J. Shannon Webster

It has been a long time since my last post – church work in abundance but also – there is a LOT of work involved once you leave the recording studio.  Mixing and Mastering are huge pieces of the final product, then there is production.  That involves more than just the final CD itself, but also photography, liner notes, and of course paying for the whole bit (my thanks to the Lilly Fund here).

Result being, the two CDs, Silverbacks and Stone, are finished and ready for your listening (I hope) pleasure.  They can be purchased from this website, www.desertgrass.com, by credit card through PayPal, or from CDbaby.com.  Or from the trunk of my car.  Or in mp3 format from Amazon.com.  They sell for $10 each or $15 for the pair.

These songs are all my own music; there are two because I’ve always had trouble finding things on double-albums, and figured maybe some of you are the same way.  Two because I wrote so many songs, since the last time I was in a studio in 1995.  They are slightly thematic.  Silverbacks contains songs about getting older and reflecting, as well as those which involved my “cohort group” of pastors and some other special people in writing or recording.  Stone is everything else, but could also be grouped as people encountering trials and surviving.

My thanks to:  Lou Ann for putting up with all this,  John Gifford at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Darren Morton at GAT3MidSouth Studios in Gadsden,  Kevin Nix at Ardent Studios in Memphis, Brad Timko at Avondale Studio in Birmingham, and Jason Brouwer at Studio-By-the-Tracks.  For Jason and others who played and sang on this album, including also Ryan Reardon and James Vines, Jonathon Yarboro, Drew Travis, Jeff, Finch, David Butler, Neill Morgan, Roger Harwerth, Sam Webster, Hannah Webster and of course Bubba Maldonado.

Thanks to all of you who have been my friends over the years, and part of these stories. And certainly thanks to the congregation of First Presbyterian Church of Birmingham, for granting me sabbatical time. You are a blessing.

It’s been just over a week since I’ve been back to work at First Presbyterian Bham, so I thought I should post a note to more or less conclude this odyssey – although this site will stay periodically active.  It is GOOD to be back at the church, with these people I love, and to have a restored spirit that spending that much time with music brings to me.  I do feel like the creative switch in my head got flipped back to “On”.

Let me write here my public Thank You, for the sabbatical time –  to the congregation for putting it in my terms of call in the first place and then supporting me in it; to Lydia Casey, Interim Associate Pastor, for covering for me while I was gone;  to the rest of the Staff, Debbie Patti, Edi, Cathy, Tim, Andrew, Kandi, for stepping up and handling wonderfully all the things that arose; to the Lilly Endowment Fund for the resources to do this;  and to all the creative and interesting people I encountered on my “Journey to Ithaca” (poetic reference; look it up under Cavafy; great poem).

The Staff welcomed me back with a wild decoration of my office, a hilarious PowerPoint of their imagined escapades in my absence,  and a guitar-shaped cake.  The congregation had a Bar-B-Q picnic in the Courtyard, and one of my favorite local bands played – 2Blu and the Lucky Stiffs – played before, during and after dinner.

A great way to come home!  And you remember how important Home is in Country Music.  If you’ve forgotten, look under the writings tab on the menu bar for the essay on metaphor!

It was a one-set deal. I was standing in the Tap Room on Market in Austin, to listen to Funky Donnie Fritts, and got to talking with a couple of guys next to me.  We talked about bands we’d heard, and I said how I wanted to hear Billy Joe Shaver later on at Shotgun’s.  “Yeah, I do too,” said one of the guys, “We come on right after him.”  That was Tom Pryor, lead guitarist and pedal steel player for the Black Lillies.  The other fella was Robert Richards, from Muscle Shoals, who is bass player for the band.  We hung out awhile, and they went off – fetching instruments, I imagine. I headed for 6^th Street, and stopped to hear another act on the way.

At Shotgun’s I worked my way into the bar for a pint of Guinness, and ended up buying one for Robert, as he showed up.  Billy Joe was playing, we were listening, when bandleader and songwriter Cruz Contreras joined us, and I later met female vocalist Trisha Gene Brady.  SXSW has a short window between acts, at each venue, so in between there is a frantic dash for one band to unplug, coil cables, pack instruments and get off the stage, even as the next is unpacking instruments and getting wired in.  Then hurried soundchecks and tuning.  It is semi-organized chaos.  I pitched in on moving guitar cases, drum stools, mic stands – and perhaps more importantly, buying bottles of water and cans of Miller Lite for the band!  Then they were on.  And they were very, very good.  Later they were not happy about the sound, which was not a surprise since half the sound guys in Austin seem to be defective. Although I admit they work under battle conditions during SouthBy. Several times during the festival I found nyself thinking of Lyle Lovett’s lyric in Closing Time: “Kenny, he been mixing sound all evening. Sometimes I’d swear that boy ain’t got no ears.”

