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blues song. Anyway, I learned it in about a week and I really fell for the guitar rather than the boy,

but we did perform it.

BiTS: I have to admit that I have never seen you play. I know that you've been over here on a
couple of occasions as the Country Blues Duo. Do you play with picks or do you use your fingers, or
what?
The Country Blues Duo
EH: I use my fingers.
I like to use my

fingers and touch the
guitar. The finger
picks, I will use them
if I break a nail and
it's an emergency, but
I find that I'm much

closer to the guitar,
it's a lot more part of
me if I don't have the
finger picks. However,
on the new album, I
played a song on my

12-string, I like to
have just a thumb pick
because the way I play
I play a bass-line with
my thumb and then I

pick out the notes
with my first two fingers. On the 12-string I find it hard to get a nice bass sound with just my
thumb, so I use the thumb pick just for that.

BiTS: I think that's the reason why Big Joe Williams took one of the pairs off at the bottom of the
guitar. He only had one single bass string.

EH: That's probably true, yes. I didn't think of that, but it does have a nice ringing tone using one
thumb pick. I have to tape the thumb pick up because otherwise whenever I use a thumb pick, it just

gets wrapped around and I get stuck [chuckles]. Wrapped around the string.

BiTS: Reverend Gary Davis used to wear his thumb pick right up on the knuckle of this thumb.

EH: Yes, I push really far up and tape the little opening. If you don't push it up far enough, it could
fall off in the middle. I think using finger picks just adds another level of technical things that could
go wrong for me [chuckling].

BiTS: I'm a guitar player myself and I never ever got used to playing with finger picks because it

feels like playing with a pair of gloves on.

EH: Yes, it's like you have some stilts in between you and the guitar, plus I learned from my dad
and he doesn't use them either. They do make the guitar louder. My friend Eleanor Ellis uses picks
and she sounds fantastic, but women often use them because it makes them louder with a smaller
hand as we have, but I found a way to kind of do a little bit of a pop when I play with my thumb and
kind of bring some, what do you call it?

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