Tag Archives: dixie bee-liners

Casey Henry

Today kicks off the week-long International Bluegrass Music Association Trade Show and Fan Fest in Nashville, Tenn. In conjunction with this WAMU's Bluegrass Country is broadcasting live from Nashville. The Dixie Bee-Liners (with Casey Henry on banjo) will be playing some tunes from 5:00-5:30 Eastern Time this afternoon. You can listen online at bluegrasscountry.org.

If you're going to be in town for the convention, the band is also playing some late-night showcases during the week. They schedule can be found here.

Casey Henry

Tonight at 7:00 central/8:00 eastern you'll have the chance to watch and/or listen to me play live with the Dixie Bee-Liners on the Music City Roots radio show, which is held at the Loveless Cafe Barn in Nashville, Tenn., and broadcast on WSM (wsmonline.com). They also stream live video at musiccityroots.com, so you can see us as well as hear us. Eddie Stubbs is the announcer, Jim Lauderdale is the host, and there are four other bands in addition to ourselves. We play first, so don't tune in late! We'll probably do about four or five songs.

If you live in town (or are coming into town for the jam camp) you can come see the show live for only $10. Details on the website.

I hope you can tune in!

Casey Henry

Last weekend the Dixie Bee-Liners played at the Gettysburg Bluegrass Festival in Pennsylvania. It’s only a couple of hours from my parents’ house, so I drove up the day before and spent the night with them. We were minus our fiddler for this gig, because her Army-officer boyfriend was home on leave from Afghanistan for two weeks, so we instead had a dobro player in the form of Matt Ledbetter, who has played with the band before and already knew most of the material.  We did, however, need to practice all the songs on the set list so we met early in the day for a run-through.

Stuffed into a room at the Red Carpet Inn in Chambersburg we breezed through our standards: “Crooked Road,” “Bugs in the Basement,” “Ball and Chain,” “Yellow-Haired Girl”. The only different songs were, of course, the dobro tunes. Matt played “Fireball,” a tune that I love. J.D. Crowe played it when I saw him at the Ryman last month and when I took my break I tried to play my absolute Croweiest.

Matt also played “Reuben,” which is typically a no-brainer. In D tuning it uses the same-old rolls you use all the time in standard tuning. However. We started off the second set with “Reuben” and the next song was “Walls of Time” also in D, but one that I play in regular tuning out of D position. Clearly there would be no time to re-tune. That meant I had to play “Reuben” also in standard tuning out of D position. That makes it COMPLETELY different! The rolls are entirely different and, may I say, just a little challenging. Thank goodness, then, that the tune came in the second set so I had about ten hours to think about it and practice it before debuting this new arrangement on stage.

I did not, of course, spend the entire ten hours practicing it. We had to play our first set, after all, and there were friends to visit (the Steep Canyon Rangers, the Seldom Scene), and a workshop to do, and supper to eat (many thanks to Mary Jo and Charlie Leet, Mike and Gay Henderson, et al, for the high-class fare!).  I did devote a few minutes to it, though, on three separate occasions throughout the day and had a respectable break worked up by the time we hit the stage at 11:30 p.m. – long after my bedtime.

So that is my challenge to you this week. Take a song and play it in an entirely new way. That may just mean capoing up and playing it in a new key. Or taking a song you play in G and trying to play it in C position, or in D tuning (that would really be a challenge!).  Or trying a high break to a song that you’ve never played up the neck. It will make you see that tune in a whole different light!

Casey Henry

I made it to England and back in one piece. The big festival we played there was really wonderful, and the little mini-festival was fun in a more low-key sort of way. Here are some pictures to illustrate the experience.

We flew out of Dulles Airport, which required a six-hour drive from our meeting place in Abingdon, Va. We took off Wednesday night, arriving in London at 10 a.m. the next morning. We had some trouble locating our driver, who was to take us to the hotel, so for a couple hours we made ourselves at home in the middle of the floor in Heathrow's terminal one.

Buddy Woodward, Casey Henry, Rachel Johnson, Todd Livingston and luggage.

Buddy Woodward, Casey Henry, Rachel Renee Johnson, Todd Livingston and luggage.

As soon as we got to the hotel, Rachel and I headed straight to the bar to get some lunch. There I enjoyed my very first Guinness of the trip. So what if it was only 9 a.m. in Nashville??

Casey with the first Guinness of the trip.

Casey with the first Guinness of the trip.

