Henry Worrall, 1853-1902.
Creator of one of the most widely used instruction book for budding guitarists in the Victorian and Edwardian era.
Like many others back then, he pushed the use of small (parlour) guitars, and fingerpicking.
But unusually for that era, he also advocated for open tunings ; in particular Open G and Open D.
If you play the Delta blues (with or without a slide) - and you really should - you know them better as spanish and vestapol tuning.
That spanish as in his famous tune The Spanish Fandango and vestapol as in his even more famous tune The Siege of Sevastopol.
Fifty years after their release, every middle class young lady in Martin Henry Dawson’s Truro Nova Scotia hometown with a parlour guitar had to know how to play both - they were the Smoke On the Water and the House of The Rising Sun of their day.
So how did they end up fuelling the Delta Blues - surely an universe away culturally ?
Credit the economics of easy - cheap - acoustic guitar making.
It is hard and expensive to make a guitar that is loud and rings out easily over the whole musical range from bass - mids - to treble.
It has to be big, use a lot of materials, and paradoxically strongly yet lightly built : that second demand is like pushing a boulder up hill with a hand tied behind your back.
But parlour guitars are small (less material needed) and lightly framed (less skilled craft work) : they play best played lightly finger style and produce only a small amount of sound, but that is in the upper mid range where human adult hearing is most acute, so its more than good enough.
They were cheap - dirt cheap - even the very poor blacks in the Mississippi Delta flats could afford them.
That a free guidebook, based on Henry Worrall’s method and tunes, was thrown in free was a Godsend.
Add a bit of polished hambone for a slide and Bob is your Robert Johnson uncle....
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