Blog Archives
Benefit Concert Saturday, March 4
Please join Shades Mountain Air, Drexel Rayford and Friends and Southern Harmony for a night of music in the warm, comfortable listening venue of Moonlight on the Mountain. Get a good taste of Bluegrass, Gospel, Folk, Barbershop and other musical styles in this well-known Birmingham acoustic venue.
The event is a benefit for Cognitive Dynamics, and proceeds will go to support the 501c3 foundation’s programs that improve quality of life for people with dementia and their caregivers through the arts and storytelling (for more information, please see http://www.cognitivedynamics.org/).
The cost of admission is $20, CASH ONLY. Please bring your own food and drink 
(except coffee), and arrive early to get a good seat (doors open at 7 pm)
For more information, please see Moonlight on the Mountain’s website athttp://www.moonlightonthemtn.com/index.html
Last year our band played for one of the Foundation’s programs. Read the rest of this entry
All Americana Night with Gary Furr and Keith Elder
All Americana Night Come on, join in.
Wednesday evening, June 29, 6-7 pm
Vestavia Hills Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama 35216
Wednesday evening at 6 pm, at Vestavia Hills Baptist Church, we will have “All Americana Night.” My friend, Keith Elder, and bandmate Don Wendorf, will join me to lead us in singing distinctively American songs from all kinds of “roots” traditions.
Wikipedia defines “Americana” as “contemporary music that incorporates elements of various American roots music styles, including country, roots-rock, folk, bluegrass, R&B and blues.” We want to have fun, sing some songs from the traditions themselves, as well as some originals. Songs for kids to join along, a few hymns and patriotic songs, a little of everything for those who come. Hope you’ll come out.
Keith was at our congregation on a Wednesday night recentlyhere a few weeks back and did a great job on a Wednesday night. Keith has spoken and performed for over thirty years in a wide variety of church, conference, and community settings. After serving local churches in North Alabama as a youth director then as a pastor, he spent a number of years as a songwriter in Read the rest of this entry
“Sixty is Just Alright”
It’s a good time to polish up friendships, love family, forgive, thank and bless.
So I turned sixty, and for some reason the people around me celebrated for a week. I know with Ebola, the Ukraine, ISIS and Israel causing the end-of-the-worlders to crank out their book my firthday isn’t a big deal globally, but it has been to me.
Sixty is alright for sure.
Over the last five years I have laid to rest a close friend, a father-in-law (who was a second father to me) and a mentor and colleague I have known for 21 years and was my predecessor. The Shadow has been around lately. I have grandchildren. There is likely more life behind than before me years-wise. You know—morbidity hangs around. Joints ache a little more.
You’ve poured a lot of concrete by sixty. Decisions, patterns, character, and events harden into tracks out of which it’s hard to escape. On the other hand, those same tracks give a certain comfort and stability to life. It’s hard to break them up.
The upside has surprised me, though. A certain amount of “I just don’t care about that anymore.” I don’t care very much at all what others think about what I think. I don’t need to correct them all Read the rest of this entry
Exploring the Discography of Life
“…there is a playful randomness about what we find and read. Or rather, what finds us”
When I first rekindled my interest in songwriting and music again, sixteen or seventeen years ago, I began hanging out in music stores, playing the guitar again and digging out songs from my memory and on faded notebook paper from years ago. One day, a worker in the store I frequent most, Fretted Instruments of Birminghm, said, “Are you just starting to explore the discography?” I had just said that “I was getting into bluegrass music” and that was his reply.
I began to delve into just that—listening, going to shows, scooting to Nashville now and then. I bought a collection of Bill Monroe’s music. Over the coming years, I heard a lot of music live—Bruce Hornsby, Ricky Skaggs, Nickel Creek, J. D. Crowe, Earl Scruggs, Vince Gill, as well as a lot of lesser-known but excellent players and singers coming through the Station Inn in Nashville or here in Birmingham, Read the rest of this entry
Mapping the Bluegrass Genome
“The genetic code of bluegrass and old time music is more sophisticated than that. It carries stories of birth, life and death in the old days. It tells of children dying young, tragic love, shame, murder, alcoholism and faith. To learn the code, no stereotype will do. You have to descend into the music and listen.”
In 2005 I took a three month sabbatical to study, pray, and feed the senses. I went to art museums, read books, went to Nashville to learn about the music industry and played at open mic at the Bluebird Café, reaching one
Shuffler and Boosinger
of my bucket list items (the ultimate would be a gig on the “Prairie Home Companion Show” while Garrison Keillor is still on earth!). But a lot of that time was “exploring my roots,” musical, theological and spiritual—which led to a week at Steve Kaufman’s Acoustic Kamp.