It's often the little differences that delight me the most when traveling abroad. This trip it was the milk that accompanied the tea/coffee tray in the hotel room. Instead of being powdered creamer like in the U.S., or even liquid milk in a little round foil-topped container, it was liquid milk in a tube. How cool!

Milk in a tube.

Milk in a tube.

Friday we played at Fairport's Cropredy Convention. Our driver, Martin Driver, picked us up and took us to the festival. Here we all are:

The Dixie Bee-Liners

Martin Driver, Rachel Renee Johnson, Sav Sankaran, Todd Livingston, Buddy Woodward, Brandi Hart, Casey Henry

The stage was, I swear, like four stories tall. Just look at how Buddy and Rachel are dwarfed by it in the picture below. It was closed on three sides, so it was almost like playing indoors.

Rachel and Buddy next to the really huge stage.

Rachel and Buddy next to the really huge stage.

This was our view from the stage. I think there were about 20,000 people in the audience. I really would have needed a wide-angle lens to capture the whole thing. This is about a quarter of the crowd.

The crowd at Cropredy.

The crowd at Cropredy.

After our set we signed autographs for nearly an hour. In addition to CDs and programs we got to sign funny hats, a pair of rain boots (still on the girl's feet), the playing side of a CD, a beach ball that we had thrown into the crowd, the front of someone's jacket while he was still wearing it, and a twenty pound note (which felt really weird. Is that even legal??) Here's us after the signing in our stage duds:

The Dixie Bee-Liners.

The Dixie Bee-Liners.

The next day's gig was at the Face Bar in Reading. A van came and picked us up for the two-hour drive. The mini-festival, called Cold Dog Soup, had five bands. The banjo player from Amy Harrison and the Secondhand Stringband interviewed me for his website. He also brought me beer. (He clearly did his research about how to get on my good side!) I was a bit nervous about getting the beer back home, since I had to check it and it was in glass bottles, but I carefully packed each bottle in a sock and wrapped up the cardboard bottle carrier in a bunch of t-shirts that we'd brought to sell but didn't. All arrived home completely intact, to be enjoyed in the near future.

Harvey's beer sampler.

Harvey's beer sampler.

I met a couple Murphy Method students while there, which was cool. Overall the trip was too short and too busy. We didn't get a chance to see anything but the roads between the airport, hotels, and gigs. I take that back. Rachel and I did walk around Banbury one evening, and we went to see the movie Inception. (Wow.) Hopefully the next trip (whenever that might be) will be at a more leisurely pace. But we met some really nice people and got to play a huge festival, so overall: a success.

Casey Henry

Today the Dixie Bee-Liners take off for England where we’ll play two days: Friday at a big folk festival in Cropredy put on by the Fairport Convention, Saturday at a mini-festival called Cold Dog Soup, held at the Face Bar in Reading. It’s great to have the opportunity to play in the UK, but a bummer our trip is so short. We come back Sunday morning.

I’m taking CDs with me (duh), packed in my checked luggage, as well as a few DVDs. It was hard to decide which DVDs to bring, since we have so many. I settled on ten, which was all that would fit in my suitcase and still leave room for clothes. Two each of: Beyond Vamping, Easy Songs, Slow Jam, Picking up the Pace, and Beginning Banjo Vol 1. I know it’s sometimes challenging for UK customers to get our products, and I don’t even know if I’ll see any of our students while I’m there, but if I don’t sell all the CDs and DVDs the people at the end of the night on Saturday are going to get some extremely good deals!

My plane reading material (because I know your’re curious) will be Barbara Kingsolver The Lacuna and Colleen McCullough The Thorn Birds, both of which have been sitting on my unread shelf a long time.

I’d better go change my strings, so that I can take my wire cutters out of my case. They don’t like them in carry-on luggage. I once had my bracket wrench almost confiscated and I had to mail it back to myself from the airport. If ever there was a more innocuous piece of metal than a bracket wrench I don’t know what it would be! But it’s now worth $5.95 more to me than it was before.

Casey Henry

Casey Henry

Over the weekend I had the pleasure of playing at the Wind Gap Bluegrass Festival in Pennsylvania with the Dixie Bee-Liners. It was, I think, the fourth time I've played Wind Gap, and the third different band I've played it with. The first, of course, was Red and Murphy and Their Excellent Children. The second was Casey and Chris and the Two-Stringers. As I recall, both times the family band played it absolutely poured rain, so we were mostly performing to a crowd of lawn chairs with a very few hearty souls hunkered down in ponchos.

