Tag: dakota duets

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Music From Home

By Jami Lynn

Jami Lynn and Derrick Lawrence perform “Sails” for the sixth and final installment of Dakota Duets.

Editor’s Note: This is the sixth and final installment of Dakota Duets, a statewide exploration of music featuring Spearfish singer/songwriter Jami Lynn and musicians from around South Dakota.

Throughout this project, I’ve really enjoyed exploring the musical landscape of South Dakota through the eyes of other musicians. Inhabiting such a rural and spread-out state, we’re not always in tune with what is happening in other areas. I often find myself going back and forth between Sioux Falls and the Black Hills to play concerts, but Sisseton, with its low rolling hills, modest population, and close proximity to the Sisseton Wahpeton Reservation has quite a nice music scene.

It is a community that not only raised me, musically speaking, but also continues to support and inspire me as well as other players in the area. Before I had even completed the concept for this project, I knew I wanted to work with guitarist Derrick Lawrence. On a small stage in Peever, he and I took in classic country, polka and folk music while honing our own performance skills.

Lawrence was always around music at home, with his father’s guitar picking and his mother’s love for the piano.”She still plays to this day,” he says. Perhaps this early immersion is why he started playing at a younger age than most musicians. At 8 years old, he was chording along with favorite songs, and he eventually dove into finger-style acoustic guitar. Chet Atkins and his father, Elden, were his first musical role models. During my formative years, I was mesmerized watching Elden play tasteful, twangy lead guitar at the monthly Jamboree in Peever. I didn’t know it then, but through listening to Elden and Derrick play guitar, I was already a fan of Chet Atkins. Today, Derrick still draws heavily on his style when performing on acoustic guitar.

In middle school, Lawrence and a few friends formed a rock band, starting out with cover songs but eventually writing some originals. The core of the band later became”Eclipse,” which, though comprised of different members, still tours the region today.”There were three of us that played guitar, I think, and we switched off,” he recalls. The early band premiered their music at Camp Dakotah, near Sisseton.”To mixed reviews,” Lawrence adds with a chuckle. Local musician Lance Pond was Lawrence’s first exposure to the”flat-picking” style that he would later employ when playing electric guitar in rock bands.

Though Lawrence plays more instrumental music than not, he’s done some lyrical writing throughout the years, and enjoys recording in his home studio and the recording studio at Sisseton Wahpeton College, where he works. For our duet, Lawrence and I selected a Steve Wariner arrangement of”Sails” written by John and Johanna Hall. The tune is almost meditative, and Lawrence’s clean fingering and even tone give it space that, when paired with the natural reverb of the windowed hall at the college, make this recording really special.

Click below for previous Dakota Duets

Paul Larson

Thomas Hentges aka The Burlap Wolf King

Mike Linderman

Jake Jackson

Erin Castle

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A Voice for All Genres

By Jami Lynn

Jami Lynn and Erin Castle perform “Brush and String” for the fifth installment of Dakota Duets.

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth installment of Dakota Duets, a statewide exploration of music featuring Spearfish singer/songwriter Jami Lynn and musicians from around South Dakota.

Erin Castle may not always take the lead, but she has carved out a niche for herself in the Sioux Falls music scene for over a decade. You may know her from folk band The Union Grove Pickers, or the alt-rock collaboration A Ghostwood Calm, but Castle’s glimmering vocals shine on their own or in the midst of a six piece band.

Castle spent most of her formative years in Brandon, where she participated in band and choir. She describes her first solo performance in fifth grade as terrifying. But the terror soon gave way to a different kind of flutter — the drive to regularly perform in front of people.”It made me feel something that I’d never felt before,” Castle says.

Towards the end of her high school days, Castle’s proximity to Sioux Falls brought her access to the burgeoning basement concert scene. The 605 House and other private venues exposed her to local and touring hard core and punk rock bands. Parts of this underground, word-of-mouth scene of the early 2000s are mirrored in Sioux Falls today. Local venue and record store Total Drag has given a home to young bands whose members are writing their own music and playing out.”I’m watching all these surf rock bands popping up in the middle of the plains, and it’s awesome,” she says.

No matter the genre in which she’s performing, Castle has a sharp ear for supporting other vocalists, male or female. As a solo vocalist now dabbling in supporting others in this series of duets, I really admire this skill. She also has piles of journals from her adolescent days, just like me. Unlike the straightforward, but methodical journals of our grandmothers, these are brimming with unrequited feelings of angst. It appears we were already collecting material to distill down into songs.

Castle’s original song”Brush and String” reads like a lullaby, but actually explores how relationships weather major life changes. I love singing with Erin Castle, and I hope to see more of her original work come to the forefront.

