“BROWN GATTON” is a song Josh Smith recorded in 2017 for his album Still, which leaned on the jazzier side of things. As the title suggests, the tune is essentially his expression of “James Brown meets Danny Gatton.” Singer and bandleader James Brown is, of course, the Godfather of Soul, and Danny Gatton, for those who may be unfamiliar, was one of the greatest all-around guitarists of all time.
00:00All right, Josh Smith back again. This month we're gonna start talking about my song Brown Gatton.
00:09This tune is from my album Still, which was a jazzier album I did, and the title should tell
00:15you a few things about this tune. It's basically James Brown meets Danny Gatton. That's at least
00:21what I was thinking when I wrote it. So it's at its heart a James Brown shuffle, like, you know.
00:30But mixed with Danny Gatton hybrid picking and ideas, and of course some interesting twists
00:37and turns. So the phrase of the song, the melody, the head of the song, has a two-beat bar every
00:44third bar. So it goes like this. One, two, three.
00:51So, what's happening there is . . . One, two, three, four. . . . One, two. . . . So it's turning itself around with a two-beat bar after every third bar of the melody.
00:58This leads to some cool twists and turns, especially when you go through the change, because then the second time we do it,
01:05we modulate to C. So we go . . . .
01:12. . .
01:19. .
01:33. . . .
01:58So that adds a lot of kind of forward motion to the tune. When we hit those two-beat bars, the audience kind of feels something, because something different than the ordinary is happening.
02:11But it doesn't feel out of place, because it's still in the same time signature. You're just dropping two beats and starting a phrase in a weird spot, as far as what the ear is used to.
02:21And then when we get into the solo later, that makes for really great, cool phrasing things, because you can have licks that cross the bar in a different way than you're used to, and resolve in a weirder spot, and I love that.
02:34And that was kind of the Danny Gatton twist on the James Brown thing. Then we get to the bridge of the song, which goes to the four-chord, and we're full-on James Brown here, where I'm playing straight eighth notes.
02:45So we're basically chromatically moving around the four-chord.
03:05. . . .
03:19With those stabs on the five-chord, and then we're into the solo. So that's the meat and the potatoes of this tune, Brown Gatt.
