one question you don’t want to ask a musician in LaFayette or maybe anywhere else in Louisiana:”Who’s Sonny Landreth?”

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I received an education in short order. He’s only the baddest slide player in the world, they told me, the Hendrix of bottleneck, former right-hand man of Zydeco superstar Clifton Chenier and official Native Stepson of this proud part of the world. His lyrics tell the story of these people, and the moan of his slide guitar embodies all the mystery and mojo that’s conjured up when you hear the word Bayou.

Whenever you hear guitar players talk about Sonny, it’s always in hushed tones and superlatives. He’s even Eric Clapton’s favorite guitarist. So… what’s the huge deal? Is it how he invented a way of opening up the fretboard to slide guitar by fretting notes behind the bottleneck, creating chords and runs that live well outside the usual open tunings? Is it his tone, which seems to combine the perfect balance of Stratocaster sting and Dumble creaminess? Is it the fact that he can play rhythm like a Cajun accordionist and wail out leads that sound like Bessie Smith at 3 A.M. on a Friday night?

All of the above. Like everybody else, I can’t shut up about Sonny Landreth.

I recently decided to get over my fear of slide guitar playing, which began when I tried to nail Ry Cooder’s song ‘Feelin’ Bad Blues’ at the age of 16. In retrospect, I actually did OK, but for some reason I never really got up the nerve to embrace slide as a serious undertaking. 2 things changed that: one was when I decided to put a slide solo on the ‘Trash Can Song’ from my album, and felt like it was one of the coolest things I’d ever recorded. The other was when Eric Dozier and I began the Moanin’ Sons project, which needs slide guitar like biscuits need gravy.

I did a little research online to see if Sonny had ever given any advice on the subject, and sure enough, Guitar Player magazine had done a whole series with him geared towards people in just my position. But the news wasn’t good. He said you have to learn to mute each string with each finger of your picking hand until it sounds as seamless as someone playing scales on a piano, lifting a finger off as the next one goes down… but inversely, because you’re plucking instead of pressing. It does make sense, because your fret-hand string muting, which is kind of what separates the men from the boys on guitar and takes 10 years to learn, is suddenly out the window the moment you put a glass tube across all 6 strings. Brutal! But there it is. I’m trying, Sonny. I’m trying.

The good news is that my online search wandered into his current touring schedule, and he was playing here in Portland that night, in a tiny venue that was almost sold out. So I ran out of the house and drove the way I learned to do in Mexico, and got there just in time to be the last guy they let in. It was meant to be, of course. What better way for a slide newbie to get initiated than to have your face melted off by 2 hours-plus of Mr. Landreth’s Strat/Dumble onslaught, all at a distance from which you can measure his string gauge?

Between that and catching Warren Haynes a few days later with Gov’t Mule, I had enough inspiration to walk around the house for a month, playing muting patterns with my right hand while making coffee and breakfast with my left. I figured once I got the inverse piano-action trick down, I could worry about little things like slide intonation and re-learning the whole fretboard in three different open tunings.

So Sonny, if you’re out there… and I know you are… I am officially ready for my lesson. I will come to you. Just send me an email and name your price.

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