Jon Shain
Encyclopedia
Jon Shain is an American
folk
musician
, guitarist
, singer-songwriter
and recording artist. Since 1986, he has been based in Durham
, North Carolina
.
Shain has produced several solo albums, and has also recorded with the bands 'WAKE' and 'Flyin' Mice'. Since 1988, he has performed live with Jorma Kaukonen
, David Grisman
, Jackson Browne
, John Hiatt
, and others. Shain played electric guitar
as part of North Carolina
blues great Richard "Big Boy" Henry's backing band in the 1980s.
dyehouse
.
Shain got his first acoustic guitar after being influenced by watching childhood friend Fran Cleary play a cheap Univox
electric model. Things went poorly, as within a short time, he accidentally broke the rented instrument in half. At age 12 he started up again with another borrowed model, this time showing more serious interest and taking lessons.
For high school
, Shain attended Governor Dummer Academy (GDA), in Byfield, Massachusetts
, where he met up with other aspiring musicians among its small student body. Almost immediately, Shain joined a student rock
band called Positive Feedback, where he played electric rhythm guitar
. At age 14, he was the youngest member of the band, and it was here that he gained his first experiences on stage. The following year, Shain and childhood friend Jim Barr, along with fellow GDA students FJ Ventre and John Miller, formed another rock cover band called The Partisans (the band's name unknowingly matched an already established punk
band from the UK). This experience further sharpened his skills and confidence as a live performer, as he was responsible for most of the arrangements performed by the band. The Partisans achieved minor notoriety throughout the region, playing dances and private parties during Shain's remaining years in high school. Eventually mixing in originals by Shain and Barr, The Partisans live set mainly consisted of classic rock staples from Chuck Berry
, The Beatles
, The Rolling Stones
, The Clash
, R.E.M., and U2
.
Shain graduated from GDA in 1985.
in Durham, North Carolina
, where he majored in history. It was during this time that Shain was introduced to the folk music of the region. In addition to playing in a frat-rock cover band, The Blind Mice, Shain began to research and play Piedmont Blues
. Shain joined The Slewfoot Blues Band, led by Mickey "Slewfoot" McLaughlin and "Sleepy" Tom Forsythe. Through Slewfoot, Shain met NC blues artists such as Big Boy Henry, John Dee Holeman
, Lightnin' Wells, and jazz pianist Brother Yusef Salim. Shain also took opportunity of Duke's great jazz program, studying one semester with saxophonist Paul Jeffery, a veteran of Thelonious Monk
's group. Shain graduated from Duke in the summer of 1989, and immediately began pursuing a career in music.
and Virginia
. Catching the ear of soundman and recording engineer Charles Jones, Flyin' Mice was signed to Jones' fledgling independent label Dr. Lime Records. The Mice expanded to a trio with the addition of drummer Mark Simonsen. In 1992, John Whitehead left the band and was replaced by bassist Aaron Oliva and Ben Saffer on guitar and banjo
. Flyin' Mice earned the tag "psychedelic bluegrass
" due to its incorporation of vintage bluegrass influences into its jam-rock
performance style. This incarnation of the band gigged steadily up and down the East Coast
until the band's breakup in 1996.
In the spring of 1996, Shain and Simonsen started a new group called WAKE, with Kirsten O'Rourke Simonsen on vocals and Stu Cole
on bass. In 1997, Cole left to join Squirrel Nut Zippers
and he was replaced by Darrell Dixon on bass and John Currie on guitar. WAKE leaned more towards an alt-country sound. WAKE broke up in early 1998.
In the fall of 1998, Shain and Simonsen began work on what would become Jon Shain's first solo album, Brand New Lifetime, which ranged from the alt-country of WAKE to a more stripped down re-discovery of Shain's acoustic blues
background. Shain began to play shows solo and with his new group, The Jon Shain Trio - composed of FJ Ventre on bass, John Currie on dobro and guitar, and Bill Newton on harmonica. This group has stayed together the longest of any of shain's musical associations. Shain has recorded several critically acclaimed albums on his own Flyin' Records and continues to tour regularly.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
folk
Folk music
Folk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....
musician
Musician
A musician is an artist who plays a musical instrument. It may or may not be the person's profession. Musicians can be classified by their roles in performing music and writing music.Also....* A person who makes music a profession....
, guitarist
Guitarist
A guitarist is a musician who plays the guitar. Guitarists may play a variety of instruments such as classical guitars, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, and bass guitars. Some guitarists accompany themselves on the guitar while singing.- Versatility :The guitarist controls an extremely...
