First printed in the Sherman Herald Democrat
BY MARY JANE FARMER
Fred Spears
Question: If a JamBone went on by any other name, would it sound just as good?
Answer: Well, yes, if Freddie Lee Spears was at the helm.
JamBone is an open mic happening every Monday night at the Eagles Lodge in Denison. Spears sets up the equipment, leads off with some songs of his own, and, without drama, others join him in the stage area made to look like the other side of a corral. The audience finds itself treated to more musicians, more styles, more instruments, more energy, and more fun than it conceived.
One particular Monday night, for instance, Bill Kline, Lonnie Johnson, and Phillip Wildman played individually and joined Spears on some duos, which turned into trios, which turned into full band. Between the four musicians, they counted a total of 14 instruments they played, including, of course, guitars, and also mandolins and harmonicas. On one song, Spears was on the mandolin, Kline on the harmonica, and the other two on guitars. On another song, one started out on the mandolin, and then swapped it off for a guitar to another musician, and neither missed a lick, while a third kept up the tune on his harmonica.
And, they took turns swapping lead vocals. Spears opened with Hoyt Axton’s “Evangelina” and followed it with a Jackson Browne classic. Kline sang “Milk Cow Blues,” whether it was the George Strait or the Doc Watson or the Willie Nelson version, well, one would have to have been there to decide that. Kline’s voice lilted against Spear’s lower octave. Johnson, following Kline’s “Heartaches By The Number,” presented the Merle Haggard classic “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive.” Still in the Haggard mood, Johnson followed up with “Shelly’s Winter Love,” and you had to love it, especially with Spears working in harmonies behind Johnson’s pure country voice.
Wildman stepped up with songs from other genres, opening with a Bobby Helms’ classic, “My Special Angel,” and followed that with The Ink Spots’ “It’s A Sin To Tell A Lie,” his voice deep and graspy and raspy. And back to Haggard, with Spears on that classic “It’s Not Love (But It’s Not Bad).”
This is just a short picture of how the evening went. Sometimes, those in the audience would try to stump the band, yelling out something like, “Play some Elvis.” They would, some tapping their toes, others their heels.
Stumping Spears or any of that foursome when it comes to music is not a simple thing to do. Talent is only one of the attributes blessing Freddie Lee, experience is another, enhanced by his passion for all things musical.
Some of these men had never met one another. At the break, after backing each other on stage, they became acquainted. Most groups swap war stories or football stories or police stories. These guys swapped Nashville-recording-sessions and gigs-with-other-folks stories.
“And they cut that ribbon at noon with us standing right there playing beside them …”
“They called me, ‘Hey, you wanna play another gig with us …”
“Man, he was …”
“We didn’t get out of the studio til …”
Wildman told about jamming at his own house in Gordonville a few weeks earlier with world champion fiddler Texas Shorty (Jim Chancellor), who had included Wildman in a concert he played the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. “He called me and said, ‘An hour of fiddle music is a lot. Will you come and sing a couple of cowboy songs with me?'”
The others had similar experiences, and, yet, there they were, in Denison, making music together.
Why? Johnson and Wildman and Kline all said, individually and out of each other’s earshot, they wanted to be a part of JamBone because they liked being on the same stage with Spears. It was that simple.
Perhaps one way to describe JamBone is that is seems very much like picking around the campfires at a music festival.
JamBone begins at 7 p.m. each Monday night at the Eagles Lodge on Main Street in Denison.