Last Friday, the guitarist Bruce Langhorne passed away from complications—kidney failure—related to a sizable stroke he suffered in 2015. He was seventy-eight, and at his home, in Venice, California. For anyone who, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, frequented the smoky, caliginous folk clubs of Greenwich Village, the muscular, smiling Langhorne and his acoustic guitar were a recurring vision: he played with Buffy Sainte-Marie, Richard and Mimi Fariña, Peter La Farge, Joan Baez, Richie Havens, Harry Belafonte, and a bevy of other revivalists. He was present for several seismic cultural shifts—too many to feel incidental. At the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, he accompanied Odetta, who sang the traditional gospel song “I’m On My Way,” shortly before the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., faced the crowd. He backed Bob Dylan on “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” from 1963, and “Bringing It All Back Home,” from 1965. Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” is a whimsical, nearly disconsolate tribute to Langhorne; the song’s narrator describes losing his spiritual footing, only to implore a mysterious figure to guide him (“Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me / In the jingle-jangle mornin’ / I'll come followin’ you”). It is as tender a tribute to the alleviative power of friendship as I can imagine. (Langhorne once referred to his and Dylan’s particular synchronicity as “telepathic.”)
Langhorne was born in 1938, in Tallahassee, Florida. His mother was a librarian, and his father was a professor at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, which remains the only historically black public college in Florida. (It was previously known as State Normal and Industrial College for Colored Students.) Langhorne’s parents divorced when he was four, and he moved north with his mother, to Harlem. When he was twelve years old, he lost two fingers and most of a thumb while messing around with homemade fireworks. In an interview with the rock journalist Richie Unterberger, he admitted that this meant “some styles of guitar playing were forever unreachable for me.”
Listening to Langhorne’s music, it’s hard to imagine that he felt limited. He was open and expansive in his playing—sometimes he worked dutifully in the call-and-response style popularized by early gospel songs; other times his parts appear to have occurred to him instantaneously, as if he were tuned in to some celestial frequency, a pure signal. And he had an instinct for the unfussy amalgamation of disparate styles, itself an act of near-dissent in the folk era. In that interview with Unterberger, he speaks of a borderless art: “Someone asked me what I thought, and what I heard for the future. And I said, I hear a synthesis. Everyone’s going to take the aesthetics from all different types of music, and put ’em together.” His vision, of course, was prescient.
If you haven’t yet spent much time with Langhorne’s work—such is the fate of the accompanist—start with his molten guitar parts on Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” or hunt down the soundtrack to the 1971 movie “The Hired Hand,” which stars Peter Fonda, as a recalcitrant cowboy, and Warren Oates, as his companion. Langhorne’s inventive score braids sitar, banjo, and fiddle into something as lonesome and foreboding as the Southwest itself. It’s an eerily fitting match for the cool fatalism of Fonda’s world view.
My favorite Langhorne performance is probably the studio version of “Corrina, Corrina,” from “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” (The guitarist Howie Collins also plays on the track.) Dylan’s vocal sounds uncharacteristically fragile, and Langhorne’s guitar becomes a generous and soothing counterpoint: sweet and assured in the beauty of all things, even deep pain. The song itself dates to at least 1926, when Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded an iteration of it for Paramount Records, though it was likely around long before that; Dylan’s particular version borrows heavily from another country-blues song, Robert Johnson’s “Stones in My Passway,” from 1937. “I got a bird that whistles, I got a bird that sings,” Dylan sings, as Johnson did. “But I ain’t a-got Corrina, life don’t mean a thing,” he finishes. It is a line that suggests great suffering—to have a life go colorless—but Langhorne somehow tugs the whole thing back from utter hopelessness. I can’t describe how it works, but it’s there: a hand on your shoulder.
Langhorne would explore beyond the folk sphere—he later collaborated with the South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela and the Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji—and moved to Hawaii, in 1980, to farm macadamia nuts. He needed a break, he said, from the monomania of Hollywood. After he was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, he founded a hot-sauce company, Brother Bru Bru’s. (Its signature pepper sauce contains no sugar, sodium, or gluten.) Its company history describes Langhorne as “a fun-loving, robust fellow who has spent a large portion of his life in the pursuit of wine, women, song, food, etc.” Here, at least, the “etc.” seems to say everything.