After the set, I helped drag off stands and stools and get cases ready for guitars.  Lord knows I can do that kind of thing!  I said “bye” to Tom and Robert, and later on set out to find out more about the Black Lillies. I’ve got two of their CD’s and I would commend them to you – good stuff.  I love Whiskey Angel, but Runaway Freeway Blues is #18 in the country on the Americana charts.  The band is from Knoxville, Tennessee. Contreras has been on the road for years, and is a seasoned professional, as is Tom Pryor.  For you Robinella fans, Contreras and his band were the sound behind her vocals.  I’d love to get the Black Lillies to Birmingham.  I’ll work on that.

A few more things to share (at this point) about SXSW.

Global Music:  First, I was surprised by the depth of the International character. I met people from all over the country, of course, and hung out some with a photographer from New Jersey and a music professor from Syracuse University.  I met people from Canada and Mexico, Chile, Singapore, Brazil and the Netherlands.  There were bands there from Ireland and Germany and Japan, Spain and Israel, Belgium and Denmark and Taiwan.  From England and Australia, Azerbaijan and Timbuktu in Mali; from Turkey, Portugal, Scotland, South Korea, France and Norway.  The Czech Republic and the Faroe Islands and Puerto Rico. Colombia, Argentina and Italy.  Iceland, Austria, Venezuela, Iran and Sweden. Uruguay, Congo, Myanmar and Croatia. New Zealand and the Phillipines. Musicians from Afghanistan led a workshop on how Music is supporting the efforts toward freedom there.

Alabama Artists:  I earlier mentioned The Bear, from Muscle Shoals, but Alabama was also represented by Belle Adair from the same town; Yelawolf is from Gadsden. From Huntsville there was G-Side, the Cole Boyz and Jackie Chain. From Birmingham there was KD, but mainly the group everyone was talking about and asking me about – St. Paul and the Broken Bones.  They are the real deal, keep your eye on them.

How Churches Didn’t “get it.”  There were 3 downtown churches that served as venues, in and among the bars and taverns.  I heard artists at St. David’s Episcopal and at Central Presbyterian, the latter a great church that is very much like First Presbyterian in Birmingham – urban ministry and social justice.  At CPC I bought a snack from the youth group table and kicked in an extra $20 for their mission trip. Always do that.  I didn’t get to the Orthodox church, but I’d be willing to bet they behaved the same.  At St. David’s, people were wandering about looking for the right door to go in, and finally giving up and wandering off. I found my way in, but there was no signage for the door on the uphill backside of the church, nor on the entrance door. It was unlocked, and we were greeted inside, by people who said “go upstairs,” but there was no direction once you were up there.  The venue turned out to be in the chapel, but official-looking Episcopalians were shushing people, and only opening the door between songs. People were sneaking out and in surreptitiously, like in a worship service.  The folk singer inside was unnerved. She said, “I can’t believe I’m in a church. Someone take a picture and send it to my mother.”

The same was true at Central Presbyterian, where outside they divided us into a line with badges and another with armbands, and were conducting a careful count of how many they admitted, to correspond to the exact number of seats they had by pew.  Inside, the atmosphere was a bit funereal.  It was all so decent and in order as to make me want to break it up with some madcap jocularity and joyful noise.  I made some mental notes, after my experience with the church venues. The clear observation was that they were hosting a “concert,” the only thing they knew how to do.  But this was the SXSW Music Festival, and nobody else was hosting a concert.  The others were providing music venues.   While the Episcopalians sold beer, wine and food that didn’t help them overcome the oh so proper atmosphere.  At all of the other venues, people came and went, and did so during the acts, there was talking and informality, and while it was harder to hear than at the churches it was what the musicians knew as well. It was relaxed; it was fun.  I made a mental note that if we ever get the stage prepped in Matthews Hall and are able to host some Friday night music events, that we run it as a venue and not as a concert.  We can surely avoid Presbyterian orderliness and Episcopalian propriety, and have some fun with music, yes?

First, my new favorite BILLBOARD, on I-35 South in Austin:  Clearly mocking the Dos Equis TV commercials, singer-songwriter James McMurtry (Larry’s son) sprawls in a chair, holding a beer can and with a saloon girl on each arm.  The caption reads:  “The Most Disinterested Man in the World, pretty much always drinks beer.”

