At the Foot of the Mountains: Piedmont Blues on the Albany-Denmark Coast

The Piedmont plateau runs from the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States through to the Atlantic Plain and stretches from New York in the north to central Alabama in the south. Rich farming land, it’s a region steep in history—‘the cradle of the Civil War’ as Paul Simon might almost have put it (he was actually thinking a bit further south and west). From the French, ‘Piedmont’ means foothills—its Latin root ‘pedemontium’ means literally ‘at the foot of the mountains’. In this case, we’re talking the original hillbilly mountains. It is also the home of a sophisticated style of American music called Piedmont Blues.

Also known as East Coast or South-Eastern Blues, the form was born in the decades following the Civil War. Predominantly a finger-picking guitar technique, it is characterised by a regular alternating bass overlain with syncopated melodies. Pleasing to the ear, it is one of the most complicated styles to master. The guitarist is simultaneously playing at least two parts (bass and lead), if not three (throw in rhythm). Comparable in sound to stride piano, it is differentiated from Texas and Mississippi Delta Blues by its distinctive ragtime rhythms. As anthropologist Nick Spitzer put it, the Piedmont style meshes “traces of gospel, fiddle tunes, blues, country, and ragtime into its rolling, exuberant sound.”

And rollickingly exuberant it is—it’s nigh on impossible to play this music without smiling. This is somewhat ironic given the stark lives most of the original Piedmont players had. Few made any money from it. Instead, they played for free on the streets and in their clapboard shanties, a gift to the world from those who could least afford it. (Alas, this part of the tradition also lives on today.)

To some ears, this laid-back music belongs to a bygone era, but it remains a hugely influential technique, not only in wooden music (as Stephen Stills famously dubbed it), but in rock, roots and pop as well.

James Taylor, one of the most influential pop fingerpickers, hails from North Carolina (in his mind), deep in Piedmont country, while many other singer-songwriter-instrumentalists, if not immersed in the Piedmont style, have dipped their toes in its waters. Ry Cooder, Arlo Guthrie, David Bromberg, Ralph McTell, Taj Mahal and Guy Davis have all recorded Piedmont music.

Across the pond, most of the English guitar gods are no strangers to Piedmont Blues. Mark Knopfler has a YouTube lesson on its fundamentals; hand Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton an acoustic guitar, and they’ll launch into a mean Piedmont pick, while a certain band of psychedelic prog-rockers took their name from the melding of two renowned Piedmont players, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.

These later players, though, are but the foothills of the form; the true mountains are the older generation: ‘the king of ragtime guitar’ Blind Blake, Josh White, Doc Watson, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Blind Boy Fuller and the Rev. Gary Davis. The recently departed Steve James and the still-kicking Stefan Grossman are regarded as custodians of this deeper Piedmont tradition.

So what does this music have to do with the Albany-Denmark coast?

Well, the terrain is similar—lush, rolling farmland that spills onto a littoral plain. True, the plain is narrower, the foothills smaller, and the Stirlings and Porongorups are hardly the Appalachians, but it has the same general feel. The music sits well in this landscape—its organic rhythms make the perfect soundtrack for a ripping ride along the winding byways that hem the southern shore.

But the deeper connection comes primarily through one highly talented and eclectic guitarist who, as a younger man, fell in love with the Piedmont finger-picking style.

Rod Vervest is a prolific performer and a promiscuous collaborator. On any weekend, you can catch him with an ever-changing ensemble of musicians in an array of venues—The Denmark Chocolate Company, Hazbeanz Café, house concerts anywhere from Esperance to Denmark—not to mention the many folk, blues, and roots festivals that pepper the South-West. The Skipjacks, Wayward Earls, Paper Collar Pickers, Rust Buckets and Nullarbor Mountain Boys are just some of the many bands he performs in.

