Beaucoup Blue
Something in the Blood
by Richard Cuccaro

The blues is like a full moon. The moon's gravitational pull tells oceans to get up and move. 
Theoretically, it also tugs at the human blood stream. When folks start behaving strangely on 
a Saturday night, getting drunker than usual, driving like maniacs and flipping the bird, 
pissing other people off, you might look up in the sky to see if there's a full moon there. 
So, too, the blues calls to something in the blood. It pulls us down into the pit of our animal 
hearts, yanking at the tide of our emotions.
Master practitioners of the blues draw on emotive skills, calling us with voices like howling, 
sighing winds and with hands that push and pull at strings that make a hollow box cry.
When this art form comes at us from a duo who share a blood bond as well as the aforementioned 
skills, something special happens. The father and son team of David and Adrian Mowry call 
themselves Beacoup Blue and they're here now to show us everything the blues can be. 
David's slide guitar is the first thing you notice. In tandem with Adrian's deft fingerpicking it's 
precision and grace is the aural equivalent of a hot fudge sundae. Their singing individually and 
in harmony combines grit and spirit. David's tenor is big and warm and Adrian's falsetto is sweet 
and soulful. How father and son came to be musical partners is a story worth telling.

Beginnings
David Mowry narrates the story of his birth as a musician this way: "One of the reigning queens 
of folk music, Buffy St. Marie, gave me quick lesson on the guitar. I grew up in Springfield, 
Massachusetts. She was going to the University of Massachusetts at the time. Buffy was staying 
with a friend of mine on the street where I lived. He was a budding rock musician and his father 
was a jazz musician.  When I first saw her she was getting ready to do a show. She was dressed 
in a buckskin dress, playing a version of "Heartbreak Hotel." It knocked my socks off. I figured 
I had to have some of that. I was about 15 at the time. While I had my ear glued to the transistor 
radio, listening to the Drifters and Sam Cooke and all of that. I had no inclination to be a musician 
until then. She started the ball rolling and I ended up with a little 'cigar box' guitar [a cheap Stella 
or the like]. Then I met the world of folk music. There was a little coffeehouse, 'The Pesky Sarpent' 
that opened up in town. Everyone played there. Patrick Sky, Jim Kweskin, Arlo Guthrie. Most 
notable was meeting Richie Havens. That was a milestone for me. His performances were mesmerizing 
and heart-opening and they galvanized me. In a spiritual sense, he got me to open my ears and my 
heart a lot more."

Learning to play
"It was hard to keep that first guitar strung, It was probably plywood, stained to look like mahogany. 
I used steel strings. They'd break and I'd be down to one string, then I'd re-string it. I listened to a lot 
of records. Peter, Paul and Mary, Modern Folk Quartet. I liked all of that stuff. Books just didn't do 
it for me. 'The Old Grey Goose is Dead,' 'Scarlet Ribbons…' I liked 'Scarlet Ribbons' to listen to but 
reading tablature was really difficult… it just didn't do it. I responded more to listening to it. 
Once the Pesky Sarpent opened I started to meet other players. I developed via the back door. 
Although I was self taught. I did learn how to play "Freight Train" from somebody. I remember going 
home and playing it and learning it. At first it was really clumsy and it took me about a week to get a 
hold of the thing and I would play it faster and faster, as fast as I could. Within a week's time I kinda 
had it, but I just figured it was an easy song.  I came back and I played it for the guy and he looked at 
me as if I'd just stabbed his best friend. He had been working on it for a year. I had the feeling that I 
was going to be able to do this, that maybe I should continue with this. At some point in all of this I 
started listening to the blues. Curiously enough, before I listened to the country blues, I listened to the 
city blues. BB King was the first and strongest influence on me. He just pulled me into all the rest of it. 
Musically, things started to happen. I left high school at age 17 &endash; never went to college. I ended up in 
Boston. I did a summer stint as an opening act and house performer at the Unicorn on Boylston Street, 
which was a big deal at the time. The was a folksinger by the name of Michael Fairbanks who was pretty 
well-known in the New England area. He was a headliner there and I opened up for him and it went 
on from there."