LADY GAGA, appeared in a voluminous dress made of plastic, after a concert the night before where she did something like getting vomited out of a mechanical pig.  She is so huge in the industry it is hard to remember she is only 28 yrs old; her fist album was in 2008.   In spite of her flamboyance, there is depth there, and some courage.  She said, “The truest way to maintain the music industry is to put all the power back into the hands of the artist… I put music out into the world and it gets eaten by a computer.”  While the studio folk might have quarreled with that, the singers, players, writers didn’t.  Her point was that the “system” in the industry makes rules that work against “you and your guitar making music and finding a way into that system.”  She tipped a hat to corporate sponsors, who made events happen, saying that without them there would be no artists to interact with, have relationship with, “because the record labels don’t have any #*$%ing money.”  She called on the industry to use the bigger acts to shine a light on the coming ones,” and said it is “so easy today to be self-made so quickly, but what will make it sustainable is to be willing to feel the pain of this business over a long period of time, because you want to make songs, because the song is what matters.”

RODNEY CROWELL, Grammy-winning songwriter, told us songwriters to “Be patient, and let the song tell you what it wants to be.”  Songwriting, he said, is finding the true thing, the true emotion, and a way to say it differently.  You have to have a love of the craft; intentionality.   He advises to listen to great songwriters, read poetry, see art – anything that feeds your craft. He stressed the value of revision.

He is not a fan of video or TV, because of what it has done to the language.  When your hearing is paired with your own imagination (and not a video feed), you form your own images and connections.  “When my songs are really working,” he said, “they are yours, not mine. It is about your relationship to the song.”  He advised us to start songwriting by asking “What am I afraid of, afraid to say?”  and then go to it. When in doubt about a phrase, “Go with the poet’s choice. “Anytime we figured out the poet’s choice, it sang; we were onto it.”

NEIL YOUNG has long been concerned with sound itself, and how inferior digitally produced music is to analog, and especially how “thin” MP3’s are.  Also, single cuts have replaced albums that he called a “family of songs.”  He said of his own albums, “I loved every song. I loved every note of every song.”  But these days albums have not value to studios, only individual tracks, and the culture and sound technology and jobs that supported that culture began to die.  Part of his effort at saving music from itself is a new technology called PONO, for which he is generating funding on Kickstarter.  It is designed to deliver high resolution playback with the sound the artist intended.

MUSIC AND MONEY sort of depressed me.  It was geared to be true to its title, but advocated things I’ve worked against.  Their points are that there is a formula for songs, and we should follow it – verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus – and always under 4 minutes long, 3½ is better. 7 out of 11 songs have no intro at all,  and no intro should be more than 15 seconds, and you better hit the theme with the title phrase, or enter the chorus, no more than 20 seconds into the song.  Also, nearly all #1 hits are collaboration, in recent years. Also faster, beats per minute are going up.  Sigh. This is how Nashville ran songs through the “blander”.

WHEN TO HIRE A PRO – when the advantages are worth the money. You can do a lot at home, with today’s technology and software.   The $$ goes into mixing, because of the time involved.  They lamented that today, “In the marketplace convenience trumps sound quality,”  and offered the corollary that, “The song has to be better than the quality.”

WHO OWNS WHAT – Copyright law still reigns, and the creator is owner.  Fair use, between the public good and copyright, and condition that, and such use should be clear, simple and honest.  One of the panelists has been sued by CraigsList, which tries to maintain that even the original poster, on a public message board, does not have ownership of their own post and cannot re-post it on another site.  Geez, that’s ridiculous.  (Lady GaGa is right!)

REACHING MILLENNIALS WITH MUSIC was an interesting panel, comprised of (among others) the CRO from Shazam, and cultural marketing guy from Pepsico.  They pointed out the App culture is using mobile devices to engage tons of media, and held that these are authentic connections leading to online and offline cultural ecosystems.  Thus, you cannot “target” millennials; you can only work with artists within that ecosystem to amplify their craft.  “If it’s good, they’ll find it.”  The Pepsi guy said that communicating within that system is finding a way to create “a soundtrack for a person’s life.”  You can’t identify separate entities within that generation (ethnic, regional, etc.) as in marketing of old.  Millennials are totally integrated and in conversation with the broader world.  “You have to get in the mix – have to live it. You can do research and so forth, but that’s not enough. When you live it, you can create an environment around it.”

Shazam moved from just data to drawing people back into the app for broader engagement with things they are interested in – on behalf of an artist or label, to be sure.  Their mobile phone is the most personal asset they have.  If they say, electronically, they like a thing, Shazam follows up with sharing capabilities within the app/

RESURRECTING JERRY GARCIA was a moving and wonderful panel.  Mark Silverman was a Dead fan, working in corporate media, who discovered the Jerry Garcia website was pretty much vacant and dead.  He offered to resurrect it, and it is now a complete multi-sensory site.  His colleague was on the panel, along with the Garcia estate’s attorney, and Jerry’s daughter, Trixie.   Their point was that the Grateful Dead had such a following, it was the original social network, and it has been re-gathered by making those memories available again through technology.  Jerry Garcia said of his own art, “When we’re done with it, they can have it,” making the fans co-creators with the band.   Silverman recalled his discovery of the Grateful Dead culture – “I had found my tribe. These are the people I wanted to be with.”  I came away with two really fine Jerry Garcia quotes, the first one illustrative of Garcia’s humility: “There were so many people who really cared about me, and I was just f*#@ing around.”  The second very appropriate for us preacher-types:  “Basically, when you get up in front of a lot of people, you feel like an idiot. There’s no getting around that.”