Standing with his resonator (steel-body) guitar (like a National, only his is a modified Chinese one) in front of an Ear-Trumpet microphone (note, no guitar amp), Vervest will pick his way through an assortment of Piedmont tunes while harmonising to the vox of his key collaborators, Bob Lipinski and Craig Sinclair. A fair whack of these numbers have been penned by Vervest in collaboration with either Lipinski or Sinclair and make a worthy contribution to the canon.

So how did an erstwhile Perth boy come to be a master of this distinctly American style of music? Interesting story.

Vervest is a second-generation guitarist. His Dutch father, Wim, is a highly accomplished, semi-professional classical player and sometime teacher. Coming from a musical family back in Holland, Vervest Père picked up the instrument as a young lad under the influence of his guitar-picking uncles. On coming to Western Australia, he fell in with the circle orbiting Sadie Bishop, a pioneer of the classical guitar in this fair state.

As a small boy, when he should have been tucked up in bed, young Rodney used to sneak out and peer through the keyhole on a room of Bohemian classicists, possibly up to no good but sounding sweet. His very earliest memory is of crawling onto his daddy’s knee and resting his ear up against the soundboard of the guitar while, as a twelve-year-old, he was enraptured when one of his dad’s students played Blind Blake’s Diddy Wah Diddy. Throw in the family’s eclectic record collection, and you can see why he was destined to become a guitarist of one kind or another.

As a teenager, Vervest had classical guitar lessons but found them too demanding. Instead, he took up the electric. After a humble beginning terrorising Mt. Lawley High School with The Electric Nipple Band, he became an accomplished interpreter of jazz fusion, not exactly the easiest of music. His first adult band, Forecast, built a solid following on the Perth pub circuit during the late '70s and early '80s, intercutting their Steely Dan covers with a set of originals. His fellow band members included the now-acclaimed Perth jazz pianist Russell Holmes and bassist Tony Gibbs.

Vervest’s Damascene moment came in 1984, when his long-term girlfriend (now wife) set off on her solo grand tour of Europe. With time on his hands, he decided to transition from electric to acoustic guitar and explore finger-picking. Raiding his dad’s record collection, he began with the music of Marcel Dadi, then moved onto Merle Travis and Chet Atkins. Once he began to buy records of his own, he discovered John James and the English folk revolution, along with the Dutch guitar masters Leo Wijnkamp (‘Wine-camp’) and Ton van Bergeijk. A little later, he fell under the spell of the Australian guitarist, Dutch Tilders.

He quickly noticed that all of these players specialised in a multi-layered finger-picking technique. At first he thought they were overdubbing, so complex was the sound, then he learned that this was the classic Piedmont style.

In those days, guitar albums, particularly on the Kicking Mule label, came with a tablature booklet so you could learn to play along. Vervest fell in love with the fantastic chord progressions, three-guitars-at-once method, intricate melodies, and overall ebullience of the music. The deeper he went into it, the deeper there was to go. Fascinated, he traded in his Telecaster and devoted himself to finger-picking Piedmont Blues.

As he puts it, “The Piedmont players were country-based; nothing fancy about them at all. Gritty and real, they spoke the subterranean language of the blues. Married to this amazing guitar style, I was hooked. An amalgam of repression and optimism, innuendo mixed with joy and, at times, comedy, it felt exciting and a bit subversive.”

It must be said that Vervest was not the first Perth person to explore this style, and not all of his mentors were European or American. Perth guitarists Peter Woodward (later of The Ten Cent Shooters) and Bernard Carney, both deft Piedmont pickers, had a strong influence on Vervest’s developing style. Woodward has a phenomenal knowledge of early blues, which also fed into Vervest’s growing understanding of the idiom.

Within a decade, he had established himself as a master guitarist. He was on the bill for the first Fairbridge Festival in 1993 and has performed in one or another of his bands at every one ever since. In 2014, he became the festival’s artistic director, a position he held until 2022. It’s little surprise that, during his tenure, the focus of the festival’s music shifted from predominantly Anglo-Celtic to include a rich dose of Americana.

