Stevie Coyle at the Me & Thee

I heard Stevie Coyle for the first time the other night at the Me & Thee Coffeehouse in Marblehead. I’m not normally a huge fan of the solo-guy-on-a-stage-playing- fingerstyle-guitar-and-singing-about-his-life type of thing. Normally I get bored after hearing the same picking patterns and the same harmonic progressions only slightly altered by the use of a capo. After a couple of songs I was trying to find an excuse to stealthily exit the room. But then something happened. I got interested by what he was doing. I know that musicians normally make the worst audience members so I tried to suspend the steady stream of fault-finding criticism that inevitably accompanies my boredom. In listening to him play and sing I was happily imagining the perfect mix of Jorma Kaukonnen / Tom Waits / Sgt. Pepper / Neil Young. The music was really good. The picking was different from song to song and even within each song. He was playing a Thompson guitar and playing and singing through a small AER amp. Each note of the guitar seemed perfectly suspended in a painting of deeply related color and rhythm. I kept looking for exotic tunings and partial capos. The farthest afield of standard tuning was that I thought I saw him go to drop-D once. He played a great mix of stuff from his latest CD “Ten in One” and covers and tunes I just didn’t know at all but probably came from his other life as a member of the band The Waybacks. Toward the end of the show he got great audience participation by singing some familiar lyrics in a surprising new and wonderful setting. One of the audience members later commented on the great range of emotion that he seemed to effortlessly elicit from ten fingers and six strings. I heartily fought the post-show reaction of assaulting the artist with my normally hyperbolic praise and digging into my wallet to buy as many CD’s as there was cash for. I failed miserably on the first account and had partial success on the second as I only left with one CD. I’ve only listened to it once all the way through and it is as I suspected really interesting. I’m really glad that I listened to my wife when she told me to get out of the office and go to the show. She’s usually (read “always”) right.

Shaving A Dead Man or Protect the Innocent

A cool tune that I learned from the playing of David Holt and John Herrmann. The banjo is tuned to  f#BEBE.  I’m playing this on a fretless banjo.  A good recording of John Herrmann playing this can be found on the excellent CD entitled “Banjo Gathering”.  John plays it together with the Leadbelly tune “Old Man Can Your Dog Catch a Rabbit” and instead of “Shaving a Dead Man” he calls it “Protect the Innocent”.

Angeline the Baker

I love this tune.  I think it is one of the first tunes that I learned to play on the banjo about 30 years ago.  I’ve played it probably a thousand times and I still find beauty in it.  The “B” part sounds like water flowing over rocks somewhere in the woods on the side of a mountain.  This tune is played out of the Double D tuning – aDADE.  The banjo used is an open-backed copy of a Vega style banjo with a tubaphone tone ring. The typically longer sustain of a tubaphone I think really serves this tune well.

Forked Deer

Here is a favorite tune, Forked Deer, played relatively slowly and simply.  One thing that makes this tune fun to play is the “A” part is in the key of D and the “B” part is in the key of A.  When playing this tune with other musicians the A part really drives you to the B part and then the B part drives you back to the A part.  Tunes that do that I find really fun to play.  One full time through the tune and your want to play it again with more abandon and after 5 or 6 times through the tune you really start to hit the “old-time music groove.  Some people call it the original American trance music.