Skip Gorman Weekend

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to spend most of the weekend listening to, learning from, pickin' with and hanging out with Skip Gorman. You won't meet a nicer fellow and a really great teacher. Skip was in town the entire weekend and my friend and a fellow Folk School board member Ellen was kind enough to host Skip at her house. Being a fiddle player herself, I'm sure she had a great time hanging out with Skip and taking him out to Geoff Seitz violin/fiddle shop.

On Friday night, Skip performed a concert at the Folk School of St. Louis. It was a great show, with Skip primarily playing guitar and singing the old songs of the West. He also treated us with a few fiddle tunes. I believe he only played one mandolin song (using my '21 Gibson F2!), but it was a treat.

After the concert, about 10 of us went back to our house and shared some snacks and nice red wine (thanks to my lovely wife - the Show Me Vegan). Skip was pretty tired, so he didn't pick any tunes after the show, but we enjoyed his stories and picked a few ourselves.

Saturday morning we headed down to KDHX 88.1 for Keith Dudding's Down Yonder radio show. Keith was a gracious host and had Skip for a nice interview and several songs. Skip even managed to get in a good plug for the Folk School!

Skip then had to rush off to grab lunch and get to his fiddle workshop, which I heard was a great success. Later that evening, Skip, Ellen, and a several other friends had a nice dinner and a little pickin' back at Ellen's house. I've never been to an old time jam where I knew NONE of the songs. Between Jim Nelson, Skip, Geoff, and Mark Renard, there was an encyclopedic knowledge of the old tunes.

As nice as all that was, finally Sunday came around and we had our mandolin workshop with Skip. As I already mentioned, he's a great instructor. He likes to weave stories into the class as he taught us 3 tunes and emphasized several aspects of Bill Monroe's playing that gave it its characteristic sound.

So I'm still working on getting the other songs from the workshop in shape for recording, but here's the first installment.

This is Waltz in G, which you can find on Skip's great CD The Old Style Mandolin Volume 2 Monroesque (or at Amazon). It's a very pretty waltz that Skip learned from Bill Monroe. I understand it was never recorded by Mr. Monroe (except for maybe on a bus recording).

Skip said as soon as he heard it he knew he was going to learn it. There's a spot where the rhythm goes to the A chord and the melody stays on a G. I really like it and I hope you will too.