Elijah Wald has been a musician since age seven and a writer since the early 1980s. He has published more than a thousand articles, mostly about folk, roots and international music for various magazines and newspapers, including over ten years as "world music" writer for the Boston Globe. In the current millennium, he has been devoting most of his time to book projects, including volumes on such disparate subjects as Delta blues, Mexican drug ballads, hitchhiking, and a broad social history of American popular music. As a musician (and to a great extent as a writer as well), his mentor was Dave Van Ronk, who gave him a year of guitar lessons and many years of staying up late at night, arguing politics and listening to records of everything from Bulgarian folk music to Bing Crosby.

“To my way of thinking, Spence's style is like a language, and the aim of this DVD is to help people understand the structure and grammar, teach a representative sample of phrases, and provide some tips on the accent. Along with his rhythmic innovations, Spence worked out a contrapuntal style in which his thumb, rather than keeping a steady rhythm, accented the melody with carefully placed notes and bass runs. He also played almost all his melodic lines in harmony, parallel sixths drawn from church singing. The result is that there are typically three lines running at the same time--melody, harmony and bass--and his unique fingerings allowed him to improvise these simultaneously. It really is like a language. While he had a few pieces that were carefully worked out and remained more or less identical over the years, he could also play any melody he heard fluently, and once one has learned how to "speak" his style, it opens up a new vocabulary for any player.” – Elijah Wald

Tablature/music is available as a PDF file for each lesson. Lessons are filmed with multiple cameras and consist of a performance, explanation, and conclude with a slow tempo split screen that follows the tab/music.