COYLE — Concerts in the Woods will present “A Night of Blues Guitar with John Long and John ‘Greyhound’ Maxwell” at 7:30 p.m. Saturday.
The concert will be at the Laurel B. Johnson Community Center, 923 Hazel Point Road, at the end of the Toandos Peninsula. Admission will be by donation.
Complimentary cookies and coffee will be served at intermission.
“We are privileged to have two experienced blues guitar players here in Coyle at the same time — John Maxwell who lives locally and John Long who is visiting from Chicago,” said series organizer Norm Johnson.
“There is something ethereal about their smooth precision on bluesy slide guitar. It makes magic in the air and the intimate listening space at our Community Center is the perfect place to hear it.”
Maxwell was born and raised in Chicago. He followed in the footsteps of earlier blues performers like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, mastering acoustic fingerstyle, bottleneck slide guitar and singing. He recently relocated to Port Townsend from San Rafael, Calif.
His debut solo CD, “Blues For Evangeline” placed in the Final 5 in the Best Self Produced CD category at the 2016 Memphis International Blues Challenge.
Maxwell has opened for such notables as Susan Tedeschi, Roy Rogers, Maria Muldaur, Ruthie Foster, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Jon Cleary, and David Lindley.
He teaches slide guitar at the Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival.
Long was born in St. Louis, Mo., in 1950 and by the end of the decade, he was absorbing the sounds of Jimmy Reed, Buster Brown, Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Junior Parker and all the rest of the R&B and jump blues of the day and working on recreating those sounds with his own guitar.
On “Lost & Found,” his debut album on Delta Groove Records (an earlier demo-styled cassette, “Long on Blues,” was released independently in 1999), Long re-created the sound of a pre-war country blues player.
“What sets Long aside from simply creating an elaborate facsimile of the style, however, is that the songs he does are not ancient Delta pieces, but originals written by himself and his brother Claude Long, each one done in the template of an old blues 78 from the 1920s or 1930s,” according to his biography.
For more about Maxwell, see www.slowlyiturnmusic.com. For more about Long, see www.johnlongblues.com.
For more about the Concert in the Woods series, see www.coyleconcerts.com.
