Music Makers and Soul Shakers with Steve Dawson

Songwriter, blues guitarist and singer Chris Smither joins me on the show today. I had the pleasure of meeting Chris and playing with him this past summer at a festival, and he really was a force of nature. He had an incredible groove between his guitar lines and his powerful foot, all brought together with a voice that has developed so much character over the years it just oozes out of him. Chris...

Legendary drummer Willie Cantu is on the show today, the sole surviving member of the ultimate lineup of one of the greatest ensembles of all time - Buck Owens’ Buckaroos. I’ve talked about the Buckaroos on this show a number of times - they keep coming up in discussions with various folks, and I’ll say it again that I think that mid to late 60’s lineup is as electrifying a band as any band of tha...

Guitarist and session ace Richard Bennett joins me on the show this week. Originally from Phoenix, Richard spent the first big chunk of his career in the 70’s LA studio scene, before moving to Nashville in the 80’s where he’s been a mainstay in studios ever since. Richard is known as one of the ultimate sidemen and spent 17 years in Neil Diamond’s band, playing on all of his records and tours from...

Jen Gunderman is one of the great keyboard players currently working out of Nashville. She is always busy in recording studios and venues around town with all kinds of bands, but is also on the road as a member of Sheryl Crow’s band, a gig she’s held for over 10 years now. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Jen now and then over the past number of years, always in the studio, and she always sho...

Singer, guitarist, jug-band pioneer and songster Jim Kweskin joins me on the show today. I can’t tell you how many times I heard Jim’s name before I ever heard his music. To the generation before me, he was a total legend, and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band was very influential to many musicians who grew up in the 60’s and 70’s. Jim came up in the Boston/Cambridge area and The Jug Band was legendary aro...

Banjo legend Tony Trischka joins me on the show this week. I first saw Tony playing with his band Psychograss back in the 90’s at a bluegrass festival in Vancouver, and have been following Tony’s music ever since. Tony is from Syracuse, and has spent most of his career in the New York area. His early bands included The Down City Ramblers, Country Cooking and Breakfast Special. He also started maki...

Pedal steel guitarist Rich Hinman joins me on the show today. Rich is a really creative player who has definitely spent a great deal of time with the classic steel guitar cannon, but has very much branched out and developed his own style and voice on the instrument. He has a great flair for improvisation, and his tone and touch are really of the highest calibre. Rich is currently a teacher at Berk...

On today’s show is Missy Raines, one of the great bluegrass bassists out there, not to mention a fabulous singer and songwriter. Bluegrass bass playing is a funny thing - on the surface it seems simple. But there’s a whole other level to it, and when you hear someone like Junior Huskey do it, or Mike Bub, or Dennis Crouch, or Missy Raines, they all play at that level. There’s a way the really good...

On today’s show is Garrett Dutton, better known to you and me as G. Love and his band G. Love and Special Sauce. G. Love appeared on my radar in the early 90’s when I was just getting into playing in bands. Originally from Philadelphia, but breaking out of the Boston music scene, Special Sauce’s debut album was pretty massive in my world. It mixed blues, soul, rap and hip hop in an organic way tha...

The incredible guitarist Duke Levine joins me on the show today. Back in the 90’s and early 2000’s when I was just getting started, Duke was putting out all these really amazing twangy instrumental guitar records. He actually started out as almost a fusion guy on his first album, but pretty quickly veered off into this highly original guitar style that has elements of blues, jazz, country, bebop a...

Dobro master Rob Ickes joins me on the show this week. Rob was kind enough to drop in to the Henhouse to hang for a while, talk and even play a little bit. Rob is one of those players that is so good on one particular instrument that he’s managed to carve out a really impressive career being dedicated to just one thing. And that one thing is the dobro, which is kind of a specific instrument - It’s...

Margaret Glaspy joins me on the show this week. Her album from last year “Echo The DIamond” was one of my favorite records of the year. Margaret started out as a fiddle player, and played pretty seriously around California as a youngster before dedicating herself to the guitar and eventually going to Berklee for a short time to study. She played around Boston and then moved to New York where she f...

My guest this week is the incredible Mississippi songwriter, guitarist and drummer Cedric Burnside. Cedric comes from a long family line of Hill Country blues musicians. His dad is the drummer Calvin Jackson and he is the grandson of the legendary R.L. Burnside, one of the great traditional Mississippi blues artists of all time. Cedric is an exceptional guitarist and songwriter who seems to have f...

