Franklin Hovington (January 9, 1919 – June 21, 1982), also known as Guitar Frank, was an American

blues Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the Afr ...

musician A musician is a person who composes, conducts, or performs music. According to the United States Employment Service, "musician" is a general term used to designate one who follows music as a profession. Musicians include songwriters who wri ...

. He played the

guitar The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that typically has six strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing selected stri ...

and

banjo The banjo is a stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity to form a resonator. The membrane is typically circular, and usually made of plastic, or occasionally animal skin. Early forms of the instrument were fashi ...

and sang in the

Piedmont blues Piedmont blues (also known as East Coast, or Southeastern blues) refers primarily to a guitar style, which is characterized by a fingerpicking approach in which a regular, alternating thumb bass string rhythmic pattern supports a syncopated melo ...

style. He lived in the vicinity of

Frederica, Delaware Frederica is a town in Kent County, Delaware, United States. It is part of the Dover, Delaware Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 774 at the 2010 census. ILC Dover, the company which manufactured the spacesuits for the Apollo and ...

. Hovington was born in

Reading, Pennsylvania Reading ( ; Pennsylvania Dutch: ''Reddin'') is a city in and the county seat of Berks County, Pennsylvania, United States. The city had a population of 95,112 as of the 2020 census and is the fourth-largest city in Pennsylvania after Philade ...

. On a tip from the folklorist Peter B. Lowry, he was recorded by

Dick Spottswood Richard K. "Dick" Spottswood (born April 17, 1937) is an American musicologist and author from Maryland, United States who has catalogued and been responsible for the reissue of many thousands of recordings of vernacular music in the United States. ...

and

Bruce Bastin Bruce Bastin (born 19 September 1939) is an English folklorist and a leading expert on the blues styles of the southeastern states of America, (East Coast Blues and Piedmont Blues). In 2022, his publication ''Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition ...

, with an

album An album is a collection of audio recordings issued on compact disc (CD), Phonograph record, vinyl, audio tape, or another medium such as Digital distribution#Music, digital distribution. Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early ...

released on

Flyright Records Flyright Records is a British record label incorporated in 1970 by Mike Leadbitter, Simon Napier, and Bruce Bastin. It specializes in blues by British musicians, though it issued some American jazz discs, including Ralph Sutton and Hoagy Carmic ...

in the UK (available on CD) and on

Rounder Records Rounder Records is an independent record label founded in 1970 in Somerville, Massachusetts by Marian Leighton Levy, Ken Irwin, and Bill Nowlin. Focused on American roots music, Rounder's catalogue of more than 3000 titles includes records by Al ...

in the US. Selections were recorded by Axel Küstner and Siggi Christmann for German release, most recently issued by

Evidence Records Evidence for a proposition is what supports this proposition. It is usually understood as an indication that the supported proposition is true. What role evidence plays and how it is conceived varies from field to field. In epistemology, evidenc ...

in the US. He disliked travel and did not play away from his Delaware home, afraid that he would lose his welfare support payments, and so did not get the publicity from

music festival A music festival is a community event with performances of singing and instrument playing that is often presented with a theme such as musical genre (e.g., rock, blues, folk, jazz, classical music), nationality, locality of musicians, or h ...

appearances that his talent deserved.

References

External links

Illustrated Frank Hovington discography
1919 births 1982 deaths Country blues musicians Piedmont blues musicians American blues guitarists American male guitarists Singers from Delaware Musicians from Reading, Pennsylvania Singers from Pennsylvania 20th-century American singers 20th-century American guitarists Guitarists from Delaware Guitarists from Pennsylvania 20th-century American male musicians {{US-guitarist-stub