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This is the 'piatarbajo', its name derived from the instruments he used to invent it. Treadles worked by the left foot operate moveable frets that push up on the strings and thus determine the chords that will be played. They are played with his right foot on the downbeat as hammers strike the drum and the strings of the banjo, bass and guitar. These sit in a shelf arrangement in a box structure at his feet. Joe Barrick's next version of the 'piatar', built about fifteen years ago, added bass guitar and banjo, and later a snare drum. Then I made another one that had all this other stuff on it. I surprised myself with how good it sounded. He had pictured it long before he actually tried to build it - and when he did: It began as an old board with a guitar neck and it had pedals on it.

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Thinking about how to play a back-up rhythm for himself (especially for his fiddle playing) without having to rely on less dependable musicians, led to ideas about how a rhythm guitar could be played without the hands but with the feet. It was hard to keep anybody together to play with anybody. That's when I started to want to play by myself. The cow's skull guitar and mandolin, the Oklahoma guitar (with it's body shaped like the state of Oklahoma), and the toilet seat guitar ('Set on it!') were all made around this time when he began playing by himself.

I just got the idea of making one so it'd be western music. and everything western you'd always see a cow's skull laying around. One of his first used the skull of a cow as the body. It was during this thirty year period, before moving back to Oklahoma 15 years ago, that he began utilising skills gained in his regular employment as a carpenter, designing and building his own instruments. When he got out of the armed services, Joe settled in California and began playing in western bands, mostly on fiddle and mandolin. He greatly admired his fiddle playing and still plays a lot of tunes associated with him. One of Joe Barrick's earliest influences was the music of Bob Wills. Seemed like you learned quite a bit that way. You'd hear a tune on the radio, then go off and learn it right quick. Few books or records were available to him: He learned tunes from other musicians and off the radio.

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He walked and hitchhiked all over southeastern-Oklahoma to play for free at dances (or, rather, parties dances were frowned upon). From a musician friend he learned his first three chords, but it wasn't long before three chords were not enough and he soon was teaching himself a more complicated style of mandolin playing and moving on to fiddle and guitar. He recalls that he wanted something light that he could play as he walked down the road. His first musical instrument, at age fifteen, was the mandolin. Joe Barrick was born of Choctaw parents in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma in 1922. Joe Barrick's one-man band Article MT098 - from Musical Traditions No 8, Early 1990 (slightly updated) Joe Barrick's one-man band a history of the piatarbajo and other one-man bands

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