York musician Harvey Reid knows the value of the troubadour. He wrote the book on it.

Harvey Reid performs guitar on a stage in a barn at his York dwelling. He and his spouse created the stage house to do livestream live shows through the pandemic. Reid has written a 500-plus web page tome titled “The Troubadour Chronicles” concerning the artwork and historical past of the troubadour custom. Gregory Rec/Employees Photographer

Harvey Reid self-published an enormous e book concerning the trials, tribulations and triumphs of the lonely troubadour as a result of somebody needed to do it.

“The story must be informed, and I simply saved realizing I used to be the man to do it,” stated the singer and guitarist from York, who has made his residing as a solo performer all his grownup life. “My credentials are fairly rattling good. My physique of labor on this subject is spectacular.”

Reid, who turns 68 within the spring, is likely to be responsible of being boastful, however he’s not mendacity. His credentials are spectacular. Till the pandemic shut him down, he spent yearly of his life since his early 20s on the highway taking part in his guitar and singing. He’s carried out 1000’s of live shows and recorded lots of of songs, in espresso homes, church buildings, golf equipment and on pageant phases. He began his personal file label in 1982, has launched dozens of CDs, and has been acknowledged as each an innovator and traditionalist on the six- and 12-string guitars, amongst different devices. For 40 years, he’s carried the popularity as one of many most interesting fingerstyle guitarists, having gained the Nationwide Fingerpicking Guitar Competitors as a younger man. Acoustic Guitar journal named his CD “Metal Drivin’ Man” a prime 10 important people file.

Thus, he felt it was inside his proverbial wheelhouse to take a swing on the huge process of telling the historical past of the often-disrespected however vibrant custom of the self-accompanied solo performer, generally often known as a singer-songwriter, though being a songwriter shouldn’t be required of being a troubadour. The result’s “The Troubadour Chronicles: A Historical past, A Celebration and A Manifesto,” which checks in at 515 pages and tells the historical past of the troubadour custom going again to historical China and Arabia, up by means of the ages of minstrels and kings who ordered their deaths for sedition, and the “relentless digital forces” of contemporary instances which have worn out a lot of Reid’s revenue.

And but, Reid is hopeful. A fundamental premise of his e book is that solo performers have an more and more necessary function in our society, as robots and algorithms take over bigger segments of life and work. He believes his artwork type is exhibiting extra energy and promise than it has in his lifetime and vastly greater than within the final 500 or so years, as a result of as know-how dehumanizes society, “wildly human actions like troubadouring” will change into extra beneficial. “We have been there initially and we might be there on the finish,” he stated. “We win by doing the issues computer systems can’t, like creating and performing, and being capricious and unpredictable.”

Reid performed one gig within the final 12 months, on March 10 proper earlier than the shutdown, together with his spouse, Joyce Andersen, on the South Berwick Public Library. He not too long ago booked his first reside gig for 2021, a limited-audience, socially-distanced present on July 11 at Hamilton Home, additionally in South Berwick. Regardless of the pause in what had been a busy touring life, he had not often been extra productive than final 12 months, the publication of a totally self-produced 515-page e book however. In April, he and Andersen started livestreaming Friday evening live shows from their barn in York, which they outfitted as a do-it-yourself sound studio and stage. They’ve livestreamed greater than 300 songs over 25 live shows for the reason that pandemic.

After a break for the vacations, the livestream live shows resume Feb. 11.

From Reid’s perspective, he and Andersen – and their friends around the globe – are exploring a brand new artwork type in livestreaming that inherently advantages the solo acoustic performer. It’s easy DIY know-how handy to dwelling that’s readily accessible to individuals in every single place. He compares livestreaming to the 78-rpm data of the early twentieth century. Each represented new know-how that expanded alternatives for troubadours.

“I’m thrilled with the success of our livestreaming effort. Our numbers aren’t within the thousands and thousands. They aren’t what skate boarders and avid gamers get,” he stated. “However we’re reaching individuals all around the nation and different international locations, and individuals who have been loyal followers for many years are saying the nicest issues. Joyce and I are spending extra time engaged on music as by no means earlier than. We’ve a cause to create and dirt off devices we haven’t taken out of the home for years,” he stated.

They’re having enjoyable. Inventive juices are flowing. “I haven’t written so many songs in I can’t keep in mind,” Reid stated.

When touring resumes, livestreaming might be a part of his future, no matter that future seems like. He cherished being dwelling in 2020 together with his spouse and children, ages 12 and 15, and by no means as soon as wished to be ready for a flight at an airport gate. “I don’t have the time or power to journey throughout the nation like I’ve been doing all of my life. I don’t like relaxation areas, motels and airports. I don’t even want a guitar case anymore,” he stated.

However he gained’t, and might’t, cease troubadouring. “I’m probably not employable. I’ve received a 45-, 50-year hole in my resume, and I can’t reside off retirement. I can’t retire. I suppose I’ll sing proper into the grave.”

