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A Waltz for Rebecca - Doug Young - Remembering Al Petteway

I was stunned to hear the sad news that Al Petteway passed away in Sept, 2023 after an illness. Al has long been a major influence on my guitar playing and taste in music, and I got to know his music fairly well, partly due to many opportunities to interact with Al over the years. I always considered Al to be one of the quintessential composers for fingerstyle guitar. His genius was that he wrote beautiful and catchy songs that lay perfectly on the guitar. With Al's music, every note seems to be exactly where it should be, both for the listener and the player. He took full advantage of the beauty of the guitar to make the tunes come alive. Some music written for guitar can be harder than it sounds, requiring a high amount of effort to play musically. Al's compositions, on the other hand, just fall naturally under your fingers and sound better than you expect with less effort than you would think. Not that Al's tunes are necessarily "easy", it's just that they are so well suited for the guitar that nothing seems forced. This can be challenging for a composer to achieve, and Al did it over and over. A Waltz for Rebecca is a good example, one of my earliest favorite tunes of Al's - and a favorite of many guitarists. The tune starts in Am, in DADGAD tuning, and leverages the tuning's strengths to create a harp-like melodic theme. On this video, I'm playing A Waltz for Rebecca on a guitar I purchased from Al just a few years ago. Al, of course, was a connoisseur of guitars. His years of working with Dream Guitars gave him access to some of the best instruments available, giving him a chance to play and record more fine guitars than most people get to experience. At some point he started searching for some fabled pre-war Martins. He found and acquired two, a 1926 OOO-18, and a 1931 O-28. There is a Dream Guitars webcast concert that you can find on You Tube on which Al plays both guitars (   • AL PETTEWAY LIVE FROM DREAM GUITARS M...  ). Al decided to let both of those guitars go at a point when he needed some funds. Our mutual friend, Steve Baughman, bought the O-28, and I purchased the OOO-18. With guitars like this (nearly 100 years old as I write this), we're all just custodians, and I told Al I'd happily sell it back to him if he got to the point that he was ready to have it back. Sadly, that was not to be. I've been playing the guitar daily since learning of Al's passing, trying to appreciate the residual connection with Al. So I hope this performance, one of my favorite tunes written by Al, played on a guitar Al owned and played himself, serves as a bit of a tribute to Al, and a thanks for his contribution to music and guitarists everywhere.