Quick Q and A with Jon Shain
 by Kathy S-B  ·  30 October 2009

Jon Shain is a veteran singer-songwriter with a knack for playing some mighty sweet and mighty mean blues with a touch of bluegrass, swing, and ragtime. Jon's a native of Haverhill and is celebrating the release of his newest CD Times Right Now. Discover more about Jon on his website. You can also hear some great licks (and lyrics) on his MySpace page. This instructional video on You Tube will delight any and all aspiring blues guitar players.

How would you describe Piedmont blues fingerstyle guitar playing?

The Piedmont blues fingerstyle is basically an alternating thumb style, imitating the ragtime piano rhythms and cadences of the jazz era. A lot of older southern white folks call it “Travis picking” after Merle Travis, but people were doing it long before him. How does it compare to other types of blues guitar? In the Mississippi Delta style, the player usually lets a melodic line become a second voice, mimicking the vocal or taking place of it, with sparer thumb picking in accompaniment. Often a slide (bottle-neck or knife) would be added to create more expression in the single-note line. It was this kind of melodic lead playing that, after electrification, became the basis of the Chicago style lead playing. I tend to mix in a lot of the single note line playing into my piedmont rhythm style; I’m in no way a purist. I actually add in a lot of idiomatic stuff from bluegrass and jazz, too. And growing up as a child of the seventies, you can’t escape the influences of the era — Jimmy Page, David Gilmour, Mark Knopfler — of course they all grew up on the blues stuff, too, so it tends to come around in every generation.

It’s been said that your latest CD, Times Right Now, has a marked New Orleans influence.

The idea to use The Grandsons from Washington, DC as backing musicians on this album — to have their instrumentation at hand — made it fun to write tunes that showed off their talent. A visit to the Crescent City in the fall of 2007 kind of precipitated the whole idea of doing something different on this record, and I’m really lucky that everyone decided to jump on board with me.

Was that intentional or did the sound evolve naturally due to the subject matter of the songs?

It was fairly intentional in that I try to listen to where I’m going in different tunes and see if a pattern emerges. If it does, I just push it a little further in that direction.

When you were growing up in Haverhill, MA, did you gravitate toward the blues or was your initial exposure to this kind of music come about when you were in college in North Carolina?

I did get to listen to a lot of different stuff, due to the influences of a more wide-open radio climate, and having a series of great music teachers. But it was all on records and tapes until I came to NC as a college kid. (Duke ‘89) It was down here that I got to meet older musicians such as Big Boy Henry, John Dee Holeman, and Lightnin’ Wells — hang out with them and watch what they were doing first-hand. . . . I also had a jazz professor at Duke who was in Thelonius Monk’s band, so there were definitely some different musical opportunities in North Carolina than in the Merrimack Valley. I hadn’t realized it when I set off for college that Durham was a hotbed of piedmont blues playing in the 1930s. Rev. Gary Davis, Blind Boy Fuller, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee all made their homes here then. And the city hasn’t forgotten it — we have a great amount of respect for the music that came out of this area.

Do you have a fairly disciplined musical life as far as songwriting and practicing are concerned?

Discipline has never been a real strong point for me. I just try to do something productive every day. You might write a little something one day, book a gig the next, maybe answer someone’s blog questions the next. It’s a long life, so I just try to keep plugging ahead. (If it’s a short life, then I got other things to worry about!) I do teach a ton of guitar lessons, though. So regardless of whether or not I’m practicing stuff that I would choose to work on for my own playing, the guitar is in my hands hours every day . . . so I guess that’s discipline in some way.

You’ve shared the stage with some pretty amazing musicians, do you have any favorite memories of any special shows?

I could probably go on until we were all asleep . . . but here are a few nuggets:

I played onstage with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. He played flute on my song “Getaway Car” and stood on one leg and all of that. He also interviewed me while we sat on a couch “talkshow style” — talk about surreal. . . .

My first big show in a theater, my band Flyin’ Mice was opening up for the Dixie Dregs — our drummer found some strange fruit backstage and opened it up to reveal some weird looking insides. A few minutes later some road manager came running through yelling, “Someone has stolen Steve Morse’s guava!” We played our first tune the fastest we’d ever played — sheer adrenaline. The crowd ate us up.

The Flyin’ Mice years — We had some pretty big cajones for a bunch of twenty-somethings. We invited Jorma Kaukonen to sit in with us and he did. We played a whole set with John Mooney sitting in with us. We went on after the Tony Rice Unit once and closed the show because the promoter wanted to set it up that way — what was he/we thinking?!

I’ve been very lucky — gotten to play with too many of my musical heroes to count — John Hiatt, Hot Tuna, Peter Rowan, David Grisman, Little Feat . . . all the singer/songwriters and blues guys — Keb Mo, John Hammond, Chris Smither, Bill Morrissey… and my good buddy Pat Wictor, of course!