We’re in Andy Fegley’s shed on a cold March night.
It’s more than a shed, really. Part machine shop, part boathouse far from the water’s edge and, most importantly at this moment, a music studio for the Eastport Oyster Boys.
“Anybody want a Natty Boh, hon?” says Kevin Brooks, the ringmaster.
For 30 years, the boys — depending on who’s talking, it’s Them Eastport Oyster Boys or just Oyster Boys — have been at the center of Chesapeake Bay folk.
It’s a musical tradition they helped invent.
Brooks and Jefferson Holland started as a duo while playing around Annapolis in other groups. They were folkies who shared an interest in singing authentic bay songs.
There just weren’t many to be sung.
“We wanted to discover and re-create some of the songs that the watermen might have been singing 100 years ago, and bring them back to life,” Holland said. “However, so far, we’ve found three.”
One of them is “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
So they began writing, playing and singing. Songs like “Good Hat, Good Dog, Good Boat,” a celebration of revelry on the bay, and “Miss Lonesome,” a lament about an old workboat abandoned in the reeds of an Annapolis creek.
“Whether you’re listening to them live in Annapolis or you’re driving down the road in Colorado, when you hear the Eastport Oyster Boys, you think the Chesapeake Bay and its energy,” said Michael Hughes, a longtime friend of the band. “The lyrics reflect the heart and soul of the people of this community.”
Now the group is winding down. Not exactly retiring, just dropping the tempo from 50 performances a year to maybe a dozen for fundraisers and friends.
This weekend, they’ll play a couple of sock burnings — a distinctly Annapolis way to greet spring — and a “Shuck It” anniversary celebration at Maryland Hall to benefit the Annapolis Musicians Fund for Musicians.
“The Oyster Boy sound is very much a stew, like the Chesapeake is,” Brooks says. “The mission is always about celebrating life here on the bay.”
When Brooks and Holland teamed up with guitar and ukulele, it was for songs and patter aboard sunset schooner cruises out of Annapolis Harbor.
As the years rolled on, Tom Guay added more guitar, Mike Lange the keyboard and Fegley his trombone. They moved from backup to the front, and when Holland left in 2011 to pursue poetry and storytelling, the Oyster Boys settled into a solid quartet.
“We brought in our friends and the best musicians that we knew — that would play with us — and that became the Oyster Boy sound,” Brooks says.
Together, they have written hundreds of songs.
Who else sings “SAV,” a tango on the significance of underwater grasses to the bay?
“Hot Crabs! Cold Beer!” is about quintessential Maryland summers.
And if you want a Chesapeake cry, listen to “Rise Up,” Fegley’s tribute to the five people murdered in the 2018 shooting in the Capital Gazette, where I once worked.
Rise up with five souls
Rise up for the young and the old
Rise up for our friends today
The music has taken them from Nova Scotia to the Florida Keys, Estonia to Iowa. They have had floating audiences on the Pride of Baltimore II, and 15 years with seniors cruising to Yorktown and back.
“The inside of those boats is like Brightview Senior Living,” Guay says.
“And the age is about the same,” Brooks laughs back.
Guay, Fegley and Lange brought jazz, blues and rock, and somehow blended it with Brooks’ and Holland’s folk rhythms.
“We’re constantly delving in and out of each other’s sounds and lines,” Fegley says.
Listening to an Oyster Boys conversation is like hearing their music, a harmony of personalities. As they putter around Fegley’s shed, it’s a night of old friends and familiar ways.
“Kevin,” Guay says as they set up. “Do you have a quarter-inch cord?”
“God, we have a lot of homework to do,” Lange adds, plugging in his keyboard.
“Jefferson, where are you?” Brooks asks, looking at his phone.
They retell stories and jokes about places they’ve performed and people they’ve played with. They’ve all had good hats, dogs and boats — and boast that each is still married to the same woman after decades of night and weekend shows.
“Not the same woman,” Guay says.
Somehow, the Oyster Boys remain largely a regional pleasure, a group whose sounds you’re most likely to hear only as far as Georgetown, Delaware and Washington, D.C.
No “Tiny Desk” concert on NPR for them, an odd omission since they created a style of music others might consider Americana. They never had aspirations for more.
“You’re playing right to people who dig what you do, or they don’t dig what you do,” Fegley says. “I don’t want to play for a bigger audience than I can shake hands with.”
Holland walks into the shed 20 minutes late. Now the Annapolis poet laureate, he plays sporadically with the Oyster Boys. Sunday is a reunion of sorts.
Trombone slides and guitar chords mix with keyboard scales and uke tinkering as five aging musicians settle in for one of three songs Holland will sing Sunday, “Miss Lonesome.”
He asks them to start a key lower than they used to, matching the way his voice has deepened over the years. There are jokes about age and where to find this supposed key of C.
Then a beautiful melancholy fills the shed, and suddenly the clutter of outboard engines and keg taps, paint cans and drill presses, all makes sense.
She’s called Miss Lonesome
And she’s as lonesome as can be
Then it’s over, followed by a pause as the boys sit for a second with what they’ve made together.
There will be a dozen more concerts this year, and then more time spent on their own boats than singing together about wrecks left to fade away in the reeds.
“Maybe a couple more years,” Lange says, “it’ll be a B-flat.”
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