I’d been to the Kamp before, in Maryville, Tennessee. Unless you are a devotee of the guitar and acoustic cousins like the mandolin, the “fiddle” (violin played a certain way), bass, banjo or dobro, you don’t realize that hundreds of camps happen every year across the world where musicians gather and play and learn the heritage of “roots” music—folk, jazz, country, celtic, and so on. In these places, campers rub shoulders with the legends of bluegrass, swing, fingerpicking and new acoustic music. I met legends like Bill Keith, Clarence White, Read the rest of this entry
Musical Profile: Laura McGhee
Laura McGhee
Laura’s talent is immense and her music full of heart…,I hope you get to hear Laura sometime. She’s a terrific musician and … You’ll find these tunes getting in your head and your voice humming along!
Laura McGhee performed together with Shades Mountain Air on Saturday evening, then came and performed at our church on Sunday morning, doing her two beautiful compositions, “Roxburghe House” and “Commemoration,” the former a musical reflection on a house in Scotland where hospice work now takes place, the latter a piece she composed for a 9-11 memorial in New York. Set in the context of worship, they affected the congregation deeply. It was quite a weekend, one in which I was able to spend more time than I often do with a fellow performer in a co-bill.
I met Laura last year when we shared a performance at Moonlight on the Mountain in Hoover, Alabama, near where I live. It was a delightful evening, and her talent and musical chops were evident to all of us. When our host on Saturday evening scheduled a retirement party for all of her friends this weekend at the same listening room, Read the rest of this entry
“Live at Moonlight On the Mountain”
Our band has produced two CDs in the past, in 2000 (Shades Mountain Air) and in 2004 (Sky’s a Clearing). For the last nine years, we’ve been promising a “new” CD while going about busy lives. I have had four individual collections of songs in the meantime, and the band has done a CD related to Greg’s short film, titled Christmas At Virgin Pines.
Sometime last year, we said, “Why don’t we try a live CD? It can capture the energy and experience of a performance, the joy of sharing with an audience, in a venue we love?” So, the result was a June 1 concert at Moonlight on the Mountain in Hoover, Alabama, one of our very favorite places to play. Engineer Fred Miller of Knoddingoffmusic came and meticulously recorded the night and mastered the CD for us. After many months, Live At Moonlight On the Mountain is finally here and available for purchase. It’s a great CD, maybe the best ever. It shows our fifteen years together, the long experience of performing our songs until the arrangement is just right, and the love and energy of playing together. I think our fans will love it!
So, I encourage you to visit our store on our website. Eventually it will be available on Amazon and iTunes, but for now, you can purchase directly here by credit card. Just click the link! LIVE AT MOONLIGHT ON THE MOUNTAIN
Thou Shalt Love Thy Bandmates
Anyway, riding in a van for a week turned us from “Friends
and Brothers” to angry inmates who couldn’t wait to bust out.
Fifteen Years. That’s how long Shades Mountain Air has been together, at least the core of Greg and Nancy Womble, Gary Furr, and Don Wendorf. We have spent a couple hours a week most of that fifteen years weekly at Greg and Nancy’s house, practicing, horsing around, composing, arranging, learning and growing from one another. We’ve only had one personnel change in all that time–Don’s son, Paul, our outstanding fiddle player, left us to move on with wife, kids, career, to Texas, and so, we were four again for a while, then found Melanie Rodgers. Mel has added dynamic new joy to our sound, and is now a part of our 15th Anniversary Live Album that is now available. (Go to the website store for our new CD click here!)
Shades Mountain Air at Moonlight, 2013
The album sounds great! We hired Fred Miller of Knodding Off Music to record and engineer our live concert. Fred did a fantastic job and we are so happy with the result. He captured our live sound and energy. It sounds like us! There is NOTHING like live music, and though it’s fun to be in a studio and monkey around with something until you get it “perfect”, there is a corresponding loss of that spark that performers-audience and a venue provide. We did it at our favorite gig–Moonlight On the Mountain in Bluff Park in Hoover, Alabama, with Keith Harrelson, as always, handling lights and sound.
