EARS, EYES & SOUL
Dwayne Brooke: From Django to Taj to Zep BY TODD COYLE Mixing old, new and original to create one of West Virginia’s finest musicians. Dwayne Brooke is an example of what passion, intelligence and focus can produce. FLUENT I was impressed with you when you first came
onto the music scene. You seemed well schooled in the history of blues, folk and rock. Where did that come from? DWAYNE BROOKE I remember being a little tiny guy and waking up before everyone and playing my dad’s Johnny Cash record. “Ring of Fire” was my first favorite jam. Maybe the alchemy of the dark voice with the trumpets. My grandma, who watched me while my parents worked, was a big country fan as well... Loretta Lynn, Kitty Wells, George Jones, Hank Williams. She played all that old stuff on a huge console record player that was basically a big piece of furniture. Don’t touch! Then my uncle Dale moved in with us for awhile, and he was a guitar player and lover of old blues, bluegrass and southern rock. He had a bunch of old albums and guitars that I was also told never to touch, so of course, I did, which I think may have been the point. He gave me my first electric guitar, and later an acoustic. He had a campfire almost every night and would sing all kinds of weird old songs and play slick country guitar licks while I strummed along. He taught me all kinds of cool stuff.... [I’m] still working on some of that. FLUENT Your love of Django Reinhart is well known.
What brought you to him? How has he influenced you? Any others we should know about? BROOKE The first Django I heard was on some old tape I was traded. I was mesmerized. But it was completely otherwordly to me and the thought that I could play it never really crossed my mind. Then one day I was improvising and I accidentally played some G Major Six 6 | fluent
stuff and I was like, ‘holy shit that’s a Django tune.’ So I started trying to figure it out. Then I saw Larry Keel play some Django, and jammed along on some with Danny Knicely and that was that. I detoured down the gypsy jazz rabbit hole for quite awhile there afterward. Django’s music enlightened me so much that I think its pretty much in everything I do to some degree. FLUENT The Woodshedders? What’s the history?
What’s next? BROOKE The Woodshedders sprouted from a couple private gypsy jazz jam sessions. It was me and Stu Orser on guitar, Ryan Mayo on upright bass and Chance McCoy on mandolin. The name came from the old Charlie Parker story about jazz cats having to literally go out to the woodshed to rehearse so they didn’t drive their families crazy rehearsing incessant scales and arpeggios. The slang came to mean that he who was “woodshedding” was working hard to become more proficient on their instrument... which we definitely had to do. Initially, The Woodshedders played only instrumental Django tunes. I had been writing songs all along, and eventually the Django influence snuck in there, too. Fiddlin’ Dave (Van Deventer) joined us once on stage and the band was complete... for a minute. We moved the weekly gypsy jazz jam session to The Hilltop House in Harpers Ferry for quite a few months. From there we eventually moved to The Cliffside Inn for another several months. Then Fiddlin’ Dave and I partnered up with Frazer Watkins and rebooted the old 1960’s Berryville bluegrass festival as “Watermelon Park Fest” in Berryville, VA. I’ve since moved on from fes-