Dee Robinson – Dee From Decatur
$14.99
The music Dee plays is much like the music a long line of his forebears played. He sits at the end of a two-hundred-year long tradition of family music playing stretched so thin that he is the last vestige of it.
Description
Andy Cohen’s Liner Notes
I’m a lone wolf in that department around here. Every guitar player in this town that’s worth anything has heard about our genre, but very few if any practice it.
Dee Robinson is a big guy, six-four and muscles on his muscles. Like a lot of big guys, he’s competent and smart but kind of shy. He doesn’t sing, which makes this CD uniquely instructional: of the twenty-one guitar pieces, nineteen are the accurately drawn guitar parts to well-known Piedmont style songs. The remaining two were instrumentals in the first place. If that were all there was to it, Dee would be one among a million guitar players the world has given rise to since the sixties. But it isn’t.
Dee lives in Decatur, Illinois, the end of the long road his family has come down. The music he plays is much like the music a long line of his forebears played. He sits at the end of a two-hundred-year long tradition of family music playing stretched so thin that he is the last vestige of it. He’s conscious of that and proud of it, as well he should be, even if some of the details are cloudy.
His great-great grandfather, Henry Beverly, was a music playing farmer from somewhere in eastern North Carolina. Mr. Beverly moved to Mississippi sometime in the vicinity of the Civil War. He raised a family there, and his granddaughter Cela bore a son by a local man named Dotson. That union didn’t work out and the couple parted; the son, Dee’s great grampa, was born about 1890 and grew up in Clarksdale. He played anything with strings on it and was known locally as an entertainer:
My great grandfather John Dotson was born and raised near Clarksdale, Mississippi. Though he grew up as an orphan, as a teenager he played banjo, then guitar shortly after the turn of the century, around 1905. His favorite guitar was a 1951 ES-125. That guitar that was given to him by my great grandmother’s brother in 1956. My great grandmother was also born and raised near Clarksdale and played guitar. She was born in 1900. Together they raised 10 children, two of my great uncles Therman and Roy Dotson were piano players, and my oldest great uncle Brazil played Blues guitar and favored Memphis Minnie. He was born in Itta Bena in 1920. On my mother’s side, I had a great, great uncle John Cook born in Pontotoc, Mississippi in the late 19th century. My grandmother said he could make a guitar talk! They wound up moving to Cairo, Illinois around the turn of the century.
He played with some of his cousins. At that time, it was mostly folk blues. He liked John Henry, Yellow Dog blues, etc. He also did hootenannies, cutting heads, and so forth. He was in the ‘circle’, a circle of chairs with other guitar players to see who could play best. Yellow Dog was usually the contest number. Just informal contests. He always won. My great grandad was that good. Him and [Rev. Gary] Davis would’ve had a field day…
My father played bass guitar, lead guitar, and piano. He was born in 1942 in New Madrid, Missouri.
The racial climate in Mississippi at the time was not favorable. The family traveled to Missouri, farming and laboring but also always playing music. At length the family settled in Decatur, Illinois, where Dee was born in 1975. Growing up, Dee heard his great grandfather, his grampa and his dad all play, mostly for friends and family. When he was young, he learned his first chords from his dad. When he was about twenty, he got serious about it. He started exploring Youtubes of players like Etta Baker, Elisabeth Cotten, Rev. Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt and some of the other canonical players of the twenties and thirties. Eventually he landed at Alan Lighty’s Music of Rev. Gary Davis page, and the Mississippi John Hurt Foundation page. For a while, until Facebook dumped him for no discernable reason, he was Admin for that page.
Once he landed on those pages, a whole other world opened to Dee. Instead of being a lone wolf stuck in Decatur, he’s now a welcome presence at small festivals, house concerts and Folklore Society events. Nothing too big, he’s hardly a popular music Big Name; but some people in the Midwest are starting to hear about this big guy who recognized his own family’s music when exposed to similar stuff in the way it’s organized on the Net. He’s finding long lost cousins like Son Thomas, the devil-pot making Bluesman from Clarksdale. His repertoire is expanding and he’s finding a good fit in the ball of steel wool that constitutes the Folk Scene of the Upper Midwest.
Andy Cohen – Riverlark Music
TRACK LIST
1 One Dime Blues 2:09 Etta Baker, NCB Scandanavia OBO Lucky Guitar Music
2 Monday Morning Blues 1:51 John Hurt, Wynwood Music Co. Inc
3 Carolina Breakdown 2:22 Etta Baker, NCB Scandanavia OBO Lucky Guitar Music
4 Crucifixion 2:33 Gary Davis, Downtown DLJ Songs LLC OBO Chandos Music Co.
5 Candy Man 1:27 John Hurt, Wynwood Music Co Inc.
6 Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me 1:42 John Hurt, Wynwood Music Co Inc. and the Adage Group LLC
7 Railroad Bill 2:33 Etta Baker, Lucky Guitar Music
8 Shake That Thing 1:25 John Hurt and Papa Charlie Jackson, Shapiro-Bernstein Co Inc.
9 Since I Laid My Burden Down 2:15 Traditional
10 Goodnight Irene 1:35 Huddie Ledbetter and John Lomax, Ludlow Music Inc.
11 Freight Train 1:20 Elizabeth Cotten, Paul James and Frederick Williams Figs. D Music, Inc. and Figs. D Music Inc. o/b/o Sanga Music
12 Spider, Spider 1:14 John S Hurt, Sony/ATV Music Publishing
13 Spike Driver Blues 1:50 John Hurt, The Adage Group and Wynwood Music Co Inc.
14 Stack O Lee 1:12 John Hurt, Wynwood Music Co. Inc., Adage Songs Publishing o/b/o Mississippi John Hurt Music Inc, and Zap Publishing Co.
15 Big Leg Blues 1:54 John S Hurt, Wynwood Music Co. Inc. and the Adage Group LLC
16 Joe Turner Blues 2:17 William Lee Conley Broonzy, Songs of Universal, Inc. OBO Primary Wave 3 Songs
17 Tender Virgins 1:24 John S Hurt, Sony/ATV Music Publishing
18 Washington Blues 1:53 Elizabeth Cotten, Figs. D Music, Inc. OBO StormKing Music
19 Boat’s Up the River 1:38 John David Jackson, BMG Bumblebee OBO Tradition Music Co.
20 Bully of the Town 1:55 Etta Baker, NCB Scandanavia OBO Lucky Guitar Music
21 First Shot Missed Him 1:08 Mississippi John Hurt, Mississippi John Hurt Music Inc. and Wynwood Music Company Inc.
CREDITS
Artist Dee Robinson
Album Title Dee From Decatur
Record Label Riverlark Music
Album Number RL-21
Release Date June 20, 2025
Recording Date February 7, 2023
Recording Engineer and Studio Fred Saurmann, Far Corner Music, Decatur, IL
Mixing and Mastering Engineer and Studio Jim Godsey, JBG Audio, Palatine, IL
New Release Promotion Art Menius Radio and Mailing Service
Digital Delivery for Airplay AirPlayDirect.com
Producers Andrew M. Cohen, Michael Robert Frank
UPC number 634351012124
Copyright © ℗ 2025 Riverlark Music
Distributors CPI Distribution and The Orchard