SXSW:  The last “pilgrimage” of the sabbatical design was to attend South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, arguably the world’s largest music festival. People come from all over the world, to attend, to play, to represent their company or country. Actually it is a couple of weeks plus of 3 different festivals – Film, Interactive (media technology), and Music – staggered and overlapping.  Some of that means massive crowds and incredibly long lines (two of my least favorite things), and a lot of walking everyday.  But it was worth it, for both the content and the experience!  I’ll just write from the Music perspective.

There are 3 broad categories of SXSW offerings: 1) Sessions, Panels and Workshops for professionals in the music business; 2) Expos, Demonstrations and Markets for music gear and music-related stuff of all kinds.  3) Music – in Concerts and Venues and Programs. I tasted all of those things.  Especially live music. It was everywhere, all the time. You couldn’t get to it all; I left so much unheard, un-experienced, for there was no time to do it all.  You never knew where music was going to break our randomly, on the streets of Austin.

You probably heard about the tragedy in the middle of the week, where a drunk driver, avoiding a DWI checkpoint, ran up on the curb and killed 3 people, injuring 23 others.  A horrible thing.  It was hard to know how to react, what to do.  The musicians and music biz people attended a prayer service at St. David’s Episcopal, and in the first pass of the plate raised something like $13,000 to help the victims.  You can still contribute – go to SXSWCares.com.  It did cast a pall on the festival, but it did not stop the music.  Music knows both life and death.

I count 8 Sessions attended, and 27 Artists in 16 venues.  I tried to keep some breadth in my listening, but as you can see below, my tastes run to Americana and Country, and there were people I wanted to hear, others I learned about at SXSW.  Below is my “play list.”  I’ll share a bit about what some of them said in the next post.

SESSIONS:  I attended the following –

1.  The Keynote, by Lady GaGa;
2.  Songwriting Session with Rodney Crowell;
3.  Interview with Neil Young;
4.  “Music and Money”;  Jeff Brabec (BMG), Sean Murphey (DePaul U.)
5.  “When to Hire a Pro” (recording); (Powell; Sputnik Studio & Pat Sansome; Wilco)
6.  “Who Owns What?” (re: copyright);
7.   “Reaching Millennials with Music“;
8.  “Resurrecting Jerry Garcia” (the Grateful Dead as the first social network)

BANDS and ARTISTS:  I heard the following –

• Jamestown Revival (Americana, Austin);
• Della Mae (Bluegrass, Boston & Nashville);
• Los Lonely Boys (Country, San Angelo, TX);
• Alvaays (Rock, Canada);
• Stanley Jordan (Jazz Guitarist, Arizona)
• Mothercraft (Rock, Japan)
• Lauren Shera (Folk, Nashville)
• Dan Dyer (Alt Country, Austin)
• Kiko Veneno (Flamenco Rock, Spain)
• Donnie Fritts (Country Songwriter, TN)
• The Bear (Americana, Muscle Shoals, AL)
• The Wonder Villains (Rock, Ireland)
• Deer Tick  (Rock, Rhode Island)
• Blue the Misfit (Rap, Dallas)
• We Butter the Bread With Butter (Berlin, Germany)
• ???? (Guys in Expo w. collapsible guitar)
• El Conjunto Nueva Ola (Rock, Mexico)
• Michael Martin Murphey (Country, Taos, NM)
• The Howlin’ Brothers (Bluegrass, South Dakota)
• Billy Joe Shaver (Country, Waco, TX)
• Agnes Obel (Folk??? Denmark)
• The Black Lillies (Alt Country, Knoxville, TN)
• Nakia (Blues, Austin)
• Porter (Rock, Guadalajara, Mexico)
• Bruce Robison and Kelly Willis (Alt Country, Austin)
• Residual Kid (Pop, Austin)
• Minor Mishap (indescribable – “Second Line” band?  From Austin)

I don’t know where to start talking about the week recording at F.A.M.E. Studios in Muscle Shoals.  Let me start with the last full day.  Some folk from the front office interrupted our recording session, giving a tour.  They give tours through the studio and control booth, etc., there, but they don’t interrupt a session to do it. They introduced us to the woman they were showing around – Hank Williams’ daughter.  Not Hank Jr.s, but his sister, Hank’s daughter.  Okay, I’m more than good with that. She was very gracious. They took her up to the control booth, and I stood there with Jeff and David. One of them said, “We oughta sing her one of her dad’s songs,” and we settled on I Saw the Light, which we did acapella, in 3-part harmony, and we nailed it.  I said to Jeff, “Not bad.”  Hank’s daughter snapped her head out of the control booth, looked at us and said, “Not bad?  It was heavenly!”  Yeah, it was that kind of a week.

