The Wandering I

Damn!  Did we have a great night last night!

Five or six years ago when I was traveling through the southeast on a shoot for one of my clients, I ended the trip staying a few days with a close friend of mine from my high school days who now lives in Beaufort, SC.  The first night I stayed, he and his wife took me to one of the “Plantations” [ very high end gated communities ] that was just completed where we had a very nice dinner in the Clubhouse and then after dinner, there was a folksinger/songwriter [ Jack Williams ] who was from the area who did a performance for a group of about 30-40 of us in the Library or the Gallery of the Clubhouse.  He had a wonderfully expressive face with very soft, gentle eyes, so after he finished his performance I chatted with him and told him I’d really like to photograph him.  I have been know to engage my mouth before engaging my brain, and I believe that was just such an occasion.  He just sort of nodded and said something like “Well, that’s interesting …”  and I could see in his eyes that he was having a serious internal debate about my sanity and whether or not I might be dangerous.  I really enjoyed the evening and ended up buying two of his CD’s.

Because I put my name on his mailing list when I bought the CD’s, I heard from him whenever he came up to the New Jersey area usually far to the north of where we live.  He must spend ten months of every year on the road [literally!] driving from one performance to another with his wife in a commercial van [I found out later].  This past spring he was doing a “House Concert” in a private home in Montclair, NJ so Audrey and I attended and it was really quite a nice afternoon.  We spent some time talking to him after the concert because we had never heard of or been to a “House Concert” before.  Apparently they are fairly common in the folk singing community.  Then, on the drive home later that day, it occured to me pretty much out of the blue [ it was one of those moments when the exclaimation piont appeared in the speech bubble over my head ] that maybe we should consider having him come to our barn to do a performance for a group of our friends.

Well, many emails back and forth between us and Jack, and he and his wife drove up our driveway around 4 pm yesterday.  They had a real barn concert Friday night outside of Albany, NY and then tonight [ Sunday ] they were having a house concert in Plymouth, MA so they figured they could squeeze us in between those two [ hey, we're only about 300 miles out of the way! ].  Talk about a small intimate concert!  It was wonderful and Jack was at peek performance!  His playing was impeccable, his songs were filled with his own honest emotions that, at many times, brought several of us [that I know of] to lumpy throats or moist eyes, his stories between the songs were wonderful and really brought us into his life experiences with the telling and his “messages” were absolutely in synch with our ideas about living life well!  It was just a night of magic!

Jack and Judy, THANK YOU SO MUCH for coming into our lives and sharing yourselves with us and our friends!

Nat

Somewhere in rural New Jersey