Long-time Freight favorites, Mitch Greenhill and Mayne Smith join two streams of American traditional music "where country meets the blues." Mitch began his career in Harvard Square's coffee houses, focusing on blues and other African American guitar styles. Mayne's home is in the Bay Area, where he developed his spine-tingling Anglo American country-style singing, as well as his dobro and pedal steel guitar technique. They performed together with the acoustic/electric band, The Frontier, and then as sidemen in a honytonk country band in the 1960s and ‘70s. They have also released two albums, Storm Coming (1979) and Back Where We've Never Been (1985).
Tonight, Mitch and Mayne celebrate their 40th anniversary as musical partners, revisiting tradition and introducing originals with their trademark tight vocal harmonies and hot licks. As always, they deliver wide-ranging material from sources like Rev. Gary Davis, Roy Acuff, and Thelonius Monk, plus original compositions in a style described by the late great San Francisco Chronicle writer Phil Elwood as "vernacular music, the real American popular music that comes out of the people, out of the performer, not off the printed score or dial spinning record producer."
Mitch Greenhill - Artist Biography by Alex Henderson
A native of the Boston area, Mitch Greenhill is an obscure folk singer/instrumentalist who plays acoustic guitar and banjo and can easily detour into country-blues. Greenhill is the son of the late promoter/manager Manny Greenhill, whose company Folklore Productions did folk and blues promotions in the Boston area for decades. The older Greenhill did a lot to encourage his son's fascination with folk and country-blues. When Mitch was growing up in the Boston suburb of Dorchester, his father's house guests included Pete Seeger, Lightnin' Hopkins, the Rev. Gary Davis, Cisco Houston, and Sonny Terry. In the 1960s and 1970s, Greenhill was a regular on the Boston/Cambridge folk circuit, although he eventually moved to California. When Manny Greenhill died in 1996, Mitch Greenhill took over Folklore Productions and ran the company with his son Matthew. Over the years, Greenhill has recorded sporadically. He provided two albums for Prestige in the 1960s -- Pickin' The City Blues and the instrumental Shepherd of the Highways -- before recording Storm Coming for Bay in 1979 and Back Where We've Never Been for Bennett House in 1985. In April 2000, Fantasy reissued both of Greenhill's Prestige albums on the CD Shepherd of the City Blues.
AllMusic: Mitch Greenhill
Mayne Smith - An Informal Autobiography
Born in 1939, I grew up with younger sisters Janet and Harriet in the family of Professor Henry Nash Smith, a prominent expert on Mark Twain and the literature of the American west. My parents had lots of folk music records. They paid for books and voice and guitar lessons, and they let me start singing in Episcopal church choirs at age 10 (my first professional gig). But I grew up knowing that I was leading a privileged life in a scary world where millions of good people weren't getting a fair shake.
We moved to Berkeley when I was 14. At my new junior high I met Neil Rosenberg and we started playing guitars and singing songs we learned from Leadbelly and Woody. On through high school and two years of college we kept learning new songs and playing with and for more people, adding, in particular, Scott Hambly to our picking circle. You can read about the Redwood Canyon Ramblers elsewhere on MayneSmith.com. By my junior year in college in 1960 I was an experienced performer in the folk music revival movement and a neophyte bluegrasser.
Flowing in the most natural direction, I got an M.A. degree in folklore studies and published articles in Sing Out! and elsewhere. (It turned out that my 1965 "Introduction to Bluegrass" in the Journal of American Folklore was an academic groundbreaker; it has been reprinted and footnoted over and over.) I spent much of the 1960s performing at folk festivals and folk music nightclubs in Oberlin OH and Bloomington IN, as well as California, as both a folkie and a bluegrass musician. Having transferred to UCLA, over the next four years I hung out at the Ash Grove and McCabe's Guitar Shop and picked with people like Ry Cooder, Taj Mahal, John Fahey, Bobby Kimmel, Mark LeVine, David Lindley, Richard Greene, and Peter Feldmann. The commercial music world was opening up to roots-based innovations.
Suddenly I was 26 and didn't need my student deferment from Vietnam any more. Michael Martin Murphey praised a slight song I'd written and turned on a switch in my psyche. I retired from post-graduate work at UCLA. I was lonely and passionate enough to power a bunch of new songs. I also had huge fun as part of a new era when it had become possible to make a living playing funky, authentic music. For a while I appeared solo as a singer-songwriter, but I preferred being part of a group. Along with my lead singing I was good at finding harmonies, and I could function as a sideman on rhythm guitar, dobro, and eventually on pedal steel. I learned about playing with drummers for dancers. On the folk music scene, I was somebody who could supply a country or rock feel. In the electric music world I offered experience with folk and old-time music.
The rest of my musical life has continued on the course established back then. Centered in the S.F. Bay Area since 1969, I've played with a bunch of bands in many styles - bluegrass, country-rock, folk-rock, and commercial country. I've spent decades in a perpetual but occasional collaboration with Mitch Greenhill that resulted in two albums (see the discographies, below). I was also blessed with a trustworthy connection to the business side of music through Folklore Productions, the company Mitch has inherited from his father, Manny, and is passing along to his son, Matt.
In the early 1980s I was the ringleader of a band called Alternate Roots that played the original Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse almost like a house band for several years, always with a guest star whose chosen songs we'd work up in one rehearsal. It started with me, Rick Epping, Ray Bierl, and Johnny Harper (Lumsdaine); soon Alan Senauke and Sam Siggins joined. Tony Marcus and Markie Sanders also came on board well before the Freight's situation changed and the band retired (except for a reunion gig at the Freight in 1998).
During much of the 1980s and 1990s, I had less time and energy to spend on music because I was on the Board of the new non-profit Freight & Salvage, and I also had to get serious about day-gigging. To my good fortune, my timing and talent were right to become a professional in computer-based publishing. With the formidable support of Gail Wilson-Smith, whom I married in 1983 and who has had a distinguished career as a public school teacher and administrator, I was able to retire from salaried work in 2002 after four years at a non-profit organization that helped disadvantaged veterans of the U.S. armed forces.
Several years ago, Johnny Harper was producing an album project for a mutual friend. I went along for the ride, getting off on the music and realizing that Johnny's working style really suited me. We got to talking, and Johnny agreed to produce an album of me performing my own songs with the multiple mixtures of musicians they needed to sound just right. These included a bluegrass band based on the guys I'd been playing with since 1956, a hot electric country-rock unit, and several different semi-acoustic combos. The CD, Places I've Been, was released in June 2008.
Who knows what happens next, in these troubled but promising times?
Official Website: Mayne Smith Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
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