The week recording in Muscle Shoals has to be said to be the core of the sabbatical, for me, the sun around which all else revolves.  If you haven’t seen the new documentary, Muscle Shoals, I commend it to you. It has been in studios, and is available on Amazon now. We were there at the studio the day the DVD was released!  F.A.M.E. was the studio where it all started, all the great musical tradition of Muscle Shoals, Alabama.  F.A.M.E. stands for Florence Area Musical Enterprises, and was founded in the 1950’s by Rick Hall, who is still deeply involved and who we met last week.  There are gold records covering the walls of his office.

I was there with some of my best musical companions over many years:  David Butler, Jeff Finch, Roger Harwerth, Neill Morgan, Drew Travis, Jonathon Yarboro (all Presbyterian ministers), James Vines from First Birmingham, and my son Sam.  We rented a “cabin” (read 5 bedroom house) at Joe Wheeler Park, in a picturesque location on the Tennessee River, and drove into the Shoals (25 min.) every morning in the van borrowed from First Light shelter. Recording is hard work, but fun. We’d record all day, drive home, cook and eat dinner, practice our songs for the next day and sometimes sing into the night. (This is the job I always wanted.)  We represented locations from Alabama, Texas, Oregon, Wisconsin, New Mexico, and D.C.  I think it was Hank Williams’ daughter who asked us,  “What do y’all call yourselves?”  Looking around at the gray hair on all we (except Sam) aging critters, I said, “the Silverbacks,” (gorillas) and that moniker sorta stuck like pasta on the wall.  We practiced saying: “We’re the Silverbacks, that little band from everywhere. We don’t take requests, but we have some.”

We knocked out 16 of my songs during the week there.  Recording at F.A.M.E. in Muscle Shoals is sort of a bucket list thing, you know – climb Mt. Everest, kiss the Pope’s ring in the Vatican, raft the Amazon, fly-fish New Zealand’s South Island, record at Muscle Shoals…  It is a musician’s holy ground. Above the couch were I sat in the control room was a folder hand-labeled “Duane Allman Outakes.”  It’s that kind of place.  Our wonderful engineer, John Griffith, showed me a room with shelves lining the walls, broken into slots holding records, alphabetized.  He handed me a 45 rpm in its sleeve, saying “We still have 18 of these.”  I looked: Percy Sledge, When a Man Loves a Woman.  John said, “That vinyl has never seen a needle.”

Etta James, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers, Paul Simon, Kris Kristofferson, Dylan, Rolling Stones, Willie Nelson, Linda Ronstadt, Jerry Reed, Mac Davis, Bobbie Gentry, Felin Husky, and scores more, all recorded in Muscle Shoals.  So we all had an “I’m not worthy” feeling, but we sang and played anyway, our voices putting whatever unmeasureable less-than-micron impression into the sound batts on walls that had resonated to Aretha Franklin, Tom Jones, Otis Redding and T.G. Sheppard, Paul Anka and Alabama, George Strait and the Dixie Chicks, Kenny Chesney and Clarence Carter, Martina McBride and Chris Ledoux, Jason Isbell and the Drive by Truckers.

What do you do in the face of a lineage like that, in a room that has seen and heard that much musical history?  The best you can.  You sing and play your heart out, however many takes and punches it requires, filled up with the echoes of the saints of R&B, Soul, Funk,  Folk, Country and Rock & Roll.  It was, as they say, “about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on!”

Thanks to F.A.M.E. Studios and John Griffith, for being so patient and gracious with a bunch of amateurs, for ushering us into the collegium of those musicians who have played Muscle Shoals.  It was one of the best weeks of my life.

Before my time in North Carolina with Luthier James Condino, I had only done relatively minor guitar repair.  All my stuff had been on the outside – things attached to the guitar, really: nut, saddle, scars to the finish, bridge pins, external minor damage.  And me, without any training, probably not high-quality work.  This was different.

We had my 70-year-old Harmony Patrician arch top, which I bought off ebay for $50.  It had no neck, the finish badly marred, no bridge, and was coming apart at the seams. The binding was failing, and inside, the braces had fallen in.  Most would say it was a piece of junk.  But I have developed some obsession about it.  It is almost the physical symbol of what my sabbatical theme is – getting the music back into me.  The old guitar has become a metaphor, for me. If it can make music again, be no longer fit for scrap but an instrument to make music with – why not my, or you or anyone?  James did observe a couple of times during the week that we were doing an awful lot of work for that particular guitar.  I just laughed and said, “Respect the metaphor!”

