David Massengill, accompanied by an Appalachian dulcimer of his Bristol Tennessee childhood, sings heartfelt and intriguing songs about social justice, passion, longing, biblical and historical characters, and more. He tells amusing stories about the same, about his family, and of various characters he has known. The following article sets some background on David's coming-of-age as a performer and the historical reasons behind this concert. In a shorter later message I’ll delve into his melodies and remarkable songs, and I'll try to entice you with his stories without giving them away. Be assured now, though, that we would not host someone for two days if they were not remarkably talented and exceedingly pleasurable to spend an evening with. I assure you that David is that.

This concert is co-hosted by the Houston Storytellers Guild, and half the seats are reserved for that esteemed group. I encourage you to make your reservation soon and to help publicize these family-friendly concerts to a broader audience than our usual folk crowd.

RESERVATION AND CONCERT INFORMATION:

General:

Songbird Sanctuary concerts are hosted by Sara Draper and Tom Yeager in our home in Montrose. Pre-donated early reservations are required except for the most unusual circumstances because they make concert night much easier on the hosts and the artists. We acknowledge all reservations promptly. Please alert us if you are not notified! If we run out of seats before we receive your reservation, or if you notify us by the Tuesday before the concert of your need to cancel your reservation, we will gladly return your donation. We suggest a donation of $17 through Tuesday, Dec. 11, and $20 thereafter. All donations go to our artist!

Use a credit card and PayPal on Line:

For best service with a credit card or bank account, reserve your seat immediately (subject to capacity) with a PayPal donation to music@songbirdsanctuary.org. This link, Click Here To Pay, will lead you through the steps. If you can’t use the link, go to WWW.PAYPAL.COM. If we don't already have all the information asked in the form below, include it in the notes section of the PayPal payment message or send it in a separate message. To reimburse us for the PayPal fee, please (you’ve been forgetting) add $1 for the first seat and 50 cents for each additional seat.

Or send a check:

Send a check payable to Sara Draper and mail it to our address below. If all the information is not on your check or we don't already have it, fill out and send the following form:

Songbird Sanctuary and Houston Storytellers Guild house concert with David Massengill on Dec. 14 or 15, 2007.

# of seats (for sure): ___________________________________________________________________

Payer’s name (imperative): _____________________________________________________________

Payer’s address (we need it): ___________________________________________________________

Phone (important): _______________________ Email: (must include) _______________________

Other attendees’ full names:(necessary): ________________________________________________

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Potluck Dinner:

To participate in the optional potluck dinner, please let us know, then come early with an appetite and a dish to share that came from your own kitchen or from somewhere else if it’s as good as homemade and worthy of the hand crafted music that will follow. We provide plates, chips and soft drinks, etc. You may bring your own more-interesting beverage (if you don't imbibe to where it shows), but no coolers, please. It's never a burden and it's a generous idea for you to leave any leftovers from the potluck for the hungry hosts and miscellaneous pickers who stop by for the songbird circle. None will be wasted.

Songbird Circle:

Pickers attending the concert are invited (and expected) to stay and share some songs. Hence, bring your guitar, banjo, harmonica, other instrument, song or poem. Gigging (and less fortunate) musicians are also welcome to join the songbird circle after the concert without reservation or donation.

Some Meetings of David Massengill

Dave Van Ronk:
In his early years in New York, David Massengill was a fan (as everyone was) of David Bromberg. Bromberg, a musician’s musician of many instruments and talents, had been Greenwich Village based since the mid '60s and was one of the old guard who had begun to notice David Massengill. About 1979, Bromberg delivered David to Tom Paxton’s dressing room at the Bottom Line to meet some of the other folk veterans, especially a dean, Dave Van Ronk. Van Ronk was one of the most beloved folk performers in New York in the 60s, and his stature was still rising. He was known in the folk world as the Mayor of MacDougal Street. The young David Massengill was embarrassed about being Bromberg’s show-and-tell monkey, but nevertheless, upon command, pulled out his mountain dulcimer and played “On the Road to Fairfax County”, David’s beautiful ballad about a young woman who fell in love with the highwayman who had just robbed her. Van Ronk, cigar in mouth, bottle nearby, stroked his beard and asked, “Do you drive?” When David assured him that he did, Van Ronk smiled and said, “We’re going to get along real good, kid.”

And they did. That night an apprenticeship bond and a mutual admiration society were formed. David became Dave Van Ronk’s tour chauffeur, roady, and opening act for some of Van Ronk’s romps across the country, and Dave became one of David’s most supportive fans. David credits Dave with showing him the ropes of the town and the chains of a tour. David gained wisdom, encouragement, and many stories from his friendship with Dave Van Ronk. Often, as David met new people in New York, they would tell him how Dave Van Ronk had already been bragging about him.

