David Bromberg
Saturday, July 6, Legendary blues musician, David Bromberg, will be playing a concert at Inspire Moore Winery in Naples, New York. Bromberg is a Grammy-nominated artist known for his blues fingerpicking style and the ability to play rhythm and lead at the same time. He made a name for himself in the 1970’s with a number of classic albums. He has collaborated with an impressive list of legendary musicians including George Harrison, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead, and many others.
In the late-1980’s he walked away from performing to open a violin shop in Wilmington, Delaware. Then after 18 years, he emerged in 2007 with Try Me One More Time, which was nominated at the Grammy’s for Best Traditional Folk Album. Since then, he has continued to record, perform, and run his violin shop named David Bromberg Fine Violins.
LOST: I first heard your music about ten years ago when I was in college. I remember driving down the road, listening to the radio. Your recording of “Statesboro Blues/Church Bell Blues” came on and I had to pull the car over. It just blew me away and I immediately went to my local record store to buy “Wanted Dead or Alive” on vinyl.
DB: Oh, that’s very nice.
LOST: You have this summer tour kicking off in Naples, and you have a new album coming out soon. Can you talk about the upcoming album?
DB: I mostly perform these days with a quintet, but there are actually 6 members counting my manager. He thought that we should make a record to be a recording of our live performances. The idea was to get a literal snapshot, not to go into the studio and do overdubs. We did about six tunes in one day with video and audio. We just stood up and did them and they came out really well.
The record actually has a sextet performing on it. Whenever we get a chance we work with a guy named Dan Walker, who is currently on the road with Heart. We met him some years ago on a tour. Dan just fit in amazingly and he is virtually a member of the band anytime or anywhere. Shortly after meeting him, he got a hold of all my albums and learned the tunes cold! I came off stage one night and there they were. And he’s good, he’s really good.
LOST: I love your guitar style. You’re known for being an incredible guitar player. Can you share a little about your early days, what got you into the blues, and your blues guitar lessons from Reverend Gary Davis?
DB: My parents had a Columbia Record called, A Guide To Jazz. It was a period piece by a French Jazz critic who told the story of the development of Jazz through recordings. The first track was a blues song by Sleepy John Estes, doing something called The Workingman’s Blues. It just captivated me. So I started buying everything I could like that. My brother had a classmate who’s father had a fantastic collection of blues 78’s. They used to let me come over on weekends and borrow them. So I learned a lot of stuff that way.
I found an LP record that had Reverend Gary Davis on one side. The only reason I knew about the Reverend was because I had come across a Weavers album where they did Twelve Gates to the City. That was one of the Reverend’s tunes and they credited him. So when I saw that album I bought it and, man, I was impressed. I really loved it. Years later I was walking in the East Village of New York on Bleeker Street. I was in college. There was a sandwich sign in front of a little coffee house that said, “Gary Davis Here This Afternoon”. So I went in and paid my money, and he gave a great show. After the show I worked up my courage and walked up to ask him if I could take lessons from him. To my surprise, he said, “Sure, five dollars. Bring the money, honey!” That was the Reverend.
So I started to take lessons from him. Each time I’d pay him the $5, which was really a ripoff of him in a lot of ways. Although that money meant more in those days, this was the 1960’s. Still, lessons would last all day. His wife would make us lunch. It was just a fantastic thing. After a little while I started more or less being his seeing eye dog because he was blind. I would take him where he needed to go—to church, concerts, wherever. That was my relationship with the Reverend.
LOST: Did you already play guitar before meeting him?
DB: Oh ya, I did. You couldn’t take beginning lessons with the Reverend. He wasn’t a beginner kind of guy. You had to have some grounding already.
LOST: You have so many great albums and songs. I always loved how your sense of humor comes through in your songwriting. One of your funnier songs is The Holdup, which you co-wrote with George Harrison. What was that like to write with him and then later record it, both with George and separately with The Grateful Dead?
DB: Well, let’s see. I recorded it twice and he wasn’t on the version with The Grateful Dead. What happened was, we were at Thanksgiving dinner with the man who was my manager at the time. It was just his family, George, and me. George and I were both guitar junkies and the only guitar that was there was my manager’s daughter’s gut string. It wasn’t a very good one, either, but we couldn’t help ourselves. We kind of passed it back and forth and without meaning to, we wrote a song. It just came out.
