John Doyle is concentrating on accompanying a song when he looks up and has to mentally pinch himself.
Yes, this is Joan Baez he is on stage with and it is Joe Hill, the song that Baez sang at Woodstock, when she was six months pregnant and missing her husband, David, who had been sent to a Texas prison for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War.
It’s a weighty song and Baez is a bona fide legend, and for two years the Dublin-born Doyle performed it with Baez as her musical director.
Humble beginnings
He was aware that he’d earned his place in Baez’s entourage on merit but was still at times bemused that someone who started out busking on the streets of Dublin could rise to keeping such company.
“Joan’s incredibly influential,” says Doyle, who appears with fiddler John McCusker and flautist Michael McGoldrick at Perth Theatre on Saturday February 19.
“We’d get backstage after the gig and there would be Pete Seeger, who’d dropped in to say hello, and politicians who wanted to hear what Joan had to say about this and that.
“And hearing her stories about singing to Martin Luther King before civil rights marches, it all made you realise that you were playing guitar for an icon.”
There are a good many people who would consider Doyle himself an icon.
Over the past 20 years and more he has established himself as the guitarist-accompanist of choice for not only Joan Baez and Mary Chapin Carpenter but also the great Chicago-born Irish fiddler and composer Liz Carroll and bluegrass stars Tim O’Brien and Dirk Powell.
A love for folk music
Folk music, in its broadest sense, is all Doyle has ever really been interested in, although he remembers being dragged along with his brothers as four- and five-year-olds to hear his grandfather and uncle playing accordion in local folk sessions.
“My dad sang and collected songs so traditional music was all around us,” he says. “My brothers and I didn’t, let’s say, love it immediately but by the time I got my first guitar, at about the age of 12, I was listening to what was going on in those sessions and what my dad was singing.
“I got to hear guitarists like Arty McGlynn and Paul Brady and I’d try to play the way they were playing to accompany songs and tunes.”
Eclectic tastes
With an older brother who was always bringing new albums home, Doyle came to appreciate Scottish and English influences – Dick Gaughan’s guitar eccentricity, Martin Carthy’s tunings, Richard Thompson’s sheer brilliance – as well as McGlynn’s rhythmical assurance and Brady’s intensity.
When his brother’s taste expanded into world music, he could hear the similarities between blues and African music and how different traditions shared common song narratives.
Applying all this listening to his own guitar playing, he left school and started busking at the age of 16.
A lucky break
Three years later he got the money together to visit a friend in New York and found the music world opening up to him.
“I lucked out, to be honest. I met Eileen Ivers and Séamus Egan fairly quickly and that led me into Solas, which became a hugely influential band in the States and a real calling card for me.
“They took me under their wing and although I overstayed my visa, I eventually got another one.”
A guitarist of invention
After five years with Solas, Doyle moved to North Carolina, where his wife is from, and entered the world of Americana, working with Tim O’Brien and Dirk Powell, while maintaining Irish music connections with Liz Carroll.
By now his reputation as a guitarist of drive and invention and empathy with lyrics and melody had spread.
When the call came asking him to consider becoming Joan Baez’s musical director, he didn’t have to think twice about his response and it was, he says, a fantastic experience.
With McGoldrick and McCusker, two stalwarts of Mark Knopfler’s band, as well as of the folk scene, he forms a trio of friends who first worked together on Transatlantic Sessions in 2007 and continue to enjoy each other’s company and music.
“We actually first met when we were teenagers,” says Doyle.
“Then we found we got on so well when we did Transatlantic Sessions that we didn’t want the fun or the music to stop – and here we still are!”
Michael McGoldrick, John McCusker and John Doyle, Perth Theatre, February 19, 8pm.