David’s latest CD, titled “Dave on Dave”, is a tribute to his friend and mentor. Following Van Ronk’s death in 2002, David was instrumental in the convincing the city to rename a Village Street Dave Van Ronk Street and to host a celebration for the departed raconteur troubadour provocateur which brought home Tom Paxton, Odetta, Pete Yarrow, Oscar Brand and many of the other scattered old guard of folk.

In the liner notes for “Dave on Dave”, David states: “Whoever it was that warned against meeting your heroes never met Dave Van Ronk. He was our Champion, our Brother in Scat, our boon companion, our gracious celebrity. He lived big. He thought big. He was big. ‘He came from the land of giants,’ says Bob Dylan in his Chronicle. His friends were legion and legend. If you don’t know Dave’s work or his story, I envy you the journey.”

Through song and story, next month, I know David will take us a few steps along that journey.

To dig into the history and state of American folk music with David Massengill as your departure, the first stop may be Dave Van Ronk, but from there two routes could be chosen. Through Van Ronk, the high road is the Dylan route. (Robert Zimmerman often employed Van Ronk’s comfortable couch, but Bob Dylan chose Van Ronk as his first New York guru.) The alternate and more democratic route takes you to the café and basket house singers who never made it to the commercial big time, but who are collectively just as important. (A basket house was a NY pub where they passed a basket for tips after each set.) On this route you'll see Jack Hardy, the Roches, Christine Lavine, Steve Forbert, Cliff Eberhardt, and Bill Morrissey, Cornelia St. Café, Gerde's Folk City, and the Speak Easy club. Other names, which might be more recognizable, include Michael Fracasso, Lucy Kaplansky, Suzanne Vega, and Shawn Colvin. These names and places were all part of the burgeoning folk scene of New York in the 70s and 80s and of which David Massengill has often been called a leading light (at his objection, actually). The breadth and diversity of this group is astounding, but there are common threads resulting from a near communistic and a fully bohemianistic spirit of the group. To some, an important instigator of this spirit was Jack Hardy.

Jack Hardy, etc.:
I wrote extensively about Jack Hardy when we hosted him for two-nights in April 2006. I won’t repeat it all, but keep in mind that David’s arrival in 1976 was just a year after Jack’s, and they, more than anyone else, have remained at the core of the essential Village folk crowd ever since.

Over a Kerrville Coho campfire last spring, Jack told me the story of his meeting David very shortly after David moved to New York to become a bohemian artist and be discovered. Upon meeting a fellow songwriter in Jack, David was excited to share his discovery of the best of what he had seen and heard so far in New York. David did not recall the performer’s name, but that didn't dampen his enthusiasm as he told to the very interested Jack of a singer whose deeply allegorical lyrics moved everyone into a rapt silence at Folk City a few days earlier. “Could he have been all that good?”, asked Jack. “He was evan better than that!”, exclaimed David. “Are you sure you don’t know him? I have to meet him.” After an additional volley or two of Jack’s prodding and David’s elevations, the mystery songwriter had been wafted by a favouring gale / as one sometimes is in trances / to a height that few can scale / save by long and weary dances (as Koko stated in the Mikado). Jack, adequately content by then, disclosed that he had been clean-shaven and short-haired for the first time in years only since that morning, and that it was indeed himself on the Folk City Stage that night.

To me that saga shows some of the innocence and a little naivety that you can detect in David’s personality and even more so in his personal stories. (Contrastingly, his songs speak more to the courage of the underdog.) David has had tentative moments in his life when self-doubting eroded confidence. Haven’t we all? If we could sing and tell stories about it like David, we could be - not discovered, but bohemians. David embraces the wisdom of not having to know everything, of not falling into the trap of the success-oriented existence, and of living the truth that more is really less. It helps to be willing to be fooled some times, and David, being willing, is richer for it. After an evening in the presence of such fine qualities, you may find that they take hold in you, too.

Jack soon arranged for David’s first performances at Folk City. The next year the two (with Rod MacDonald and others) formed the Songwriters Exchange, a weekly Petri dish for songwriting that Jack hosts yet today in his SOHO apartment and which David maintains an essential role. The all night Speak Easy club came under their operation next, as a place for the gang to perform and host touring folk songwriters. Then, in 1982, they started the famed “CooP - Fast Folk Musical Magazine” a record-of-the-month publication (with stories, lyrics, and news, too) that gave them and an amazing number of songwriters (some of which did become famous) their very first recordings. David appears on 20 of these vinyl and paper editions, including Volume 1, Number 1. I’m proud to say that I was a subscriber, but you can order CD reprints of those great disks through the Folkways label of the Smithsonian.