LOST: So you’ve played with George Harrison, The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, the list goes on and on. Do you have any other favorite stories or fond memories of working with these big artists you collaborated with?
DB: I produced some tunes for Bob Dylan. One time we did some songs with a choir. They haven’t been released yet, I’m sure eventually they will be. My wife was in this Baptist women's choir and they were really good. I wanted them on this track, so they were way down at the end of the studio and Bob was in the vocal booth at the other end of the studio. The tune he wanted to do was one I have recorded twice, called Nobody’s Fault but Mine. We were recording it during the big “Disco scare”, and the song had more or less a Disco beat. So Bob was trying to find a different groove for it, but he really had my arrangement printed on his mind. He was having trouble with it. The women were just waiting and eventually they sat on the floor. My wife told me that after a while they said a prayer which went, “Dear Lord, please help this man find what it is he is looking for, and with a quickness!” That’s one of my favorite stories about Bob.
LOST: So you worked nonstop through the 70’s, releasing a bunch of classic albums. You made some great albums in the 80’s, then you took a break and stopped playing guitar all together. Eventually you moved to Delaware to open your violin shop. Through that journey, what brought you back to eventually recording and touring again?
DB: When I moved to Wilmington, Delaware, I started having lunch with the mayor who is a big jazz fan. He told me that the street I live on used to have a lot of live music that was no longer happening, and that he’d liked to see that again. Since I hadn’t played in well over 20 years, the only way I thought I’d be able to do that was to start a couple of jam sessions. I thought, “I can do that, join them for a month or so, and they’ll live on by themselves.” So I did that, and really good musicians started showing up. Some were professionals I had worked with from way back when, some were just musicians who heard I was doing it and traveled some distance to get there. Playing with these good musicians, I started to really enjoy it again, and that got me back on the road.
LOST: Then of course, in 2007 you came out with Try Me One More Time, which was nominated for a Grammy.
DB: Easiest record I ever made. I wasn’t trying to do anything special. I was just doing the tunes the way I do them. I would go into the studio and do a tune two or three times, then do something else, then something else. I figured maybe in a year or so I’d have an album out of it. But it really only took two or three months, recording only on the weekends. It came together pretty quickly.
LOST: One of my favorite songs on that is the title track. Is that an original song of yours?
DB: I kind of rewrote an old Blues tune. There was a song by that title with some similar lines. It was recorded in the 1930’s.
LOST: The sketch on the cover of that album has a striking similarity to the drawing on your debut album cover. Who sketched those drawings?
DB: My sister did the sketch that was on my first album. The Try Me One More Time album cover was kind of a computer rendering to echo the sketch from the first album.
LOST: Paul Simon recently released an album of re-recorded songs that he felt had been overlooked at their original release date and deserved a second listen. With your catalog, are there any deep cuts that you personally regard as something that fans should take another look at?
DB: Well there’s one that I’ve taken another look at. Bob Dylan wanted to do one of my tunes on that stuff that I was producing and I stupidly talked him out of doing it. I was confusing it with another one that I don’t like. Now that I’ve got that straightened out, I’m thinking about reviving it.
LOST: How is everything at the violin shop?
DB: Very well.
LOST: I heard you have almost 300 violins, all American-made?
DB: Well that’s not in the shop. That’s in my house above the shop in my private collection. The violin shop has violins from all over the world, mostly European, but my hobby is fine American violins.
LOST: What got you into the violins?
DB: I started playing a little fiddle back in the day. When I went to get my first fiddle, the one I picked turned out to be an American one. I thought, that makes sense because I play American music. Having a collectors bent, I started collecting American violins. At the time it was kind of easy because nobody thought there were any good ones—which strikes me as kind of dumb—but that was the view point then. It isn’t anymore. People blame me that it isn’t. I may be one of the responsible parties for that.
Tickets for the Saturday, July 6 concert in Naples are available here. You can follow David Bromberg on Instagram @davidbrombergband
Essential Tracks by David Bromberg
Header Photo: Joe del Tufo
Lost + Found is a series of short, standardized Q+A interviews with people involved in the Finger Lakes community. We sit down with the seekers, artisans, crafts people, and enthusiasts of the region, searching for food & drink, entertainment, culture, nature – everything that makes The Finger Lakes great. We invite you to get lost with us, and maybe find yourself along the way.
