Next Monday night Jemima James will treat the public to the kind of concert that regularly takes place in her own home. With two musically accomplished sons (her older is currently touring Europe with Norah Jones) and Ms. James an Island legend in her own right, she has become a matriarch of sorts for the Vineyard folk music scene. It is a scene that is surprisingly young and vibrant and a perfect match for the Musical Mondays summer series at the Featherstone Center for the Arts.
“I’ve been playing at Featherstone for a while off and on, and last year I decided to bring some of these young people with me because some of the stuff we’ve been doing in my living room just sounded great.”
On July 5, Ms. James will host the second annual Jemima James Variety Show at Featherstone, sharing the stage with such locally mined talent as Nina Violet and Marciana Jones, Lexie Roth, Lilah Larson and Sons of an Illustrious Father, Tauras Biskus and members of Ballyhoo, as well as West Tisbury poet and singer Dan Waters.
Ms. James has long enchanted Island audiences with the soulful, whiskey-mellow timbre of her voice, the evocative, moseying melodies of the country west and the effortless strumming of her 1962 Gibson Hummingbird (a guitar that inspired envy in the likes of J. Geils, Mick Jagger and Arlo Guthrie during her tenure at the legendary Long View Farm recording studio in the 1970s). Ms. James, who has been collaborating with Island artist Dan Waters of late, talked about the burgeoning generation of musical talent on the Vineyard at a recent practice session at Mr. Waters’s West Tisbury home.
“There was always a lot of music in our house, and there was also this whole group of singer-songwriters coming up at the same time,” she said. “I remember hearing Nina [Violet] for the first time at the high school talent show when my son was there. She seemed like just this little girl with huge dreadlocks. When she started to sing she was riveting, though — I just said, oh my God.”
Mr. Waters, a former West Tisbury poet laureate who is musically rooted in the Brazilian bossa nova of his childhood, recalled a similar experience upon first encountering Ms. Violet, who is currently touring Wales recording with Warner Brothers.
“When I heard Nina I thought, okay I’m never going to judge anyone by first impressions again,” he said. “I was helping with the sound at Che’s Lounge one night and I set up the microphone for this sort of timid-looking girl. She was very awkwardly holding a guitar, like she had only had one guitar lesson in her life. She was looking at me with what I thought was apprehension at the time but what I know now was mild amusement. I kept telling her, make sure you sing into the microphone, and she would say, mmhmm. Then she opened her mouth and started to sing. The hair went up on my head and I realized what was coming out of her was a lifetime of music.”
Mr. Waters recalled another occasion at the recently shuttered Che’s Lounge in Vineyard Haven, a popular venue for local musicians, when Ms. James’s son, Willy Mason, performed a medley of his own songs, an experience Mr. Waters says illustrates the support of the Island’s devoted musical community.
“A hurricane was on its way and they’d turned all the lights out, there was just candlelight,” he said. “There were no amplifiers and the wind was picking up outside, and Willy held these people in the palm of his hand. He sang very quietly and what impressed me the most is that everyone in the room knew the lyrics and they were singing along. That’s a tribute to the Island.”
Monday’s event will feature a roster of younger artists but will also include the talents of Ms. James and Mr. Waters themselves. At Tuesday’s practice session, Ms. James and Mr. Waters harmonized about sunsets over the prairie, louche cowpokes and eagles circling high above the Continental Divide. Included in Mr. Waters’s set list for Monday is one particularly topical song he recently penned as an indignant entreaty to the oil industry.
“This song is dedicated to all the non-human victims of the Gulf oil spill,” he says by way of introduction. Recalling the great American tradition of protest folk songs, the bitterness is palpable as he began singing.
“Was I there the day they auctioned off the ocean floor . . . Where is the reason and the grace?”
Music will not be the only entertainment on offer Monday night though. Ms. James has also enlisted the talents of a local fire-dancer to accompany the bands.
“She usually does it to a sort of techno beat, so I don’t know if she’ll have a hard time with slow country waltzes,” she laughed.
“When I asked [Featherstone director] Francine Kelly if it was all right, she said just keep her away from the trees and she’ll be fine.”
As the generations mingle for a common musical purpose on Monday night, Mr. Waters is reminded of a scold his Brazilian mother once offered him when he picked up and left for the Island at a young age.
“Martha’s Vineyard isn’t part of the real world, she would say, MV is an old-age home for young people.”
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