Jon Shain – The Bunker: November 28, 2022

Jon Shain flew in from Durham, North Carolina and took the Bunker folk club museum through a terraplane musical ride of Americana.

The warm acoustic atmosphere is enhanced by the relics on the walls. There were relics still drawing breath, and we all experienced a real treat from a virtuoso guitarist.

Shain specialises in the Piedmont school of blues music, a finger-pick style of syncopated melodic lines on the treble strings matched with a rhythmic thumb bass. Rag time and stride piano translated onto guitar.

Blind Blake may be the most celebrated early recording artist in this style. Later with the folk and blues revival of the Fifties came the likes of Josh White, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Right up to our favourite musicologist Ry Cooder.

Originally from Massachusetts, he played in frat-rock bands in high school. He attended jazz school as well as completing a history major.

North Carolina is also a home for bluegrass. Flying Mice was a psychedelic bluegrass outfit he fronted. Eastern seaboard Grateful Dead possibly.

He is a highly regarded singer-songwriter with a career spanning forty- plus years. The most recent accolade was gaining first place in the solo/duo category in the 2019 International Blues Challenge in Memphis.

The show starts with Buck Dancers’s Choice, an instrumental also done by John Fahey and Taj Mahal. A perfect mix of folk and blues which swings and struts nicely.

Blues to bluegrass is perfectly captured with Seven Thieves.

The 2018 album, Gettin’ Handy with the Blues, is a musical trip through some of the classic tunes from the Father of the Blues, W. C. Handy.

Fuzzy Wuzzy Rag sounds like rolling ragtime piano. Down Home Blues has the melody lines of the original classic blues. The style from the vaudeville stage with the likes of Bessie Smith, Victoria Spivey and Ma Rainey.

Candle in the Window and Deep Freeze. His voice and phrasing is reminiscent of Randy Newman, especially in songs which venture into country americana.

Last Time I Saw Laszlo slips in some Eastern European klezmer jazz tones.

The musical road trip continues with the folk blues sound of My Creole Belle, a great Mississippi John Hurt song. Beautiful fluid rolling riffs.

Getaway Car is introduced as his big hit. What’s interesting here is that Shain does not have a southern American accent, but on the best americana song of the night, he gets to phrase like Levon Helm.

In discovering Shain for the first time, a good place to start would be his last album released in 2021, Never Found a Way to Tame the Blues. The title song is a lyrical paean to the mythic appeal of the open road. At peace with the pain of life. Fell to my knees/ Cried to the Lord.

Of course, the spectre of Robert Johnson’s music is present. His most overtly ragtime blues number was the anomalous They’re Red Hot. The thumb-picked walking bass signature of Sweet Home Chicago, likely is the Piedmont style.

That all comes together on a superlative take on Muddy Water’s Louisiana Blues. Slide guitar which stings like a bee and slashes like lightning.

Bob Dylan’s Meet Me in the Morning is given an original country blues treatment after the familiar opening riff.

Big Boss Man. The Jimmy Reed song has percussive playing with tasty melodic flourishes. Sounding a little like the Elvis version in vocal treatment.

The evening finishes appropriately with Steel Guitar Rag. A seminal Western Swing song which Bob Will’s Band has claimed as authors but was first recorded by Sylvester Weaver. Great slide guitar bending out some Hawaiian touches.

Jon Shain presented a masterclass of americana and music history on his first trip to New Zealand. He could have just walked straight out of that Basement Tapes cover photo.

Rev Orange Peel     

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