This month’s coffee house offers Festival favorites Fitzgerald and Beach in the more intimate setting of the Wesley College Chapel. Opening the evening will be Big Hats and No Cattle, from the Chestertown area. It’ll be only the second event in our new venue, and the first with scheduled performers. The “shakedown cruise” was July’s open mic, which incidentally resulted in two of the performers being offered slots in the October and November coffee house schedule. More about those folks in the months to come.

DC Fitzgerald and Bob Beach have been playing acoustic blues together for nearly 35 years, and it shows in everything they do. DC plays guitar and sings while Bob plays harmonica and flute and adds vocals as well. They employ gospel, R & B, rock & roll, country and of course the blues in both original material and unique arrangements. Bob and DC truly appreciate and complement each other's musical talents.

They have just finished recording a new project released on BoneDog Records called “Pilot Me”. The new disc contains originals, old gospel tunes, and a few re-worked blues classics, like Denise LaSalle’s “Hey Mister”. The duo also released "Joyful Noise", a collection of spiritual and gospel tunes both original and from other sources, at the Philadelphia Folk Festival in August of 2004. Previous recorded works include “Muddy Water Into Wine” (2002) and "Blues, New and Used"(1997).

Recent performances have included Northeast Folk Alliance Showcases, Calliope Folk Series, Three Rivers Arts Festival, the 2004 Philadelphia Folk Festival, Spring Fever Folk Festival, Forksville Folk Festival, Hickory Fest, Lansdowne Folk Club, the Point, Club Café, World Café Live and many house concerts and other coffeehouses.
DC Fitzgerald is a veteran of blues and folk venues and has performed everywhere from Rome to Kerrville, Texas. In 1995 he performed in the Pittsburgh City Theater's production of “Woody Guthrie, An American Song”. The production was taken on the road for a tour of the South and Mid-West. DC recently produced a recording for Washington state vocalist Libby Goines and has been involved in both performance and production duties for a number of other recording projects. His sideman credits include accompanying Tom Paxton. DC lives in Pittsburgh, PA where he teaches guitar, plays regularly, and produces other artists.

Bob Beach's flute, harmonica, and vocal talents have been part of the classic rock band American Music and the Bob Beach Blues Band since the early 1980s. He also played harmonica on the Corbin Hanner Band hit "Oklahoma Crude," from their second album. Bob now lives near Philadelphia, PA. He produced the Philadelphia Jug Band’s first CD and has been playing with them regularly. Bob performs in the Philadelphia area on a regular basis with a number of different bands and has been a session player for many local artists. In addition to all of this, he has been the musical director for the 1st Light Team Alternative Worship band of Lansdowne Presbyterian Church. This band has brought a unique sound to Worship services around the Philadelphia area.

Starting the evening will be Big Hats and No Cattle. Several members of this autonomous collective showed up at our February open mic, and like many others, managed to get the attention of the audience good enough to win an invitation to return. Clark Bjorke may be familiar to some of our members with seniority. He has been an MC at the Delmarva Folk Festival and for a long time had a local folk music show on WKHS in Worton, MD. Clark plays sings and plays guitar, and is the group’s leader, in the sense that he’s the one who gets gigs for the band. Others in the group (comments are their’s) include Johnson Fortenbaugh, the yodeling yacht broker, Wendy Morrison, kazoo virtuoso, and Tom Anthony (What is a graduate of Berkelee doing with this crowd?).

Given the good-time tongue-in-cheek nature of their web site, you might expect a rather loose performance style, and that’s exactly what you get. But don’t mistake looseness for lack of talent. These four are quite gifted when it comes to playing and singing, and like so many of us, they do this folk music thing because it’s fun. Their self-description on myspace says so much: “We first got together to do a one time show at a coffeehouse when the scheduled act couldn't make it. Rather like Arlo, we were allowed to play until they got somebody good. More than ten years later we are still together and still waiting for somebody good to come and take the stage away from us.

It all starts at 7:30 pm, September 16, in The Wesley College Chapel, corner of Division and North Bradford streets in Dover. Admission will be $5 for members and $7 for non-members. Kids 12 and under get in free. A great evening of music, hot & cold drinks, and sweet treats await. Don’t let it happen without you. There’s nothing else like it in Dover.