Bluegrass Highway: Pick and Stomp: The Fog Valley Drifters.
Bluegrass Highway
Fog Valley Drifters drift into fog city.
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Despite living in different areas and working in different professions, the five members of the Fog Valley Drifters are united by one thing: a love of good old-fashioned bluegrass music. The band, featuring fiddler Al Tsacle (the head of the computer technology department at Cal-State Stanislaus), singer/mandolin player Rachel Bennett (a teacher at Seaside High School), singer/guitarist Ross Redding (an optometrist living in Modesto), bassist Brooks Judd (a dispatcher for Foster Farms in Turlock), and banjo player Colonel Chuck Hurd (the vice-principal at Carmel Middle School), somehow find the time to meet up for gigs at places like Columbia’s Jack Douglas Saloon and Modesto’s St. Stan’s Brewery.
On an eight-song demo CD, the quintet plays light-hearted traditional numbers like “Whiskey Before Breakfast,” a great fiddle-driven ditty, and “Dooley,” a song about a moonshiner, alongside more serious fare like “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “Carrie Brown,” a Steve Earle tune from his 1999 bluegrass album, The Mountain.
At their Ocean Thunder show, Hurd says the group will probably debut a few originals written by Bennett. “They are like fiddle tunes,” he says.
The Fog Valley Drifters play Ocean Thunder, 214 Lighthouse Ave., Monterey, Saturday at 9pm. No Cover. 643-9169.
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