Leo Kottke plays slide guitar and uses open tunings (chordal tunings) that originated in the Southern U.S., chiefly among black blues guitar players. I was born in Kentucky, and the finger-picking style is common in Nashville, Tennessee (think Chet Atkins), Merle Travis, of Rosewood, Kentucky, and Franklin, Tennesee’s first finger picker to play the Grand Old Opry, Sam McGee. Kottke plays McGee’s ‘Last Steam Engine Train’ on his third LP ‘Greenhouse.’
Leo Kotke Turns 80: Eccentric Virtuoso of the Flattop Acoustic Finger-Picking-Style-Steel- Six-and-Twelve-String Guitar
I saw Leo Kottke play live briefly at the University of Kentucky Student Center Ballroom in the Fall of 1975 during my senior year of college. I operated a Singer Super 8 millimeter projector showing movies to classes, and I had to work the night one of my favorite guitarists – on vinyl records anyway – played in the ballroom. As soon as I finished with the movie and returned the projector to the audio-visual room and locked up, I trotted across campus a hundred yards or so to the student center.
As I approached the ballroom, I could hear guitar music, and a dark-haired student with a short beard, looking disinterested and distressed, guarded the open front door.
“Leo’s still playing; I hear him,” I commented to the man at the door.
“Well, it’ll be over in a few minutes. You wanting to come back in? You got a ticket?”
“No, I like his playing a lot, but I had to work tonight and just got off,” I said. “It doesn’t look like there’s such a big crowd.”
“Well, they’re mostly at the front of the stage. I’m the concert committee chairman. It’ll be over soon,” he said. “Go on in if you want to.”
“Thanks, man” I said, and took off lickety-split for the stage.
He was right. Directly in front of Leo the crowd was shoulder-to-shoulder, so I shuffled around bodies and found a place at the right front of the stage with a decent view of the guitar wizard.
There he was sitting in a chair. No long hair, no beard, hair neatly combed, wearing an oxford, collared shirt and jeans, looking more like a choir boy than a mid-seventies musician. No Earth shoes even, but a pair of sports sneakers. A clean-cut kid.
Both his hands were in flight. The pinky finger on his left hand wore a metallic slide that glided over the fret board of his twelve-string. He had a plastic thumb pick alternating on six bass strings and two metal fingerpicks on the six treble strings. His hands played at one tempo – Overdrive. I didn’t recognize the tune he was playing, but I hadn’t listened closely to the last couple of albums. I would after seeing him live for a few precious minutes at the ballroom.
He stopped playing once for a few seconds and started up again. Perhaps he was playing a medley? Leo did that sometimes when he was finishing up a show, as I’d heard him do that on his live record.
He didn’t seem to give a hang about the audience’s reactions. Pure concentration on his instrument.
After eight to ten minutes of machine-like precision playing across a wide-spread tonal range, he stopped and spoke in a baritone voice, “Thank you, Kentucky,” and left off-stage.
The crowd front-center clapped, hooted, jeered, and whistled the Minnesota Maestro back on-stage.
“You all are a bunch of hogs, that’s what you are,” he said to the assemblage below him, in his one-of-a-kind voice.
Excluding his appearance, everything about him was one-of-a-kind.
He started up again with a bouncy, herky-jerky rhythm on his metronome-like perfect alternating bass notes, and then the trebly whine of his slide heading off for the higher register – Vaaah – roooom.
I didn’t know the name of this tune either, and some of his one-of-a-kind titles comically came to mind: “Jack Figg,” “Vaseline Machine Gun,” “The Driving of the Year Nail,” “The Sailor Buried on the Great Prairie.” All of these titles came from “Leo Kottke, Six and Twelve String Guitar,” originally recorded in 1969 on John Fahey’s Tacoma Records label. Reading the titles on the album cover and his describing his own voice as being “like geese farts on a muggy day” made me think – Geez, this guy sure is one goof ball.
John Fahey, who passed on in 2001, was himself a finger-picking flat-top six-string guitar playing eccentric, and a mentor to Leo Kottke at the time of the recording.
“I owe my adult life to John Fahey,” Leo once said.
Fahey called his finger picking style American Primitive music, and recorded several of his own records on his Tacoma label. Although Kottke’s Armadillo record – so called because of the Armadillo drawing on the black and white cover – sold more than any other of the three other guitarists on the label, but Fahey always struggled to make ends meet for the record company. He finally sold the label to Chrysalis Records in 1979. Kottke’s total sales of the Armadillo record on different labels would reach around 500,000 copies, his best selling collection to date.
After nine records, including two compilations, in 1976 Leo moved from Capitol to Chrysalis Records and he recorded six albums on this label as a rising star. From the late 70’s to early 80’s he was named Best Acoustic Guitar Player by Guitar magazine by its readers five-years running.
On the dark side of things, in the early 80’s he developed very serious, and very painful tendonitis as a result of his forceful, aggressive playing style on the 12-string guitar. He underwent treatment which included giving up the thumb pick and finger picks, taking classical guitar lessons to learn to use his fingers differently, and to put more pressure on the arm and less on the tendons. During his recuperation he even learned to read musical notation.
Leo left Chrysalis Records for Private Music Records, in a move to a label that resembled some of the New Age recording industry companies like Windham Hill – small but progressive in its artists’ approach to musical composition, and a catalogue of mainly instrumental music.
He slowed down on recording and touring and in 1986 Private Music released A Shout Towards Noon and two years later – as he continued to rehabilitate – Regards from Chuck Pink. For a time he favored the six-string guitar as it was less physically demanding on his right hand than the 12-string.
In 2002 Leo teamed up with Phish bassist Mike Gordon for the first time in recording Clone on Sony International. They would make three records together, including their latest titled Noon on Megaplum/ATO records which came out in August 2020. To date this is Leo’s latest album release and his first studio album since 2005.
What are the secrets that Kottke attributes to his huge international success as an acoustic guitar player?
“Curiosity, the desire to play around and see something happen – is all you need,” he said in an interview with Acoustic Guitar magazine in the July/August 2021 issue.
He also spoke of the importance of imagination in the same interview.
“The imagination is very plastic. It has all the room in the world to go anywhere, and it gave me a life. It still does.”
Leo still performs live, although in most pictures taken recently, he plays a six-string guitar. For those of us who play guitar as amateurs or just for fun, we congratulate you as you turn 80 on September 11, 2025.
“It never stops to surprise me that somebody wants to pay me to hear me play,” he added in the Acoustic Guitar interview.
I didn’t pay, but I still revere those special few minutes at the U.K. Student Center Ballroom. Thanks Leo. Oh, and thanks to the concert committee chairman who let me go in for free at the close of the show. I was so excited I never even got his name.
~end~
