The EILEEN HEMPHILL-HALEY BAND is the combined artistry of singer-songwriter-guitarist Eileen Hemphill-Haley; lap-slide (aka ‘dobro’) player Michael Proctor; bassist Ron Sharp; and drummer Brandon Schwab.  We describe our musical style “story-oriented folk-rock," and although the sound is quite contemporary, it is also clearly rooted in traditional American folk, rock and blues, and reflects the individual and combined experiences in music for the group.

EH-H:  vocal & guitar

Ron Sharp:  bass

Brandon Schwab: drums

Michael Proctor, dobro

 

Meet my band…

 

To give you a bit of background of who we are as a group, I interviewed Ron Sharp, Brandon Schwab, and Michael Proctor, and provide you with the following insights;

 

 

Ron Sharp knows the secret to playing bass, and to locking in with drums in a rhythm section, is to blend in so naturally with the music that people totally take it for granted.  It doesn’t seem fair, but that’s the way it is with bass.  People only really notice it when it’s played badly, or missing altogether.  He’s philosophical about it all, and explains it like this:  “When I listen to music, every song is a story.  How do you support the story and bring out the texture and color? The best bass and drums are so good together that you almost can’t tell which is which; the bass is like an extension of he drums.  If you’re not wedded to the drums you’re just getting in the way.”   Ron exemplifies these comments when he plays, with his wonderfully solid and melodic style that adds just the right feel to every song, and gets him none of the attention he deserves.

    Ron was one of the first people I met when I moved from Oregon to northern California.  We didn’t meet because of music right off, but rather through an act of kindness (by him) toward a stranger (me) new in town and looking for a place for my family to live.  He helped us find a house to rent, and as a thank you I dropped off a note and a CD at his door.  He followed through with an email saying’ “ hey! I didn’t realize you were a musician.  I play bass and my best friend plays dobro.”  The next thing I knew we had a band, rehearsing at the house he helped us find.

Ron Sharp is a native of southern California, born on New Year’s Eve in 1950, and raised in Santa Ana.  A witty and soft-spoken guy, he started playing guitar as a teenager, and in the early 70’s decided to move to northern California to pursue music more full time.  Over the years he played guitar -- and eventually bass -- with a number of different rock, country and bluegrass groups.   He now focuses on the bass, and plays possibly the most beautiful bass guitar on the northcoast, a 2004 Moonstone Neptune bass hand-made by his close friend and master luthier Steve Helgeson.  Ron credits numerous musical influences in rock and acoustic music, from Walter Becker to Alison Krauss, and likes listening to songwriters like James McMurtry and John Hyatt.  He’s not crazy about jazz, but loves a great ballad. Besides playing bass for the EH-H Band, Ron also handles a lot of the behind-the-scenes organizing for the group, including making song charts and handling publicity.

Ron is married to Barbara Browning, the founder of OrderWithin.com, and is the father of Kelsey (22).  He also has two grandkids, McKenzie (2) and a new baby, Ryan.  Be sure to check out Ron’s work on the “Dog Tracks” CD, and if by chance you catch the band live, tune in Ron’s playing.  You can’t help but notice how good he sounds, and also how much fun he seems to have when he plays.  It’s really great.

 

 

Born November 12, 1970, Brandon Schwab is that smart, wisecracking guy at the back of the band, holding all the sound together.  He’s a wonderfully subtle genius on the drums, a great friend, and my long-time collaborator.  Brandon is also known as Dr. Brandon Schwab, Ph.D. in geology, and professor at Humboldt State University.  He’s married to Angie Schwab, an artist’s rep and owner of Humboldt Artworks in northern California, and father of two sons, Avery (3) and Harper (1).

Raised in rural Ohio, music was a mainstay in Brandon’s life beginning in elementary school.  He played in every school music group through his high school years, and continued in orchestra through his first year of college.  His favorite thing was playing in pit orchestras, where he might single-handedly play all the percussion parts for different performances.  But along with music he always had a right-brained love for science and nature, and ended up putting the drums away for a number of years while focusing his efforts on an education in earth science.  But during graduate school at the University of Oregon, he was recruited back into drumming, first with an absolutely raucous surf band (The “Surf Chiefs”) and starting in 1996, with a solo folk-rock artist (that would be me, y’all) looking for just the right drummer to expand her sound.  