It was scary, when we steamed the hide glue until the seams released, and the back game off. There we were, looking into the insides of the wooden box – the heart of a stringed instrument, from which (resonating to the strings) music comes.  It was kind of like looking at a friend naked.  In the end, instead of only building a neck -a very difficult and precise task – we rebuilt the guitar from inside out.  James had me shave down the braces to 1/3rd of their previous mass, and shape them.  This changes the sound that will come out. We tapped the top on the outside, to listen to the tap-tone and how the two different sides (over the brace) sounded to one another, then shaved and shaped some more.  We revoiced the guitar.  Also had to reglue the kerfing that supports the inside rim of top and back.

James (a luthier with an engineering degree that helps him understand the slightest differences that effect the outcome) did the calculating and measuring and the technical adjustments I simply did not have time that week to learn.  Me, I did a lot of sanding, then some more sanding. When I was done with that, I did some more sanding, and… there’s a lot of chiseling and sanding that goes into making a guitar! I finally sanded off my fingerprints (not on purpose).  I made the fretboard for the neck myself (with coaching and advising), from striped ebony, and pressed in the Evo frets. Then more sanding.  Much chiseling on the neck.  We were able to save the old rosewood tailpiece, but with a new way of securing it, and before we closed up the box we added an electric pickup inside.

Condino plays music to the guitars, mandolins and basses – the ones hanging on the wall, new, nearly finished, but also the old ones there for repair.  I had heard of this – that you can “age” a new guitar by leaving it for hours in front of your stereo speaker.  What happens is that the wood, the top (the soundboard, usually spruce) vibrates to the rhythms of the music, and settles in. Condino doesn’t call it aging. He says of the wood in the guitar -“It used to be a tree, a living thing. When it is reformed, it just has to be reminded, to come back to life in a different form.”

The song is in the wood. The tightness and direction of the grain, the thinness or thickness of the soundboard, the bracing inside that supports it, the character and voice of the tonewood that make up the back and sides, the shapes into which it bends, all change the song, the voice of the guitar. Mahogany projects a clear and bright definition, maple nearly sharp and crisp, rosewood is warm and complex and speaks from deeper in its chest.  The song is in the wood.  The luthier’s task is to create a way for it to emerge.

I loved all of it.  I love the smell of the wood, the smell of the hide glue, the color of the shavings coming off under the chisel, the wood dust from sanding, the lore of those who work with wood, watching that tree-stuff turn into music.  I may be too old and lacking space for the requisite power tools to ever master this and be a luthier. But I know more than I did before about how to make repairs to an instrument that needs some.  I understand more than I ever have about the insides of the instrument, and how the sounds I so love are shaped and formed, in response to the player’s hand. I love the song that comes from the wood.  This particular wooden box was made in 1944, with a rosewood tailpiece because all the metal was going into ships and planes. She is mahogany and spruce, and now has a bit of ebony – fretboard, bridge and headplate. I don’t know how long it has been since it was played, how long it was in this condition, lacking even a neck.  But she is going to sing again.

I am sitting in Montreat, in the beautiful home of dear friends Jim and Kay Layman, looking out at a snowy winter wonderland that could be a scene from Vermont.  It snowed for probably 18 hours, and it is deep, here in North Carolina.  We are snowed in! I worked for Jim back in 1975, at First and Calvary Presbyterian in Springfield. We’ve kept in touch over the years, and now Jim and Kay are close enough to see more regularly.  They are volunteers and representatives for nearby Warren Wilson College, one of our Presbtyerian schools.

This week has been Lutherie, for me, a word that means making or repairing stringed instruments – in this case a guitar.  I am working under the tutelage of master builder James Condino, who is a patient teacher. We swap stories while we work, of far places we have traveled, and interesting people we met.

I’m working on an old arch top guitar that I bought off ebay one night in a fit of enhanced muse. Nobody else even bid on the old girl, and she arrived loosely packed in a cardboard box.  She was entirely missing a neck, the internal bracing had fallen down, the top was coming off, which is okay because so was the back.  The finish is badly scratched, and the binding is separating.  I paid $50.

It took me 6 weeks to discover what the guitar even was.  Turns out she is a 1944 Harmony Patrician.  Patrician was Harmony’s next-to-top of the line, in those days, and in 1944 she cost $65.  The Patrician was not one of the legendary great guitars that Gibson, Epiphone and Vega were making, but it was a good guitar.  I was able to identify the make and year by several identifying markers.  It has a 3-piece solid top, spruce with a mahogany center panel. (3-piece backs are not at all uncommon, but I’ve never before seen a 3-piece top.)  The rest is solid mahogany, a good and usual guitar wood.  But around the face are tiny blocks of differently colored wood, and a marquetry pattern.  Also unusual (you couldn’t afford that today).  The tailpiece was still on it, but was not steel, as it is in almost all the old archtops, but (again, oddly) was a chunk of rosewood screwed into the guitar edge.  Turns out that it was because in 1944 all the steel was going into ships and planes, and among the small cult of Harmony nerds they call this the “Wartime Harmony.”

