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Every once in a while an unexpected treat comes along. That was the case this past Wednesday evening. Somehow I got on the mailing list for The Triple Door. The Triple Door is a music venue in the style of a Vegas dinner show, meaning that the seating is all booths or bar-style seating with full menu service. You don’t have to order food or drinks but if you want to you can make it a full evening. The food is provided by Wild Ginger, which is an Asian Fusion restaurant located across the street.
Anyway, I got an email with a deal to get tickets to a show featuring Sue Foley for $10 with no other fees attached. I had never heard of Sue Foley but some quick research showed that she’s a highly regarded blues artist and plays a mean guitar via her signature pink Telecaster. For ten bucks, count me in. Sam was working Wednesday night so couldn’t go but that allowed me to snag a lone front row seat on the counter at the front of the stage.
The concert turned out to be completely different from what I was expecting. I was expecting blues music with a full band. Instead I got a solo artist with an acoustic classical guitar. Turns out Sue is quite a bit more than just a blues guitar player. She apparently had got a lot going on and in this particular case she seemed to be touring to support her work to get her PHD. Huh?
Sue called this her “one woman, one guitar” tour. Piecing it all together, Sue is working on a PHD which I gathered to be part of a music degree and her final “project” was to research women pioneers of guitar who had an impact on music as a whole. These were mainly women who played in the early part of the last century. There was a leaning towards blues style guitarists but Sue also touched on classical and country artists. For the entire show, other than the encore, Sue played a nylon stringed flamenco-style acoustic guitar she had purchased in Mexico.
For example Sue talked about a French woman whose father was a huge fan of classical guitar and wanted his next child to play. He had a baby girl and went so far as to spend nights pulling on her fingers when she was an infant to make them longer. She turned out to be quite the prodigy and was playing sold out concerts in German occupied France by the time she was in her teens before sadly passing away in her mid-forties.
Sue had also researched and spent a fair amount of time talking about Maybelle Carter, matriarch of the Carter family and June Carter Cash’s mother. Maybelle developed a few styles that influence guitarists to this day. Sue played a couple of Maybelle’s songs but also played one of the only original songs of the evening, a song Sue wrote about Maybelle’s guitar, which apparently is in the country music hall of fame.
One other notable artist was Charo. I remember Charo as a flamboyant performer on variety shows and TV episodes of “The Love Boat” but apparently Charo was also a serious guitarist who studied classical guitar in Spain at the school of Andres Segovia, one of the fathers of modern classical guitar music. There were gypsies living on the school grounds and they introduced Charo to flamenco music, which influenced her classical playing. As Sue explained it, Charo might have portrayed a ditzy comedian but as soon as she picked up her guitar she was deadly serious.
Anyway, for each of these artists and their songs Sue has not only researched them and their playing style but she also learned how to play their musical style and performed each of the songs in the original style the artist would have played it in. It was impressive.
To cap it off apparently Sue is also writing a book with a chapter on each of the artists she has researched.
So, a completely different evening than I was expecting but a very enjoyable one, and a bit of a history lesson as well.