As for musical influences?  “Everything I listen to influences me,” he says.  “My playing style has definitely evolved over the years.  I use to play straight rock-and-roll, but also had a lot of jazz influences.  But as for my style, I always like to think about how the drums fit into the music.  My goal is to be supporting, and not be in the way.”

“I guess my goal is to not be noticed,” he laughs.

The truth is, you can’t help but notice Brandon’s drumming because it works so well with whatever music he plays.  For examples of his work, check out most of the tracks on “Porch Songs,” all of the tracks on “Dog Tracks,” or catch him at a live show!

 

 

“The first thing you need to know about me,” confesses lap-slide guitarist Michael Proctor, “is that I’m a big liar.  You can’t believe anything I tell you.”

    So, apparently there’s a chance that much of what you’ll read here about Michael Proctor is completely untrue.  How would I know otherwise?  I’ve worked with Michael for a couple of years now, playing with him in the EH-H band and as a duo, and collaborating on two CDs.  I’ve met his family, so I know he’s been with his wife Paula for 23 years, and that they have three kids, Mia (20), Gina (18) and Jackson (15).  But how would I know if he was really born in Newmarket, Canada on April 9, 1953, and lived there only three months before his family moved to Orange County, California where he grew up?  He claims he started playing piano as a kid, got into guitar as a teenager, and fell in love with slide guitar after being wowed by a friend’s collection of blues records.  But how do we know for sure?  

I have some verification of facts from Michael’s best friend (and bassist for the EH-H band), Ron Sharp.  Ron and Michael have been friends since high school in southern California, and Ron informed me that yes, as a teenager Michael was known for playing slide guitar, and then later played pedal steel as well.  He recalled that Michael’s first pedal steel had coat hangers for pedal rods.  Somehow, knowing Michael, this sounds true.

Michael says he was raised on rock and roll, loves jazz and bluegrass, but actually likes to play anything in the realm of acoustic music.  In the early 70s he moved to northern California (verified by Ron, since they both moved there), where he played in a number of different country groups and string bands.  This included “Buckshot,” the house band at the biggest honky tonk on the northern California coast, the Ramada Inn in Arcata.  Every weekend Buckshot played for a crowd of college students, hippies and loggers, and miraculously no one was ever killed.   But after a while bluegrass music became the main interest for Michael.  This led him to invest in his first dobro, the instrument for which he is best known today.  A “dobro,” of course, is a kind of wood-body lap-slide guitar that has a distinctive sound prevalent in bluegrass music.  Michael’s regular old Gibson acoustic guitar, which he had been using to play slide since high school, wasn’t going to cut it for playing bluegrass.  So, in 1976 he and Ron took a 300-mile trip to San Francisco in search of a new dobro (Ron verifies this, too).  “Our mission,” Michael recounts, “was not to return until we found one.”  Just one short weekend later they returned home with a 1975 Dobro D-60, the very guitar he plays today.

OK, now we know he got the dobro, but how did he learn how to play it?  Self-taught for the most part, claims Michael, but he also credits an all-night jam session with Vince Gill in the late 70s for giving him a huge dose of new ideas and an instantaneous boost in his playing.  Um, Vince Gill?  The country music star?  Yes, Michael claims, he was just a kid at the time, a child prodigy if you will, playing in a touring band passing through town.  Believe it or not…

Michael’s playing is well known in northern California, and he has appeared on I-don’t-know-how-many recording projects over the years.  This is true; I really don’t know how many, but it is lots and lots.  The guy makes everyone sound good, so the calls keep coming.  I met him in 2003, and in November of that year we played our first gig together as a band.  We have done a lot of work together since then.

So, how much of Michael’s story here is true?  Who can say?  But I can tell you this:  Michael Proctor is great to work with, and it is a ton of fun collaborating with him.  He makes playing that dobro -- a very complicated instrument -- sound like it’s the easiest thing in the world.  Check out his work on both “Dog Tracks” and “Ordinary Life,” or do yourself a favor and catch him at a live show.  The ideas he comes up with for lead parts are so cool, and never cease to floor me.  And that my friends, is no lie.