Good beginner finger style books

No book suggestions but watched a video of Doc Watson showing how he learned. He said "ten years later, I finally got it".

Something occurred to me a few minutes ago. I don't know if this comes under the heading of finger picking, per se, but, what I want to do is learn to finger pick a particular song in a particular key and build on that. Everything I know/do is from that style/process. Short of a one on one teacher, which in this day and time is hard to find, even in a place the size of Houston, I was hoping (I guess) a book, or books would lead me in that direction.

Here is a good fingerstyle book:

tinyurl.com/y5snr399

It is really three books in one, which can also be purchased separately. It does start from the beginning, but takes you to a very high level if that is what you decide you want.

If you only want to focus on basic Travis picking, then the beginner Mark Hanson books are a good idea...

tinyurl.com/y4evfjot

...followed by:

tinyurl.com/y4wqb8l2

...and finally:

tinyurl.com/y5gub3pe

All three are offered as a bundle on each amazon page.

As to which is better for you, I couldn't answer. It depends on your learning style and which presentation makes the most sense to you.

The way I learned was spending a whole summer locked away with a Happy Traum book from Oak Publications called "Contemporary Fingerstyle Guitar", that is long out of print. It had stuff such as Doc Watson's "Sitting on to of the world" in it.

I just looked at the notation as vertical slices in time, and made my fingers go from one stack of notes to the next very slowly, and slowly speeding up until it sounded vaguely like music. It took most of that summer back around 1973. After that, I started learning John Denver and others like him by ear off the recording.

Today, there is an overwhelming amount of books, DVDs, online courses, etc. It seems like too much. When I was learning, it was really much easier because there were very few books and no video or teaching recordings, so you worked with what was, and made it work for you.

One thing about the few books there were back then is that you had to be able to read.  There was no TAB to work with.

Tony

I understand what he says.

This is what I'd like to mimmick

A "music teachers" reaction to Colter Wall