This year, though, the weather was perfect. Sunny, with a few scattered clouds, not too hot, not too cold, not too humid. It was a Goldilocks kind of day.

We played two sets and our first one was sandwiched in between Bill Emerson and Sweet Dixie, and Eddie and Martha Adcock. I joked that being scheduled right between two former Country Gentlemen created "no pressure at all" for the banjo player! In truth, you couldn't find two nicer guys and it was a huge honor to share the same stage with them. Additionally, Lynn Morris was at the festival, running sound for Emerson, and having her in the audience always makes me super conscious of my playing. Not nervous exactly, just hyper-vigilant.

On this day, my hyper-vigilance paid off, because she was very complimentary of my playing. It means so much to me to get a positive comment from Lynn because she's the kind of person who will tell you the truth if you ask her. She doesn't give fluffy compliments.

My biggest thrill of the day, in truth one of the biggest thrills of my banjo-playing life, came after our first set. I had said hello to Bill Emerson before we went on stage. I've known him for quite a few years and he doesn't live that far from my parents. I snuck into the front row to listen to a couple of songs in their set. We were mostly warming up and tuning while they were on stage, since our set followed theirs. After we had played and were standing around the record table---excuse me, product table---Bill came over to me and said, and I quote, "That was right in there." I was SO excited. It told him it was going up on my wall of great quotes. I feel like I've accomplished some huge goal I didn't know I was working towards. Bill Emerson gave his stamp of approval to my playing!! I immediately Tweeted it. And then called my parents to tell them. They were properly appreciative. Then I watched Emerson's whole second set from the front row, recording some choice tunes on my phone---specifically "Theme Time," which I sometimes play with the Bee-Liners, hoping to cop some of his licks. His playing is so clean, so precise. It's a joy to listen to.

I was a little bummed to have to leave the festival that night. After the Bee-Liners' second set I had to immediately get in my car and head south to get to my cousin Caroline's high school graduation, which was at 3:00 the next day. I kind of wanted to stay and hang out because my friends Matt McBriarty and the Grillbillies were there and I know that a rowdy night of jamming fun was in the cards. But family events take precedence, so I drove late, and I drove early, and I arrived exactly at 3:00. Usually I'm not a good night driver, being the early-to-bed-early-to-rise type, but the excitement of the events of the day kept me going, and I expect they'll keep on keeping me going for the next few weeks, at least!

Casey Henry

Casey Henry

This weekend The Dixie-Bee Liners headed north to play in Ohio and Michigan. The festival we were booked at was a full day’s drive, so we picked up a routing date in Dayton at the Canal Street Tavern. The club reminded me of the Station Inn in Nashville. It’s been around since the early eighties and the walls of the back room are covered in graffiti and stickers, which have been consistently and painstakingly altered to reflect the most juvenile locker-room humor.

A flyer in the Canal Street Tavern for a Frank Wakefield show a few years back.

A flyer in the Canal Street Tavern for a Frank Wakefield show a few years back.

The bar walls are adorned with blown up copies (at least 4 by 5 feet) of autographed black and white 8 x 10 publicity pictures of the very young Riders in the Sky, and New Grass Revival, among others.

Unfortunately, summer is the wrong time to play at this place, as there are so many other activities going on in the city. For example, there is a baseball park right across the street. There were lots of people at the game. There were seven paying customers to watch us play. So it goes.

But the gig got us cheap hotel rooms for the night, and that was really the point anyway. At least that’s what we tell ourselves when seven people come to a show. The next two days at the Niles, Mich., bluegrass festival were considerably better. We played two sets each day. The festival is free to all attendees and is held in the city’s riverfront park.

Friday night we alternated sets with the John Cowan Trio, which is Jeff Autry on guitar and Shad Cobb on fiddle, in addition to John on bass. I’ve been knowing Jeff since I was young but I hardly ever see him, so it was awesome to get to catch up and hang out a little bit. Shad and John also live in Nashville, but I also never see them. Actually, Shad’s brother Jesse lives two houses down from me so I occasionally see him out mowing Jesse’s grass for him. What a nice brother.

Us on stage with Cowan: Casey Henry, Shad Cobb, Rachel Renee Johnson, John Cowan, and Jeff Autry.

Us on stage with Cowan: Casey Henry, Shad Cobb, Rachel Renee Johnson, John Cowan, and Jeff Autry.