, singer-songwriter
Singer-songwriter
Singer-songwriters are musicians who write, compose and sing their own musical material including lyrics and melodies. As opposed to contemporary popular music singers who write their own songs, the term singer-songwriter describes a distinct form of artistry, closely associated with the...
and recording artist. Since 1986, he has been based in Durham
Durham, North Carolina
Durham is a city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. It is the county seat of Durham County and also extends into Wake County. It is the fifth-largest city in the state, and the 85th-largest in the United States by population, with 228,330 residents as of the 2010 United States census...
, North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
.
Shain has produced several solo albums, and has also recorded with the bands 'WAKE' and 'Flyin' Mice'. Since 1988, he has performed live with Jorma Kaukonen
Jorma Kaukonen
Jorma Ludwik Kaukonen Jr. is an American blues, folk, and rock guitarist, best known for his work with Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna.-Biography:...
, David Grisman
David Grisman
David Grisman is an American bluegrass/newgrass mandolinist and composer of acoustic music. In the early 1990s, he started the Acoustic Disc record label in an effort to preserve and spread acoustic or instrumental music.-Biography:Grisman grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey...
, Jackson Browne
Jackson Browne
Jackson Browne is an American singer-songwriter and musician who has sold over 17 million albums in the United States alone....
, John Hiatt
John Hiatt
John Hiatt is an American rock guitarist, pianist, singer, and songwriter. He has played a variety of musical styles on his albums, including New Wave, blues and country. Hiatt has been nominated for several Grammy Awards - although he has never won- and has been awarded a variety of other...
, and others. Shain played electric guitar
Electric guitar
An electric guitar is a guitar that uses the principle of direct electromagnetic induction to convert vibrations of its metal strings into electric audio signals. The signal generated by an electric guitar is too weak to drive a loudspeaker, so it is amplified before sending it to a loudspeaker...
as part of North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
blues great Richard "Big Boy" Henry's backing band in the 1980s.
Early life
Shain is Jewish, the eldest of three children to Steven and Carol Shain, who are also Haverhill, Massachusetts natives. His father and grandfather operated a small but successful textileTextile
A textile or cloth is a flexible woven material consisting of a network of natural or artificial fibres often referred to as thread or yarn. Yarn is produced by spinning raw fibres of wool, flax, cotton, or other material to produce long strands...
dyehouse
Dyeing
Dyeing is the process of adding color to textile products like fibers, yarns, and fabrics. Dyeing is normally done in a special solution containing dyes and particular chemical material. After dyeing, dye molecules have uncut Chemical bond with fiber molecules. The temperature and time controlling...
.
Shain got his first acoustic guitar after being influenced by watching childhood friend Fran Cleary play a cheap Univox
Univox
For Univox portable keyboards, see Vox In the early 1960s the Unicord Corporation, a manufacturer of electronic transformers purchased the Amplifier Corporation of America of Westbury, New York. They began marketing a line of amplifiers under the name of Univox. The company was purchased by Gulf +...
electric model. Things went poorly, as within a short time, he accidentally broke the rented instrument in half. At age 12 he started up again with another borrowed model, this time showing more serious interest and taking lessons.
For high school
High school
High school is a term used in parts of the English speaking world to describe institutions which provide all or part of secondary education. The term is often incorporated into the name of such institutions....
, Shain attended Governor Dummer Academy (GDA), in Byfield, Massachusetts
Byfield, Massachusetts
Byfield is a village in the town of Newbury, in Essex County, Massachusetts, in the United States. It borders West Newbury, Georgetown, and Rowley. It is located about 30 miles north-northeast of Boston, along Interstate 95, about 10 miles south of the border between New Hampshire and...
, where he met up with other aspiring musicians among its small student body. Almost immediately, Shain joined a student rock
Rock music
Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...
band called Positive Feedback, where he played electric rhythm guitar
Rhythm guitar
Rhythm guitar is a technique and rôle that performs a combination of two functions: to provide all or part of the rhythmic pulse in conjunction with singers or other instruments; and to provide all or part of the harmony, ie. the chords, where a chord is a group of notes played together...
