Shake & Dana back at Kerrville

I came upon this wonderful video of Shake Russell and Dana Cooper at Kerrville in a roundabout way. I became a fan of Shake’s the first time I saw the band Ewing Street Times, that also featured the late, great John Vandiver. The next I heard from Shake was on an LP that was recorded during a live session at a Houston radio station. One of the first songs I heard off that album was You’ve Got a Lover and my immediate reaction was "Who’s that girl singing with Shake?" Of course, "that girl" turned out to be the wonderful Dana Cooper.

I first saw them play together in the late-1970s when the Shake Russell-Dana Cooper Band played the Kerrville Folk Festival, which, for the first quarter century of its existence, I attended every year. I was completely blown away. Besides Shake and Dana, the band consisted of the late Michael Mashkes on bass, the incredible Riley Osborne on keyboards and Jim Alderman on drums.

Tomorrow is Jim Alderman’s birthday and, because of that, I searched for videos of Jim playing with Shake and Dana. I couldn’t find that one, but I did come across this wonderful version of Shake’s Acadian Angel at the 2001 Kerrville festival. In addition to Dana, the tune features Annie Clark on vocals and someone on fiddle that I frankly don’t recognize but might be a former friend of Shake’s who later had a falling out with him over something I could never ascertain.

Be that as it may. Enjoy the video and, in another roundabout way, Happy Birthday, Jim.