John Cephas, the blues guitarist who died last week at age 78, planted sounds and emotions in my head that I never got over, not in the nearly 20 years since I saw him at a concert in Chicago with a touring group of steel-string guitar masters. I’d say there was a sweetness in his music, if “sweet” weren’t such a devalued word. The sweetness I’m thinking of is closer to whatever it is that provokes and prolongs happiness.
It was there in his smile and his voice, a honeyed baritone that was the opposite of the stereotypical bluesman’s growl. In songs like “Darkness on the Delta,” “John Henry” and “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues,” Mr. Cephas beckoned the listener. He opened an emotional door that you could find yourself aching to walk through.
It was only later that I, a total guitar nonexpert, learned how much of that appeal was rooted in technique. Mr. Cephas, a Virginian, played the Piedmont blues, an old East Coast style of finger picking, where the thumb plays the rhythm, the fingers take the melody and the syncopation is irresistible.
Mr. Cephas learned the style from a cousin and spent decades teaching it to others. He was well aware of its power. His obituary in The Times included this from a Washington Post interview: “You hear that wonderfully melodic, alternating thumb and finger, you just stop and say, ‘I want to go hear more of that!’ It’s instant emotional appeal, and people all over, wherever they heard it, they’re just drawn to it.”
I asked the guitarist and music scholar Ry Cooder about it. Finger-picking “done really well” has universal appeal, he said, no matter what the style. So that would explain my weakness not only for Mr. Cephas but also Joseph Spence, the great and strange Bahamian, and Gabby Pahinui, the Hawaiian slack key master, who I think could bring anyone to happy tears.
It’s sweetness matched with swing. “It happens when you get this rolling thing going,” Mr. Cooder said. “People feel comfortable. They like to hear the thumb-and-finger, thumb-and-finger. It’s buoyant. It suggests happiness, that all is well. Life is good, for a time. But only for a time. Why do you think they invented bars with music?”