Yes, folks, as we mentioned last week, Christopher’s song “Walking West to Memphis” is up for the “Song of the Year” award at SPBGMA. (That’s the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music in America.) Everybody attending the convention is eligible to vote, so if you’re going to SBBGMA, PLEASE VOTE!
“Walkin’ West to Memphis” is getting lots of airplay, and is now #3 in the National Bluegrasss Survey in the new edition of Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine! I believe that’s up from #4 in January.
For those who enjoy good songs and original mandopicking, here’s Chris singing and playing W.W.T.M. with Shawn Camp at the Station Inn in Nashville:
Here’s a link to a post on the No Depression website about a project that both Murphy and I participated in. Previously we’ve posted the videos (here and here and here and here) that Dyann Arthur filmed of both of us, but this nice little article has an overview of the whole project as well as some of the clips of the other women that she recorded.
Here are some clips from YouTube that you may not have seen. (Or you may have if you’re an inveterate haunter of YouTube.) This first one comes from The Music Box Project, an oral history project compiling stories of women who play traditional music. Murphy and Red play Murphy’s original song “When My Mama Sang To Me” in their studio in Winchester, VA.
This second clip is from the Spirit of the Suwanee festival in 1989. Red and Murphy sing “East Virginia Blues” with Karen Spence on tenor and playing bass, George Custer on fiddle, and Tuck Tucker on dobro.
This third clip is from the same festival. It’s Murphy’s song “How They Loved to Sing”
I’m posting this picture because my mom asked me to, and I always do what my mother asks. (Okay, almost always, but I swear it’s like 98% of the time!) I went to the IBMA Awards show this year with friends since no other family members were going. We went out for a stellar meal beforehand at the Nashville restaurant Flyte. Also in our group was Megan’s mom Maria, who deserves credit for taking this picture:
Joe Smart, Casey Henry, Megan Lynch, David Thomas
Later on in the week, on Saturday of FanFest in fact, I ran into the awesome and talented Missy Raines in the hallway while I happened to be wearing her new t-shirt design.
Here we are: Missy Raines and Casey Henry (Photo credit: Ben Surratt)
Today while I was searching around YouTube I found that someone has posted a new video of the Dixie Bee-Liners from the show we played in Abingdon, Va., on September 11th. This is my tune “Leroy and Liza.”
I also found three more videos of the band, to which I’ll just post links, since they don’t have ALL that much of me in them. The first two are from the showcase we played in the Acoustic Trail Listening Room at IBMA in the wee hours of Thursday morning.
This last one is from a fan at the Cropredy festival that we played in England in August. We’re on stage and you can hear us very well, but what he actually shows is quite random and kinda silly. It contains snippets of quite a few of the songs from our set. Here’s that link.
Last week at the International Bluegrass Music Association conference our favorite clawhammer banjo instructor Lynn Morris received a Distinguished Achievement Award from the organization in recognition for her illustrious career in the bluegrass music business. From her early days in the City Limits Bluegrass Band through Whetstone Run and her own Lynn Morris Band, Lynn has always striven for perfection. That dedication paid off when she was the first woman to win the National Banjo Championship at Winfield, Kansas, and again a few years later when she was the first person ever to take the title twice. She was named IBMA Female Vocalist of the Year three times and her band put out five superlative albums. She was at the height of her career when she suffered a stroke, which robbed her of her ability to speak and play. Since then she has worked tirelessly, with tremendous strength and determination, to recover what she lost. She has regained so much ground; we are so proud of her. Currently Lynn works as the sound engineer on the road with Bill Emerson and Sweet Dixie.
This video is of most of her acceptance speech at the Special Awards Ceremony at IBMA on September 30, 2010. I missed the first bit. (Sorry!)
This video is the first single of the music from an upcoming album to be released before the end of the year. Chris Lovelace and I have been making music quite a while in different genres. We’ve been punk rockers, hip-hoppers, and now we’re putting some of our favorite sounds together in what has been described by The Bluegrass Blog as “Alt-County”. I like that, not alt-country, but alt-county. We’re county fellers and though neither one of us grew up farming or hunting, we really do connect with the county vibe. Chris has two daughters, Lilian and Evelyn, who are just starting kindergarten this year and you can see their initials on his shirt in some parts of the video. I’m wearing a pin that my grandmother used to wear.
We were initially going to film the video in Luray Caverns. That was the location that the director who came down from New York, Liquid, had chosen. We got there and they said it was a no-go, so we started driving up and down some back roads until we saw a fellow out in a field with a metal detector. He was looking for civil war stuff and we found out that he knew some bluegrass folks. As I recall, I believe his wife had maybe sold a house to one of the Yates brothers and might have been related to Earl Taylor, so that was a good connection. We asked him if he knew a good place to go and he said he had some land up the road. I asked him if it was purty and he replied “Well, I think so.” And when we got there via a grass path off the main dirt road, it was pretty. We shot the first part there and then cruised up the skyline drive and shot some footage looking out toward the Shenandoah Valley towards North Mountain, where Chris and I grew up. The last location, where the waterwall is, was in Sterling and I used to pass it going to work and always thought it would be a good scene for a music video.
Liquid rode the MegaBus down from up north and arrived at 5 in the morning in D.C. I picked him up, late, at about 9 and we shot from about 12 to 8, having lunch in Luray. We got back to the studio in Sterling and he finished editing about 4 in the morning and I took him back to D.C. and he caught about a 9AM bus back. So it was a whirlwind 24 hours and Chris and I had a really good time making our first video. Stay tuned for more Archetones music videos and an album to be release this fall!
I filmed thesetunes as part of a video oral history project on women who play traditional music, which is being made by a woman named Dyann Arthur. It’s called the Music Box Project. She is interviewing women all around the country. Although she’d talked to several clawhammer players, I was the first Scruggs-style player she had included. She has an interview scheduled with Murphy later on this summer. This is the title tune from my CD, “Real Women Drive Trucks.” I wish that I had been able to get my banjo into more perfect tune, but I had to drop it into D tuning that morning, and it really needs at least a day to acclimate before it starts sounding right.
I write this from the kitchen table of my grandparents’ house in Clarkesville, Georgia. I spent all of yesterday picking blackberries and making jelly, and completely forgetting to blog. So, I offer another video clip from YouTube. This, as I say in the introduction, is an arrangement of a lullaby Grandmother used to sing to us when we were little. I recorded it on my Real Women Drive Trucks CD.
I just found this while I was searching around on YouTube. Mark Panfil is our is the instructor on our Beginning Dobro DVD. He posted this lesson on YouTube back in January for one of our signature Murphy Method songs: “Banjo in the Hollow.” As you know it’s the first tune we teach on the Beginning Banjo DVD, but it’s not on the Dobro DVD. It’s also on the Slow Jam DVD, so Mark has considerately made a Dobro lesson for it so that any Dobroists who have that Slow Jam disc can learn it and play along with it.
