live music

Concert at Framingham State 3/7/2011

On Monday, March 7th, I will be playing a fun selection of shanties and sea ballads at Framingham State College from 1:30pm to 2:15pm. I will be joined with George Arata on bouzouki, Luke Stark on bass and Mark Evans on concertina. In fact you can hear Mark in a recording I posted of him awhile back. Also, you can check out a recording below from one of our practices to get a sense of what we’ll be playing on Monday. We’re really looking forward to it.
 

 
Esequibo River by baconworks

song

Sam’s Gone Away

Strum Stick

 
A couple of months ago a friend of mine loaned me a strumstick. The strumstick, a three stringed instrument that is a close musical relatives of the Appalachian Dulcimer, was created by Bob McNally. As I was testing out the strumstick one morning at the breakfast table I started singing, to my children’s delight, a simple chantey called Sam’s Gone Away that I had recently learned off a great old album called Colonial and Revolutionary War Sea Songs and Shanties by my friend Cliff Haslam.
 
Album Cover
 
I had so much fun beatn’ away at this song on this odd little instrument that I decided to give both the song and the strumstick a go on tape. The first instrument on the recording is actually guitar. The strumstick comes in on the break and hangs around for the rest of the song. Incidentally, this is the first time I’ve recorded vocals and, apparently, I’ve still got some learning to do. But hell, this is all just for fun. So here ya go.