I say all this because Shades Mountain Air is more than a band. We have become family together. We love playing together, singing, creating, whether anyone is listening or not. Greg and Nancy’s kids grew up having to hear us every week in their house. We have been through life crises, griefs, and changes Read the rest of this entry
Jim Hurst Can Play a Guitar
Jim Hurst picks. He came dangerously close to Herb Trotman’s “10,000 note limit”
Last night, I went to hear JIM HURST, IBMA (International Bluegrass Music Association) Guitarist of the Year. That means he is a fast-pickin’ guy. “Bluegrass,” like few other labels, can lock you in. The people who love and adore it who are more on the “traditional” side (Has to be like Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs played it or it ain’t bluegrass) will leave you for growing, experimenting and deviating. The rest of the music listening world (Country, whatever that is anymore, sheesh!), folk, indie, etc. is disinterested because they never get beyond stereotypes like “Deliverance” and the Beverly Hillbillies. Read the rest of this entry
Fiddle Tunes, Old Time, and “Jamming”
When you jam, you shoot for fun and participation, not showing off
Well, the other day Nancy called me and said, “Hey, we’re going to have a jam over at the house.” Jim Brown and his daughter are coming to play fiddle, and a couple of neighbors are coming, one plays the guitar.” So I went. We had a grand time.
Taking turns ain’t so bad.
Jam sessions used to terrify my when I was still learning the “discography,” as they say. The bluegrass, celtic, Irish, old-time and folk worlds are an oral tradition of literally thousands of songs. Just the familiar American fiddle tunes common in jams, like “Blackberry Blossom,” “Bill Cheatham,” “Whisky Before Breakfast,” “Salt Creek” and so on, number in the hundreds. And there are different ways they are played. Anyone wanting to learn guitar, and especially folk and bluegrass music, does well to practice these tunes until the most common 30-50 of them are familiar to you.
The most powerful truth about “fiddle tunes” is that they were originally not for performing but playing together and dancing. In other words, they were communal. It was something people did before blood-spurting video games, cruising the next and texting, all solitary expressions that tell who we are. Modern Airports are museums of eccentric anonymity—looking at their screens and ears plugged with those ubiquitous white Apple ear deafeners. Lots of people carrying instruments somewhere, but not a dern one of us pulls it out of the case and gathers new friends to pick. Shame. It would sure help us forget how much we hate the airlines.
When you jam, you shoot for fun and participation, not showing off. Off course, plenty of the latter happens, but it’s better if you don’t go for it. Showing everybody else up is, well, obnoxious, same as in regular life. It’s like beating your two year old in basketball. And it proves what?
Anyway, the world of this music is a world of sharing, courtesy, respect and encouragement. Not mostly about showy breaks, but all things decently, in order, and as widely involving as possible. I’m reading Blue Ridge Music Trails of North Carolina, and in it, the author cites the “Ten Commandments of Jamming” by Laura Pharis.[i] Here they are, in case you decide to gather a quick jam at the airport next time so it can have a smidge of humanity amid the sterility of moving masses on the flying tubes.
1. Thou shalt not forsake the beat.
2. Thou shalt always play in tune.
3. Thou shalt arrange thyselves in a circle so thou mayest hear and see the other musicians and thou shalt play in accord with the group.
4. Thou shalt commence and cease playing in unison.
5. Thou shalt stick out thine own foot or lift up thine own voice and cry, “This is it!” if thou hast been the one to begin the song, this in order to endeth the tune, which otherwise wilt go on and on forever and forevermore.
6. Thou shalt concentrate and not confound the music by mixing up the A part and the B part. If thou should sinneth in this, or make any mistake that is unclean, thou mayest atone for thy transgression by reentering the tune in the proper place and playing thereafter in time.
7. Thou shalt be mindful of the key of the banjo, and play many tunes in that key, for the banjo is but a lowly instrument which must be retuned each time there is a key change.
8. Thou shalt not speed up nor slow down when playing a tune, for such is an abomination.
9. Thou shalt not noodle by thine ownself on a tune which the other musicians know not, unless thou art asked or unless thou art teaching that tune, for it is an abomination and the other musicians will not hold thee guiltless, and shall take thee off their computer lists, yea, even unto the third and fourth generations. Thou shalt not come to impress others with thine own amazing talents, but will adhere to the song, which shall be the center around which all musicians play.
10. Thou shalt play well and have fun.
Far as I’m concerned, ought to send it to the United Nations, Congress, and the G8. Some good jamming would resolve many of the biggest diplomatic crises of our time. Look at the dictators and tyrants of history. You wouldn’t find a banjo or mandolin within a mile of ‘em. That’s where the problems started. As the late Briscoe Darlin once said on Andy Griffith, “You got time to breathe, you got time for music.” Or, a man that ain’t got time to pick a tune, well, he’s trouble waitin’ to happen.” Stay back so the explosion doesn’t get you.
[i] Pp. 161-162, Hannah Allen is a contributing writer for the North Carolina Arts Council blog, NCArtsEveryday,
