TRIBUTE FROM DYLAN
Bruce Langhorne, an intuitive guitarist who played a crucial role in the transition from folk music to folk-rock, notably through his work with Bob Dylan, died on Friday at his home in Venice, California. He was 78. A close friend, Cynthia Riddle, said the cause was kidney failure.
From his pealing lead guitar on Maggie’s Farm to his liquid electric guitar lines on Love Minus Zero/no Limit and She Belongs to Me, Langhorne was best known for his playing on Dylan’s landmark 1965 album, Bringing It All Back Home. He also contributed hypnotic countermelodies to tracks like Mr Tambourine Man and It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.
Bringing It All Back Home proved a harbinger of Sixties folk-rock. Langhorne’s empathetic accompaniment, always stressing feeling over flash, animated all 11 of the album’s tracks.
In his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Dylan said of Langhorne, “If you had Bruce playing with you, that’s all you would need to do just about anything.”
Dylan credited Langhorne with inspiring Mr Tambourine Man, recalling in 1985 that the song came to him after seeing Langhorne arrive for a 1964 recording session with an oversize Turkish drum arrayed with bells. (“In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you,” Dylan sang.)
Langhorne had not set out to become a guitar player. A student of the violin, he had to forgo a career in classical music after losing two fingers and most of the thumb on his right hand in an accident involving homemadefireworkswhenhe was 12. He took up the guitar at 17, developing a unique calland-response approach to the instrument.
“Since I have fingers missing, some styles of guitar playing were forever unreachable for me,” he told an interviewer. “I really needed someone who had a thread going to really do my job,” he continued. “Because then they could generate a couple of lines of polyphony, or a rhythmic structure, and then I could enhance that.”
Besides his work with Dylan – which also included the track Corinna, Corinna on the 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan – Langhorne played electric guitar on such influential folk-rock albums as Joan Baez’s Farewell, Angelina,.
Langhorne recorded with a wide variety of musicians, including South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji and American folk singer Odetta. He and Odetta performed 28 Augus 1963, at the March on Washington, just before the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Langhorne was born in Tallahassee, Florida. Langhorne’s parents separated when he was four. His mother took him to East Harlem in New York. He attended the private Horace Mann School in the Bronx but was expelled after he was accused of being involved with street gangs.
His first professional work came with folk singer Brother John Sellers, who at the time was master of ceremonies at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village.
Langhorne was soon backing others at Gerde’s and was invited to play on recordings like Carolyn Hester’s 1961 selftitled album, which featured Dylan on harmonica.
Langhorne also became friends with a fellow guitarist, Sandy Bull, with whom he shared an enthusiasm for African and Middle Eastern music, as well as for the reverb-steeped guitar of Roebuck Staples, the patriarch of the family gospel group the Staple Singers. Bull lent Langhorne the Fender Twin Reverb amplifier into which he plugged his acoustic 1920 model Martin guitar to create the electrifying sounds that helped give birth to folk-rock.
In 1971, actor Peter Fonda, to whom Langhorne was introduced by Masekela, invited him to compose the music for his movie The Hired Hand. The austere soundtrack that featured banjo, fiddle and acoustic guitar. He later worked with director Jonathan Demme on music for movies like Fighting Mad (1976), which starred Fonda, and played on Dylan’s soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), whose cast included Dylan.
Not suited to the pace of Hollywood, to which he relocated from New York in the late 1960s, Langhorne moved to Hawaii in 1980 to farm macadamia nuts. He moved to Los Angeles in 1985 and, in 1992, learned that he had Type 2 diabetes. His diagnosis inspired him to create Brother Brubru’s Hot Sauce, an organic, low-sodium salsa.
Langhorne gave up the guitar in 2006 after having a stroke. He played percussion and keyboards on his first and only solo album, Tambourine Man, featuring Caribbean-style music, which was released in 2011.
He is survived by his wife of 29 years, Janet Bachelor.
Among the many performers with whom he worked over the years, Langhorne spoke with particular relish about his collaborations with Dylan.
“The connection I had with Bobby was telepathic, and when I use that word, I mean it,” he said in a 2007 interview. “Between the two of us, the communication was always very strong.” ©New York Times 2017 Distributed by NYT Syndication Service