Click below for previous Dakota Duets

Paul Larson

Thomas Hentges aka The Burlap Wolf King

Mike Linderman

Jake Jackson

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A Man and His Guitar

By Jami Lynn

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth installment of Dakota Duets, a statewide exploration of music featuring Spearfish singer/songwriter Jami Lynn and musicians from around South Dakota.

Jami Lynn and Jake Jackson perform Jackson’s “Once in Awhile” for the fourth Dakota Duet.

A musician’s attachment to their first real instrument is magical. Finding my first beloved instrument took years, multiple guitars and two banjos. To find the guitar that flat-picker Jake Jackson affectionately refers to as his”workhorse,” took him a few days tooling around guitar shops on Colorado’s front range.”It was actually the first guitar that I played out of the whole trip,” Jackson says.”I probably played 30 guitars, and for whatever reason, that was just the one.”

Years of hard playing indoors and outdoors, a stint in the Lawrence County evidence locker following the guitar’s theft from his truck, and several major tune-ups still haven’t shaken his attachment to his instrument.

But for Jackson, it wasn’t always about the guitar. In second grade, the Black Hills Chamber Orchestra visited his school. After the performance, he went home and announced that he was going to play the violin. He started in the Rapid City Schools’ orchestra program and took private lessons. Eventually, he joined the bar scene in Rapid City and Tuesday night old-time jam sessions with the Black Hills Bluegrass Band. During those Tuesday night sessions, he moved from the fiddle to the banjo, and soon settled into picking the guitar in the bluegrass style called flat-picking.”We didn’t play anything really fast, but we played all the traditional tunes,” Jackson says.”It’s kinda how you know someone’s got their old-time chops: If you walk into the room and say, ‘Hey, let’s play Sally Goodin,’ and they know how to do it.”

In 1998, he met banjo player Trappor Mason, bassist Dave Curington, and mandolin player Dan Cross, which led to the formation of his Spearfish based band, Six Mile Road. Twenty years of playing together has refined their progressive bluegrass sound, and given Jackson an outlet for his songwriting.

While he’s not one to sit down and intentionally try to write a song, they seem to find him just the same.”If it doesn’t happen for eight months, then it just doesn’t happen. It’s important to just let them come on in their own way.”

For our Dakota Duets collaboration, we chose Jackson’s original song”Once in Awhile.” Like most of his songs, it was conceived and finished within 30 minutes. It showcases Jackson’s straightforward style of writing, easygoing tenor and that workhorse of a guitar.

Click below for previous Dakota Duets

Paul Larson

Thomas Hentges aka The Burlap Wolf King

Mike Linderman

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Dakota Duets

Spearfish folk singer Jami Lynn traveled the state during the summer of 2018, pairing with singers and songwriters from every corner of South Dakota in a web series called Dakota Duets.

Jami began to perform at age 13, debuting at community gatherings in the little town of Peever in the Glacial Lakes country of northern South Dakota. She majored in music at the University of South Dakota. She also studied and performed in Nashville, but her deep connection to our rural landscapes, people and culture of the Northern Plains called her home. That’s good news for music fans who love her range of country, folk and jazz. She has quickly become one of South Dakota’s most popular performers.

Thanks to a South Dakota Arts Council fellowship grant, Jami embarked on the Dakota Duets road trip. Six videos, one per month from April through September, were posted on the South Dakota Magazine website. You’ll find the videos here, along with links to the original stories for each.

April 9, 2018 – Paul Larson

See the original story here.

May 16, 2018 – Thomas Hentges aka The Burlap Wolf King

See the original story here.

June 13, 2018 – Mike Linderman

See the original story here.

July 19, 2018 – Jake Jackson

See the original story here.

August 22, 2018 – Erin Castle

See the original story here.

September 19, 2018 – Derrick Lawrence

See the original story here.

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Cultivating a Listening Culture

Mike Linderman and Jami Lynn record the third installment of Dakota Duets.

Mike Linderman was growing up in Greybull, Wyoming when he and his friends — soon to be seniors in high school — ordered instruments from a Montgomery Ward catalog and started a band.”We learned ‘Proud Mary’ and ‘House of the Rising Sun’ and played those two songs like a hundred times,” Linderman says.

It’s safe to say Linderman’s songbook has grown substantially since then. He’s established himself as one of the Southern Hills’ most recognizable musicians, and is featured in the third installment of Dakota Duets, a statewide tour featuring folk singer Jami Lynn and an assortment of South Dakota singers and songwriters.

Linderman fell in love with the landscape around Wind Cave National Park following a stay at a friend’s cabin and hiking adventures around Custer and Fall River counties. That led to his move to Hot Springs. He used his musical talents by performing and booking other artists at venues like The Songbird Cafe in Custer. The bi-weekly concerts and open mic nights were modeled after similar events at The Bluebird Cafe, a 90-seat music club in Nashville that features acoustic performances by nationally known artists and receives more than 70,000 visitors annually.