JJ Grey joins me this week to get Season 8 rolling in style! JJ is an incredible singer, songwriter, guitar player and frontman for his band JJ Grey and Mofro, based in the Jacksonville, Florida area. He’s been making soulful, brash, and deeply authentic soul and rock n roll records since the release of “Blackwater” in 2001. JJ has a brand new album out now called “Olustee”, which is a remarkable...

This episode is just to check in and let listeners know the schedule for the upcoming season, which will begin droping new episodes one week from today. Be sure to subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and thanks for tuning in! Visit us and check out all the past episodes at: https://www.makersandshakerspodcast.com You can join our Patreon here to get all episodes ad-fr...

I’m preparing to release Season 8 starting very soon, but in the meantime, the great Duane Eddy passed away earlier this week and I have decided to re-release our conversation from 2016. That was a 2-part episiode, but I’ve combined them here into one so you can spend a couple hours with Duane and I chewin’ the fat. RIP Duane Eddy!! You can join our Patreon here to get all episodes ad-free, as wel...

Tommy Emmanuel, the stellar Australian fingerstyle guitarist joins me on the show this week for the last episode of Season 7! I first saw Tommy play back in the early 90’s when he was relatively unknown and was blown away by his adventurous technique, style, and obvious dedication to his craft. Since then, Tommy has gone on to be one of the most well-known acoustic guitarists of our time and to cr...

Mandolinist John Reischman joins me on the show this week. I’ve actually known John for many years, as he moved to Vancouver in the 90’s and when I was starting to do more acoustic music, our paths would cross at festivals and I’d also bring him in for various projects and sessions. John is an absolute master of his instrument with a unique touch and tone that is truly remarkable. He grew up in Ca...

Larry Klein has had his mitts on so many amazing records over the past 40 years, but is still a relatively quiet, behind-the-scenes kind of musician. He is a four time grammy winner as a producer, and has made records for artists like Joni Mitchell, Herbie Hancock, Holly Cole, Madeleine Peyroux and Tracy Chapman. I think the first time I ever saw his name was on a cassette I had of Shawn Colvin ca...

John Paul White is an amzing performer, singer, songwriter and studio nerd who lives in Florence, Alabama and is known by many for all his amazing work with his Grammy-winning band The Civil Wars. John Paul has also worked as a professional songwriter, and runs a studio and a label called Single Lock Records. This all goes down in Florence, which is part of the 3 cities known as The Shoals, or as...

Alison Brown is a Grammy Winning banjo player, composer and producer who has made a bunch of great albums under her own name but also as a sideperson and collaborator with artists like Alison Krauss, Michelle Shocked, and Stuart Duncan. She started playing as a youngster, first on dobro and then switched over to banjo. She spent her early years cutting her teeth at bluegrass events and venues arou...

Julian Lage is truly a guitarist like no other. He’s insanely creative, prolific, has unbelievable technical facility, but also plays with incredible taste, tone and restraint. He grew up around the bay area of California and was a child prodigy who started getting noticed when he was just a little tyke. There’s even a movie about him from that time called “Jules At Eight” (when he was eight!), an...

Afie Jurvanen, better known as Bahamas, joins me on the show today. Afie has made 6 records as Bahamas, and the newest one, “Bootcut”, just came out a few weeks ago. It’s a great record with inventive melodies, killer guitar playing and singing, and I guess will be sort of pinned as his “country” record, although I don’t think it’s that. But he did make it in Nashville, and used a bunch of seasone...

Duane Betts joins me on the show today. Duane is the son of the innovative guitarist and songwriter from the Allman Brothers Band, Dickey Betts, and while he’s certainly a chip off the ol’ block, Duane has his own thing going on and has finally just released his debut solo album “Wild & Precious Life”. It’s an inspired and engaging record - sort of a modern take on southern rock that’s unique...

Steel guitarist and dobro player Al Perkins is on the show today. Al is a true legend of the steel guitar, having played on hundreds of albums, including classics by Manassas, Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris, The Rolling Stones, as well as plenty of modern country hits through recent years. Al grew up playing steel guitar as a little tyke in country bands on radio and TV around his home state of Texa...