Sundal, Yarrow and Donald

Sam Bush, a member of the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and the creator of the musical genre, “new grass,” had an album in mind.

He turned to Donnie Sundal, with whom he has a history of trading favors, and asked his buddy if he would be willing to record a demo album for him. Sundal, of Miramar Beach, was only too happy to help out.

Bush, whose New Grass Revival band once backed the late, great Leon Russell, would play several different instruments in recording the demo, which he intended to give to members of his band so that they could learn the songs and be prepared to lay them down for real.

The demo demolished those plans.

“Neither of us knew we were making a record,” Sundal said. “But somewhere along the line, someone told Sam that he would be a fool to re-record the demo, and months later, I found out we were going to actually use the stuff.”

And to good effect.

Their acoustic album, Radio John: Songs of John Hartford, received a 2024 Grammy Awards nomination for Best Bluegrass Album of the Year. In addition to serving as recording engineer on the album, Sundal sings background vocals on the song, In Tall Buildings.

“When you are not trying to do something, that’s when it happens,” Sundal said.

Sundal first met Bush via his association with the local band Dread Clampitt, which had added players in assembling an electric version of itself. Sundal joined Electric Dread on keyboards and co-produced a record with the group.

Dread’s guitar player, Kyle Ogle, aware that Bush was in town on vacation from Nashville, screwed up the nerve to deliver him some oysters and invite him to the band’s CD release party.

“Whatever Kyle did worked, and Sam came and played with us,” Sundal said. Bush has done so at various times since then, always with a caveat — “I may not be able to stay to the end” — and never leaving early.

Sundal was among the scores of performers who participated in the annual 30A Songwriters Festival, held in January and billed, “15 Years of Hooks, Lines and Singers.” He has the distinction of having played all 15.

On a Sunday evening at the Rosemary Beach Town Hall, he alternated songs with Joy Clark of New Orleans, seeking to complement, rather than overwhelm her soft, introspective songs of hope, desire and childhood memories. He answered Clark’s Tell it to the Wind — “Tell it everything I hope for, everything I desire” — with Stay Broke in which a forlorn soul laments, “I work my fingers to the bone and I can’t get no rest / Everything I try to do always turns out second best / It costs a whole lotta money / Just to stay broke.”

Here, then, was a restrained Sundal, but as if unable to help himself, he would turn up the dial with a driving song, Back to New Orleans, and the ribald Jump Back (In Your Pants). Sundal comes in various (musical) forms, and he may be at his best when he lets his bangs cascade over his eyes and wails.

He is a singer first — he discovered his musical ability in a high school choir class in Rockford, Illinois — and learned keyboards owing to a desire to be able to accompany himself. He “fell into” sound engineering, he said, and stuck with it to supplement his income as a performer and ensure that he wouldn’t have to get a regular job.

With New Orleans native and guitar player Derwin “Big D” Perkins, Sundal makes up the nucleus of Boukou Groove, a funk-and-soul band capable, as Sundal has written, of “taking you low to highs you never know.”

Derwin “Big D” Perkins (left) and Sundal (center) make up the soul-funk band Boukou Groove. Local musician Traylin Gastone (right) moonlights as the band’s drummer. Photo courtesy of Boukou Groove

Early in their relationship, Sundal listened as Perkins played a song he had been unable to finish. It married up in Donnie’s mind with a song he had started and abandoned.

“The vocals and words were right, but the music was not,” Sundal said. He put them on top of Perkins’ false start, and it all worked.

“When you play with some people, there is a certain communication,” Sundal said. “It’s not about how good you are together technically. You can play with the best musician in the world, and if he’s just playing over the top of you, it’s nothing. When two guys get it the same way, that’s chemistry.”

Such chemistry is contagious, and that’s what the universal language of music and 30A Songwriters are all about.

At 85, Peter Yarrow can still bring the chemistry, the connection and thoughtful communion. He, too, played at the Town Hall, where for a couple of songs, he was joined by James Taylor’s brother, Livingston, and succeeded even in causing a polite, listening-room audience to sing along with him.

The 30A Songwriters Festival encourages performers to share stories that relate to their songs. Perhaps no one was better equipped to do so than Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary fame, a man noted for his activism during the Vietnam War era and for his efforts to combat the proliferation of nuclear power plants. He once wrote a song encouraging people to get colonoscopies. He was inclusive before inclusivity was a thing.

“How many of you feel that there is a need in your heart and in your life for some understanding, for some compassion?” Peter Yarrow asked his audience before performing at the 2024 Songwriters Festival. Of 1960s folk fame, the 85-year-old musician and activist performed music new and old and was accompanied by Livingston Taylor for a Bob Dylan cover. Photo by Bryan Lasky

Yarrow doffed his roadster cap, shuffled toward a chair on the stage and settled in. His hands shook badly with an expressive tremor, and he was unable to reach and turn the tuning knobs on his guitar. A pick wasn’t working for him, and he asked if anyone in the crowd had a business card. A man came forward with one. Yarrow folded it in half and was ready to play.

