FORKS — Crescent Blue, the West End bluegrass band featuring Barney Munger, Ken Lambert, Dave Lenahan and Mary Meyer, is set to give a free concert at Peninsula College’s Forks site this Saturday night.
The 7 p.m. show will bring songs sad and joyous, fast and slow, familiar and not so familiar, and everyone is welcome to the free music at the Forks college site, 71 S. Forks Ave.
Meyer, the quartet’s singer and rhythm guitarist, fell in love with bluegrass in the early 1970s when she heard the band Tall Timber in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. She also fell for that band’s banjo man: Munger. He played with Tall Timber from 1965 to 1980; nowadays with Crescent Blue — and his wife Mary — he continues to seek a melodic sound.
Lambert, the lead guitarist and singer, first encountered the bluegrass sound in 1986 while stationed in Germany. In taking his rock ’n’ roll skills into bluegrass flatpicking, he looked to the late Doc Watson for inspiration.
Lenahan, Crescent Blue’s newest member, has been playing his Gibson Thunderbird bass since high school in the early ’60s. Country and western, swing, blues and folk have all been part of his beat, and when he joined Meyer, Munger and Lambert three years ago, he took playing bluegrass as a challenge. With that, he said, he’s “found another avenue for my love of music.”
For more details about Saturday’s free concert, phone Peninsula College’s Forks Site at 360-374-3223.