Vervest’s mature style sits at the ragtime-blues end of the Piedmont tradition and is shot through with Dutch and English influences. He prefers to call it Ragtime Blues.

There are two classic stories that attest to his formidable guitar skills.

In the early 1990s, he and his wife travelled to the States. While in North Carolina, he dropped into a music shop. Finding the place empty, he picked up one of the guitars and began to play Doc Watson’s tune, Windy and Warm. Quick-smart, the store manager emerged from the backroom, took up another guitar, and, without a word, began to play a harmonising part. At the end of the song, the manager introduced himself as Jack. On hearing Vervest’s accent, he did a double take.

“Where the hell are you from?” he drawled.

Vervest told him.

“They play this kind of music in Orstraylia!!”

Jack invited Vervest to a Piedmont Blues festival that was coming up. Rejigging his itinerary, he went. The first act was his old hero, Doc Watson. After a few solo tunes, Watson invited his playing partner onto the stage. Out walked Jack (Lawrence).

A few years before Vervest took over the reins at Fairbridge, Stefan Grossman appeared on the bill. As happens at that festival, after hours, the musicians fell into a jam. Vervest and Grossman began trading licks. Vervest was in heaven; he had learned so much from Grossman’s records. His key moment came, though, when he unleashed a run of his own invention.

“Play that again,” Grossman growled. “I don’t know that one. It’s beautiful.”

One of Vervest’s regrets at Fairbridge was that Steve James, the other aforementioned custodian, did not make it onto the program. They were in negotiations, trading stories, and planning the tour when James unexpectedly passed away.

And so we return to the Albany-Denmark coast.

March this year was a hectic time for Vervest and the Piedmont Blues. In the course of four weekends, he performed multiple times with three of his key ensembles.

The first was The Skipjacks, a duo with Vervest’s principal playing partner, the Denmark-based American harmonica player and singer Bob Lipinski. These two have been working together for a good fifteen years. Most weekends, they put in an appearance at Hazbeanz Café, overlooking the marina on Princess Royal Harbour. It’s a good way to ease into your morning: sipping a long black as they perch in the corner of the open alcove and wend their way through some thirty-odd happy tunes.

This March, they also put in one of their Sunday lunchtime gigs at the Denmark Chocolate Company, a superb winery-come-chocaholic haunt some fifteen minutes west of the Denmark township.

This was a sweet gig. The two men know each other’s styles inside and out. Not only does Vervest’s guitar fit seamlessly with Lipinski’s wailing harp and rich, warm, east-coast baritone, but his backing vocals add a wry commentary to Lipinski’s already wry lyrics. With your foot tapping time, the smile on your face just gets broader and broader as the words sink in.

Their repertoire included a fair cross-section of the masters: Doc Watson’s Deep River Blue and Walk On Boy, Steve James’ County Line Road, Merle Travis’ 16 Tons, Chet Atkins’ Standing Room Only, and Ry Cooder’s Tamp ‘Em Up Solid. There were also some quirky adaptations of classic show tunes, an Irving Berlin number, Leon Redbone’s rendition of Big Time Woman (dedicated to Gina Reinhardt), and John Sebastian’s Passing Fantasy, along with the originals No Fish Today, Last Deal (Going Down), and Pardelup Farm. The three sets made for a jolly afternoon in the languid Denmark light.

The Chocolate Company, too, is a wonder to behold, not only for its sweets and wine but also for the lush garden with its themed walk through the history of chocolate. Tasty and informative.

The following weekend, another long-term collaborator travelled south for a swag of shows. The Skipjacks became the Wayward Earls as Peter Grayling wove by turns his cello and century-old mandolin through the now familiar harp and guitar.

Grayling has been playing with Vervest for nigh on thirty years, from Clarke’s Grey Vest, a trio with fiddler/singer/harp-blower Dave Clarke, through to The Rustbuckets quartet (Clarke’s Grey Vest with Bill Lawrie on guitar, harp and vocals).

