[Dragaera] Richard Dyer-Bennet

[David Dyer-Bennet]

On Wed, January 19, 2011 00:51, Philip Hart wrote:
> When I was a lonely grad student in Chicago, I used to listen to a radio
> program called "The Midnight Special", which played folk and other sorts
> of music.  For a period the show would open with a song by some guy who
> sounded like he had just come in from forty days and forty nights in the
> wilderness, with an amazing range and some sort of guitar technique that
> probably involved a lost dulcimer.  I just looked up the song, which I've
> never known anything about at all but which has always meant a lot to me,
> and arrived at
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRJMQgRhrGw
>
> Lots of other cool stuff can be found there.

All the albums he released on his own label are now available in rather
nicely re-mastered CD versions from Smithsonian Folkways
<http://www.folkways.si.edu/searchresults.aspx?sPhrase=Dyer-Bennet&sType=%27phrase%27>.
 And there's a biography available
<http://www.amazon.com/Richard-Dyer-Bennet-Minstrel-American-Music/dp/1604733608/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1295449496&sr=8-2>
(Paul O. Jenkins lived next door to us when we first lived in Northfield,
and first heard Richard's music on our stereo.  Well, it wasn't actually a
stereo yet, back then.)

He did perform briefly with a lute.  I'm not aware of a dulcimer figuring
into things.  When he changed to guitar, he studied classical guitar for
three years with one of the Spanish masters, whose name I'm now forgetting
(it's in the book).
-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info