David and Jack became close friends and remain so today having now accumulated 31 years of influencing each other and serving as anchors to the Village folk scene. David summed it up: “Jack had a big part in recognizing what I was doing and encouraging me in any way he could. It took some years, but I hung in there. When you have a dream, you're oblivious to your living conditions. My mother would say, 'David, you don't have a telephone, you don't have a car, you don't have insurance, you don't have anything.’ But I thought I was on top of the world. I was living in this bohemian artist enclave that, for years and years, just kept getting better and better. There seemed to be a series of successes that were very encouraging, and you thought, 'well, maybe I'll be next.’ First there was Steve Forbert and the Roches, then there was Shawn Colvin, Suzanne Vega, and John Gorka.” [from "David Massengill /Tales Both True and Tall by Richard Cuccaro for Acoustic Live Newsletter, Sep. 8, 2006]

Edsel Martin:
David Massengill is considered a master of the mountain dulcimer. His dulcimers were hand carved by Edsel Martin whose instruments also hang in the Smithsonian. So Edsel played a role in David’s beautiful melodies and songs, but he’s better known through David’s most humorous stories and attitude.

Evidently, Edsel was a popular subject matter in Appalachia. David had been hearing tales about him for much of his life but had been reluctant to meet Edsel, thinking that his image of him might be diminished. His caution was unfounded, though, for fables barely cover the man. David now calls their meeting around 1990 a turning point in his life.

By the time that David was invited to perform at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro TN, in 1992, stories about Edsel (who admitted to being the loafingest man in western North Carolina), were becoming an important part of his repertoire and an additional draw for his audience. Until then, David had considered himself primarily a songwriter with an advanced story-like patter, but telling stories to 500 spellbound people at one time has its rewards, and tellin’ has been an important part of David’s life ever since. Now David is as popular on the storytelling festival circuit as he is on the discriminating intimate music circuit.

David and Edsel became good friends, something that seems to happen to David a lot, and David became a loyal disciple of Edsel’s well practiced ways of loafin’ and lyin’. David once suggested to Edsel that they combine the forces of Edsel’s loafin’ and David’s bohemianism to form the “Loafin Bohemians Club”. Of course, Edsel rejected to idea as being “too much trouble”, and David had to agree.

Myself, Tom Yeager:
One time when David called me, he first asked, as polite people tend to do, how I was. Responding courteously as on cue, I answered, “I’m quite well, thank you,” not knowing that I was flunking my first test. David said, “I thought you were going to say, ‘W e l l..., I was just about to b u t t o n my shirt’.” That was one of Edsel’s standard returns, and one that any disciple of lying and loafing should fall back on when a lazier occupation is not at the time enjoyed. David had already recognized his source of greatest appeal to me: his encouragement to do more loafin’ and his knowing that telling the truth sometimes is not as much fun as lying.

At the prompting of the discerning agent he shared with Michael Smith, David had been on our list of artists to consider hosting for many years, but I never could find the chance to audition him. I was out bird watching during David’s 1989 Kerrville New Folk win, and I missed his opening night performance at the 2002 festival, the year he, himself, judged New Folk and gave us Aengus Finnan, Anny Gallup, and Zoë Lewis as winners. (Now that’s a judge who has read the folk constitution.)

David finally made another tour south in May of this year and I met him at Ken Gaines’ Thursday night song circle. I saw Carolyn Davis, one of our area’s better listeners, buying every CD that David had to offer because she couldn’t remember which ones she had from those earlier Kerrville shows. Carolyn immediately started working on me to invite David for a concert, not knowing that her job was too easy.

When I talked with David that night, I found my words were slower and some of my enunciation was rounded off. David’s gentle southern drawl has the peculiar effect on some people that makes us unconsciously mimic him. I also found myself inching closer and closer to him, which is something that this month’s performer, Brooks Williams, warned us about. Brooks said that when the Songbird crowd returns for David Massengill, that we’d all be leaning closer and closer in our seats throughout the show. I know he was right; I have experienced it.

I was enthralled enough in the short song circle to drive that weekend to David’s full concert at the Austin Acoustic Series hosted by my friend, Sally Cooper. In Austin, David’s show elicited feelings of triumph, embarrassment, joy, sadness, and childhood. At times, he seemed like an uncle on a holiday family gathering who sang and told stories until all the cousins were asleep by the fire. Later, in song and story, David served as a historian of important political events and their meanings. He was a guide to the wonders of nature, and taught respect for it. He employed traditional tones and themes, at times, but slaughtered sacred cows at others. He was whimsically genuine, so real, and without pretension.

A full concert with David Massengill, I found, covers a great amount of emotional landscape. I knew then that his shows here would be among the most fun we have ever hosted. Songbird Sanctuary and The Houston Storytellers Guild is very proud to present David in his first full concerts in our area. I do hope you will join us for one of these rewarding evenings.

Bring food! Bring instruments! Bring ears!

Songbird Sanctuary

"Preserving the Songwriters' Art"

117 Stratford St. Houston, Texas 77006

(at N.E. corner of Helena, in Montrose)

713-524-6545 (before 11PM)

music@songbirdsanctuary.org