James and I worked on it, (“I…” by which I mean James told me what to do and I did what he said; I’m learning, though), and the first thing was steam the seams and take it apart.  A little nerve wracking and scary for me, even though I only paid half a c-note for a non-working hunk of wood.  We used hide glue to repair and cleat the cracks, and reinforce the stress points.  I shaved the existing giant top bracing down to half its size, and tapered them.  James built new back braces, and we reglued the kerfing (an articulated, narrow piece of wood outling both top and back where they meet the sides).  We cut a beautiful piece of striped ebony for the fret board, and a matching piece for headstock plate, threaded a piece of steel for a truss rod.  Sanding, sanding sanding on all the new wood parts. Then sanding some more.  Notched the fingerboard, and I spent most of yesterday cutting fret wire and pressing frets into it.  We are going to be able to save and incorporate the rosewood tailpiece, and I am glad of that because it was the main that led me to her provenance. Tomorrow, if the snow allows, we will begin shaping the neck, and fitting the dovetail to the guitar. The box is ready to glue back together, and I am putting a sound pickup in it before we do so.  The goal is to string her back up by Saturday or Sunday. The creativity involved in this process is exciting. This is not “measure and cut” mechanical exercise.  It is art.

I am getting excited.  The old guitar is metaphor, she is.  If we can bring her back to life, if she can sing again, she becomes symbolic – especially to an aging preacher like me.  I am coming to love this guitar, and I’ve never heard it, of course.  But I cannot wait to do so.  When you have put many hours of the work of your own hands into something, there is an attachment… even more, a relationship, with the instrument. I knoinvolved in this process is exciting . Soon we will make music together!

I did get another treat, a couple of night ago.  James and I played at the White Horse Tavern in Black Mountain, NC – me on the guitar (I brought my Larrivee) and James backing me up, on the mandolin. I played mostly my own songs, and they were well-received by what was a smallish crowd that night.  It was fun to play again in a secular venue. James plays a great mandolin, but around here mostly plays the upright bass.  He is a fine builder – guitars, mandolins and string basses – but if you want one you’ll have to get in line!  He and his wife were both outdoor-adventure guides in exciting and far-flung places.  Now he is a Luthier, and she a hospital Social Worker (I’m married to one of those myself!) while they raise kids in Ashville.  He makes some interesting observations about instrument repair, and I plan to reflect and share a bit on those, soon, in an essay under the “Writings” tab on the main menu of this site.

In the meantime, more guitar restoration awaits, before the song rises again!

Lou Ann and I managed to drive (carefully) out of Birmingham, mid-day Wednesday after the snow and ice storm, on the second “Pilgrimage” of the sabbatical, a vacation to Nashville.   We stayed at Hotel Indigo (which we recommend) Downtown, an easy walk to the music chaos that is Broadway. Fun and wonderful!

NASHVILLE:   First, Nashville is a great city, and its citizens on the street are among the friendliest, most helpful, gracious folks I’ve encountered.  Naturally they get a lot of tourists, but they all seem conditioned to helping us tourists and making our visit easier.  You can find that in Birmingham as well, but there seems a stronger culture of it in Nashville.

Musically, Nashville has been both a boon and a curse to what we call Country Music.    On the plus side, the concentration of the music industry in Nashville paved the way for careful marketers to make what we now call Country Music an attraction on radio and live both, and accepted within the larger culture.  Without the influence of the Nashville music machine, much would have been lose.  On the negative side, Nashville homogenized music that was geographically unique in differnt parts of the country.  They took wonderful, diverse American roots music and ran it through the “blander,” according to whatever was going to be sale-able on the mass market.  In that sense, much was lost.

THE MOTHER CHURCH.  They call the Ryman Auditorium the “Mother Church of Country Music”. Sadly, there was no concert there during our time in the city, but we did get the Backstage Tour.  You can feel the gravitas of that theater.  Everyone played the Ryman one time or another. It was the original home of the Grand Ole Opry.  It is sacred space to Country music, and you can for sure feel it.  They have tested the acoustics sonically, and claim they are second only to the Mormon Tabernacle.  It was originally a church, the Gospel Tabernacle, until out became a concert hall and auditorium, and they have maintained that feel – with the pews, the windows and the architecture.  It has the feel of a church even today, and in some ways the guitars and costumes on display in cases around the wall had the feel of the graves, mausoleums, etc. in churches in Europe.  It was an important visit to a shrine, for me.

