Lena Hughes — Queen of the Flat Top Guitar

Tompkins Square has a consistent reputation for excellent archival releases, with their recent boxset “Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard: Hard Time, Good Time & End TIme Music, 1923-1936” setting the standard incredibly high. This album (I’m reviewing a digital copy) reissues an “impossibly rare” LP from the early 1960s, which is the sole entry in Lena Hughes’ discography. Described by Tompkins Square as an “amateur”, Hughes was born in Missouri, in 1904. She was a regular performer at fiddler conventions and folk festivals, on the banjo, fiddle and guitar; and had a wealth of rare knowledge regarding parlour pieces and their specialised tunings. The accompanying spiel from Tompkins Square divides her repertoire roughly in half: “finger-picked numbers adapted from fiddle tunes and recast parlor guitar pieces gleaned from popular sentimental songs, hymns, and 19th century airs”.

The album contains eleven tracks of unaccompanied guitar pieces, performed on the flat top guitar - this was an intriguing mystery for me initially, but it turns out that a flat-top guitar is the common garden variety, as distinct from the arched body type favoured by jazz players. These eleven pieces are uniformly melodic and tuneful, as you might expect; the only one I recognise being “What A Friend We Have In Jesus”. To cut to the quick, the virtue of Hughes’ playing is also the reason why my ears can’t get on with it: it’s unashamedly pretty. I don’t have a problem with prettiness or beauty per se, but I don’t really get on with these things when its a guitar evoking them. Its just a personal thing - I have similar grievances with some of the work of John Fahey or James Blackshaw. So, having confessed this, its fair to say that Lena Hughes’ guitar-playing is indeed some of the prettiest I’ve ever heard. Technically, she appears to use a lot of open tunings; which gives her playing a resonant, effortless beauty. There’s truly an elegant simplicity at work, here. To quote something my father regularly says regarding football teams, she has “just enough technique”: whilst the playing is undoubtedly complex at times, there’s no sense of it being a technical workout, there’s no flashiness - her technical ability is entirely devoted to the beauty and melody of the piece.

Given the recent revival of interest in finger-picking, this is a timely reissue. As I said above, its not something that will reside in my stereo for any great length of time; but for those interested in (for example) Fahey’s more “traditional” work, it might. There’s an “innocence” and warmth to Hughes’ playing, which sparkles out of the speakers; giving us eleven tracks of really very beautiful guitar pieces. They do run the danger of sounding somewhat “chocolate box”, which is essentially my issue with “Queen of the Flat Top Guitar”; but more sympathetic listeners will find an effortlessly charming album.