John was extremely nice and asked Rachel (our fiddle player) and me up on stage during their set to pick a couple tunes. Actually, I was sitting in our van, eating a couple of crackers with almond butter before our second set and I thought I heard my name, then I thought I heard it again and I realized it was John, from on stage, saying “Oh, Casey…” I shoved the rest of the cracker in my mouth, grabbed my case from the back of the van and hotfooted to over to the stage (about fifty yards), with Rachel not far behind. I jammed on my picks and whipped my banjo out of its case, only a little out of breath.

Rachel and Shad twinned “Dixie Hoedown” (I was extremely glad she and I had played it just the day before, as the break is largely melodic), and then John sang “Rose of Old Kentucky” in C, which I kicked off. Actually, when I kicked into it I totally had “Little Georgia Rose” in my head (I have the two songs terminally confused in my brain), so the kickoff sounded extremely awkward, but I survived, and Rachel got to sing harmony on the chorus, making her aunt (who has a huge crush on John Cowan) terribly jealous.

Our own sets went fine. We tend to skew our material in a more traditional direction at festivals. Brandi sang “Foggy Mountain Top,” the Davis Sisters version, not the Carter Family version, and someone actually complimented me afterwards on my up-the-neck break on it, which really tickled me. I met several Murphy Method students over the weekend, which is always a treat.

The festival ended in a hurry on Saturday night as a storm was moving in. In the lightning and thunder with the sky about to open up any second we threw our gear and instruments into the van and made a beeline for our hotel. My drive home the next day ended up being ten and a half hours. Buddy, Brandi and Rachel had twelve, and Sav had fourteen. Come to think of it, next weekend I'LL have fourteen. Why do I even call myself a professional musician? I should call myself a professional driver!

Casey Henry

Casey Henry

Now that I'm temporarily back home and in front of my desktop computer, here are some pictures from last weekend's touring.

The Dixie Bee-Liners, on the air at WNRN in Charlottesville. Sav Sankaran, Buddy Woodward, Brandi Hart, Rachel Renee Johnson.

The Dixie Bee-Liners, on the air at WNRN in Charlottesville. Sav Sankaran, Buddy Woodward, Brandi Hart, Rachel Renee Johnson.

This cracked me up. It was on the bulletin board at the WNRN studio.

This cracked me up. It was on the bulletin board at the WNRN studio.

Last Friday night's venue, in Staunton, Virginia.

Last Friday night's venue, in Staunton, Virginia.

Notice the little bee they drew on their chalkboard marquee. That's attention to detail, right there!

Notice the little bee they drew on their chalkboard marquee. That's attention to detail, right there!

The Dixie Bee-Liners on stage at the Mockingbird: Casey Henry, Buddy Woodward, Brandi Hart, Rachel Renee Johnson, Sav Sankaran.

The Dixie Bee-Liners on stage at the Mockingbird: Casey Henry, Buddy Woodward, Brandi Hart, Rachel Renee Johnson, Sav Sankaran.

...and a view from the opposite direction...

...and a view from the opposite direction...

We stayed at the Rooster Hill bed and breakfast in Crozet, Virginia, for the weekend. They have chickens. Here's Rachel, gathering our Saturday morning breakfast!

We stayed at the Rooster Hill bed and breakfast in Crozet, Virginia, for the weekend. They have chickens. Here's Rachel, gathering our Saturday morning breakfast!

And finally, the sign outside the Purple Fiddle in Thomas, West Virginia. This was next to the street, just in case anyone was driving by and suddenly realized they had the urge to stop and hear some live music.

And finally, the sign outside the Purple Fiddle in Thomas, West Virginia. This was next to the street, just in case anyone was driving by and suddenly realized they had the urge to stop and hear some live music.

Casey Henry

Casey Henry

As you read this I’m on my way home from The Dixie Bee-Liners’ weekend gigs, which took us to Staunton and Charlottesville, Va. and Thomas, WVa., and I have to say it was one of the best eating tours that I can ever remember. I’ll spare you all the foodie details (I expect they’ll be up soon[ish] over on my own blog) and I’ll try to confine my comments to the venues and the shows.

Friday night found us in the surprisingly hip town of Staunton. I found several really cool restaurants as I was walking around town before the show, many of which used local sources for their ingredients. One of these was the place we played that night: the Mockingbird. This new venue (it’s only six months old) combines gourmet fare with a concert hall large enough to provide a decent paycheck for the band but small enough for an intimate-feeling show. It’s the ideal type of venue for this band because we like to be close enough to the audience to interact with them and really see their faces. The owner, Wade Luhn, and all the staff were extremely attentive and made sure we had everything we needed, from plenty of cold water, to a great dinner, to a nice private place to warm up and stash our stuff.

