Photos

Solo and with Tim O'Brien

JD meets Tim — Flashback to the '70s:

Tim claims that he used to pop in occasionally at a music store where I used to work in Wheeling back in 1970.That may be, but—my frame of mind at that time was such that I would not have remembered had George Washington risen from the dead and come in that store for a capo or a set of guitar strings.

So…ooo—shoot ahead five years. After hearing from virtually all the “folk” music people about “Red-head Tim” O’brien, I met him in earnest at a “bluegrass” party some friends were having on the banks of the Big Wheeling Creek. It was the makings of an excellent night. Tim joined in with a bunch of us who were playing, and, with his guitar, sang and played “Peach-picking Time In Georgia”—and I thought to myself, “well, ain’t that sump’m!”

We all played on for an hour or so, then took a little break for grease and liquid—and to socialize a bit. I remember asking Tim what he was planning to do with himself at that point—mind, I was scheming furiously to invent some way of including him in the band (The Hutchison Brothers Band) that I was working with my brother just then. Tim responded that he didn’t exactly have any major plan worked out, and I remember saying to him: “Well, don’t even think about anything else—‘cause you’re gone now”.

That was in the fall of 1975. Tim has proved to be, since then, the most elegant and innovative player known to me by name or reputation. Eclectic and nonpareil. I am so very proud of him as any good brother is proud of another.

Miscellaneous pictures, mostly from the Athens area