Artists
Andy Cohen
Andy Cohen (June 2, 1968) has adapted the late Piedmont blues/gospel guitarist/singer, Reverend Gary Davis’s musical technique to an eclectic range of music. While he paid tribute to Davis’s repertoire with his 1997 album, The Sacred Songs Of Rev. Gary Davis, Cohen has incorporated old Southern music, country blues, ragtime, gospel, old timey and field hollers to his Davis-like acoustic guitar finger-picking. Establishing his career in his native Ohio, Cohen took an ethnomusicologist-like approach to the area’s musical roots. He spent countless hours visiting and studying with master blues and folk musicians, learning songs that he subsequently performed at folk festivals and coffeehouses throughout the United States. Since relocating to Memphis, to marry multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Larakin Bryant, in September 1996, Cohen has become one of the Tennessee city’s busiest musicians. In addition to performing, with his wife, as a duo, Cohen has served as president of the Beale Street Blues Society and has directed the Kent State Folk Festival. With his wife, he launched an independent record label, Riverlark Mark, to release albums of mostly Southern traditional music. – ByCraig Harris
Rev. Gary Davis
Rev. Gary D. Davis (April 30, 1896 – May 5, 1972), known as Reverend Gary Davis and Blind Gary Davis, was a blues and gospel singer who was also proficient on the banjo, guitar and harmonica. Born in Laurens, South Carolina and blind since infancy, Davis first performed professionally in the Piedmont blues scene of Durham, North Carolina in the 1930s, then converted to Christianity and became a minister. After moving to New York in the 1940s, Davis experienced a career rebirth as part of the American folk music revival that peaked during the 1960s. Davis’ most notable recordings include “Samson and Delilah and “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”.
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverend_Gary_Davis
Recordings:
Preachin’ In That Wilderness
Ken Tillery
Ken Tillery is a bare-finger guitar instrumentalist with a preternaturally fine touch. It doesn’t much matter if they’re simple ‘parlor’ pieces where there’s nothing to hide behind, or if they’re so layered that it normally takes two men and a boy to play them.
His words: “I started playing acoustic guitar when I was around 16. Not too long into it, I became very interested in fingerstyle blues (though I didn’t know the term then) after listening to people like Lightnin’ Hopkins, Brownie McGhee, Robert Johnson, and Taj Mahal on CDs and tapes made available to me by my dad and Aunt Donna. I think that style of playing appealed to me, initially, because I realized a lot of cool sounds could be made by just one person without the aid of other players or a bunch of equipment. So, I went to a local guitar shop, along with my Lightnin’ Hopkins CD, and told the owner I wanted to take lessons to learn the stuff on that CD. He jokingly asked if I was serious and, when I said I was, he said the teacher there didn’t know anything that could help me but told me to come back a few hours later and he would have something ready to get me started; when I returned he gave me a copy of a Roy Book Binder video and told me to just go home and learn everything on it. I did just that and, in the process, learned about Rev. Gary Davis, Pink Anderson, Sam McGee, Elizabeth Cotten, and so many more wonderful players from Roy’s stories.
Several years later, I eventually met and took a few lessons with Roy Book Binder in Florida; that was a pivotal experience for me and we became friends. In talking with Roy, he told me about a luthier, Tony Klassen, that built a guitar for him. Playing that guitar at Roy’s house affected me in almost the same way as when I first heard fingerpicking and I eventually ended up with 3 of Tony Klassen’s guitars (all of which were used on my recording). In researching and watching some of Tony’s videos on YouTube, I was introduced to the music of Andy Cohen and Dakota Dave Hull. I was so taken with their music and playing that I reached out to both of them and asked if I could meet and take lessons with them; Dakota Dave Hull obliged my request when he was passing through Arkansas in 2017. I met Andy Cohen in the spring of 2019 when he agreed to stop by my house on his way back to Memphis and that meeting had, and continues to have, the biggest effect on my playing so far.”
Recordings:
Used To Ain’t Here No More
Larkin Bryant
Maybe Jean Ritchie did more to establish the Appalachian Dulcimer in the canon of American Folk Music, but Larkin Bryant spent her life doing the grunt work that made the instrument come alive in the hands of players at all skill levels. She took the instrument up at the Ozark Folk Center and after honing her technique for a few years she taught it in person and through her instructional, Larkin’s Dulcimer Book. That was a new thing, a programmed text, graded from beginning to end, with its own cassette (remember those?) to tune to and play along with. Her own first performance project from back in the cassette days was called Deep Like a River, and caused quite a stir in the Dulcimer universe of the day.
