This page is created In Loving Memory to tribute one of my most influential mentors, Jimmy Chard
Two More For The Road
I met Jimmy Chard in the early nineties at the first Bluegrass Festival I went to and before I knew it we were taking turns on the one-hour drive between Belgrade and Brunswick to get together and play music. Our voices worked really well together, and I was the rhythm mule and Jim would play great bluegrass instrumentals on the guitar and the mandolin. Jimmy and I had a common background with Jonathan Edwards and Bob Dylan tunes, but he held the key to the obscure and eclectic bluegrass repertoire that would become our trademark for the next few years as we formed the guitar - mandolin duo called "Two More Fore The Road". It didn't take long before I gave up my rental and chose to rent a room at Jimmy's so we could practice more. We would play twenty to thirty hours a week in a real rural environment in Brunswick Maine for the next couple of years without the distractions of television or much other media except for musical instruments. I grew more musically in these two years than I had in the previous twenty. Jimmy and I were both writing a bunch of tunes during this time so it was commonplace to be sitting around the table and say,"checkout the song I just wrote" and the harmonies would be in place before it was sung through the first time. We played a lot of gigs in Central Maine and headlined a couple of small Bluegrass Festivals in the area.
We had a tremendous amount of great and talented friends in the music community who we called upon when it came time to attempt a recording. Three of the songs from this "Two More For The Road" effort are in my Original Music Showcase on this site, so if you want to go back in time check out ("Your The Only One I'm Thinking Of", "For More Than a Song" and "Follow Your Dreams" - a co-write with Jimmy Chard).
Jimmy passed away in 2019 and I think of him often and I thought I would digitize and build this page in his honor. I recently found some old recordings we did on cassette I'll try to digitize them soon so I can share them on this page.
Jimmy hired up a limo to go from Brunswick ME to Jaffery NH to pick up his new mandolin when Jack O'Brien had finished the handmade instrument he had waited two years for and some of these photos are from that day.
We had a tremendous amount of great and talented friends in the music community who we called upon when it came time to attempt a recording. Three of the songs from this "Two More For The Road" effort are in my Original Music Showcase on this site, so if you want to go back in time check out ("Your The Only One I'm Thinking Of", "For More Than a Song" and "Follow Your Dreams" - a co-write with Jimmy Chard).
Jimmy passed away in 2019 and I think of him often and I thought I would digitize and build this page in his honor. I recently found some old recordings we did on cassette I'll try to digitize them soon so I can share them on this page.
Jimmy hired up a limo to go from Brunswick ME to Jaffery NH to pick up his new mandolin when Jack O'Brien had finished the handmade instrument he had waited two years for and some of these photos are from that day.
