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new music

Planxty Grace Davis

Here is another track that I recorded a bunch of years back at Melville Park Studio. The tune is in honor of Grace Davis who was the wife of my great Uncle Stinson Davis, the schooner ship captain. You can find the music notation here. Also, I’ve added the tune to the virtual album Castaway.
 
Grace Davis
 
I always loved this picture. It makes me wonder how many evenings she waited on the shore for her husband to return…or would he ever? It is hard to imagine the complete lack of communication that often accompanied life during the age of sail.

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New way to email subscribe to baconworks.com

The tool I was using to manage my email subscriptions at baconworks.com was fraught with hassle. It was painful to set up and was unreliable. In fact, it stopped sending email altogether in the last couple of months. So, out with the old…in with the new.
 
feedblitz
 
I am switching over to a service provided by FeedBlitz. They will essentially suck in my RSS feed and send new articles as emails to anyone on the email subscribe list. The best part is that you don’t need to know any of that. All you need to do is fill out the form below and … shazam … you get email updates from baconworks.com. Cool!!!

So, try it out and subscribe now:

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photo

flickr it to your blog

pluc
 
So, I’m just trying out this cool service from flickr where you upload your photo’s on their site…and they automagically post it to your blog. Cool. Here is a picture of my banjo buddy Brian in the back and me on the ‘ol guitar. This photo was taken a few weeks back during our St. Pat’s gig.

new music

More Collaborative Recording

Bouzouki
 
My buddy, and fellow Plucian, George, A.K.A Mustachio, wrote a beautiful bouzouki tune a few months back called The Christmas Wish. About a week ago Mustachio sent me an mp3 that he recorded in his home, complete with trucks passing by outside and someone cleaning dishes in the kitchen. You gotta love home recordings.

I took his demo of the tune and added a bit of guitar and tried to remove the clinking glasses. I shouldn’t rib him too much because as I was recording the guitar track my interrupting furnace kicked on during the last few notes, forcing me to overdub a couple of chords. Ironically, it only ever ignites during the takes I want to keep. GRRRrrrrr. Anyhow, Mustachio will probably have my head when he finds out I posted this rough cut here. But, in spite of the passing garbage trucks, the dinner crowd in the kitchen and my background boiler, I enjoy the recording.

Nice work Mustachio.

new music

Moving Cloud / Devany’s Goat / Julia Delaney

Today I received an email from someone I have not heard from in ~20 years … apparently Facebook really does have a way of connecting you to your past. Anyhow, this old friend ultimately stumbled upon baconworks and asked me about more music that her children might be able to step dance along with. So, I began poking around my site, realizing how difficult it actually is to find all the mp3’s I’ve posted (I’ll have to fix that), and discovered that I have yet to post a few of the tracks from my old Amadán album. I guess I’m just getting lazy.
 
Amadán
 
This set of tunes was the first that we recorded as a group. As I recall, we were real excited to get into the studio and lay down some tracks. We were well prepared, had it all planned out…except for the part where Kevin, our guitar player, broke a string while tunning up. In his guitar case he found no spares. I offered my guitar, not the prized Lowden, but instead the infamous Rhapsoby . No, that is not a misspelling. Rhapsoby, not Rhapsody. The guitar is so obscure that even a Google search turns up almost nothing. And when I say ‘obscure’ I don’t mean the good kind, like a 1909-S VDB penny.

Needless to say, Kevin wanted no part of the Rhapsoby. So, there we were, wasting precious time and money in the studio, with no guitar. We had no other choice but for Kevin to leave the studio to try and track down some strings. Scrap all the practices and all the preparing, we had to come up with a new plan, which, of course, we did only after Kevin left on his hunt for new strings. In his absence Roger the percussionist, Damon the fiddler and I on the Rhapsoby, pulled this old set out of the bottom of our repertoire. We recorded it once or twice together and had the track nearly finished, to Kevin’s dismay, by the time he returned an hour later with his new strings.

