Bluegrass folks in and around Boston have a real treat in store on May 10, as do grassers all over the world with an internet connection, when The Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, MA hosts a special edition of Bluegrass Tuesdays in the form of a Geoff Bartley appreciation night tomorrow evening.
Geoff was the original host of this Tuesday Beantown tradition, lasting for 27 years until the pandemic shutdowns forced its demise. His hard work and dedication to keeping bluegrass active at The Cantab has been a big part of its ongoing success, and though Tony Watt has since taken over management of Bluegrass Tuesdays since The Cantab reopened, all of the local bluegrass community feels a deep debt of gratitude to Bartley.
So with Geoff returning tomorrow to join the proceedings, Tony has put a big show together in his honor. Boston’s top traditional bluegrass band, The Reunion Band, featuring Richard Brown on mandolin, BB Bowness on banjo, and Laura Orshaw on fiddle, will perform for the first time in two years, as will Bartley’s group, The Wabash Cannibals.
Given the historic nature of the evening’s entertainment, and a sincere desire to recognize Geoff for his many years of hard work promoting bluegrass, Watt will also be live-streaming the show on Facebook. Bluegrass Tuesdays have always had an unpredictable sense of spontaneity, with guest pickers showing up without notice, and Tony says that there are a number of surprises in the works for tomorrow night as well.
Everything starts at 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, May 10, and as The Cantab is not a large venue, Bostonians who would like to get a seat are encouraged to come early. The rest of us can simply RSVP for Tony’s Bluegrass Tuesdays Facebook Event, and you will get a notification when it goes live.
Over the years, thousands of people who went to college in Boston spent time enjoying the bluegrass music and jamming at The Cantab, but have since left the region for work or family reasons. Here is a great opportunity to relive the experience virtually, and see Geoff Bartley back on the stage.
Here’s the lineup for the next few weeks as well:
May 17 – Andy Reiner & Better Gnomes and Gardens (G Rockwell’s Jam opens)
May 24 – The Ruta Beggars (The New Grown-Ups open)
May 31 – Josh “Jug” Rinkel of The Po’ Ramblin’ Boys (The Splinters open)
June 7 – Andy Cambria & Friends (Deviant Folk opens)
Boston’s bluegrass community was seriously disheartened last summer when news broke that The Cantab Lounge, actually located in the adjacent city of Cambridge, was to be sold. For years the club was given over to Bluegrass Tuesdays every week, where fans could always hear some solid music, and pickers at every level could come out to jam.
The club – more of a dive bar – succumbed to the COVID-19 shutdowns of 2020 when owner Richard “Fitzy” Fitzgerald saw no alternative but to close up shop and hope that new owners might be interested in reviving it at some point. Their entire draw is live music, and once that was prohibited, his entire source of income was eliminated.
But during the summer of 2021, a new owner emerged in the person of Tim Dibble, a partner in a local private equity firm, who has reopened The Cantab as a live performance venue. He has made major improvements to the facility, including replacing the floors and renovating the bathrooms, but not so much so as to lose the dive bar charm of The Cantab. They expect to reopen sometime around Thanksgiving.
And now comes news that Bluegrass Tuesdays will return starting in December, under the direction of Boston native Tony Watt, guitarist with Alan Bibey & Grasstowne, and a popular local instructor for bluegrass musicians.
Tony offered up a preview of what to expect at the first edition on December 7.
“As in the past, Bluegrass Tuesdays at the Cantab will consist of three different groups playing music upstairs, as well as all-night jamming downstairs. For our Grand Reopening Party, we are very excited to welcome a band formed just for this auspicious occasion, The Cantab Bluegrass All-Stars.
The All-Stars are made up of some of the best-known and most-talented bluegrass musicians in the area:
Greg Liszt on banjo from Crooked Still, Bruce Springsteen
Laura Orshaw on fiddle from The Po’ Ramblin’ Boys
Ben Pearce on mandolin from Outlier Instrument Workshop
Frank Drake on bass from The Bag Boys, Saturday Burren Jam
And a very special guest on guitar and vocals”
A new web site for Bluegrass Tuesdays is up now online, where you can sign up for their email list, and contact them if your band would like to play one week.
Watt also shared this thumbnail history of bluegrass at The Cantab.
