The Hazards of Hatteras

Stinson Davis

My great, great uncle Stinson Davis, pictured above, was a sailor. He wasn’t just your average day sailor. He was the real deal. In fact, he was the last real deal.

A captain of three, four and five masted schooner ships during the waning age of sail, he spent years of his life carrying whale oil from the West Indies, coal from Portugal and hauling lumber out of Africa.

schooner

Stinson was one of those witty Yankee Mainers with enough salt and grit to live four years past the centenarian mark in spite of the fact that he was cast adrift twice after loosing his vessels at sea. He had two lives worth of stories and if I accumulate half the stories of one of those lives I’d have twice as many as anyone I know.

When I was fourteen I attended his hundredth birthday party. You think it is hard buying a gift for your dad’s birthday? What do you get someone turning one hundred? My father was wise and convinced me to do some research and draw him a big map of all his sailing routes. I spent weeks with colored markers and piece poster board charting his journeys. On the day of his birthday party, in some Grange hall near Five Islands, Maine I nervously presented my gift. He quietly looked it over. After a few moments, instead of a ‘thank you’, he began pointing out the routes I had missed, like the one that lead him a thousand miles up the Congo River. He began to tell me stories of his voyages, bouts of malaria, brothers lost at sea, The Maude Palmer, Cape Horn and the hazards of Cape Hatteras. I suppose I thought I was giving an old man a map to remind him of the places he’d been. Truth is, he didn’t need it.

Reflecting back to that day I think it is safe to say that my real gift to him was the wide eyed curiosity of a young boy. And in a way it was he who gave me the map. I pull out that map on days when life is hard and I ask myself this: Have I really been everywhere I want to go? If the answer is ‘no’ then it is time to start charting a course for my West Indies, even if it means that I will have to face the Hazards of Hatteras.

The following tune is the first one I wrote that I was every happy with. It is also the first of many that have titles that serve as my own reminders of my ancestry. I have included two mp3’s in which you will find three stylistic variations of the same tune.
live album
The first recording was done by The Ancient Mariners and comes from a live album I co-produced with good friend Roger Hunnewell. Incidentally, that is me with outstretched arms at the top of the disc and no, I was not responsible for the artwork. The graphic work was a surprise to me! The second is from an unreleased recording that I did back in 2000. I was interested in combining both fifing style with Irish flute style onto one track. Lastly, here is the chart for this trio.

Calliope House / Stone’s Mongrel

Home recording has never been easier. Recently I have been experimenting with some equipment and have found the audio quality to be quite stunning. The experiments have looked something like this:

recording

I record in my basement in between the furnace going on and off, which is a real pain since it has been so cold lately. Nothing like a perfectly good track ruined by the boiler firing up.

The track at the bottom of this post is made up of two tunes. The first is called Calliope House and is a tune that was written by Dave Richardson of ‘The Boys of the Lough’.

The second tune is one I wrote in January of 2007. I have been attending a session at a pub called John Stone’s Public House. After hearing lots of A minor jigs this tune fell out of my head on the way home from the session. I am quite sure it has to be a mix of all the tunes I had been listening to. The thing I like about the tune is that the A strain has ten measures … two more than is typical.

Stone’s Mongrel

For those interested in the recording details, I used the following equipment:
AKG C1000S microphone ~$200
into a
Pesonus TUBEPre preamp ~$100
into an
Echo Indigo IO ~$150
into the pcmcia slot on my laptop, which is not at all optimized for recording. It has a Pentium M processor, 1500 MHz and 1 GB of RAM.

I used free software called Kristal Audio Engine for mixing tracks, adding reverb, EQ and such. I also added additional effects such as compression from Kjaerhus Audio. They provide a set of free VST plugins.

Indigo

It is funny how a word can have very little meaning in your life one day and the next it turns up around every corner. In the fall of 2006 I went out sailing in the waters around New London, CT with some old friends on a boat called The Indigo. Since then I have been trying to lyrically incorporate the word ‘Indigo’, along with my experience, into a song. Unfortunately my songwriting skills are horrible and I have, to date, failed miserably. More recently I have been testing some recording equipment and coincidentally one of the components is called Indigo. Oddly enough both Indigo the vessel and Indigo the hardware have provided me with a sense of revitalizing freedom. After thinking a bit about the tune I blogged about last night in Hot off the Brain I realized that it is Indigo. So I put together a quick mp3 of the tune on whistle with some guitar backing. It’s a rough mix but you’ll get the point. At some point I am hoping to thread it together with some other tunes and record them all.

Also, here is a legible copy of the sheet music for the tune.
Indigo

Hot off the Brain

I just got back from my weekly John Stone’s session and I gotta tell ya that playing with good musicians is always an inspiration for writing tunes. I had to pull over twice on the way home to jot down the following tune. I will try to get a simple mp3 and something legible posted as soon as I can. In the interim, I need to come up with a title.

untitled1

The Making of a Tune

I have been playing a lot of traditional Irish music at John Stone’s Public House in Ashland, MA lately. One evening, while driving home from the session a few weeks back, I pulled over and jotted down the following tune that was rattling around in my head. I keep a penny whistle lying around my vehicle for these very moments.

The Perfect Pint

A couple days later I continued to work on the tune only to find that I was confused by what I had written. I quickly realized I had written it as if there were a pickup when, indeed, there was none. I then struggled a bit trying to tack on a B part and after an evening of failed attempts I did the only logical thing. I gave up. I have always found that if I force myself to look at a problem from a new perspective, I am often led to a solution that I did not anticipate. One mechanism that I often use when writing music and am in need of a new perspective is to simply change instruments. So, the next day I picked up a bouzouki and … shazam! … the B part presented itself.

When I played it for Mustachio later that week he asked about the name of the tune. ‘Oohh, I haven’t gotten that far’ I said. However, that very same evening the two of us were admiring the love and attention that is put into pouring a pint of Guinness at John Stone’s. So, from that chat I decided the tune should be called The Perfect Pint. Here is the final printed version that I typed into Finale:

The Perfect Pint

Incidentally, here is how you ruin a Guinness .
Here is a basic mp3 of the tune