The Battle of the Daves -- A Night in Jonesborough

My wife and I have been telling people about Dave Eggar for a while now. When someone asks about live music in our area, his name comes up early and often. We have seen him perform numerous times, and every show has been worth the drive. But last night in Jonesborough was something different. Last night was one of his best.

The bill was billed, informally, as the Battle of the Daves — Dave Eggar on cello alongside David Shenton, a Royal College of Music-trained violinist and pianist of remarkable ability. Eggar sang more last night than I have ever heard him — a dimension of the show that felt new and welcome. Shenton's wife, Erin Shields, joined them to sing, offering a set that ranged from original material to Judy Garland standards to Feed the Birds from Mary Poppins — the latter a quietly devastating choice in the hands of someone who can actually deliver it.

But the evening belonged, as it usually does, to Eggar.

The Man With the Carbon Fiber Cello

Eggar was playing a carbon fiber cello last night — you could tell from the look of it, that distinctive matte shell that no wooden instrument has. Whatever the reason for the choice, it made no difference to what came out of it. It didn't matter. He can make a cello do things that seem to belong to a different physics. At one point he was flat on his back on the stage, cello held aloft by his feet, bow moving across the strings with complete control. The audience laughed, then went quiet, because the music was still beautiful.

This is what separates Eggar from nearly every other musician I have seen live. The instrument is not a constraint. It is simply an extension of whatever he needs to express at that moment.

The Tall Old Man Down the Street

Between songs, Eggar told stories. This is part of what makes his shows so singular — he is generous with his history, and his history is extraordinary.

He grew up near a man who lived just down the street. A tall, quiet man who helped out at the local music hall that Eggar's mother ran. Eggar, six years old, had learned to play one of this man's compositions on the piano. So he did what any confident six year old would do — he wrote the man a letter, told him he had learned his song, and suggested he should probably come hear him play it.

The man was Aaron Copland.

Eggar had no idea. He was just a kid writing to a neighbor. Copland, then in his late seventies and living in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, received the letter and invited the boy over. That first meeting lasted four hours. Eggar became his pupil.

When you watch Eggar move between classical, bluegrass, gospel, jazz, and folk without any apparent seam, you are watching what Aaron Copland poured into a six year old boy in Westchester. Copland spent his life arguing that serious music and American vernacular music were not opposites. His most devoted student seems to have taken that lesson and carried it all the way to a small stage in Jonesborough, Tennessee.

Grundy, Virginia by Way of Carnegie Hall

Eggar also talked about Bristol Lightning, his band — cello, guitar (Phil Falconi), mandolin, and bass, with a revolving cast of guests that might be tap dancers one night and opera singers the next. Last night was a smaller configuration — Eggar and Falconi among others, without the full band. But the spirit was the same.

I have heard Eggar describe Bristol Lightning at another show — at the Down Home in Johnson City — as what happens when someone like Mozart grows up in Grundy, Virginia.

Grundy is coal country. Deep southwest Virginia, as Appalachian as it gets. That is not a romantic metaphor he is reaching for — it is a claim about roots, about place, about what music sounds like when it comes from somewhere real rather than somewhere polished. Bristol Lightning is that claim in practice.

There is another story in his biography that fits this perfectly. His connection to Dr. Ralph Stanley — the patriarch of bluegrass, the voice behind O Brother Where Art Thou — began with someone lying to Eggar's agent, claiming a connection they didn't actually have. But Eggar went anyway, the door opened, and he spent a week recording with Stanley. That is the kind of thing that happens to a man who knows no genre walls, who plays Carnegie Hall and hollers on a front porch with equal sincerity.

Down by the River

Late in the show, something shifted.

Eggar played Down by the River. And then, without stopping, without a break in the music, he moved into Amazing Grace — and from there into a worship song I couldn't name but will not forget. There was no announcement, no pause, no reset. It was one continuous movement, like watching a river find its way home.

I want to be careful here, because it is easy to describe this wrong. He was not performing worship music. He was not playing a worship set. What I watched was a man worshipping. The cello was still in his hands, the audience was still in their seats, but something in the room changed in the way that rooms change when someone stops doing a thing and starts being it.

Dave Eggar is a Christian. When he is home in Bristol and not on the road, he plays at his church. That is not a footnote in his biography — it is the ground everything else grows from. You do not spend four hours with Aaron Copland as a child, record with Ralph Stanley, and end a show in the mountains of northeast Tennessee worshipping with a cello in your hands without a thread connecting all of it. That thread is faith.

The night closed with Come Together. The Beatles, at full Bristol Lightning energy, sending everyone back out into the Jonesborough night.

What It Meant to Be There as a Cello Student

I am learning cello. I am early — genuinely early, still working on the fundamentals, still learning to listen to what the instrument tells me about intonation and resonance. I am a long way from what I watched last night.

But I sat in that room and watched what the instrument becomes in the hands of someone who has given it everything. I watched a man who was trained by one of the greatest composers America ever produced play flat on his back with a carbon fiber cello held up by his feet, and then worship God with the same instrument twenty minutes later.

That is where the cello can go. That is worth knowing when you are sitting at the beginning of a long road.

If you are in the Bristol area and you have not seen Dave Eggar perform, fix that. The Battle of the Daves was a special night — my wife and I agree, one of his best. But any night with Bristol Lightning in a room this size is a gift.

TheBrassResonance.com · Centered on a walk with God, exploring the gifts of music, the warmth of the kitchen, and the art of a quiet intentional life.