In 2017, the Cantab Lounge was named one of America’s 15 Best Dive Bars. Located in multi-ethnic, multi-generation Central Square in Cambridge, MA, it was also named one of the 50 Best Small Music Venues In America. Bluegrass Tuesdays at the Cantab Lounge began in September of 1993 and has grown to host regional and national artists on stage, and serve as a weekly gathering place for the local bluegrass community. For 27 years, Tuesday Night Bluegrass at the Cantab Lounge was hosted by folk icon Geoff Bartley, who was honored on February 13, 2004 when the City of Cambridge proclaimed it to be ‘Geoff Bartley Day.’
Geoff welcomed nationally-known bluegrass artists to The Cantab stage such as Dale Ann Bradley, Tony Trischka, Darol Anger, Jim Hurst & Missy Raines, David Grier, Chris Jones, Molly Tuttle, and the late James King. Bluegrass Tuesdays has also been a place where many bluegrass musicians have ‘cut their teeth,’ including members of The Infamous Stringdusters, Crooked Still, Della Mae, The Gibson Brothers, The Steep Canyon Rangers, Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen, Mile Twelve, The Po’ Ramblin’ Boys, and Alan Bibey & Grasstowne.
Wonderful news for grassers in the region. Here’s hoping that Bluegrass Tuesdays will last another 27 years and more!
A pall has fallen over the bluegrass and acoustic music community its in Boston over the news that the Cantab Lounge, the region’s home for bluegrass shows and jams for many years, is to be sold.
The popular night spot, located on Mass Ave in Cambridge, MA near the MIT campus, housed two music clubs in one. The Cantab was upstairs, and the Club Bohemia down, with shows going six nights a week with live music, jam sessions, pickin’ parties, and the Boston Poetry Slam. Always a familiar hang out for the area’s grassers, it also served as a beacon for the many young acoustic musicians who studied in the city’s many music colleges.
Mile Twelve, a hot bluegrass band touring all over the world, met there during the jam nights, and consider it their home spot in town. Every major bluegrass artist in the northeast has played the club at one time, and many acts from outside as well.
Word is that The Cantab, which has been shut down since mid-March, has hopes of reopening in a new location as soon as live music returns, but one never knows if the magic will be the same. Lots of bluegrass memories were made in this admitted dive bar, and lots of fine music was shared.
Tony Watt, an area native and well-known instructor now working with Alan Bibey & Grasstowne on guitar, tells us that it was an important piece of him being involved in bluegrass.
“I started going every week when I graduated from Georgia Tech in 1999, and my dad, Steve Watt, has been the de facto house band leader for most of the past 25 plus years. I attended almost every week from 1999 until I moved to Johnson City in 2002, and then I started attending again when I moved back to Cambridge in late 2008. I hosted a weekly jam there (as part of the bluegrass Tuesday night line-up) for roughly two years from 2017 until 2019.
Many bluegrass musicians ‘cut their teeth’ at the Cantab, including current and former members of The Infamous Stringdusters, Crooked Still, Della Mae, The Gibson Brothers, Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen, Joy Kills Sorrow, The Steep Canyon Rangers, Town Mountain, The Deadly Gentlemen, Tim O’Brien’s band, Mile Twelve, The Lonely Heartstrings Band, and many more.”
Today this message was shared on The Cantab Lounge Facebook page from Mickey Bliss:
“We are sad to announce that the Cantab Lounge is being sold. After the C-Note this is yet another club is a victim of COVID-19. We want to thank everyone for all the support over the years, we wish you well, and we will keep the Bohemia website open. Please send us your ideas as how we can continue to keep promoting artists during this COVID-19. And we’ll see what happens.”
Geoff Bartley, who has hosted an open mic night there for some time, shared this…
“Yes… it’s sad but true… our home-away-from-home… our song-swapping soiree… our fiddle tune temple… that sweet little joint everybody knew… the mighty, ever-burning Cantab… is being sold. I know nothing about the new owners’ plans, but think it highly unlikely that they include reopening the ancient and funky Cantab the way it is.
The virus will have to die down before we start up again in a new place, and that could take two or three more years. But do not be discouraged! My associates and I will be plunging valiantly ahead, scoping out potential venues and processing input and feedback from you.
So be patient! Don’t let yourself be hospitalized for withdrawal symptoms! Don’t lose your chops! Keep singing! Keep learning new songs! Don’t sell your mandolin! Don’t move to Nashville or Austin! Keep writing! Don’t let your calluses get soft!
