The sun is slowly setting, families are settling into blankets and lawn chairs. Musicians are setting up speakers on the back deck of a low ranch home of Texas limestone. About 60 people have gathered tonight for Suzanna Choffel, joined by Eldridge Goins on drums. The fourth show in the fourth season of the Wyldwood house concert series is about to begin.
My first ever visit was just at the beginning of May, to see Rod Picott and Amanda Shires. Amy and Andrew Murphy work their network of contacts to book great music into Wyldwood that we may not often have a chance to hear in Austin.
Rod is from Maine; he has shared both school bus rides and songwriting credits with Slaid Cleaves. Two Austin radio stations keep Slaid in regular rotation, so I'd heard some of the songs they collaborated on before. It's easy to learn about the music as Rod introduces each song, gives its name and a brief history of how he came to write it.
Amanda shone on the fiddle (yes, I checked her website, it's a fiddle, although some prefer to call the instrument a "violin"). I am still enchanted with one of their collaborations, "Drive that Devil Out," which you can hear on the myspace site they share.
Two weeks later, I was in the audience again to hear Will T. Massey on guitar and Mike Meadows on his "cajón." Cajón is the Spanish word for a wooden box; it's also a drum, a drum that is, well, a resonate wooden box. Mike turns his whole body into an instrument, perched on this box with jingles tied on his arms and legs, tapping all sides in different ways, making a wide variety of rhythms come to life to complement Will T's soulful folk about angels and demons, love and war.
I've been pondering what makes this venue such a perfect place to hear music. One is, of course, that you can truly hear the music. I asked Will T. how he felt after playing at Wyldwood, and he said that "house concerts are going a long way towards keeping folk music alive."
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