It’s been two months since I played at Open Mic night at Cup of Joe, located in downtown Cedar Falls, IA… I missed the last one to attend a Wilco concert in Cedar Rapids.
The Wilco show was a lot of fun and it was a treat seeing Nels Cline play guitar, as he is one of the top players in the country. The venue in which Wilco played was also quite marvelous. It was an ornately restored old downtown theater with marvelous acoustics.
Nevertheless, I was glad to be back at the Cup again with a chance to perform in a small intimate setting… I am clearly not a headline performer… instead, the specter of performing in front of people really motivates me to work at the craft of playing guitar!
In the above image, you can see I was delighted to be back. This is me posing before the coffee counter just before my performance… Call my performance costume, ” old man cool-eclectic.” 😁
It was a big night for me because I was going to play publicly, for the first time, Stefan Grossman’s arrangement of A Tribute to Lonnie Johnson… this piece is epic in length and requires a reasonable amount of finger-style skill to pull it off so for me at least it marked a stage of development along my guitar playing journey…
I’d been working on the Lonnie Johnson piece for weeks and weeks and though I’ve pretty much mastered it, it is still difficult for me to play it flawlessly even alone at home, so playing it publicly was going to be quite an adventure for me, but I was looking forward to seeing how well I could do.
A year ago, my fingers would sometime disassociate themselves from my brain on pieces of music much simpler than the Lonnie Johnson charts, so I set a high bar for myself.
I actually began working on the Lonnie Johnson piece using my newest guitar, shown above, the Taylor T5z Pro, which is an acoustic/electric hybrid that sounds great whatever you play on it, but especially nice when playing old finger-style country blues; however, at the last moment I decided to play that night on my Taylor Solid Body Custom, which you can see me holding above. After playing the T5z for weeks on end, I think I just needed a change of pace. I am holding the Solid Body in the photo at the top of this article. It is a lovely instrument and plays like butter… While the T5z plays beautifully too, it is bit more demanding than the Solid Body, and that is probably why I made the last moment switch…
I’ve written before on this weblog about finger-style blues and why I am so dedicated to that genre:
- It’s a musical style that can be played strictly instrumentally or accompanied by singing. In instrumental form, the music holds up on its own, so it is suitable for a single guitar player to perform without accompaniment. Since I have no interest in being in a band, this genre is perfect for me.
- Country blues pieces span from the elegantly simple to the moderately complex and there are available lots of charts and educational videos from which to learn, so it is a great genre to develop playing chops, which can be very satisfying.
- While there is a very active global community of country blues players, they are still diminutive in size compared to other musical genres, so it is a smaller fairly supportive group of players.
- As a baby boomer, I grew up with early rock ‘n roll and this music serves as its foundation. Country blues are THE essential roots of much of the popular music that I grew up with. My experience is that audiences are not exposed to country blues that often but like it when they hear it. Much more interesting than the millionth cover of Moondance they’ve heard before.
- While players use picks or strum through country blues, the really authentic way to play it is with the fingers. Finger-style playing is way too cool… just sayin’
As testament to the roots nature of country blues, I am embedding a link through the photo of classic bluesman Charlie Patton on the right. It leads to an interesting blog article that gives a nice comparative sampling of rock music to its original country blues form. The blog is called Please Kill Me… This is what is cool… Click on Charlie Patton and then come back!
As is typical for me, I signed up to play first. There are actually only 6 15 minute slots available for open mic wannabes, so I usually get to the shop about 45 minutes before Rick and Bill, the hosts arrive and when they do I hit the sign-up sheet promptly. My friend Grant is almost always there too and he signs up to play second. In fact, we are hoping to play a full set on our own at the Cup some time in the near future!
That particular night I played in the following order:
- A Tribute to Lonnie Johnson in Drop D tuning… (Stefan Grossman) – I did ok… shanked some into the rough, but pulled it off… at Open Mic it would be too challenging to record myself; however, I do have a decent sampling of Lonnie Johnson that I made at home, which is embedded below. Note that I am playing the T5z.
- Spoonful in Drop D tuning… (Charlie Patton, arranged by Stefan Grossman) a briefer and lighter tune to cleanse the palette after the heavy low down Lonnie Johnson piece…
- Cocaine Blues… (traditional, arranged by Stefan Grossman) a favorite of mine and the rare tune I have completely memorized… breezed through it… a crowd favorite too… a lovely, complex finger-style tune that stays at home in the top three frets… relaxing and also cleansing to play…
- Police and a Sergeant… (Robert Wilkins, rearranged by Catfish Keith) I love this piece and it’s a great way to end the set. It’s very meaningful to me because I took a lesson with Catfish Keith to work on it! Last time I played it at the Cup, I pretty much lost my way and unravelled, though I got through it somehow… The other night I played it clean as country water…
Below you can see a photo that my wife took of me playing… it’s been post processed and posterized a bit to make it more fun… Note that I am for the first time performing with my iPad and foot pedal for page turning…
It was a great night closed out by the Jacobs playing some jazzed-up seasonal tunes!
Thanks also to my friend Grant for the call out at the end of my set! He played a fine set too!