She started but was not able to finish half a dozen projects that her husband hopes to finish at length. She left an entire roomful of tabs, in folders and notebooks, boxes and lying loose. In her sixties she fell in love with Irish fiddle tunes, playing in a Ceilidh band for ten years until she passed. She would collect the tunes off The Session website, assemble them into notebooks and play through them for hours. In all that time she also cared for about forty cats and several dogs, all of them rescues or strays.
She toured, she taught, she accumulated a minutely gradated set of tunes she taught from that became Larkin’s Dulcimer Book. She counted the money from a thousand Bingo games that bought the first transmitter for Memphis’s community radio station, WEVL. She organized concerts for all manner of folk players in Memphis for years before she organized the Memphis Dulcimer Festival which went on for roughly twenty years. She wrote out music for Lessons and Carols for four different churches over half a dozen years, trios to nonettes, all the parts handwritten with a nib pen. She was the Celtic Service music minister at Memphis’s Church of the Holy Communion from 2005 until her death from Glioblastoma in 2021.
Paul Kaye
Paul Kaye (December 15, 1964 – August 25, 2022) A recent Living Blues magazine review recognized Paul Kaye for his “versatility” within the blues idiom. Noted Chicago blues journalist/writer David Whiteis introduced Paul to a 2015 Chicago Blues Fest crowd as “one of the top traditional blues musicians in the city [of Chicago].” The late David “Honeyboy” Edwards (Blues Legend), when asked by a Milwaukee concert promotor, simply declared, “Paul is the best…”
Paul Kaye landed in the Windy City at the dawn of the 1990s. For most of the decade he remained an “in demand sideman”; playing alongside a remarkable variety of Chicago’s finest blues talent, both legendary and not so legendary, including: Harmonica Hinds, Detroit, Jr., Buddy Guy, Jr. Wells, David Myers, Louis Myers (The Aces), Billy Branch, Erwin Helfer, Barrelhouse Chuck, David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Kenny “Beedy Eyes” Smith and many others.
In the late ’90s, Paul co-founded the acoustic/roots trio Devil in a Woodpile, with whom he made two critically acclaimed recordings for Bloodshot Records. More recently he played guitar on the last release by legendary delta bluesman Honeyboy Edwards, Roamin’ and Ramblin’ (Earwig Records).
These days, you’re likely to hear Paul Kaye stomping’ the blues in his distinctive solo style, leading his hard-rocking’ trio, the Blues Cartel, teaching any number of blues guitar, mandolin, banjo, etc…classes online (via Chicago’s own Old Town School of Folk Music) or even contributing written arrangements to a range of Hal Leonard Publications, from professional “fakebooks” to “EZ Guitar” books for beginners. However, first and foremost……Paul Kaye is a Bluesman!
Recordings:
Ham Hound Crave
Roman Barten-Sherman
Roman Barten-Sherman is a twenty-year-old guitarist, singer, and banjo player who performs American vernacular music inspired and informed by a lifelong exploration of pre-war country blues, ballads, and spirituals. Roman grew up in the high desert of Bisbee, Arizona. Her love for country blues began when a neighbor gave her a small handmade fretless banjo along with cassettes of Mance Lipscomb and Mississippi Fred McDowell. During formative travels to Mississippi, she learned the Bentonian blues style from Jimmy “Duck” Holmes at his Blue Front Cafe, and the trance blues of Robert Belfour in Clarksdale juke joints. Her polyrhythmic guitar and banjo stylings and nuanced vocals have been honed through hundreds of performances to national and international audiences.
Recordings:
Death’s Little Black Train
Wendy Grossman
Wendy Grossman (born January 26, 1954) is about as steeped in musical and ballad traditions from all over as anyone is or could be. During her college years, she fell in with the Cornell University Folk Song Club crowd, who were justly famous for being a very serious bunch of Ballad and Old Time Music scholars, and for supporting one of the liveliest ongoing music scenes, anywhere, ever. She is well grounded in the breadth of all that.
She is a multi-instrumentalist on guitar, autoharp and squeezebox, going pro from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. She issued one LP-record, Roseville Fair, in 1980. She gave up touring (but not playing!)
She rarely writes songs. She doesn’t need to. The likes of Bill Steele, Archie Fisher, Bill Staines, Stan Rogers and a host of other writer-singers have done that for her. What she does do is unique, very clear arrangements of their best ones. She knows how to handle the old Love Songs too, and betimes, makes up ‘just music’ of her own. All of that is represented here.
Recordings:
The Last Trip Home