Music Makers and Soul Shakers with Steve Dawson Steve Dawson

Margaret Glaspy joins me on the show this week. Her album from last year “Echo The DIamond” was one of my favorite records of the year. Margaret started out as a fiddle player, and played pretty seriously around California as a youngster before dedicating herself to the guitar and eventually going to Berklee for a short time to study. She played around Boston and then moved to New York where she found her way into the creative music scene in Brooklyn in the mid 2000’s. She started making EP’s and then full-legth albums in around 2016. I first heard her “Emotions and Math” LP and was really intrigued by her approach to writing, and especially how she seemed to build intricate, angular guitar parts that would weave through her songs. “Devotion” came next in 2020, and then “Echo The Diamond” in 2023. On “Echo”, her songwriting is incredible, her guitar playing is intense and jagged, the band is stellar (she’s working with Chris Morrissey who has played with Andrew Bird and Ben Kweller, and David King, the drummer for The Bad Plus). It's a co-production with her husband, Julian Lage, and Margaret has also produced several of Julian’s recent releases. She just released a solo acoustic record called “The Sun Doesn’t Think” and we talk about all of these projects here today.
Check out all of Margaret’s amazing music and find out where she’s playing over at margaretglaspy.com - Enjoy my conversation with Margaret Glaspy!
This season is brought to you by our sponsors Larivée Guitars and Fishman Amplification
You can join our Patreon here to get all episodes ad-free, as well as access to all early episodes
The show’s website can be found at www.makersandshakerspodcast.com
Get ad-free episodes and access to all early episodes by subscribing to Patreon.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest this week is the incredible Mississippi songwriter, guitarist and drummer Cedric Burnside.
Cedric comes from a long family line of Hill Country blues musicians. His dad is the drummer Calvin Jackson and he is the grandson of the legendary R.L. Burnside, one of the great traditional Mississippi blues artists of all time. Cedric is an exceptional guitarist and songwriter who seems to have found a unique place in the landscape of modern music. He’s able to make records that sound fresh and current, but is very much honoring the traditions of the Hill Country region. It’s a totally unique style of music that you catch glimpses of with artists like John Lee Hooker and Jesse Mae Hemphill, but the really traditional music is even more specific than that. Born in the juke joints of Northern Mississippi, the music is usually driven by guitars and drums. It’s hypnotic, relentless and so unpredicatble and exciting to see live. It’s almost the kind of music that you’d think wouldn’t translate that well to record, but in Cedirc’s hands it does. He is also a fantastic drummer who has played with all kinds of artists including Jimmy Buffett, Widespread Panic, T-Model Ford, and The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, not to mention his grandfather R.L.. He has a bunch of albums out under his own name including the Grammy Award-winning “I Be Trying” from 2021 and the brand new “Hill Country Love”, both of which we get into in this episode.
You can get all the info on the new album and his extensive worldwide tour dates at cedricburnside.net - Enjoy our conversation!
This season is brought to you by our sponsors Larivée Guitars and Fishman Amplification
You can join our Patreon here to get all episodes ad-free, as well as access to all early episodes
The show’s website can be found at www.makersandshakerspodcast.com
Your fearless host, Steve Dawson can be found at www.stevedawson.ca
Get ad-free episodes and access to all early episodes by subscribing to Patreon.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

JJ Grey joins me this week to get Season 8 rolling in style!
JJ is an incredible singer, songwriter, guitar player and frontman for his band JJ Grey and Mofro, based in the Jacksonville, Florida area. He’s been making soulful, brash, and deeply authentic soul and rock n roll records since the release of “Blackwater” in 2001. JJ has a brand new album out now called “Olustee”, which is a remarkable record due to the stellar material and inspired performances perfromances, but also in how it was made. We had a chance to sit down and talk about how it all came together, as well as his songwriting and recording process, how he records his vocals with a $15 microphone, getting janky guitar sounds (janky is his own term, as you’ll hear), along with self-producing for the first time and working on mixing the new record with Vance Powell. Enjoy my conversation with JJ Grey!
You can get all the info on the new album and his extensive worldwide tour dates at jjgrey.com
You can join our Patreon here to get all episodes ad-free, as well as access to all early episodes
The show’s website can be found at www.makersandshakerspodcast.com
Your fearless host, Steve Dawson can be found at www.stevedawson.ca
This season is brought to you by our sponsors Larivée Guitars and Fishman Amplification
Get ad-free episodes and access to all early episodes by subscribing to Patreon.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is just to check in and let listeners know the schedule for the upcoming season, which will begin droping new episodes one week from today. Be sure to subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and thanks for tuning in!
Visit us and check out all the past episodes at:
https://www.makersandshakerspodcast.com
You can join our Patreon here to get all episodes ad-free, as well as access to all early episodes
Get ad-free episodes and access to all early episodes by subscribing to Patreon.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I’m preparing to release Season 8 starting very soon, but in the meantime, the great Duane Eddy passed away earlier this week and I have decided to re-release our conversation from 2016. That was a 2-part episiode, but I’ve combined them here into one so you can spend a couple hours with Duane and I chewin’ the fat. RIP Duane Eddy!!
You can join our Patreon here to get all episodes ad-free, as well as access to all early episodes.
Get ad-free episodes and access to all early episodes by subscribing to Patreon.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tommy Emmanuel, the stellar Australian fingerstyle guitarist joins me on the show this week for the last episode of Season 7! I first saw Tommy play back in the early 90’s when he was relatively unknown and was blown away by his adventurous technique, style, and obvious dedication to his craft. Since then, Tommy has gone on to be one of the most well-known acoustic guitarists of our time and to create an incredible body of work, but he is still mostly known for his spellbinding solo shows. Tommy was a child prodigy, playing professionally since he was 6 years old. He and his brother, along with their dad, toured all over Australia and that lead to session work, and eventually pulled him to the US, where he landed in the 80’s and met his hero, Chet Atkins, in Nashville. Tommy received the coveted seal of approval from Chet, and is one of the few guitarists alive to have the official “CGP” title, given out only by Chet himself. Tommy has made tons of records, some solo, some duets and some with bands. The latest of these is the second in a series and it’s called “Accomplice Two”, a recording of collaborations with artists like Jerry Douglas, Sierra Hull, Little Feat, Molly Tuttle, David Grisman and many more. Since we do talk about his meeting with Chet quite a bit, be sure to also check out “The Day Fingerpickers Took Over The World”, Tommy’s collaboration with Chet Atkins, and must be the last thing Chet ever recorded, from 1997. It was great to have Tommy on the show - we did get a chance to talk quite a bit about Chet, their meeting, and his influence, as well as Lenny Breau, some of Tommy’s stage gear, how he goes back and forth from thumbpicks to flatpicks, and how he approaches arranging tunes for solo fingerstyle guitar. He was also kind enough to grab his trusty Maton guitar and show me some of the things he was talking about as well.
You can get all the current info on Tommy and his very busy tour schedule at tommyemmanuel.com
Enjoy my conversation with Tommy Emmanuel!
You can join our Patreon here to get all episodes ad-free, as well as access to all early episodes
The show’s website can be found at www.makersandshakerspodcast.com
Your fearless host, Steve Dawson can be found at www.stevedawson.ca
Get ad-free episodes and access to all early episodes by subscribing to Patreon.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.