Talk:Arnold Shultz

Untitled
The last intact version doesn't seem substantial enough to me to even count as a copyvio... 63.170.80.2 (talk) 23:10, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
 * My apologies, I only saw the first paragraph from the diff. Could that be reinstated as a non-copyvio (stub)? 63.170.80.2 (talk) 23:12, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
 * There is a new version of the article in place. There's plenty of room for improvement, though. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 03:05, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

From Robert Cantwell's book Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound (1984), on pages 30-32 it says the following:

"Me and him" Monroe recalls, alluding to Arnold Shultz, a black fiddler and guitar player who worked for a time in Rosine, "played for a dance there one night and he played the fiddle and we started at sundown and the next morning at daylight we was still playing music - all night long. And, of course, that automatically made you be dancing on Sunday..."

"Still more telling, perhaps, is the young Monroe's association with Arnold Shultz, an important Kentucky tradition bearer whose influence reached not only Monroe but Ike Everly - the Everly Brother's father - Mose Rager, and, through Rager, Merle Travis. Folklorist William Lightfoot has discovered in interviews some of the important details of Shultz's otherwise obscure life: that he was born in 1886 in Ohio County, Kentucky, the son of a man who had been born into slavery and who had taken his name from his owner, a Revolutionary War soldier who had moved to Ohio County before the turn of the eighteenth century. Shultz's whole family played stringed instruments and toured Ohio County as a family band; his cousin remembers him playing "Waggoner" and "Old Hen Cackle" on the fiddle. His most important contribution was then known as "thumb-style" guitar, the instrument which Shultz took up first in 1900, taking lessons from his uncle. From this style grew the regional guitar-picking style now most associated with Merle Travis and Chet Atkins, characterized by a syncopated melody, a steady, damped bass heavily accented, walking bass runs, melodic ornaments, a swinging or bouncing tempo, and, in contrast to other country styles, sophisticated chording up the neck of the guitar, with all the strings stopped. In other words, the guitar style which Arnold Shultz apparently introduced into central Kentucky had all the earmarks of jazz, if it was not actually a jazz style. Shultz died in 1931, leaving behind him a number of legends: that he had played showboats on the Green River, that he had played with Louis Armstrong, that he had been poisoned at the end by a jealous white musician."

"It was not until rather late in his career, under the influence of the new self-consciousness aroused by the folk revival, that Bill Monroe explicitly acknowledged the black influence upon his music and named the man to whom that influence could be attributed. Yet throughout his career Monroe has shown an interest in and an admiration for the black musician far more typical of country musicians than is generally acknowledged or even understood. The popular tent show which Monroe ran in the early forties included the Opry's black harmonica player, DeFord Bailey, with whom Monroe developed a close friendship, taking it upon himself to find lodgings for Bailey in the many southern towns in which blacks were not offered hospitality."

A quote from Bill Monroe about Arnold Shultz on page 32: "I used to listen to him talk and he would tell us about the contests that he had been in and how tough they was... I admired him that much that I never forgot alot of the things that he would say. There's things in my music, you know, that come from Arnold Shultz - runs that I use alot in my music, I don't say that I make them the same way that he could make them 'cause he was powerful with it. In following a fiddle piece or a breakdown, he used a pick and he could just run from one chord to another the prettiest you've ever heard. There's no guitar picker today that could do that... I believe it was the next day about ten o'clock there was a passing train come down through and stopped at Rosine and I believe he caught that train and went back home and that was about the last time I ever saw him. I believe if there's ever an old gentleman that passed away and is resting in peace, it was Arnold Shultz - I really believe that."

"Monroe asserts that had circumstances not led him to the mandolin he would have become a blues guitar player, "the way Arnold Shultz played it, with a straight pick.""

Geneisner (talk) 17:51, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Spelling of surname
Why is his surname spelled two different ways in this article? That doesn't seem very encyclopedic. 173.89.236.187 (talk) 19:56, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Roots Music History I
— Assignment last updated by Jakesmithmusic (talk) 00:23, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

I am an ETSU student editing this article for educational purposes. I made some edits to both the biography and influence paragraphs. I also added the legacy paragraph. Here are my sources:

WILLIAM E. LIGHTFOOT. (2015). A Regional Musical Style: The Legacy of Arnold Shultz. In Sense Of Place (pp. 120-). The University Press of Kentucky.

Ewing, T. (2018). Bill Monroe : the life and music of the Blue Grass man. University of Illinois Press.

"The Arnold Shultz Fund". The IBMA Foundation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by JoeHensonMando (talk • contribs) 16:48, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Photo misspelling
The photo spells his last name incorrectly. All is mind (talk) 04:09, 14 March 2024 (UTC)