“How many of you feel that there is a need in your heart and in your life for some understanding, for some compassion?” Yarrow asked. “That there’s some healing to do. How many of you feel that way?”

The audience applauded, and Yarrow proceeded to tell a story. He needed blinds for his apartment in New York. A young man arrived to take measurements and after doing so, asked Yarrow to write a song for his mother, who, he explained, was suffering with cancer. A big ask.

Something about the blinds man led Yarrow to agree to the request. He asked the man to supply him with a letter describing his mother and, on the basis of it, wrote With Your Face to the Wind (Harriet’s Song).

With your face to the wind, I see you smilin’ again

Spirit’s movin’ within, I know that you’re gonna win.

Harriet succumbed to cancer, but, said Yarrow, “she had the feeling when she heard this song that every moment was precious and belonged to her, and that’s how this song got made.”

Yarrow, joined by Taylor, proceeded to sing Bob Dylan’s existential questions …

How many roads must a man walk down

Before you call him a man?

How many seas must a white dove sail

Before she sleeps in the sand?

Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly

Before they’re forever banned?

… before they closed with Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land and all were reminded how vast and grand and small and delicate our country is.

It’s a darn shame that Amanda Donald was unable to take in the Yarrow moment, but she was a few miles removed from the scene playing music of her own at Red Fish Taco.

A master of string instruments including the mandolin, fiddle and guitar, folk-fusion musician Amanda Donald draws inspiration from ’60s genre trailblazers Simon & Garfunkel and Peter, Paul and Mary. Photos courtesy of Bryan Lasky

Like Yarrow, Donald, of Mobile, Alabama, is a balladeer for whom folk musicians are a big musical influence. She is a huge fan of Peter, Paul and Mary and her favorites are Simon & Garfunkel. Her No. 1 record is the duo’s Live from New York album from 1967.

Donald is an accomplished musician — mandolin, guitar, fiddle — who often plays with her upright-bass-playing sister, Katrina Kolb. She sings with an entrancing lilt that favors Alison Krauss, by design. Her voice can turn slightly haunting as it does in the title song from her first album, 100 Roots, about a man, Charles Boyington, wrongfully convicted of murder, hanged and buried in an unmarked grave where 100 roots “grow ’neath the shadow of an oak.”

Boyington was buried in 1835. Famous as trees go, the Boyington Oak still stands in Mobile.

Donald is an old soul possessed of a lively inner child. When a writer suggested that she was channeling or harboring past lives, her eyes widened.

“Lately, I’ve been nerding out on ancestry.com and digging into my family tree,” Donald said during a conversation following a festival performance on Saturday at the Camp Creek Inn. “There is a lot of Irish on my dad’s side, and I am super connected to them. I love Irish music. Have you ever heard of DNA memory?”

In ’Til the End of Time, Donald sings about her paternal grandparents who married young, had too many kids and struggled to support their household. When Peepaw started a worm farm as a side hustle, Meemee gladly suffered the indignity of delivering inventory to gas stations and bait shops.

She dies first.

Her mind ain’t working like it used to,

She calls her sister by her daughter’s name,

But he stays right there with her,

Keeps her safe ’til her last day.

“My music is from my heart, and I am glad when I learn that people can see that,” Donald said. Her songs are rich, deep, genuine and of her backyard.

She is a believer in love like that of her grandparents but recognizes that there are different kinds of love, some of them dangerous.

“I’m still denyin’ the rip tide is pulling me away from the shore / Back to your arms once more,” she sings in Red Flags.

Donald, too, is a believer in songs and hopes that an appetite for storytellers survives an era of diminished attention spans, superficiality and conformity to trends. In What If the Music Was Enough? she sings …

As long as you look pretty,

They don’t care if you can sing,

They just wanna look,

They don’t wanna listen,

But what if the music was enough?

Sometimes, it is enough, Amanda. Enough to turn tides, enough to pull people up and together. Sometimes, like love, it’s what there’s just too little of.

Music for Sale

Photo courtesy of Boukou Groove

Mario and Jort Koopman, owners of a vinyl record store in the Netherlands, are fans of Donnie Sundal and Derwin “Big D” Perkins, mainstays in the New Orleans-style funk band, Boukou Groove. The Koopmans reached out to the duo seeking permission to press a record made up of selected songs from Boukou’s previous releases and to market it across Europe. “They created a label called Juicy Records and they picked the songs, and we sent them photos,” Sundal said. The Koopmans are accepting orders for the album, called Groovin’, on their website.

Sundal and Perkins plan to make it available at boukougroove.com.

Photo courtesy of AmandaDonald.com

To obtain a copy of Amanda Donald’s CD, 100 Roots, visit amandadonald.com.