Rivers, Roads & Harvey Reid

This Weds. night, I went to hear the incomparable Harvey Reid at the Beachland Ballroom on a rainy night in Cleveland. He began his set with Water is Wide, which set me to thinking how interconnected the folk world is, since that was the last song I heard on Folk Alley before leaving work (a version off of Karla Bonoff‘s best of collection All My Life that reminded me of Mustard’s Retreat, who often sing it in concert).

Harvey Reid plays stinged instruments like it’s all he could possibly have been meant to do with his life. Slide guitar blues, fingerpicking that mimicked the uilleann pipes, the autoharp (an instrument that he holds in an intimate caress as he plays) – Jim Blum says that Harvey can literally play anything. It was a brilliant evening with an amazing musician.

Where were you the last time you saw live folk music?