A good friend and fellow troubadour, the flatpick grasp Dan Crary of California has recognized Reid for 30-plus years, and has all the time appreciated his good friend’s dedication to taking part in nicely on many alternative sorts of devices, in addition to his curiosity within the historical past and integrity of the minstrel custom. “The explanation for his e book is that he’s pondering significantly about what he does. He’s philosophical about it, and as a philosophy and theological seminary scholar, I admire individuals who get philosophical about what they’re doing. They consider the importance and significance of it, and it influences what they do and the way they do it,” Crary stated.

“It is a man who’s critical about what he’s doing and desires others to be critical about it, and he needs respect and regard for people who find themselves significantly making an attempt to carry out this sort of inventive expression.”

Bruce Pratt of Swanville, one other longtime good friend, music promoter and a former touring companion of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, known as Reid “probably the most unbiased of the profitable musicians I do know. He has all the time performed it his approach somewhat than capitulate,” stated Pratt, who teaches English and artistic writing on the College of Maine. “I’ve all the time admired his enterprise expertise, as a result of he by no means turned a businessman. He simply turned sensible about the best way to hold his profession going.”

Reid started enthusiastic about the e book in 2016 when Bob Dylan gained the Nobel Prize in literature. After centuries of exile from tradition’s higher echelons, the troubadour custom appeared to be coming into a brand new period of respect. That concept gestated, and he piled up his analysis over time, all the time with the thought of a tomb-like e book as an final result. He learn 400 books and listened to greater than 1,000 songs. “I combed your entire recorded output of lots of and lots of of artists, each obscure and common, to search out the sorts of songs and concepts I used to be in search of, since I had a sense nobody else had ever tried to take a look at the panorama of American music by means of the lens I used to be utilizing,” he stated.

As a result of he printed “The Troubadour Chronicles” himself, Reid determined it was OK to indulge, and 2020 created each the chance and incentive to complete the e book. Out there by means of Amazon and Reid’s website, woodpecker.com, the e book is an usually humorous and all the time fascinating tackle the peripatetic lifetime of a lonely musician. It’s not a memoir, although Reid weaves his story all through. It’s a full of life historical past and a treatise, and, as its title guarantees, a manifesto about “an everlasting however invisible music.” The e book’s fundamental premise is individuals have been singing songs whereas accompanying themselves on an instrument since they lived in caves, however the solo troubadour artwork type not often penetrates popular culture in important methods – till perhaps currently. There are untold examples of solo artists with large hits and lengthy careers as soloists, however they not often carry out solo in lasting or important methods. As quickly as a performer turns into adept and common as a soloist, they’re given a band and lose the essence of what made them common within the first place, Reid writes.

He factors to examples from Elvis Presley to Dylan to Shawn Colvin to Ed Sheeran and even 12-year-old Grace VanderWaal, who gained “America’s Acquired Expertise” in 2016 for singing and taking part in the ukulele and rapidly stopped producing solo songs “although it was abundantly clear that her unadorned private troubadour power was the essence of her attraction,” he writes.

The unmet potential of Elvis as a troubadour particularly rankles him. “Elvis performed a strong rhythm guitar, and did so on most of his recordings till about 1958, although taking part in acoustic guitar in a band with poor amplification, he broke plenty of strings on stage, and sometimes put the guitar down or didn’t play,” Reid writes. In 1968, when Elvis staged a comeback together with his band within the studio and small viewers, “he’s no slouch on guitar, and performs like a freight practice, whereas additionally being impossibly good-looking and funky. Like so many who adopted him, he was a troubadour earlier than he turned a rock star.”

Reid obsessed over his premise. He studied 80 years of Billboard charts, all of the MTV “Unplugged” set lists, and set lists and rosters of greater than 600 “Austin Metropolis Limits” TV broadcasts. He studied all of the set lists of Woodstock, which he known as “a cultural excessive water mark” for solo performers with eight troubadours out of 32 acts, although solely three completely solo units, by John Sebastian, Melanie and Nation Joe. In keeping with his analysis, Billy Joel is the one musician who has carried out a solo, self-accompanied model of the nationwide anthem at a Tremendous Bowl, in 2007. By his historic reckoning, there hasn’t been what he calls a significant hit tune with only one individual taking part in and singing since “T For Texas” by Jimmie Rodgers in 1928.

Troubadours have usually been handled as outlaws, in a strict sense when English kings executed minstrels, and in a figurative sense, when the fathers of the women Reid dated in highschool stared daggers at him when he confirmed up at their doorways together with his guitar and lengthy hair. With Dylan’s Nobel prize as one piece of proof, Reid thinks that is likely to be altering, and he sees each the pandemic and people relentless digital forces – regardless of one decimating his revenue from an absence of touring and the opposite from misplaced CD gross sales – as causes for hope. Each have left individuals craving the direct musical connections that solely solo performers can present – and all the time have, in individual or by means of livestreaming, regardless of the circumstance.

He famous the presence of Bruce Springsteen and John Legend – “two of the most-troubadour-like pop stars at present” – in President Joe Biden’s inauguration as different hopeful indicators. It’s a superb time for troubadours, he stated.

Have guitar, will journey.

“Musicians and troubadours aren’t actually first responders. They by no means ship for us, aside from weddings,” Reid stated. “However we’ve to know what to do once we are known as. When the ship is sinking, you don’t want a troubadour. However when you have got been in a lifeboat a couple of days, music is basically beneficial.”

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