The Carter Family Collection

Rating:
Summary: A must for playing Carter Family songs
Review: Fred Sokolow's description of Maybelle Carter's "scratch" style and slide guitar techniques are simply written and easy to follow. The combination of having the lyrics, standard notation and guitar tablature is fantanstic! A beginner can easily get into most of these songs, if you can get beyond re-tuning. But it would probably take a more advanced player to appreciate the nuances of her playing. I also play banjo and have used the standard notation to compose banjo solos. No matter what your level of guitar, if you love the Carter Family songs, you'll love this book!

Rating:
Summary: Good songs, not easy playing
Review: While the songs here are a great collection, what is not clear until you purchase the book is that the Carter's enjoyed playing the C chord shape, but not in the key of C. Therefore, most of the songs require non-standard tuning of your guitar - usually tuning DOWN frets (like from E to E flat) so even a capo doesn't help. Who wants to constantly be changing the tuning of all the strings just because you'd like to play one song?