MUSIC.  One of the things we were able to do was to plan for and experience music in almost all the venues available in Nashville in which to hear music.  We were in the DIVES down on Broadway, where  singers hoping to be heard start at 10 or 11, at Legend’s Corner or Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, and go one after another until 3am.  So we did that.  But we also were in one of the established popular concert VENUES, 3rd and Lindsley, for that sort of a show.  A local band, The Great Peacock, was the opener – and they were fun and high energy.  When the main act came on, it didn’t take until the second phrase for us to think: “Wow. The real musicians just showed up.  We heard “Jamestown Revival,” young folks out of East Texas, and they were wonderful.  Their fist album, “Utah”, goes on the market February 11.  Buy it. They’re great!

Friday night we were at the Commodore Grill near the Vanderbilt campus, for the SONGWRITER’S SHOWCASE – aspiring songwriters, mostly young, hoping to make it in Nashville.  Some were iffy, some were wonderful.  They ran three “rounds,” which had 3 or 4 songwriters each, taking turns singing their music.  I would have been far from out of place trotting my own songs out, and had I been more sure how it worked, I might have signed up to do that. Probably I learned more, and had less stress, just listening to others that night.

We made the GRAND OLE OPRY the Saturday night before we returned.  The Opry is now in East Nashville, in a new Opry House.  They did cut a circle of wood from the floor of the Old Ryman Auditorium, and put it in the new stage, for continuity.  The same as I have heard churches merging, or going to a new building, and taking some representative piece of stained glass to install in the new buliding.  The Opry has “members” – Artists who have been invited to join. Those invited have been successful in the industry, have crowd appeal and popularity, anf agree to sing a significant number of times a year.  It is still a live-broadcast radio show on WSM, the longest running of it’s kind anywhere.  There are four segments; the host brings on artists who sing 2 songs each.  It moves pretty quickly, does not get dull.  The night we were there we heard old timers John Conlee,  Jeannie Seely, Bill Anderson, Jean Shepherd, and Bill Anderson.  They brought on people like Mel Tillis, Tracey Lawrence, and Terri Clark.  Rising artists who played included CMA nominated duo Dan and Shay, and Frankie Ballard – a young man who came on and owned the stage.  Watch for him to be a star!  The Opry is something of a circus, and extravaganza, slightly horrifying  and absolutely wonderful.  It is physical the embodiment of a Nashville that boosts C&W Music, and at the same time suppressed creativity.

At the end of the night, Lou Ann and I did the backstage tour, and did get to step on that Ryman-wood circle, and our young guide offered that we could sing something on the Opry Stage.  Several did, and I beleted out the chorus of a new song I just finished.  (Other folks on our tour were saying, “I haven’t heard that one yet!”  (“I just finished it last week.”)  “I really like!   I hope you get to sell it. Good luck with it.”  (“In my dreams . . .”)

I had forgotten what hard work recording is!  I broke the sabbatical time into 3 different recording sessions – 3 days in Gadsden at GAT3 MidSouth Studios this month, and 2 days there in March, interspersed with a week in February at the legendary F.A.M.E. Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. (Most folks don’t realize that FAME is not  boast but an acronym, for Florence Area Musical Enterprises.)

GAT3 has a marvelous recording room, and a great board and equipment.  They are an expansion into Alabama from an established studio in Charlotte, NC.  I got rough tracks down on 9 of my songs. Cody Ginn , from Atlanta, was the young sound engineer on my project.  He is 22 years old, and I’m 61 now, but we established a rapport and a system, and worked together well.  I’m rusty, so it will need a lot of editing. Their equipment is state of the art, and has amazing capabilities, beyond what I remember from my last such venture back in 1996.  Digital recording opens lots of possibilities for correcting errors, saving time, and getting the best results.

When we began, trying to get a sense of how this was going to go, he asked me who were my inspirations and whose CD’s were the kind of thing I wanted to sound like.  “Guy Clark.” (Blank look), “Ray Wylie Hubbard?” (Head shake)….  “Kristofferson?”  Reply: “I’ve heard of him… so, Old School.”  “Um, yeah…that would be me.”  The next recording stop us Muscle Shoals the last week of February.

 

I missed the movie documentary about Muscle Shoals that was out earlier in the year, but I’ll catch it later.  Muscle Shoals has giant historic presence in American music – a “Who’s Who” roster has recorded there.   Word is, there is a resurgence of the Muscle Shoals influence into music again.  North Alabama has been the seedbed of serious music tradition – including Sam Phillips (founder of Sun Records), the great W.C. Handy, Tammy Wynette is from Red Bay, and more importantly so is Mac MacAnally – voted Musician of the Year 6 times in a row by the Country Music Association, the group Alabama if course, The Muslce Shoals Rhythm Section and more.  North Alabama is producing some great music and musicians these days: Alabama Shakes, the Drive By Truckers, and now Jason Isbell in a solo career.  And of course, to list famous musician from Alabama would take a whole page!