Woody Mann
In a very real sense, the four original compositions
performed by Woody Mann mark the turning of a full
musical circle. A native of Long Island, New York, Mann
was 12 years-old when he met the Reverend Gary Davis, a
blind guitarist and preacher who set folk music enthusiasts
on their ear with his amazing fingerpicking and eclectic
repertoire in the early 1960s. Mann, who had studied the
clarinet, began taking guitar lessons from Davis, and the
two continued a close association until Davis’s death in
1972.
“I still have about 50 hours of my lessons with him on
tape,” Mann says. “I’d spend the whole day at his house. I
think because I was a kid, he was very patient with me. He
spent hours and hours teaching me to play. Yet one of the
things he always emphasized was to eventually play my
own music.”
Mann became intensely interested in early blues, and
had the good fortune to meet meet Nick Perls, the founder
of Yazoo Records, a small independent label that reissued
well-informed compilations of country blues recordings
from Perls own record collection. Mann listened, learned,
and wrote liner notes for some of the Yazoo albums. In
time he became a proficient acoustic bluesman, but his
musical journey was far from over.
“After Gary Davis died I basically lost interest in blues,”
Mann says. “I became interested in jazz, and then I met
Lenny Tristano. He became my mentor, which opened up