The Day I Found Out I’d Been Playing Music Wrong for Thirty Years
My name is Chris Sharp. I’m a rhythm guitar player and I’ve done it for a living for about thirty five years. I played on the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? and won a Grammy for it in 2002. I’ve gotten to play with Willie Nelson, Earl Scruggs, John Hartford, and a lot of other people whose records I grew up on. My grandfather played fiddle with Benny Martin back in the fifties, before I was born.
I’m telling you that so you know I was not a beginner when this happened. I’d been around great players my whole life. I should have already understood the thing I’m about to describe. I didn’t. I was in my fifties before I worked it out, and I worked it out by accident, sitting on my couch.
It started with a movie I’d already seen
I took a job at IBM in 2014 and settled into corporate life. I wasn’t gigging anymore. I’d practice a little, watch some videos, teach a couple of students online once a week. The music was still in there. It had just gone quiet.
In 2019 my family bought a house in Cary, North Carolina. My favorite thing about it was the sidewalks. I’m lazy about driving, but if I can walk out the front door and just go, I’ll do it every day. So I did. I’d read that walking in the right heart rate zone burns off cortisol and brings your anxiety down, and it turned out to be true. It also gave me time to think and to listen to music and to let things settle.
A few months after we moved in, a friend came over and we put on the movie Ray. I owned it. I’d seen it several times. But watching it that day made me want to go back and listen to the actual music, closer than I ever had. I can’t explain it better than that. Something was going on that I needed to understand.
A while later I found a clip on YouTube of Ray playing a song called “A Tear Fell,” live in France. And it was the first time in my life I’d really thought about the fact that Ray Charles was blind.
Ray was blind. That meant he couldn’t look up after he played something good and check the room for a reaction. He didn’t have that option, so he never built the habit. He just stayed in the music.
There was something else, too. He made the same little sound whether he’d played something he liked, or Billy Preston had, or the backup singers had. He wasn’t keeping track of who did what. He wasn’t keeping track of anything.
That’s when the first domino fell. I was watching him and it landed on me all at once. No ego. There’s no ego there. And right behind that one came another. That’s just like Benny.
Benny Martin, and what I’d been looking at for twenty years
Benny Martin was one of the great bluegrass fiddle players. He’d played with Flatt and Scruggs. He and my grandfather had run around Nashville together. I knew Benny near the end of his life, when he was old and mostly on his own, and somehow I ended up being one of his friends. I drove him to the last show he ever played, in Durham, and I got to back him up on guitar.
When Benny played, the same thing happened that I was now watching Ray Charles do. The music just ran through him. He wasn’t performing it and he wasn’t steering it. He was more like a pipe with water moving through it. No resistance. Nothing in the way.
I had seen that twenty years before I ever sat down to watch Ray. I just never had words for it. The words showed up that day on the couch, and once they did I couldn’t stop seeing the thing everywhere.
That was also the first time I ever really saw music. I mean saw it. Music isn’t made of light, so how would you see it? The same way you see wind. You can’t see wind on its own. You see it by what it does to the things it touches. Think of a willow tree. The branches are thin and loose and there are a lot of them. In a storm you can see the wind just fine, by watching the tree. Music works the same way. If the player has gotten out of the way, you can watch the music move them instead. Pull up Ray Charles singing the National Anthem near the end of his life and watch the last minute with the sound off. You’ll see it.
There’s a word in Zen for what happened to me that day. Satori. I like the word because it points at a moment when something real lands in you all at once, in your body, not as an idea you talked yourself into. It’s like standing at an overlook and then noticing, a little while later, that you’ve been standing there in plain awe without a thought in your head. That was the kind of moment it was. I didn’t walk away from it with a new lick. I walked away understanding one thing I hadn’t understood before. The ego was never supposed to be in the music.
Then I tried to play along with him, and I couldn’t
I decided I wanted to play along with Ray’s records. Now, I’d spent my life playing folk, country, and bluegrass. This was not my music and I didn’t really know the style. But the style stopped being the problem almost right away, because I hit a stranger one. Every time I tried to play along, even on simple songs, I was out of time with him.
