Electric Fan and Guitar in F Major 7

A story about fingers and tension

Dad and I playing at the former Coffee Scene in Seven Lakes, North Carolina, back in 2005. I miss you, Dad. Thanks for teaching me to play the guitar.

You can hear me reading this story by clicking the “play” button – sound effects included!

Hello friends,

Here’s a story about me learning to play the F chord. There was a long time in my life where I was embarrassed if I wasn’t good at something right away. It was as though I didn’t understand the concept of learning – new thing, practice, keep going, mess up, try again, practice, etc, days, weeks, years pass, and ta-da! I felt completely defeated if I couldn’t do something perfectly the very first time. I only shook this ridiculous expectation of myself about ten years ago. Now, I enjoy learning. I don’t think I should be perfect from the outset. What a relief!

I’ve also come to understand that some of the things that we invent as we’re learning something new become an integral part of our work. So, the way I first learned to play the F chord on the guitar and on the mandolin has meant that my songs have a particular sound. Even now that I can play those chords in the standard way, I prefer my quirky versions of the F chord. Listen to me read the story or read it for yourself below. Enjoy!

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Electric Fan and Guitar in F Major 7

When I was a kid, I tied some string I found in the buffet drawer at Mawmaw’s onto the frame of her heavy grey Westinghouse fan. I could feel the strings flying out from the fan and tickling my face. I could imagine them like the strings of a ghostly Celtic harp playing accompaniment to my childhood songs.

Really I wanted to sing with a guitar not just the fan in the hallway. I wanted a guitar like my dad had. But the steel guitar strings were so hard to push down on the fretboard. Too much tension. The pain in my fingers while trying to make chords was terrible and the F chord was the most terrible of all. Four strings to push down. Two strings to push down at the same time with my index finger. Never.

Then, one day a friend showed me how to make a different F chord. I only had to push down three strings instead of four. This simpler F chord had an eerie sound. It was dissonant. There was an E in that F. And it was the F chord I could play.¹ But secretly I was ashamed of it. I knew I played it because my hands weren’t strong enough to play the real F chord.

Eventually my hands grew stronger and I started playing the real F chord. It was like nothing. No pain. No big deal. Hey, I could play an F chord like everyone else.

Except one day I wrote a song with the real F chord and I thought, I know it’s the real F chord, but it’s just not right. It doesn’t make me feel the way my special F chord did, the easy one, the eerie one. There’s not enough tension here. The real F chord sounds too major, too smooth, too every day.

Back in the days of trying to get the hang of that F chord. Photo by John Copenhaver. Washington DC, 2005.

So, I played my old F chord and that was the answer. The dissonance was there. The tension was there. The sound was right for the mood of my melancholy song – a song about my Aunt Laurie raising seventeen children² in the Appalachian mountains, about the constant work, the laundry, the mending, the washing line, the apron strings. My strange old F chord sounded right with my voice singing Laurie’s story.

I wasn’t ashamed of my melancholy chord anymore. I chose that sound and it had chosen me, too, now. Those were the strings I wanted – they were the sound of that ghostly Celtic harp in Mawmaw’s fan with the strings blowing into the hallway tickling my face as I sang my childhood song.

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I hope that, if you’re learning something new, you’ll be really kind to yourself and celebrate the little steps you make each time you practice. Keep going! I made leather doll shoes for the first time today and they’re not perfect, but they’re a start and the next ones will be even better. Dolls are very understanding and they always seem to have a little sister who can wear shoes that are too small!

With kindness from your friend,

Jeni

Mawmaw Margie whose electric fan was one of my first accompanists.

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My articles for Modern Daily Knitting.

1. The first recording of me using this F chord in an original song is “Chicken Ridge” on the album Jewell Ridge Coal.

2. Before I wrote the song for Aunt Laura, I was told by my extended family that she’d had seventeen children. But when I consulted the Hylton Family archive, I realized that Laura and Pat were the parents of sixteen children. By then the song was written and recorded. Ah, storytelling – a fine example of how it’s different than non-fiction.

Aunt Laura in Clell, Virginia. Her husband Pat was the brother of my great-grandmother Narcie. Laura’s song needed my special F chord.