Whoever said, “Those who can’t do, teach” has never heard David Hamburger.
Among his two dozen instructional books and videos, Beginning Blues Guitar, awarded Best New Educational Book or Video at NAMM in 1994, boasts more than 100,000 in sales. In addition to supplying music for advertising and TV, the 60-year-old has recorded with Freedy Johnston, toured with Joan Baez, and played Dobro on Bruce Springsteen’s remake of “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” featuring Pete Seeger.
Following his 2022 solo album Beautiful Scar, the singer, songwriter, and acoustic fingerstylist released the instrumental Parisian Blues last year.
The Boston-area native moved to Brooklyn after college, and now makes Austin his home.
When did you take up guitar?
When I was 12, I took lessons from Lucille Magliozzi, a bluegrass player. I was learning folk guitar while my friends were learning Van Halen and Jimmy Page. In high school, a teacher taught me “Anji” by Davy Graham; at Wesleyan University I studied jazz, which taught me about improvising and knowing the instrument. But most of what I learned was from records or other people. An upperclassman named Steadman Hinckley played slide guitar. So I’d take classical guitar every Thursday and then play slide with Steadman in the stairwell – Duane Allman licks and open tunings.
I was also teaching at the National Guitar Workshop in New Milford, and whenever a blues guitarist came in, I’d host. The first year we had Gatemouth Brown, and we had Duke Robillard twice. I started taking notes because I wanted to remember what he was showing us, like the Freddie Green comping stuff. So the students said, “Can we get those notes?” I also took a half-dozen lessons from Emily Remler. I tried to figure out how to combine the things that I liked.
Who are your fingerpicking influences?
My earliest influences were Mississippi John Hurt and folk-revival guys – Stefan Grossman, Roy Book Binder, Dave Van Ronk, Jorma Kaukonen, Ry Cooder, and Guy Van Duser. I had a jazz CD, Commodore Piano Anthology, that was very influential, as well as House Of Blues’ Essential Blues Piano.
Beyond the original guitar influences, when it comes to solo instrumental guitar, I’m thinking more about pianists Jelly Roll Morton or James Booker. Ray Bryant’s solo piano records are like a bebop guy who still had a two-handed conception of how to play blues, infiltrating it with jazz harmonies.
What made you decide to do an instrumental album?
The mission was to groove and have that underpinning, and it also had to have improvisation. What I always wanted to do was improvise while playing solo guitar. There’s not a lot out there on how to do it. Everybody will teach you how to play arrangements of tunes, so fingerstyle blues is taught like a repertoire, almost like classical music – not playing a tune and soloing, like piano players do. There was also a hugely influential book called The Art Of Ragtime Guitar, by Richard Saslow, which had a flexi-disc and covered all kinds of cool chords and licks. I couldn’t sit down and play Robert Johnson or Gary Davis songs note for note, but eventually I figured out my own thing that drew from those second-generation sources. I’ll have an arrangement, but it’s not all worked out. I want there to be places where I can improvise and take solos.
Some of the instrumental tunes were written for students, like the title cut, which was a TrueFire lesson that I extended and developed. A few originals were written for my “Fingerstyle Five” Fretboard Confidential online membership. “Mueslissippi Ibis” is a repackaging of “Mississippi Blues” by Willie Brown.
My producer, Bret Boyer, was interested in the kind of stuff I play around the house, and I don’t really listen to that much blues anymore. I put on jazz records because that’s what speaks to me. My grandfather loved Broadway tunes, and my dad studied classical piano. The standards, like “After You’ve Gone,” are things I heard him play.
Which guitar did you play on the album?
I used the ’56 Martin 00-18 I got in the late ’90s. The first record I ever made was at a studio in Brooklyn, and the engineer had a 1930s OM-28 he let me use. Afterward, I started looking for a good acoustic and found the 00-18 at Mandolin Brothers.
Which guitar do you use on gigs?
My main performing guitar is a Collings OO2H that I bought at the factory in Austin in 2001. I discovered that I like short-scale (247/8″) guitars. It’s got a K&K piezo pickup in the saddle and a Fishman Rare Earth pickup in the sound-hole. It’s wired in stereo and goes into a dual-channel Red Eye analog DI. Dick Dubois in Austin did the work on it. I also have Empress parametric EQ and a TC Electronic tuner.
With the internet, I can just teach fingerstyle blues guitar. I don’t have to teach Led Zeppelin or Gary Davis or anything I don’t want to. – Dan Forte
This article originally appeared in VG’s March 2025 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