Apart from a haunting rendition of St. James Infirmary, the repertoire at The Wayward Earls’ Sunday sunset house concert was pretty much the same as the Chocolate Company gig, but the dynamic was completely different. The extra instruments and third voice enriched the sound, making it not necessarily better but decidedly more complex, its Americana even more mellow.

Highlights included the mirroring of guitar and mandolin on Big Bad Bill, Lipinski’s understated harp on St. James Infirmary and Vervest’s ironic interjections on Honey Babe.

Two ten-song sets prepped the mainly older audience well for the week ahead. It’s good to end a weekend with a smile on your dial.

The following Friday, a third collaborator breezed into Albany for a series of special shows to launch the Paper Collar Pickers’ new album Peddling Rag.

Guitarist/singer Craig Sinclair, another erstwhile Perth boy, now lives in the Blue Mountains. Vervest met him when he moved briefly to Albany, and they played together in the Pepperjacks. As well as fingerpicking, Sinclair plays lap steel. This provides two further twists to the Piedmont style: harmonising guitars á lá Doc Watson and Jack Lawrence, and slide.

Beginning with a more formal show at the Denmark Arts Centre, over the following week they delivered a series of five house concerts wending north to Perth.

In some ways, even though it was only the two of them, the Paper Collar Pickers had the fullest sound of the three configurations. When you think about it, though, this makes sense. At full tilt, with two three-in-one guitars, you actually have six parts playing at once. Add in vocal and backup, and you’re pushing eight. The rhythmic interweaving of counterpointing bass lines and harmonising melodies makes for a tight mesh of music. But then again, as Vervest astutely noted, the Ear Trumpet microphone turns them into a trio.

It's worth dwelling for a moment on these microphones. They are pretty amazing. A single mic, like the big one the Paper Collar Pickers use, can cover an entire acoustic band. Their warm, woody sound resonates through an auditorium—in Fairbridge’s case, a large marquee—turning these vast spaces into a cosy living room. Every member of the audience feels like they are sitting right next to the band, not twenty rows away. They really are a wonder to behear.

As well as the ten tracks on the album—four classic covers, three Sinclair, and three Sinclair/Vervest originals—the Paper Collar Pickers rounded out their Denmark show with another half dozen tunes. Some of these—Stella in My Arms (his guitar, not his girlfriend) and City of Lights—were older originals. The former, an exemplar of the Piedmont style, harks back to Clarke’s Grey Vest and their album Three.

The covers on Peddling Rag include a third version of Doc Watson’s Walk On Boy as well as the happenstance duet Windy and Warm. This time Vervest played the harmonising part while Sinclair stuck to the root. On other tunes, the lap steel provided a beautiful contrast, its silvery slides weaving a different, equally exotic course through Vervest’s meticulous pick.

The colourful mood lighting in the Arts Centre gave the show a strange edge; its deep reds and blues were more disco than the music would otherwise suggest.

Peddling Rag is the twelfth studio album Vervest has worked on. If you are interested in listening to more in this fine Piedmont style, Three and the Ragabilly’s self-titled album are worth checking out. All are available on Bandcamp. Individual tracks can be viewed on Vervest’s YouTube channel. 

March was an especially busy month, but on average, Vervest delivers at least two, if not three, shows a week, spreading joy around the region. Over the next few months, he will be busy pulling the Albany Sea Shanty Festival together, but next time you’re looking for something to do in the Great Southern, keep an eye out for him. His playing will enrich your day or night.

And finally, if you are thinking this really is old-fashioned music only of interest to older male guitarists, well, you would be half right. But then, it does resonate with some in the younger generation, and there are a few women who play this kind of guitar. Muireann Bradley, a fourteen-year-old Irish girl, delivers a very mean Piedmont and Mississippi Delta finger pick. Check out her London show at the Moth Club.

Bradley’s miss-tery of the guitar is enough to make many older players weep. You’d swear that, like Rod Vervest, she’s been to the mountain top before coming back to them thar foothills!

IAN LILBURNE