The Hiatus 
There were a number of other acts that followed. The venerated blues player Paul Geremia was among 
them, just starting up back then. [Acoustic Live has, for some time, been distracted from its goal of 
interviewing Paul Geremia and hopes to correct this soon]. At the end of the summer, a misunderstanding 
over David's supposedly comped hotel bill left him wandering the streets, homeless, with his instruments 
locked up in the hotel. David tried to figure things out on his own, but word reached his parents about the 
situation and they came to pay the bill and get the instruments out and get David home. His guitar had 
either been kicked in or had collapsed from heat and had to be repaired. After this, David decided to give 
the "big city" a rest. He went home and spent some time there and got married during this time.
When he was 21, he returned to Boston with his wife and began working the clubs again, and touring 
New England as well. His stature as a performer rose. One particularly memorable experience was being 
a part of the performance roster on the night that the legendary Club 47 closed in 1968. All the performers 
who had been associated with Club 47 were there. To be included, he had to audition in front of, among 
others, Taj Mahal &endash; no small feat. "A little white boy trying to sing the blues," as David puts it. He passed 
muster with his credentials intact &endash; a testament to his skill and guts. 
In an unorthodox move, rather than stay in the Boston area, working it as long as possible, David moved 
to California for a year. He then returned to the east coast and lived in Woodstock for five years (1970-75). 

The Slide Guitar
When I asked how he came to play the dobro, David responded: "When I lived in California in 1969, we 
were making these large sand cast candles in Venice Beach and it kind of destroyed my hands. I was trying 
to play in clubs out there It was difficult to play finger style on the guitar, so I picked up a slide guitar and 
thought, 'I'll just play this way.'  I started to develop some prowess with it. For some reason, though, I put 
it down and continued to play finger style until we formed the original band Beaucoup Blue around 1993. 
I added electric slide for a couple of numbers. I realized that if I was going to use it, I'd have to go at it 
more thoroughly. The band eventually dispersed and became a duo with just me and Adrian. That got me 
back to the roots of what I had started to do musically. 
Ten years ago, David had brought the guitar he had been using for slide to be repaired. When his wife went 
to pick it up, she saw a dobro at the shop and bought it for him as a surprise for his birthday. "I haven't 
been able to put it down since, " he says.

Adrian's Journey
Adrian grew up in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, where the family moved when he was seven years old.  
He states: "I don't remember having too many baby sitters. They took me pretty much everywhere. 
I remember crawling around, hearing him play for audiences at clubs and parties. I always admired t
hat in him and wanted to do it too, but didn't know if I had an affinity for it. I listened to him and the 
other musicians he played with who became kind of like my uncles. The music has always been a big 
part of my life. I remember being able to keep a beat." 
It was around the age of 14 when Adrian began to play. He says, "I could pick up songs off the radio. 
I used to take one of his guitars and lock myself in the bedroom so no one could hear me."
In discussing the blossoming of Adrian's skills, he and his father shared a dialogue:  
David remembers, "When he wanted to play, he came to me and said he wanted to learn something. 
I'd could show him something and place his fingers exactly where they were supposed to go. Even 
though he wasn't a 'player' at the time, he would play the damn thing!  Most people can't do that. 
The test of it was, 'Classical Gas' by Mason Williams. I had learned it at one point. It was a guitar piece 
with an orchestra backup. When he was 15, I boiled down the orchestral part to its essence and taught 
it to him. It was uncanny. When he played it, it sounded great. I know people who are real guitarists 
who wouldn't get that." Adrian added, "This was before I even knew what chords I was playing."
David emphasized, "He didn't know anything about the instrument, but he kept doing exactly what I 
told him to do."
Adrian: I would take things from his record collection and pick out guitar parts. It was a combination 
of learning stuff on my own by ear, playing songs without knowing the names of the chords, somehow 
just figuring it out and then at some point, going to him and saying 'I'm stuck. Can you help me?' And 
he did and he continues to. From there we started going to open mics and blues jams. I would be 
stubborn about some things and not want to go for help. I wanted to figure some things out for myself. 
I continue to teach myself but now I'm smarter and I go for help when I need it. I feel very fortunate 
to have that."

Adrian & David Jamming at the 2005 NERFA Conference. Blues stalwart Toby Walker is at left.

