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Glass Onion Folk Club
An evening of roots blues at the Glass Onion
Thursday, February 20, 2003
Doc MacLean with his 1920's National guitar.
Getting into his work.
Blues guitarist Michael Schatte added a nice touch to the evening.
Traditional roots blues musician Doc MacLean visited the Glass Onion Folk Club last weekend, immersing the audience in the sounds of his 1920's National guitar and the mournful vocal offerings that are the signature sounds of the true delta blues sound.
The Glass Onion crowd met at the Gardiner-McPhail Residence in Wallaceburg for an intimate house concert, with MacLean taking up his position on a dining room chair and getting straight to business.
He opened with his own arrangement of a Son House tune, Jinx Blues, and followed that with a string of his own material. Tunes included Po' Boy, Dead Men Walkin' and Bone Train and by the time the show had reached the latter tune, the audience was fully into MacLean's solid slide guitar work and vocal stylings that harked back to a period of the blues that is mostly gone now.
Indeed, only a handful of musicians continue to stay true to the real sound of the delta blues and MacLean is one of the best. If you closed your eyes during the show, you could have imagined being out in the bayou in a clapboard shack, listening to the blues of another era – stripped of all the flash and gloss that characterize most of the modern blues.
As well as his own material, MacLean presented the audience with some real blues standards from artists like Willie Brown, Charlie Patton and Reverend Pearly Brown. Before most tunes, he offered a bit of the history of the song and a little insight into the artist who'd originally performed it.
He told the audience that he works hard to keep the traditional music alive. Original offerings like Narrow House Blues (the name of an upcoming CD) and Blood In My Eyes sound about as traditional as they come and MacLean's performance style surely harks back to the more rootsy side of the blues.
As a special added treat for the evening, Chatham-based Michael Schatte, who is an outstanding blues artist in his own right, pulled out his guitar and did several tunes. He kept the theme of the evening alive by performing some traditional slide guitar tunes by artists like John Lee Hooker.
Guests to the Glass Onion had a full evening of roots blues music with MacLean and Schatte. While the winter winds howled outside, there was a night of hot blues happening inside.
Next show for the Glass Onion is Friday, April 4 when the featured performer will be Matt Minglewood. Call 519-627-5978 for ticket information.
John Gardiner is a 25-year-veteran of the community newspaper business, but he is also a prolific writer of moralistic short fiction he refers to as "emotional thoughtscapes" or "adult fables". Samples of his fiction can be found at:
- Melancholy Man and Minister's Son
- Reality Check
- Grim Faerie Tale
- Once Upon a Visit
- Toward the End, Oyster Boy
- And It Was Christmas
- From Genesis to Revelations (Chapter 1) - the novel. the rest of the novel follows month by month