That made no sense to me. I’d practiced with a metronome for years. And Ray’s timing wasn’t loose. Ray’s timing was as good as it gets. So why couldn’t I lock in with him?
My first idea was to memorize my way through it. Learn each song, learn where it sped up and where it pulled back, and just play the map. That fell apart fast. It was slow and it didn’t work. Weeks went by and I wasn’t any closer. The only thing that kept me going was stubbornness. I don’t like not understanding something about my own playing that I feel like I ought to understand.
Then one day I was just sitting there turning it over, and it hit me.
I was expecting Ray to play in my version of perfect time. I was holding him up against the metronome in my head and waiting on him to match it. What I should have been doing was paying attention to where he actually played, with no expectation at all, and then answering what he did instead of what I’d decided he ought to do.
I picked up the guitar, put on a song with easy chords, and quit trying to lead him. I listened, and I followed. The difference was immediate. I could play with him.
This had happened to me before. O Brother is the clearest case, my playing bending to fit the people around me. It had happened other times too. But every other time, I didn’t know what it meant. This time I did.
What it meant was that I’d had the job wrong
What it meant was that I’d been policing people for years. Forcing my will on them. Trying to make everyone around me play what I had decided was correct, metronomic time. And the thing I should have been doing the whole time, the actual job, was listen.
After I could play along with Ray, I started pulling up other bands on YouTube. Bands that had always sounded off to me. Bands that had been hard to play with. They weren’t hard anymore. They were just bands. If I listened, I could fit right into what they were doing. I figured out that the metronome is a guide but it isn’t the truth. It’s just one set of points. Other musicians give you a different set of points. The skill was taking my rhythm and lifting it off one set and onto the other. As long as I listened with no expectation and answered what I actually heard, timing stopped being a problem.
So I started going to jam sessions. I want to be honest about how backward I’d had this. For years I’d avoided jam sessions, and I’d told younger players to avoid them too, because I thought playing alongside people who didn’t keep strict time would hurt their playing. That’s how far off I was.
Once I started going, the small realizations kept coming. The biggest one was simple. Nobody is trying to make a mistake. Everybody at that jam wants to play in time and wants to play well. If a person can tap their foot, if a person can hear when a singer goes flat, then they are not a bad musician. They’ve got an attention problem, or they just haven’t put in the hours yet to build the muscle memory. Almost anybody could become a good player. Nobody out there is trying to be a bad one.
That was a humbling thing to land on. It made me regret all the years I’d spent using my guitar to yell at people for disagreeing with my sense of time.
The best compliment I’ve ever gotten
So at jam sessions I started doing something different. If somebody began drifting out of time, or out of what I thought was time, I’d just back off. I’d drop the rhythm, tinker around on a few bass notes, and wait. I’d wait until I heard them find their own footing. The second they steadied, I’d come back in underneath them, quiet, just a kind of supporting shell for them to keep playing inside of. When you do that, players get more confident. They settle deeper into the groove. Their timing gets better right there while it’s happening.
Done right, nobody even knows you did anything.
One night at a jam session at IBMA there was a banjo player working through Scruggs-style tunes and a fiddler playing fiddle tunes. Both of them tended to rush and drag, and they didn’t do it at the same time as each other. So when the banjo player took the lead, I put all my attention on getting with him, and once he steadied I’d hold him there. Then the fiddler would come in and I’d start the whole thing over for her.
After four or five songs, those two men started congratulating each other on how well they were playing together.
Neither of them said a word to me. Neither of them knew I’d done a thing. And that made me happy, because for me there’s no higher prize than holding people up without them ever knowing it happened. No mess, no fuss, just rhythm. That’s where the gold is.
Zen and Taoism and the other non-dual ways of thinking come the closest to describing what I’m trying to get at here, so I’ll end with one more small thing. I was walking up the road one day, and I realized I was walking up the road.
That’s how to play music.
Chris Sharp is a Grammy-winning rhythm guitarist whose credits include the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. He is writing a memoir called Embracing the Paradox*, about the life of a journeyman rhythm guitar player. This essay is adapted from a chapter of that book.*