Al Petteway &Amy White
Together at Last
by Pamela Murray Winters

Al Petteway was born in Illinois and grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, known to music aficionados as the home of the Birchmere music hall. The Washington area music scene became a great proving ground for Petteway's talents: In the early days of Petteway the musician, he played bass and drums in local funk bands. "I was always in bands, playing at the sock hop," he said. He also fell in with the bluegrass crowd, becoming a house musician at the Birchmere.
In the early 1980s, Petteway was part of Grazz Matazz with mandolinist Akira Otsuka. "I really liked Grazz Matazz, his bluegrass-fusion band," said Lisa Moscatiello, a friend and fellow musician who later worked with Petteway on "Time to Remember the Poor," a track by The New St. George. Béla Fleck, Mike Auldridge, and Jethro Burns were among the guests on the Grazz Matazz album, Delinquent Minor.

Like most musicians, Petteway had a day job. "Working at National Geographic gave me the time I needed to develop my own music without the pressure of trying to make money," said Petteway. Through the mid-80s, he continued playing flatpick guitar in bluegrass bands until a wrist injury sidelined him.

As so often happens to Petteway, fate intervened. One night the Birchmere called him. John Renbourn and Bert Jansch were coming to town, but their guitars had been lost on the transatlantic flight. The club was calling local guitarists in the hope of getting loaner guitars. "I'd been sitting around watching TV for months," Petteway said. Petteway and another local musician, Mary Chapin Carpenter, showed up at the Birchmere, cases in hand. Jansch played Carpenter's guitar; Renbourn played Petteway's. "I sat there all night with my mouth open. I thought: This is what I want to do."
He devoted himself to fingerstyle playing. Soon he was a fixture on the local Celtic folk scene, which (thanks in part to the presence of Maggie Sansone and her Maggie's Music label) is especially strong in the Baltimore-Washington area, and he's won enough WAMMIEs (Washington Area Music Awards) to form a WAMMIE chess set.

Meanwhile, over in Arlington, Virginia, a shy, creative girl named Amy White was growing up in a musical family. Her father played oboe in the National Symphony; her mother was a lyric soprano. Musical standards in her family were very high. White was a perfectionist, and she didn't have the confidence to come out as a musician.

A brief foray with guitar playing was abandoned when, trying to play the chords in a Joni Mitchell songbook, she failed to recognize that the guitar was supposed to be in an altered tuning. So she pursued visual arts openly and played music in private. She avoided the school activities that one might expect of the talented daughter of an accomplished family, preferring to hang out with a coterie of older artists in Arlington. "I got 'Most Artistic' in high school," White observed dryly. "I think it was because they didn't understand me."


This is an excerpt. Read the full article in Dirty Linen #86 (Feb/Mar '00).