We were happy to have our regular fiddler, Rachel Renee Johnson, back after two weekends without her. Our two sets flew by, as they often do when the audience is on our wavelength, laughing at our jokes, and calling for an encore. I was honored to have Robin Williams in the crowd (of the fabulous folk duo Robin and Linda Williams) for our first set. I thought it was especially generous of him to come out to the show, especially since he and Linda had been working out in their garden all day. I got to see Robin and Linda and Their Fine Group in Nashville earlier this month, which is always a huge treat.

Also in the crowd were my friends Bert and Marianne Lampert. I gave banjo lessons to Burt for a while when I attended the University of Virginia. We couldn’t actually figure out when was the last time we’d seen each other (many years…) and it was awesome to see them and catch up.

The next night found us in Charlottesville, where I insisted we go to Bodo’s Bagels. They make the best bagels in the south and they are the number one thing I miss about living in C’ville. We played at the Southern Café, another bar/restaurant/music hall, where we split the bill with the Fitzmarice Band, a young group from Maryland. They opened up with a fantastic show and we played one long set to another excellent crowd. To tell you the truth, the members of the Fitzmarice band provided much of the enthusiasm from the seats they took in the audience after they played.

I was going to add a lot more to this post, but it’s after midnight. We just got done playing at the Purple Fiddle in Thomas, WVa., and I’m tired, darn it. So, as my mom says, that’s all you get for a nickel!

Casey Henry

Casey Henry

The Dixie Bee-Liners went out last weekend for a quick run up to Iowa and Wisconsin to play a couple of gigs. These weekend out-and-back trips are typical for a touring bluegrass band, so I thought I'd give you a brief picture of how our time breaks down.

Total time away from home: 77 hours

Time spent driving/riding: 32.5 hours (or 42%)

Time spent sleeping 20 hours (this is pretty good, actually!)

Time spent practicing: 2 hours

Time spent actually playing music on stage 3 hours 10 minutes (or 4%)

The two shows we played went really, really well. At the Legion Arts Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, we had a nearly-sold-out crowd that was extremely enthusiastic and bought lots of CDs. (That's our favorite type of crowd!) The building that housed the show---built in 1891---was originally a Czech social hall and it had that wonderful, slightly musty old building smell the second you walked in the door. Now it's used for concerts and art exhibits. The exhibit currently on display featured artifacts someone had pulled our of their river two years ago when it flooded. (The many still-empty store fronts in downtown Cedar Rapids provided a sobering parallel to Nashville's more recent disaster.)

Possibly the most interesting element of our show that night was the bat that flew around while we played. It made a couple of swooping passes during each set and, I suppose, kept the room mosquito free. Our concert was the next-to-last before they pause for a major building renovation, during which they will close up all the holes where bats come in (among other things). I, for one, am extremely glad we got to play in the old version of the hall. Bats add so much scope for imagination.

The Quaker Oats factory in Cedar Rapids.

The Quaker Oats factory in Cedar Rapids.

(Exciting side note [well, exciting to me, anyway...]: Cedar Rapids is apparently the home of Quaker Oats. Our hotel was right across from their factory. And downtown really did smell like oatmeal! Dear Quaker Oats folks, I have one request: organic steel-cut oats. Thank you.)

Our show the next day was in Two Rivers, WI. We were a bit late arriving because the GPS (I believe I've mentioned here before that I HATE THE GPS!!!) took us on a longer-than-necessary route (instead of 312 miles on four-lane state highways---5 hours 45 min---it sent us 389 miles on interstates---6 hours 30 minutes).

But after a speedy set-up and soundcheck we were treated to yet another enthusiastic audience. This time they not only gave us an encore, but baked goods as well. The famous Hagar, who makes half-pound cookies (no kidding), bestowed upon us a bag full of them, one of which became my supper. We actually sold out of Susanville CDs that night, which is a great feeling.

My first attempt at a granny square.

My first attempt at a granny square.

During all of our driving around I finished up one crocheting project, and figured out how to make my very first granny square (perhaps a little messy, but still recognizable). I predict many more of these in the future.

On the trip back Sunday I, for once, actually arrived home before the rest of the band. Usually we head east, so I meet the van at Brandi and Buddy's house in Abingdon, Va., which is a five-hour drive from my house. This time we met up in Louisville---three hours for me, but six for them. As I sat on my couch that evening, with a frosty cold beer, I thought about them, still in the van, traveling through the night to make it back home.