. At age 14, he was the youngest member of the band, and it was here that he gained his first experiences on stage. The following year, Shain and childhood friend Jim Barr, along with fellow GDA students FJ Ventre and John Miller, formed another rock cover band called The Partisans (the band's name unknowingly matched an already established punk
Punk rock
Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...
band from the UK). This experience further sharpened his skills and confidence as a live performer, as he was responsible for most of the arrangements performed by the band. The Partisans achieved minor notoriety throughout the region, playing dances and private parties during Shain's remaining years in high school. Eventually mixing in originals by Shain and Barr, The Partisans live set mainly consisted of classic rock staples from Chuck Berry
Chuck Berry
Charles Edward Anderson "Chuck" Berry is an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter, and one of the pioneers of rock and roll music. With songs such as "Maybellene" , "Roll Over Beethoven" , "Rock and Roll Music" and "Johnny B...
, The Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
, The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones are an English rock band, formed in London in April 1962 by Brian Jones , Ian Stewart , Mick Jagger , and Keith Richards . Bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts completed the early line-up...
, The Clash
The Clash
The Clash were an English punk rock band that formed in 1976 as part of the original wave of British punk. Along with punk, their music incorporated elements of reggae, ska, dub, funk, rap, dance, and rockabilly...
, R.E.M., and U2
U2
U2 are an Irish rock band from Dublin. Formed in 1976, the group consists of Bono , The Edge , Adam Clayton , and Larry Mullen, Jr. . U2's early sound was rooted in post-punk but eventually grew to incorporate influences from many genres of popular music...
.
Shain graduated from GDA in 1985.
College years
Shain attended Duke UniversityDuke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
in Durham, North Carolina
Durham, North Carolina
Durham is a city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. It is the county seat of Durham County and also extends into Wake County. It is the fifth-largest city in the state, and the 85th-largest in the United States by population, with 228,330 residents as of the 2010 United States census...
, where he majored in history. It was during this time that Shain was introduced to the folk music of the region. In addition to playing in a frat-rock cover band, The Blind Mice, Shain began to research and play Piedmont Blues
Piedmont blues
Piedmont blues refers primarily to a guitar style, the Piedmont fingerstyle, which is characterized by a fingerpicking approach in which a regular, alternating thumb bass string rhythmic pattern supports a syncopated melody using the treble strings generally picked with the fore-finger,...
. Shain joined The Slewfoot Blues Band, led by Mickey "Slewfoot" McLaughlin and "Sleepy" Tom Forsythe. Through Slewfoot, Shain met NC blues artists such as Big Boy Henry, John Dee Holeman
John Dee Holeman
John Dee Holeman is an American Piedmont blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter. His music includes elements of Texas blues, R&B and jazz. In his younger days he was also known for his proficiency as a 'buckdancer'.-Biography:...
, Lightnin' Wells, and jazz pianist Brother Yusef Salim. Shain also took opportunity of Duke's great jazz program, studying one semester with saxophonist Paul Jeffery, a veteran of Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Sphere Monk was an American jazz pianist and composer considered "one of the giants of American music". Monk had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "Epistrophy", "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser"...
's group. Shain graduated from Duke in the summer of 1989, and immediately began pursuing a career in music.
Professional career
In the spring of 1989, Shain and bassist John Whitehead formed a blues-rock duo, Flyin' Mice. They began to play shows at local clubs and festivals in The CarolinasThe Carolinas
The Carolinas is a term used in the United States to refer collectively to the states of North and South Carolina. Together, the two states + have a population of 13,942,126. "Carolina" would be the fifth most populous state behind California, Texas, New York, and Florida...
and Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
. Catching the ear of soundman and recording engineer Charles Jones, Flyin' Mice was signed to Jones' fledgling independent label Dr. Lime Records. The Mice expanded to a trio with the addition of drummer Mark Simonsen. In 1992, John Whitehead left the band and was replaced by bassist Aaron Oliva and Ben Saffer on guitar and banjo
Banjo
In the 1830s Sweeney became the first white man to play the banjo on stage. His version of the instrument replaced the gourd with a drum-like sound box and included four full-length strings alongside a short fifth-string. There is no proof, however, that Sweeney invented either innovation. This new...
. Flyin' Mice earned the tag "psychedelic bluegrass
Bluegrass music
Bluegrass music is a form of American roots music, and a sub-genre of country music. It has mixed roots in Scottish, English, Welsh and Irish traditional music...
" due to its incorporation of vintage bluegrass influences into its jam-rock
Jam band
-Ambiguity:By the late 1990s use of the term jam band also became ambiguous. An editorial at jamband.com suggested that any band of which a primary band such as Phish has done a cover of be included as jam band. The example was including New York post-punk band Talking Heads after Phish performed...
performance style. This incarnation of the band gigged steadily up and down the East Coast
East Coast of the United States
The East Coast of the United States, also known as the Eastern Seaboard, refers to the easternmost coastal states in the United States, which touch the Atlantic Ocean and stretch up to Canada. The term includes the U.S...
until the band's breakup in 1996.
