Gospel Guitar of Rev Gary Davis [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

Another classic from Ernie Hawkins on Rev. Gary Davis.

Not everyone knows the music of Gary Davis, but if you are a fan of the Rev. Gary Davis, or if you are just a fan of the blues and would love to learn some very unique songs and fingerstyle play, this is a terrific opportunity to spend many hours with a master player and teacher.

Hawkins is a gifted teacher who is an expert on the music of Rev. Gary Davis, including many of the lesser known songs. This collection has some wonderful songs not normally known by many; the early religious songs of Gary Davis.

Hawkins is a low key, patient teacher, who like all skilled teachers, is able to anticipate where his student will struggle. For this reason, he will slow down at certain points, repeat himself, and bring the student along with great skill.

For the intermediate guitarist, or for the high drive late beginner, this DVD set equals months of great lessons at an incredible value. Ernie Hawkins also taught the terrific C-A-G-E-D series, helping the student learn the fret board, which is here at Amazon.

This is a very generous teaching, and this will provide the student with many months of "private lessons" which would be impossible to afford, should you be able to land one of the country's top teachers for private lessons.

Plan to spend an hour a week or more with the DVD, using the Pause button often, and learn these terrific songs.

Primarly for the Intermediate guitarist (or early Advanced), someone who is late in the Beginner stage who has the drive to push forward, will benefit greatly from Hawkins' teaching.

See Ernie Hawkins' other DVDs for more excellent acoustic blues lessons.

Between his slow, methodical teaching, his easy going personality, terrific selection of songs, and skilled camera work, you are purchasing months of "personal" lessons with one of our country's best teachers of acoustic guitar.

This is my first experience with Ernie Hawkins guitar instruction and I am very impressed on a number of levels. The clips of The Rev are truly inspirational and the respect (almost reverence) of Ernie for his teacher is inspirational as well. The connection of the teacher, in this case Hawkins, to the music is a powerful component to this DVD set. The care and pace of repeatedly going over every musical detail was, for me, very similar to a personal lesson and enabled me to learn and play while "watching and pausing" the video without the necessity of going back to earlier sections again and again. Ernie, obviously, knows this music extremely well and is a Master of this style. Technically, the DVD is outstanding with excellent sound and video. It appears (not sure) that Ernie does the instruction on Rev. Davis' personal guitar! Great stuff.

Ernie Hawkins does great service to his own memory and reverence for Davis and his own learning from him in almost a tribute instruction DVD of the Reverend's gospel music.His gospel music is great music and one doesn't have to be religious to be able to derive much listening pleasure from them and /or to learn superb finger picking possibilities from Hawkin's offering. One can either learn the tunes or some of them as is ( but most are pretty difficult)or simply become aware of some new ideas, runs, riffs or whatever to incorporate into uyour pieces of like keys. These ideas become part of one's playing arsenal - as Stefan Grossman might say - of learning and playing other tunes. I've often thought that if Davis played with three or four fingers instead of just the index and thumb his greatness would even be more so.