In bluegrass songs, good times are either past and gone or expected in a future beyond the grave, but in the present, times are hard. The hammer is too heavy, the road is rough and rocky, and the bucket has a hole in it. Once something wonderful is lost, we can sing about it (They Tore Down the Hillbilly Ranch), and not before. Someday, songs will be written about Geoff Bartley and the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but since bluegrass Tuesdays at the Cantab are happily in the present, Geoff must make do for now with a handsome plaque from the Boston Bluegrass Union, naming him the recipient of its 2016 Industry Heritage Award.
Though pleased and honored by the award, Geoff seems convinced that it is unearned, calling himself “not a bluegrass guy.” His own illustrious musical career is rooted in traditional blues and folk. “I’m a fingerstyle player, and I had not played with a flat pick in a bluegrass style until Tuesday nights started. So I’m really new to flatpicking bluegrass style. I’m sure I was looked down on,” he says. “The musicians that moved me were solo guitar players/singers: Lightnin’ Hopkins, Dave van Ronk, Bob Dylan,” and that was the musical path he followed. He has received innumerable awards for performance and songwriting, include winning the New Hampshire Acoustic Guitar Contest twice, winning second place and a guitar in the Winfield National Fingerpicking Contest no fewer than four times, and winning first place in the 2015 Podunk songwriting competition with his song Sunny Side of Town. He has released over a dozen CDs, he is a regular sideman for Tom Paxton, he performs locally with Howie Tarnower, and his songs and solo instrumentals are licensed for films, television, and advertising around the world.
Geoff has nevertheless played a key role in the growth of Boston’s lively bluegrass scene. The Tuesday evening performances and jams he has run since 1993 are legendary. Members of national acts such as Crooked Still, Della Mae, the Gibson Brothers, and the Steep Canyon Rangers have played on the Cantab stage, and multiple rising young bands have formed via the Cantab jams. He books the bands, provides and runs the sound system, and passes the hat around the packed house to support the established and emerging bands that appear.
One sunny summer afternoon, we sit down for a conversation in Geoff’s living room, and I count two dozen visible guitars, plus numerous other cases and instruments. Trophies and plaques abound. Asked how he connected with the bluegrass world, Geoff vividly recalls the first time he heard bluegrass music. The rhythm, lyricism and dynamic emphasis of his speech may not translate to text, but they offer a glimpse of his songwriting prowess.
“In 1970, I was going out with the love of my life, and she was way hipper than me, and took me to a Sunday afternoon bluegrass jam at a building in Harvard Square,” Geoff says, “and I heard a band there, it’s the first time I ever saw Eric Levenson, I’ve remembered him ever since, and the power of that band. It was Joe Val and the New England Bluegrass Boys.”
“There must have been 200 people there, big gigantic beautiful rooms where people could be isolated acoustically from each other enough to have four bands going full tilt at the same time. I ended up next to a band that decided to rip through something at speed, and I’d never heard anything like it. I think that’s probably when I got inoculated.”
His next exposure to the bluegrass bug came at Winfield, Kansas, in the 1980s. “I didn’t go out there because of the bluegrass,” he says. “I went out there to try to win a guitar, and while I was there, I would go to the main stage, or some of the satellite stages, and I heard Hot Rize, and I got my hair blown straight back. It was like rock music, but they were playing it on banjos and fiddles and flattop Martins. God almighty, they were good!”
After touring into the late ’80s, Geoff became discouraged and depressed, and stopped performing for some time. During that period, he was offered the opportunity to run a folk singer/songwriter open mic at the Cantab Lounge, which he began in December of 1991. After a couple years, “It was strong enough that the owner of the Cantab offered me Tuesday nights to do whatever I wanted to with,” says Geoff. “I didn’t have a clue what to do with them.”
There were no weekly bluegrass events around Boston at the time, so he asked friends in the bluegrass world for advice and contacts, and according to Geoff, “Everyone I called for advice was extremely enthusiastic, and so, bit by bit, my ignorance and stupidity were replaced by little insights about how incredibly deep and wide the bluegrass community network is in greater Boston and New England.”
Bluegrass Tuesdays began in 1993, but remained slow for years, which he attributes in part to the location: “The Cantab, in former years, was rough. I mean broken bottle fights, fist fights, knife fights, police out there every night… That’s an exaggeration, but the Cantab was rough. It was a down and out stinkhole of a bar with smelly restrooms, and no person of any dignity and class would go in there,” plus it was hard to find a parking spot.