In the spring of 1996, Shain and Simonsen started a new group called WAKE, with Kirsten O'Rourke Simonsen on vocals and Stu Cole
Stu Cole
Stewart Bryan Cole is a former Major League Baseball player. Cole played for the Kansas City Royals in the 1991 season. In nine games, Cole had one hit in seven at-bats, with two walks...
on bass. In 1997, Cole left to join Squirrel Nut Zippers
Squirrel Nut Zippers
The Squirrel Nut Zippers are a band formed in 1993 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina by James "Jimbo" Mathus , Katharine Whalen , Chris Phillips on drums, Don Raleigh on bass and sideman Ken Mosher....
and he was replaced by Darrell Dixon on bass and John Currie on guitar. WAKE leaned more towards an alt-country sound. WAKE broke up in early 1998.
In the fall of 1998, Shain and Simonsen began work on what would become Jon Shain's first solo album, Brand New Lifetime, which ranged from the alt-country of WAKE to a more stripped down re-discovery of Shain's acoustic blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
background. Shain began to play shows solo and with his new group, The Jon Shain Trio - composed of FJ Ventre on bass, John Currie on dobro and guitar, and Bill Newton on harmonica. This group has stayed together the longest of any of shain's musical associations. Shain has recorded several critically acclaimed albums on his own Flyin' Records and continues to tour regularly.
Solo albums
| 1999 | Brand New Lifetime | Flyin' Records | CD | ||||||
| 2001 | Fools and Fine Ladies | Flyin' Records | CD | ||||||
| 2003 | No Tag, No Tail Light | Flyin' Records | CD | ||||||
| 2005 | Home Before Long | Flyin' Records | CD | ||||||
| 2007 | Army Jacket Winter Army Jacket Winter Army Jacket Winter is a 2007 album by Jon Shain. Accompanying Shain on the album is the Jon Shain Trio, made up of FJ Ventre, John Currie, and Bill Newton. Drummer Zeke Hutchins and jazz trumpeter Stephen Franckevich appear as guest musicians on the album... |
Flyin' Records | CD | ||||||
| 2009 | Times Right Now | Flyin' Records | CD | ||||||
| 2011 | The Kress Sessions | Flyin' Records | CD |
Other albums
| 1988 | Big Boy Henry & The Slewfoot Blues Band |
Big Boy Henry & The Slewfoot Blues Band |
Self-released | Cassette | ||||||||
| 1991 | Flyin' Mice | So Hi Drive | Dr. Lime Records | CD and Cassette | ||||||||
| 1992 | Flyin' Mice | Paranoia Drugstore Blues / Running Free |
Dr. Lime Records | 7" single | ||||||||
| 1994 | Flyin' Mice | Brighter Day | Dr. Lime Records | CD and Cassette | ||||||||
| 1996 | Flyin' Mice | So Long | Self-released | Cassette | ||||||||
| 1997 | WAKE | WAKE | Flyin' Records | CD | ||||||||
Other recording appearances
| 1999 | David Scott Kepford | Steps | DSK Records | CD | ||||||||
| 2000 | Phil Cohen and Patricia Ford | Caution to the Wind | Hard Miles Music | CD | ||||||||
| 2001 | Judy Woodall's Muletrain | Black Pony | Back Home Music | CD | ||||||||
| 2003 | Phil Cohen and Patricia Ford | Long Road 'til Sunrise | Hard Miles Music | CD | ||||||||
| 2003 | Judy Woodall and Muletrain | Monkey Goat Sinnerman | Back Home Music | CD | ||||||||
| 2004 | Dana Kletter | Mrs. Moon | CD | |||||||||
| 2008 | Jefferson Pepper | American Evolution | American Fallout Records | CD | ||||||||
| 2010 | Jim Avett | Tribes | Ramseur Records | CD | ||||||||
| 2010 | Greg Humphreys | Realign Your Mind | Phrex Records | CD | ||||||||
| 2010 | Danny Gotham | Guitarheel | self-released | CD | ||||||||
| 2010 | Jon Shain | Song for Isabella | in the film Generation Exile | DVD | ||||||||
| 2010 | Jon Shain | Winter Waits | Hudson Harding Holiday sampler vol. 5 | CD | ||||||||