The Repertoire

Every class description at IGS named names. That was not decoration. The seminar's whole method rested on the idea that you learn this music from the people who made it — off the recordings, by ear — and that a class is a way of being shown how to listen, not a substitute for listening. This page gathers the players the syllabus kept returning to, and what each of them was in the syllabus for.

The Delta

Charley Patton

Charley Patton was the first name on the launch page in 1998 and stayed on every subsequent version of it. What the classes took from him was rhythm rather than repertoire: the percussive, unstable, whole-body feel of Delta playing, in which the guitar is a drum with pitches on it. Bob Brozman's "Rhythm in Your Riffs" was built partly on Patton, and the point being made was that the heavy quality students hear in this music comes from tone production in both hands rather than from any particular lick.

Robert Johnson and Bukka White

Robert Johnson appeared in the classes for a specific and slightly contrarian reason: his standard-tuning playing. The class advertised "hidden conceptual tricks of Robert Johnson's standard-tuning playing," which is a corrective to the assumption that Delta blues means open tunings and a bottleneck. Bukka White sat alongside him for the same purpose — the edge where Delta rhythm starts to become swing.

Ragtime and the East Coast

Blind Blake

Blind Blake is the reference point for the ragtime side of the syllabus and for the alternating-bass technique that underpins it. Woody Mann's "Syncopating The Dance" was largely built here: bringing out the top-line melody of a phrase while the thumb keeps the picking swinging, then improvising your own variations from inside the form rather than over the top of it.

Reverend Gary Davis

Gary Davis occupies a particular place in this story, since Woody Mann studied with him directly. Davis was the bridge between the gospel and ragtime traditions and the second-generation players who carried them forward, and his repertoire appeared in the "Different Styles — Common Sense" class as the clearest demonstration of the seminar's central claim: that apparently unrelated styles share a small set of underlying techniques.

John Cephas and the Piedmont style

Having a Piedmont player on staff gave students a live comparison rather than a described one. Piedmont picking — the East Coast, ragtime-inflected style with its regular alternating bass — sits at a real distance from Delta playing, and hearing both taught in the same week is the fastest way to understand what actually separates them.

The jazz edge

Lonnie Johnson

Lonnie Johnson is where the seminar's blues syllabus met its jazz one. Johnson's single-string melodic playing and harmonic vocabulary made him the natural subject when a class wanted to show how the blues opens onto early jazz, and he recurs in both of Woody Mann's classes. Big Bill Broonzy and Scrapper Blackwell served a similar function from different angles — Broonzy for the sheer breadth of what one player could hold, Blackwell for the taut, economical lines.

Bottleneck and the slide traditions

Blind Willie Johnson and Kokomo Arnold

The launch page named both explicitly as bottleneck sources. Blind Willie Johnson for gravity and vocal phrasing on the slide; Kokomo Arnold for speed and attack. Between them they define most of the expressive range the slide classes worked within.

The Hawaiian styles

This is the element that most clearly marked IGS out from other blues camps. The 1998 curriculum listed "the Hawaiian slide styles" beside the Delta and ragtime material — reflecting Bob Brozman's research into the global travels of the resonator guitar and the fact that lap-style playing and slack-key tunings are part of the same story as bottleneck blues rather than a separate curiosity. The tunings page covers the technical side of this.

Skip James

Skip James was a standing option on the requested-workshop list. His open E-minor playing is unlike anything else in the tradition, and it functioned in the syllabus as the demonstration that a tuning can generate a whole musical personality rather than merely a convenient set of open strings.

How the material was taught

Two principles ran through all of it. The first was learning by ear: the FAQ told students plainly that the best way to learn blues is by ear, which is why everyone was asked to bring a recorder. The second was the "jumping off point" idea — that understanding and playing past guitar styles is where your own music starts, not where it ends. Both are set out in the class descriptions.

For listening, the recordings themselves remain the syllabus. Discussion of sources, transcriptions and provenance continues in long-running communities such as Mudcat Café, and instructional editions of much of this repertoire are still published by Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop.