Folks, we just wanted to mention that we’re starting the video editing for our upcoming harmony singing DVD, and it’s looking (and sounding) good. Target date for availability is April 1st! We’ll see if we make it!
Archive for February, 2012
Harmony Singing DVD in the Works
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012Harmony Singing DVD: The Rest of the Story
Thursday, February 16th, 2012
Murphy Henry
Now that I’ve told you about content of the Harmony Singing DVD, let me tell you about the fun stuff! I picked Janet Beazley and Chris Stuart up at the airport on Saturday night about 7:45. I’d originally told them I’d meet them curbside, but of course by the time I’d made the almost two-hour trip (primed by a Starbucks Tall Americano and oatmeal cookie!) I needed the visit the “loo” as they say in Jolly Olde England. So I met them inside at baggage. I’d told them they could use our instruments, so all they had was two suitcases. (“And no merch!” as they both exclaimed.)
When we stepped outside the terminal, they were both stunned by the cold (22 degrees) which was made even colder by the brisk wind which was making the flags stand straight out. Yikes! We didn’t waste any time getting in the car and cranking up the heat.
I figured they would want to eat something so I told them they had three choices: eat junk food at the airport, eat fast food when we got to Winchester (about an hour’s drive), or wait till we got home and eat some of the food I had fixed. Bless their hearts, they opted to eat at home.
With Janet in the front seat, she and I talked all the way home, with Chris occasionally chiming in from somewhere in the back. She and I had met (and bonded) a few years ago at Mid-West Banjo Camp over a beer at a local tavern and the book Eat, Pray, Love. Deeply engrossed in conversation, we didn’t realize a huge summer thunderstorm had arisen and that we were due back on campus to perform real soon. The only thing to do was to make a dash for it through the pouring rain with lightning flashing all around and “thunder roaring, bursting in the clouds.” We arrived at our dorm drenched to the skin and looking liked drowned rats. We had just time to towel our hair day and change clothes before jumping on stage to sing Love Come Home as a duet. It sounded great. We’ve been buddies ever since.
Arriving back at the house, I warmed up bowls of a slow-cooker roast/stew I had concocted based on my friend Robyn’s recipe which included dumping in a bottle of beer and ¼ cup of brown sugar to the roast and adding onion, carrots, apple, apricots, prunes, and cranberries. By the time I’d added all that there was no room for the sweet potatoes! So it goes. They said it was yummy and I had to agree! (Could have used a tad more salt…)
Meanwhile Bill Evans was making his way to the house in his rental car. (He’d flown in earlier in the week to visit his sister in Richmond and to do a banjo workshop.) I called him and he said he’d be there at precisely 10:26. So of course, at 10:27 I called and told him he was late! He had a good excuse: he was almost in sight of the house when he found the road blocked and a “blue light special” (police cars) surrounding a truck which had run off the road and had “fetched up” with its front tires in the lake. The cops had rerouted him up the mountain which was taking longer than he had expected. I was aghast at the police cars because Chris and Janet and I had passed that same truck on our way in. (No police cars at the time.) I had laughed about it because there was a can of beer sitting by the truck and had said, laughingly, “Welcome to our hillbilly subdivision!” The truck looked abandoned and I certainly didn’t think anyone was in it. (And I hope to goodness I was right). But still, I realized as Bill was telling the story that we should have stopped to make sure.
Anyhow, Bill arrived safe and sound, and joined us in our evening meal and conversation. We batted around a few ideas for the DVD, talked about what time we’d like to start filming (11ish) and then….what do you think we four banjo pickers did? Did we rehearse? Did we break out four old fives and get down with some Earl? Some Ralph? Some Sonny Osborne (one of Bill’s favorites)? No, we did not. Sad to say, being the Baby Boomers that we are, we all went straight to bed. (Okay, Bill probably stayed up a while and did Facebook and email from his bedroom.) But, maybe, being Baby Boomers, we just realized that we had work to do tomorrow and that the RESPONSIBLE thing to do, was get a good night’s rest. I prefer to think of it that way!
And now, as my grandmother would say, “Mouse is run, my story’s done.” At least as much as I can tell now. Now it’s time to go record a few extra introductory clips for the DVD. When you get the DVD, you can check closely to see if you can tell which ones I added today! The clothes will be the same, the earrings and necklace with be the same, but the hair never turns out the same way twice!
Harmony Singing DVD!
Tuesday, February 14th, 2012Murphy Henry
Wow! What a weekend! On Monday evening, we finished recording our brand-new Harmony Singing DVD! (Not yet titled and not yet for sale!) Bill Evans, Janet Beazley, and Chris Stuart (all from California) joined Red and me in the studio to record a DVD that’s all about teaching folks to sing harmony. It was way too much fun, and we put down some amazing lessons.
And of course we did it totally by ear, the Murphy Method way, with no talk about theory or use of big phrases like “five chord,” “parallel thirds,” or “sing a B note.” In fact, I made Bill go back and re-do a clip in which he referred to an E chord as a “five chord.” That’s a no-no, Bill!
We chose six songs that are fairly easy to sing and are well-known, standard bluegrass numbers: Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Bury Me Beneath the Willow, All the Good Times Are Past and Gone, Don’t This Road Look Rough and Rocky, Amazing Grace, and Just Over in the Gloryland.
It is our firm belief that you learn to sing harmony by singing harmony! (Just as you learn to sing lead—which is the melody—by singing lead.) So, for every song, we sang the lead part and each harmony part separately (with guitar accompaniment) so you can hear that part clearly and practice singing along with us.
And here is beauty of our approach: We demonstrated the first song, Will the Circle, in three different keys so that no matter what your vocal range is, you can sing with us! So, Murphy sang lead in the key of A, Janet sang lead in the key of C, and Bill sang lead in the key of E. We also demonstrated and sang the harmony parts (tenor and baritone) for each key. We also did the second and third songs (Willow and All the Good Times) that way.
For the fourth song, Rough and Rocky, which is longer (verse and chorus in harmony all the way through), we used just one arrangement with Chris singing lead in G. And the last two numbers we performed as quartets so all you bass singers can get involved!
Since this DVD concentrates on singing, we kept the instrumentation minimal (usually Chris on guitar) so you could always hear the singing. Then, at the very end, we closed out with a rousing quartet of Over in the Gloryland with Bill and me both playing our banjos. We were cooking!
[Then there was that extra footage we shot with the strange rabbit, but I don’t want to say too much about that yet....]
I am so excited about this DVD! We’ve never done a singing DVD so this is a totally new venture for us. I started thinking about this (with some prodding from Bill!) after he and I did a harmony singing workshop with Janet at Mid-West Banjo Camp this past June. She was the workshop leader and she did an amazing job of teaching a class of 30 adults to sing three-part harmony to Don’t This Road Look Rough and Rocky. (All Bill and I had to do was sing what she told us to!) It was her ability to talk about bluegrass harmony singing in simple terms—and sing all three parts herself with ease (although not at the same time!)—that made me want to record this DVD and open up the sometimes mysterious world of harmony singing to everyone.
So, stay tuned for more info on the release date. (And the title!) We’re hoping to have the DVD out in a couple of months. And, believe me, you’ll be the first to know!
PS: And what did we do after our long days of recording? Sunday night we watched the PBS Masterpiece Classic Downton Abby (two blissful hours!) and Monday night we watched the screamingly funny (and extremely risqué) movie Hall Pass. (Not recommended for kids! Or grandkids! I might consider letting Dalton see it when he gets to be 21…or 30! Oh! I guess that would be Casey’s decision! Or, by that time, his! Hey, this grandmothering is harder than you think!)
PPS: And speaking of mothering, happy birthday to son Chris whose birthday is tomorrow, Feb. 15th!!! As Mr. Spock would say, Live long and prosper!
Portland Workshop, Part 2
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012
Murphy Henry
After a short (very short!) visit with Dalton this afternoon, I headed back to my house to teach my afternoon lessons. I am now resuming my previously interrupted blog!
So, we learned the chords to Boil Them Cabbage. Then I taught the high break. I love teaching that to a group because it’s basically one lick, the Foggy Mountain Breakdown Lick (2121/5215), played in different, up-the-neck chord positions. I will admit that I did modify the last lick of the high break so that the beginners would not have to try to make the Cumberland Gap position up the neck. We did 3-pinch/2-pinch down the neck instead. Which sounded fine. We spent some time moving from the vamp to the lead and back again and then it was time for lunch!
I was afraid that after lunch folks would be too sluggish to learn much but the students surprised me. We jumped right into improvising with my favorite first improv song Blue Ridge Cabin Home.
Murphy and Claire Levine (on guitar) at the Portland banjo workshop.
I had already given my spiel about improvising which is lick based, not melody based. That is, we don’t look for the melody notes first and then try to build a roll around them because that is MUCH TOO HARD. Instead, we learn the chords of the song and then use GENERIC licks to fit the chords. This is Improv 101. Later, when the students are much more advanced, they can begin to try to work in more melody notes, but not now.
So, first of all, we went over the chords, because you can improvise if you don’t know the chords. I choose Blue Ridge Cabin Home because it is a “real” bluegrass song and the chords are so simple: GCDG/GCDG, four beats of everything.
Once we had the chords down, I showed the class the simplest form of improvising: playing a forward and backward roll (3215/1231) in all of the chords. That way, the beginners would always have something to fall back on if the rest of the licks proved to be too hard. We called that our “lousy level,” which is a term John Hartford used to denote the foundational level, the bottom-most rung of the ladder that you can come back to if all else fails. (And they could also vamp.)
Then we started “spicing” up the break by adding a 2-3 slide to the forward roll, then a 3-2 pull off to the backward roll. This gave us a classic Scruggs lick that fits two beats of G every day of the week. We added pinches (3 pinch/2 pinch) to fill out the “measure” of G and then we had to stop and have a conversation about “measures.”
I always think in four-beat measures (when I think of measures at all, which is not often!) but some people think in two-beat measures. It’s no big deal, so I didn’t let us linger here long and get side-tracked from what we were doing which was PLAYING!
So already we had a pretty good-sounding break. And now came the time to venture into more advanced territory. I asked those who played Foggy Mountain Breakdown already to take the “tag lick” (and the pinches that follow it) and drop it into the song as a substitute for those last four beats of G. Bingo! They were able to do that fairly easily. So we played that for a while.
Then I asked them to now take the “D” lick from FMB and drop that into the song as a substitute for the four-beat D lick we were already doing. I told them it would hook right onto the tag lick, that they would share that last third string note.
That proved to be a little harder as not everyone “hears” that open fourth string as the start of the D lick. But with students asking questions and showing me what they were doing, we got it all straightened out.
So now we hard a darn good break, chock full of hard-core Scruggs licks. We left the C lick as it was (forward/backward rolls) because by now the students were getting pretty mentally exhausted. We put everything we knew together and played Blue Ridge Cabin Home as a real song, using our newly-constructed break for a kickoff and then, after the verse and chorus as a break. Whoo hoo! It sounded great! And let me not fail to add that during all this time our faithful guitar player, Claire, hung right in there, playing slow, slow, slow. It was a huge help.
We finished out the rest of the class time with another unrehearsed performance from Patty and Claire and me. I kept referring to Patty as the “poster child” for the Murphy Method because she has done so well, but I think she got a little tired of that, so I stopped. (Did you notice that I stopped, Patty??) It’s just that I am so proud of her. She demonstrated everything that I preach as we played. If she didn’t know a break, she improvised one. If she made a mistake, she kept on playing. If I said, “What do you want to play?” she immediately came up with a tune. (Always be prepared!)
Murphy (center) with all the Portland workshop participants.
Sunday morning, we met again bright and early at 10 a.m. for three more hours of picking, playing, and singing. And improvising. Tommie had already taken the improvising licks she had learned yesterday and had tried to apply them to Bury Me Beneath the Willow. But she had had a problem: Since the chord progression of Willow is GCGD/GCG-DG [and I use G-D to represent a “split measure” of two beats G/two beats D] she couldn’t get the licks to fit. Did they, in fact, fit?
I told her that was exactly what we were going to work on! (And really, I had planned that in advance!) So we did. In addition to plugging in all the licks we had learned yesterday, I showed them how the “tag lick” (and pinches)– which is usually used to end a phrase–now could be used to fill out that third G measure. (And believe me, I hate to be “talking” about this on paper—so to speak—because it rarely makes much sense. SEE THE IMPROVISING DVD! It’s all there!)
And my goodness! That was a hard concept to get across! It was hard for the students to adjust their ears to “hearing” the tag lick in the middle of the song. But we worked long and hard on it, and many people did, in fact get it.
But by that time, the students had pretty much reached the saturation point when their brains simply couldn’t absorb anything else new. So it was Patty and Claire to the rescue, to play a few more tunes including Sally Goodwin. We also had a question and answer session and a general wrap-up. And then, the workshop was over. My how time flies when you’re having fun!
We all took our banjos inside the car repair shop and had our pictures taken along side this lovely old car. We are all smiling because someone said, “Say TAB!”
But the day was not over for me. No, it wasn’t. Claire had told me about a square dance that night that was featuring a live old-time band. Patty bravely offered to accompany me so off we went, via a coffee shop to caffeine up! Since I have spent the last year learning to dance the man’s part (so I will never lack for a partner!) Patty was able to be my partner. We had a wonderful time!
The square dancing was not exactly what I’ve been doing which is called Modern Western Square Dancing where you have to take classes to learn all the moves which have weirdo names like Relay the Deucy and Spin the Top and Spin Chain and Exchange the Gears. But we did square up four couples and then the two callers taught the moves right there on the spot. (They were excellent teachers). The moves weren’t too complicated, but they were somewhat involved and you did have to pay attention to what you were doing. It definitely wasn’t square dancing for dummies. We must have had 7 or 8 squares going all night long. And lots and lots of young people, twenty-somethings, all dressed in funky Portland clothes, lots of cowboy boots, and leggings, and some short skirts and some long skirts, and one man in a skirt. So much young energy in the room! It was great!
A few of the moves were the same ones I had been dancing: allemande left followed by right and left grand is pretty standard, as is do-si-do and swing your partner. But we also did Box the Gnat and Grand Square. Which are way cool.
So my weekend in Portland ended on a high, high note. My flight back Monday morning was uneventful (if long) and now here I am, back at the old homeplace.
Thanks again, Patty and Claire, for all your hard work and many thanks to all you wonderful students for turning out and giving the Murphy Method whirl. Hope we can do it again!
And if you’re interested in a Murphy Method workshop, don’t forget we’ve got our Intermediate Camp coming up in Winchester on March 23, 24, and 25. Check it out on our web page! Hope to see some of you there!