April's First Friday Surprise

We already suspected that with Peter Spencer at the helm we'd have a wonderful musical presentation on April 5th's First Friday Artwalk.  But when Peter called to report that he was bringing a surprise, our collective spines tingled.

At Showtime minus 30 minutes he strolled in with an imposing gentleman and introduced us to Orville Johnson.  And we're here to tell you, Orville is a Really Big Deal:  Known for his dobro and slide guitar stylings and soulful vocal acrobatics, he is a singer, instrumentalist, record producer, songwriter, session player, teacher, and the top dobro player on the West Coast of America (a dobro, incidentally, is a resonator guitar). 



Orville Johnson
(photo credit Tito Fuentes)

Born and raised in a small farming town in Illinois not far from the banks of the Mississippi river, Orville's early playing career was focused around the St Louis, Missouri music scene where he was exposed to and participated in a variety of blues, bluegrass, and American Roots music. He began singing in his Pentecostal church as a young boy, in rock bands during middle school, and then took up guitar and dobro at age 17 with early influences from Doc Watson, Mississippi John Hurt, Mike Auldridge, and Chuck Berry. His travels took him west to Colorado and California, south to New Orleans and Memphis, and in the mid 1970s Orville spent several seasons playing on the SS Julia Belle Swain, a period piece Mississippi river paddlewheel steamboat plying the inland waterways.

Orville moved to Seattle in 1978 where he was a founding member of the legendary Northwest folk/rock group The Dynamic Logs.  Over the years he has played with a diverse list of artists including Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, John Hartford, Maria Muldaur, Richie Havens, Laura Love, blues artists John Cephas, Howard Armstrong, Sam Andrew (Big Brother and the Holding Company) and Mick Taylor (Rolling Stones). He has guested on over 400 albums, appeared on Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion, Jay Leno's Tonight Show, and was featured in the 1997 film Georgia with Mare Winningham and Jennifer Jason-Leigh. He is also in demand as a teacher and author, writing for Acoustic Guitar and Fretboard Journal and teaching at prestigious workshops worldwide, including Euro Blues Week, International Guitar Seminar, Puget Sound Guitar Workshop and Guitar Intensives.

Orville also has several solo CDs to his credit:  Blueprint for the Blues (1998), Slide & Joy (1999), an all-instrumental dobro tour de force, Freehand (2003), two discs with Mark Graham as The Kings of Mongrel Folk, four discs with the File Gumbo Zydeco Band, albums with Laura Love, John Cephas and Woody Mann, Grant Dermody and John Miller, and appearances on slide guitar collections Legends of the Incredible Lap Steel and Southern Filibuster: a tribute to Tut Taylor. His music has been featured in soundtracks for PBS' Frontier House, movies The Wooly Boys and Georgia Rule.  He also has several instructional DVDs available.

Wow...

Oh, and did we mention he sounded great in our back room?

Our gallery-strollers were treated to several straight hours of full-bodied soul, blues, and you-name-it from these two awe-inspiring musicians.

Could be, though, that possibly the most amazing feature of the performance is something that few in the audience realized.  Peter spilled the beans to us:

"Orville agreed to fill in at the last minute and NONE of the tunes we played had been rehearsed. In fact, we had never played together at all before sitting down Friday night in your back room. I expected top-flight musicianship and the complete ability to follow and complement anything I chose to play, and that's exactly what I got."


 And that's exactly what we got, too, Peter. 


Peter and Orville Making Magic
(photo credit J. Nunn)

Thank you, thank you both.  Can't wait for next time.