Forming the Band
Adrian remembers: "I had moved away from home when I was about 18. I continued to play music, 
but not seriously… some open mics, rock n'roll bands. I didn't start to think about it seriously until we 
started to form a band together, actually get a rhythm section."
David added, "It got to be pretty good, thanks to the drummer who remains a very good friend who 
we occasionally play with when we upgrade to a quartet. He was kind of a taskmaster. He helped 
Adrian get to a pretty good place, able to play in an ensemble."
Adrian continued, "They whipped me into shape pretty quick. I was the rhythm guitar player in the 
band and there's no better place to be when you're inexperienced. All the musicians were 10 to 15 
years my senior, so it was a great school for me."
It took a while before Adrian began playing lead patterns. The band made a couple of recordings that 
are no longer promoted since the groups per se no longer exists. On the first recording the band made, 
Adrian told David that he wanted to do some lead work on a couple of songs. David said "Go to it." 
David found the results eye-opening:  "He had a real unique expressive understanding of lyrical line. 
You can't buy that. You can't teach that. You either have it or you don't."
There were some harmony vocals in the band, but no lead vocalizing by Adrian. When Adrian decide
that he wanted to sing as his father did, he took it upon himself to go to one of the best vocal coaches 
in Philadelphia. David remembers, "He didn't need a whole lot of time doing that before it started to 
happen." 
At that time (1999-2000) they got a residency at a place called Abilene on South Street in Philadelphia. 
It had been strictly a "blues haunt" but was forced to hire "top 40" bands in order to survive. The owner, 
a blues lover, wanted to preserve some authenticity, so he asked David to come in and perform every 
Friday and Saturday night. David agreed only if he could bring Adrian with him. This became Adrian's 
passage of fire into becoming a vocalist.  He assessed the trial and error, stating, "It helped me to break 
out of a shell. You have to go through the anguish of it." The residency was a success and lasted three years. 
David and Adrian both decided that they wanted to evade the fate of the many club musicians forever 
playing South Street, so they began to gig and tour elsewhere. 
Acoustic Live came across them as they jammed in the lounge at Kutscher's Hotel during the Northeast 
Folk Alliance Conference last fall. The sound of David's sweet slide and the harmonies with Adrian, both 
vocal and stringed, caused every head to turn.
Their CD, Hearts at Home, was a revelation. The songs, while grounded in the blues, span from gospel 
to swing and pop. David explains: "I've never decided what kind of music I've wanted to do, and I'm not 
gonna bother now either." The combination of elements prompted questions.
When I asked about the inclusion of the great swing classic, "Stompin' at the Savoy," David gave credit 
to a couple of sources. One was an album called Tone Poems III: The Sounds of the Great Slide & 
Resophonic Instruments with Bob Brozman, David Grisman, and Mike Auldridge. David said, "I just 
love the idea that they had stretched old folk songs, old blues, old swing tunes, everything. This stuff 
is right in my bones." He also credits a CD Adrian had given him of Charlie Christian doing a jam 
session in Kansas City in the early 40's. "Dizzy Gillespie was a part of this …everybody. They did a 
version of 'Stompin' at the Savoy,'   a breakneck bebop version. I thought, 'I know this song is slower 
than that.' I tried to do the different parts myself, then got Adrian involved. Auldridge , Brozman, and 
Grisman, gave me the formula for being able to do stuff like that."
Along with "Stompin' at the Savoy,"  "Rainy Night in Georgia" was another wonderful surprise. 
Acoustic Live wrote in a review last December, that Beacoup Blue's version broke new ground. 
David describes its genesis this way: "I grew up listening to rhythm and blues, Sam Cooke, The 
Drifters and Brook Benton. At one point, I had been in Philadelphia working on a grueling carpentry 
job during a rainy period. Afterward we got on a plane to San Diego. The next morning, still exhausted, 
I walked into a coffee shop and "Rainy Night in Georgia" was playing on the sound system. For 
some reason, it hit me hard, emotionally. It was an epiphany. I had always loved the song. The simplicity 
and the beauty of it struck me." David climbs into the song and lives in it. The result is a powerful 
projection of the narrator's mood.

The Continuing Path
When I asked how they saw their music evolving David replied: "Music is always a youthful energy, 
a discovery. The best musicians, no matter what their age, are living that and never cease to 
maintain the inspiration of the early formative years. There's no place to rest." 
Acoustic Live hopes they never do. 

Upcoming shows:

Monday, August 7 Ortlieb's Jazz Haus opening for Melody Gardot,  
847 N 3rd St, Philadelphia, PA 19123  Tel: (215) 922-1035
   
Thursday, August 10, Rockwood Music Hall,  
196 Allen St., NYC   Tel: 212-477-4195
   
Wednesday, September 27  8:30pm  Cornelia St. Cafe  
Cornelia St, NYC  Tel: (212) 989-9319
   
Saturday, October 7  15th Annual Delmarva Folk Festival, 
Field's Farm Hartley, Delaware
   
Friday, October 13  8pm  Darlington Art Center  
977 Shavertown Road  Boothwyn, PA 19061  Tel: (610) 358-3632

Website: www.beaucoupblue.com