The gentle voice of Dorothy Scott greeted us as she began the Art of Music set at Manitowoc, Wisconsin’s Acoustic Fest on Sunday, July 15, singing her song, “Waterboy,” like a quiet call in the hills looking for a long-lost helper but not yelling to loud so as not to wake the sheep.
After two songs alone, Scott was joined by her Art of Music partner for the evening, pat mAcdonald. With his stomp board, harmonica, and buzzing Lowebow (cigar box guitar a.k.a. Purgatory Hill Harp), mAcdonald is anything but gentle. The pair launched into Neil Young’s “Tell Me Why” with a goal of waking up those sheep and waterboys.
The Art of Music is a series of shows mainly in Door County, Wisconsin, although the idea seems to extend elsewhere when Scott takes to the road. Combining different artists and styles, the impression the Scott/mAcdonald set gave is a of workshop on stage. There was no set list, and when the pair chose to sing together, they were often teaching other as they went. You could tell they love to collaborate, but the show was about discovering their collaborating not about seeing a well-rehearsed product of collaboration. In this sense, it was most genuine, enjoyable, and revealed the art of making music.
Unfortunately, for the crowd, the art may have been lost on them. After an afternoon and early evening of local favorites, many attendees packed up their folding chairs when the unknown (in other words, not from around here) folks took the stage. With a dwindling crowd, Scott and mAcdonald did their best to connect, but even the festival organizers were hard to convince. They talked loudly to their friends just off to the side of the audience, drinking beer, showing relative little attention towards their headlining guests–even almost missing Scott’s thank you and dedication of a song to them. It’s the kind of thing that makes me think the art of music is lost on my Manitowoc.
And there was art in the music. As I wrote elsewhere, Scott and mAcdonald laid down tones able to conjure up whole spiritual dimensions. That’s art. mAcdonald led Scott through a stomp blues revival that landed briefly on different classics–”Baby, Please Don’t Go,” “See That My Grave is Kept Clean,” “After Midnight.” After each excursion into a song, mAcdonald would bring them back to his stomp vamp. It was like blues dreams coming back, rising up in front of your vision to be vivid and strange, and then sliding back into the ethereal.
Elsewhere, Scott played a version of Van Morrison’s “Caravan” that kicked it up onto a clap-along rhythm matching her stage presence which is a bit manic, slightly anxious, but truly endearing. At times her voice even seems to have a touch of an Irish brogue furthering its tender, fantastical qualities.
Yet, on “Pass It On,” Scott displayed an urgency like an early Shawn Colvin. The folk singer format may hide the blues ready to come growling out of her music and voice. If let loose, she may even have that acoustic thrash folk of Hamell on Trial.
Calling upon a song from Steel Bridge Songfest, a songwriting workshop and concert to save a bridge in mAcdonald’s Sturgeon Bay, mAcdonald took a bluesy walk into something akin to John Lennon. But when the Beatlesque sounds faded, and mAcdonald played “My Little Dark Angel,” it was as if Neil Osborne from 54*40 had arrived with the song’s post-punk turn of phrase (“My little darling/my little dark angel”) and a bluesy core.
When Scott invited mAcdonald to join her on John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery,” I kept imagining that mAcdonald would be wicked on that guitar if left to really let loose. It’s not what we got at Acoustic Fest, and he even said after show it wasn’t the right event to let it all fly. However, I am eager to see him where the amps are cranked high, although given his wandering and false starts, I’d really like to see what he’s like being led by a band to follow that wicked streak out to its rocking flame.
Thank you to Dorothy Scott and pat mAcdonald for the review CDs.
