Dirty Linen #101

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen magazine #101 (August /September 2002). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription.

Duck Soup

A Portrait of Duck Baker
by Opal Louis Nations

Duck Baker would be the last finger-picking guitar stylist ever to admit that he aspired to virtuosity. To be "hot" and to always generate excitement supersede excellence, asserts Baker. "Best of all," he says, "my central focus is to be a credible 'old-timey' musician and to function as such in every discipline, whether it be traditional Irish music, bluegrass, country swing, blues, and modern or free-form jazz." Along the way he felt it a privilege to have worked with so many fine musicians — people like Jamie Findley, Kieran Fahy, and Stefan Grossman — who have inspired and carried him across the chasms of today's commercial music emptiness. He adamantly believes that 90 percent of today's acoustic music is meaningless and without real value. "Great music," says Baker, "is written by players who project a specific identity and a sense that their art comes from a personal space." He also affirms that the growth of an ever-sprawling suburban environment put an end to the preservation and cultivation of honest, traditional musical forms.

One of Baker's teachers was Rosswell Rudd, who taught him that it mattered little to make mistakes in performance, that what was most important was to "go-for-broke," play as if your life depended on it. One certainly gets a glimpse of this fury in concert, where Baker, his forehead furrowed, eyes tightly shut and upper lip twisted in contortion, strikes his strings with such percussive zeal one thinks one can hear the belly of his instrument cry out for mercy. To counter this, Baker would continue along in restraint and play simply and nimbly, perhaps add complex chords and create an intimate atmosphere. The next moment he transports you to a smooth, comfortable place.

Baker's sometimes neo-classical style is confected with a variety of moods, sudden changes in tempo, haunting "aftersounds," stanzas from songs of other genres, all ingeniously written into the overall fabric. Over the course of the last 30 years, Baker has developed an artistry all his own. He was born Richard Royal Baker IV in Washington, D.C., in 1949 and grew up in Richmond County, Virginia. His father pastored an Episcopal church in neighboring Warsaw. At school, Baker's fellow classmates tagged him "Duck" as they thought he looked much like the aquatic bird. Baker did not much mind. In fact, he liked it and stuck with it.

In 1953, Baker and his family moved to Gainesville, Florida, where they stayed for three years before returning to Richmond County. Baker was first inspired to play music in 1961 when he was taken by the skills of a young woman who played commercial Gypsy tunes. He pestered his parents to buy him a fiddle, but somehow or other he ended up with a violin. Baker spent four or five years under the tutelage of various violin instructors. One day his parents took him to see a Brahms recital. "Watching the female fiddle soloist and listening to her trying to interpret the music put me right off fiddle playing for good."

In 1963 — on his 14th birthday — Baker's father gave him a ukulele. Mastering the instrument led him to want to try the guitar. Armed with a Jerry Silverman instruction book, Baker labored at mastering a few basic chords on the instrument. After going electric, Baker joined a teenage rock band called The Soothe Sayers, who played a lot of fashionable English pop record covers. Baker also doubled on keyboards and faked a few sustained chunky chordings. He remembers his rudimentary grasp of organ parts to ? and the Mysterians' "96 Tears" and Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs' "Woolly Bully."

Alan Gay was Baker's best friend in the band. Gay's older sister often played Dylan records, and the music caught Baker's attention. Gay's father, an artist, would take Baker down to the Coffee House in Richmond, a venue for touring folk musicians; this was an eye-opening experience. Baker did not do too well in high school because all of his thoughts were channeled into becoming a troubadouring musician. He soon mastered the Travis fingerpicking style and wanted to do better.

This is an excerpt from an article in Dirty Linen #101 (Aug./Sept. '02). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.