Potluck! A CD of Tasty Autoharp Duets

I’ve been a duet player since I first sat down at a piano with my mother at age five or six.  The idea of playing with another person always made the music more fun.  So when I first heard Bob Lewis and Les Gustafson-Zook playing autoharp duets just for fun, I knew it was something that I’d learn how to do before long.

In 2003 I was part of the Autoharp Legacy Project, a collaboration dreamed up and organized by Bryan Bowers to create a snapshot of the then-current state of the autoharp community by teaming up more than 50 autoharpers with duet partners. That week in Nashville when we gathered to record our duets was an incredible amount of fun, and I was completely thrilled to be a part of it.  And the resulting double CD is still one of my favorite autoharp recordings.

Around 2013 my Autoharp Legacy duet partner, Bonnie Phipps, started bugging me to record a new CD of my own. I kept saying that I didn’t have a concept yet. And then one day we got to talking about duets, and I realized that an autoharp duet CD might be really fun to do.  So I asked Bonnie if she’d play with me and she said “Well, I’d do ONE with you.” Realizing that I had a lot of friends who might do the same, I started asking, and they all said “Yes!” It took more than two years to organize the whole thing and get everyone into the studio and do all the mixing and graphics.  But on my 60th birthday “Potluck” was released. You can find it at CD Baby as a physical package for $15, or you can download the album for $9.99 or individual tracks for $.99.  It will also be available electronically on iTunes once it works its way through the distribution channel.

If you download the CD and would like a copy of the booklet, you can download and print one right here.  It’s not as nice as the printed version, but it does have all the text and photos, so you can get the whole story yourself.

And just for fun, here’s the preview video with some of the great photos we took along the way.