During those years, though, Geoff came to appreciate another side of bluegrass music. “I began to realize that these were nice people, they had found something that meant something to them, and they were friendly to me, and if the music wasn’t sophisticated, that gave it an advantage, because it was accessible to a wide group. And then the messages in bluegrass began to penetrate my tortured and fevered and screaming mad brain, and these are not messages advocating destruction, and the themes touched upon home and love and church and all that. I’m still a million miles from that, but it’s okay. And we’re able to play these songs together and it’s inclusive and it’s healing and it’s wholesome and it’s fun.”
Eventually the bluegrass evenings began to pick up steam, getting a big boost from the release of O Brother, Where Art Thou in December of 2000, and its popular soundtrack of bluegrass and mountain music. Says Geoff, “It was a huge boom for us. That was a Coen brother’s movie, starring George Clooney, and it made American string band music, all of a sudden, thank you Ethan and Joel, made it hip.” By early 2001, bluegrass Tuesdays had become so popular that the bar owner added an additional bartender and opened the basement and stairwells to jammers.
“Three places where people can jam. And this is a big deal, “Geoff says. “So many people have said ‘Yeah, I met him in a jam on the back stairs,’ and now they’re recording for Sugar Hill Records and touring Belgium!”
He still denies deserving the Boston Bluegrass Union award, however, saying, “I see it completely opposite. I see it that I just got lucky and I hit this huge vein.” He credits other factors, such as the presence of Rounder Records nearby, support from the Boston Bluegrass Union, the longrunning radio show Hillbilly at Harvard, and perhaps most of all, Matt Glaser, renowned jazz and roots violinist and longtime head of the strings department at Berklee College of Music, where he is currently Artistic Director of the American Roots Music program.
“You’ve got all these things going on, Matt Glaser bringing students over to the Cantab the day they turn 21,” says Geoff. “Everyone coming through [Berklee] with a fiddle is going to be exposed to Matt’s huge brain and his enormous skill set. Matt is a very valuable, very deep resource, he knows everybody, and he is known all over the world. He is an educator who has influenced several generations of fiddle players.”
Matt Glaser sees it otherwise. Reached by phone, he says, “It would be almost impossible to overstate what he has done! The Cantab is the epicenter of the bluegrass scene in Boston. Geoff is a wonderful, wonderful person and a wonderful, wonderful musician. He may say he doesn’t play bluegrass, but I have enjoyed playing all kinds of music with him, I love playing blues and bluegrass with him. And he has created an incredible beautiful thing, and it has nurtured all these young bands. He’s absolutely deserving of this award, and it shows how somebody can, by persevering, create an incredible scene.”
Members of the redhot band Mile Twelve first met at the Cantab, and they concur. “The first time I met Bronwyn she was on the stage of the Cantab, and I was like, who’s that young lady fiddling, and she was killing Gold Rush. Probably Nate and Evan too, it’s kind of the place to meet,” says banjo player B.B. Bowness. “A lot bands form from meeting there and jamming there. He’s a force of the scene in Boston.” She cites the importance of 23 years of consistent Tuesday evening bluegrass in building the local bluegrass community, adding, “Some weeks, it’s like every single person I know is at the Cantab. Darol Anger is dropping by, or Matt Glaser, all those amazing pickers.”
Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, Mile Twelve’s prizewinning fiddler, agrees, saying “He was always one of the most supportive people at the Cantab for me. I came to Berklee as an Irish fiddle player and was really interested in bluegrass and pretty intimidated by it, and going to the Cantab every week for many years was how I got into it. It’s amazing that he’s done it for so long and created such an amazing community in Boston. I don’t think the bluegrass community in Boston would be nearly as strong without the Cantab.”
So when Geoff claims, “The community was already built, all I did was stumble blindly into a stage,” take it with several grains of salt. Bluegrass around Boston is enjoying a golden age, and Geoff Bartley has played an essential role in its creation. Someday, the songs will be written. For now bluegrass pickers and fans can revel in the knowledge that if you show up at the Cantab on a Tuesday night, the performances will be brilliant, the jamming will be hot, the beer will be cold, and Geoff will be there, making it all work.
Interviews are edited and condensed. For more about Geoff Bartley, visit his website at www.geoffbartley.com. Photo of Geoff is by Dan Tappan, used by permission. The Cantab Lounge is located at 738 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139, and the performance calendar is here. The Cantab has cleaned up well over the past 23 years, but it remains a genuine dive bar with great live music every night, and parking is worse than ever.