The set starts with a little Rhapsoby intro, followed with some tempo challenged foot stomping. Incidentally, the foot stomping seems as bad of an idea today as it did then, but neither I nor the engineer could convince Damon to can his cacophonous idea. In addition, my good friend Roger plays some real nice Bodhrán and Bones throughout the set. And, just so Kevin didn’t feel entirely left out, we let him overdub some tenor banjo.

Incidentally, I enjoyed Devany’s Goat so much that years later I did my own recording of the tune, this time setting aside the Rhapsoby and opting for the Lowden.

So, I don’t know if this is step-dancable but, here is Moving Cloud, Devany’s Goat and Julia Delaney.

Moving Cloud / Devany’s Goat / Julia Delaney by baconworks

song

Sam’s Gone Away

Strum Stick

 
A couple of months ago a friend of mine loaned me a strumstick. The strumstick, a three stringed instrument that is a close musical relatives of the Appalachian Dulcimer, was created by Bob McNally. As I was testing out the strumstick one morning at the breakfast table I started singing, to my children’s delight, a simple chantey called Sam’s Gone Away that I had recently learned off a great old album called Colonial and Revolutionary War Sea Songs and Shanties by my friend Cliff Haslam.
 
Album Cover
 
I had so much fun beatn’ away at this song on this odd little instrument that I decided to give both the song and the strumstick a go on tape. The first instrument on the recording is actually guitar. The strumstick comes in on the break and hangs around for the rest of the song. Incidentally, this is the first time I’ve recorded vocals and, apparently, I’ve still got some learning to do. But hell, this is all just for fun. So here ya go.

video

Happy St. Pat’s Lark

Ok, someone…not really sure who…sent me the following video. It stars both yours truly along with some of the other musicians from the John Stone’s session. I’ll let you figure out which one I am. Incidentally, the tune that we are vigorously stepping to is called Lark in the Morning. I guess I always assumed that Lark referred to a bird. In this case, however, it appears that this video is a different kind of ‘Lark in the Morning’. Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all.
 
Lark in the Morning

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Pre St. Pat’s Concert

Saint Patrick’s day is coming up and here is your chance to hear some great traditional Irish music without getting pints of beer spilled on you. I, along with many musicians from the John Stone’s session in Ashland, MA, will be performing a free concert next Monday, March 10th at Framingham State College during the afternoon.
 
Gaelic Traditions Concert
 
The concert starts sharply at 1:30 pm and will end at 2:15 pm.

I am really excited about this as there will be some excellent musicians on a variety of instruments including the hammered dulcimer, Irish flute, fiddle, bouzouki, tenor banjo, accordion, bohdran and guitar. As a group the session players of John Stone’s have been informally playing music for a couple of years. While we are not technically a band, we have all found great pleasure in the quality music that we’ve played with each other. This is a real opportunity for us to share a bit of the fun and positive energy that we seek each Tuesday evening at Stone’s.

So, take a late lunch and come on over to the Heineman Ecumenical and Cultural Center at Framingham State College for a few tunes. Below is a map with the Ecumenical center circled?
 
map

 
If anyone is interested, please contact me as I may be able to provide you guest parking passes.

author profile

Author Profile: Josiah Raiche

Composer: Josiah Raiche
Music: The St. Albans Raid
 
Josiah Raiche
 

Josiah wrote that he “frequently arranges piano tunes for fife as well as harmonies for existing fife tunes, but have never before written an entire piece “from scratch.” This was a great challenge, and I hope that you will continue doing this contest.” Here is a bit more about Josiah:

Josiah Raiche is a teenage snare drummer in Hanaford’s Volunteers Fife and Drum Corps in northern VT. He plays multiple instruments, including Piano and Fife, and is involved in several musical groups. He is also a semiprofessional website and e-commerce page designer. Although he is usually quite busy homeschooling, he is also a prolific composer and has put together many fife harmonies and written two drum solos.

Check out Josiah’s drumming performance at the 2007 Maple Festival.