Nashville’s Crys Matthews plays a right-handed acoustic guitar as a leftie, upside down to the casual viewer, with the tenor strings up top and the wrapped lower strings sitting on the bottom, a tradition which dates back to the pre-recording era of American blues music, and was the style in which Elizabeth “Libba” Cotton, the godmother of contrapuntal gospel folk blues, played her instrument. Matthews comes from another time and place, but her thumb-strummed sound is urgent and timeless, speaking the language of dispossessed with a new eloquence above an
old style. You should check her out tonight at the Arcata Playhouse at 8 p.m. ($20).
This article appears in The Man Who Unsolved a Murder.