The John Miller Quartet +3 — live event
I grew up in a musical family, in the middle of five kids. My mother is a classical pianist and organist and piano and music teacher, and my dad was very musical, a good singer and played harmonica. We kids all learned musical instruments, too. By 1963, my older sister, MaryAnn, and brother, Alan, were both playing guitar and we were listening to a lot of Folk Music, starting to get into Country Blues, Old-Time and Bluegrass. I attended the Saturday night concert at the 1963 Philadelphia Folk Festival when I was 12, and in one evening saw Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys, Hobart Smith, Elizabeth Cotten, Mike Seeger, Dave Van Ronk, and most important for me, Mississippi John Hurt. John Hurt's music made a big impression on me, but no bigger an impression than his personality did. He was so comfortable with who he was, and so engaging. I sent away for his first post-rediscovery album on Piedmont and listened to it all the time. One morning, I woke up early, took my brother's guitar out into the living room and figured out John Hurt's Casey Jones from the record. It was the first thing I ever played on the guitar. For the next three years, I didn't have a guitar of my own, but would play on anyone's guitar whenever I had the opportunity. I was very fortunate where and when I grew up, in southeastern Pennsylvania in the '60s and with the support I got from my parents for my interest in music. There was a great Country Music park, Sunset Park, where we would go in the summer and where I got to see all the great Bluegrass bands of the period--Bill Monroe, Jimmy Martin, Jim and Jesse, Flatt and Scruggs, Reno & Smiley and others. In addition, the Philadelphia area had great coffeehouses, the Second Fret in Philadelphia and the Main Point in Bryn Mawr, as well as the Philadelphia Folk Festival and the Swarthmore College Folk Festival. As a result of the very active scene and my older siblings' and parents' willingness to get me to these events, which they often attended too, by the time I graduated from high school I had seen a kind of Who's Who of Old-Time and Country Blues performers, including the New Lost City Ramblers, Maybelle Carter, the McGee Brothers and Arthur Smith, Son House, Skip James, Rev. Gary Davis, Shirley Griffith, Connie Williams, Bukka White and many more. I was additionally fortunate in having an older brother who was a very good guitar player that I admired very much (and still do), and who set a good example in terms of working on music, and in growing up near the Barenberg family, in which three of the kids, Russ, David, and Lynn, studied guitar with my sister and then my brother. Russ Barenberg, who of course has become a tremendous flat-picking guitarist, and he and his brother David and I kind of grew up in our teen years playing music together and attending these music events.
Starts: 2024-04-07T19:30:44Z
Ends: 2024-04-07T21:30:44Z
Where: 44 East 32nd Street, New York, New York 10016, United States
Price: $27.83