“Cultivating a listening culture as a music organizer is no small feat,” Jami Lynn says.”It doesn’t surprise me, however, that such a driven and focused individual as Mike could accomplish this.

“One of the first things I learned about Mike is that not only does he keep his guitar in a high quality hard case, but that case then goes inside a guitar cooler, or thermal case. I imagined someone who valued their instrument so much must also have mastery of it. I was not disappointed. His melodic finger-style accompaniment to carefully chosen or written songs not only thrills me, but brings me to a more focused listening space than usual.”

Linderman chose”One Lone Rowan Tree,” for this installment of Dakota Duets. The song by Kim McKee tells of the Celtic tradition of the burial of lost souls.”During a certain period of time in Ireland, if an individual was cast out of the church for any reason, a churchyard burial was also forbidden,” Jami Lynn says.”People started burying these loved ones under lone standing trees, believing the trees would watch over them. The story and song have a haunting quality that highlights Mike’s delicate finger-style arrangement and unadorned vocals. It was a pleasure to lend my voice to a carefully crafted arrangement of this beautiful song.”

Click below for previous Dakota Duets

Paul Larson

Thomas Hentges aka The Burlap Wolf King

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Jami and the Wolf King

Thomas Hentges’ first gig involved four songs played in front of the Chester High School student body before they were dismissed for Christmas vacation.”I got pulled out of the place by my ear by the principal because he thought I was using profanity on the stage,” Hentges recalls with a laugh.”I assured him that I wasn’t and that he needed to get his hands off me.”

It was a rough start to what became a successful musical career. Hentges now performs solo and with a band, both under the unique moniker Burlap Wolf King. The Sioux Falls artist is the second musician to be featured in Dakota Duets, a summer-long, statewide music tour in which South Dakota singer Jami Lynn performs with artists in a variety of genres. All six installments will be featured on our South Dakota Magazine website.

“Though our beginnings look very different, time and musical evolution brought Thomas and I to almost the same place at the same time,” Jami Lynn says.”Many consider him one of the best songwriters in the state. And just as we’ve finally fallen in the same folky singer/songwriter genre these past few years, Thomas is already morphing into his next musical state.”

For the second installment of Dakota Duets, Jami Lynn and Hentges perform”If I Needed You,” by Townes Van Zandt, a songwriter perhaps best known for his country hit”Pancho and Lefty,” recorded in 1983 by Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson. Van Zandt has been a source of inspiration for Hentges.”What I didn’t know what that around 2006, he watched the Townes Van Zandt documentary Be Here to Love Me for the first time,” Jami Lynn says.”It inspired him to ‘pick up that crappy acoustic guitar in the corner of my apartment and get into three chords and the truth.’ I think you’ll find the truth in Thomas Hentges’ voice and lyrics in any genre. While listening to our version of ‘If I Needed You,’ I hope you’ll agree that three chords are exactly the right amount.”

Click below for previous Dakota Duets.

Paul Larson

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Dakota Duets Debuts

Talented musicians can be found in towns and cities, large and small, across South Dakota and our bordering states. Unfortunately, we don’t always get a chance to know and hear those who live outside our own neighborhoods.

That’s exactly why Spearfish singer/songwriter Jami Lynn is hitting the road, performing with six men and women in a new summer-long web series called Dakota Duets.

“There are so many musicians in South Dakota that I really admire,” Jami says.”Some of them are people I’ve gotten to work with in passing. Some of them, I’ve just enjoyed listening to, or learning from. I started this project because I wanted an excuse to work with each musician featured, and to hone my backup skills a bit. It’s also an opportunity for me to play a few different styles of music that I maybe wouldn’t have touched on my own.”

Jami began to perform at age 13, debuting at community gatherings in the little town of Peever in the Glacial Lakes country of northern South Dakota. She majored in music at the University of South Dakota. She also studied and performed in Nashville, but her deep connection to our rural landscapes, people and culture of the Northern Plains called her home. That’s good news for music fans who love her range of country, folk and jazz. She has quickly become one of South Dakota’s most popular performers.

Thanks to a South Dakota Arts Council fellowship grant, Jami is now embarking on the Dakota Duets road trip.

Her first video features Paul Larson, a cowboy poet from Rochford who also performs traditional cowboy music. The duo sings”Butterflies and Pearls,” a cowboy waltz that tells the story of how Larson met his longtime girlfriend, Amy, while riding horseback in the woods.

Jami plans to release five more videos — one in each of the next five months — and you’ll find them all here on our South Dakota Magazine web site. Next up is Thomas Hentges, also known as Burlap Wolf King, of Sioux Falls.