Warner Williams, Jonny Grave, Joyce Ettingoff on Silver Spring's Veterans Plaza, Thursday, August 4, 2011, 7 pm. Free!

Enjoy the acoustic blues guitar magic of Warner Williams & Jonny Grave on Silver Spring's Veterans Plaza, Thursday, August 4, 2011 at 7 pm. The performance is free.

The Silver Spring Town Center, Inc. is proud to present two guitar masters for your listening pleasure: Jonny Grave & Warner Williams.

Guitarist and songster Warner Williams is one of the greatest unsung heroes of the Piedmont blues—an Eastern seaboard style that incorporates fiddle tunes, ballads, country and popular songs, ragtime, and gospel. With a jaunty rhythmic finger-picked guitar style and an eclectic repertoire that ranges from blues to honky-tonk, jazz crooning to children’s songs, Warner Williams is an old-style community entertainer of national significance.

Jonny Grave's music is true acoustic blues from the Heartland, steeped in the traditions of R.L. Burnside, Fred McDowell and others. Unlike the more common Delta variety, Grave’s blues hails from the North Mississippi hill country, like the music of Bukka White and Junior Kimbrough. As a solo acoustic bluesman, Grave maintains a traditional grip on the genre while seamlessly adding a modern twist, incorporating the singer-songwriter, bluegrass, and Americana genres into the recipe.

Both six and twelve-string guitar, Dobro, and Appalachian fretless banjo (made by Grave himself) make up his repertoire of sound. Grave began playing guitar in his early adolescence, and quickly picked up the slide guitar technique from watching Washington DC bluesman Robert Lighthouse perform. Grave performs fingerstyle guitar (without flat picks) and emulates the styles of Leo Kottke, John Fahey and Chris Smither.

Joing Warner Williams & Jonny Grave will be Joyce Ettingoff of Silver Spring-- a wonderful harmonica player who plays throughout the metro Washington region, often with the band The Traveling BlueJayes.

Silver Spring's Veterans Plaza is located at the intersection of Fenton Street & Ellsworth Drive in downtown Silver Spring.

These performances are productions of the Silver Spring Town Center, Inc. Visit our blog at www.silverspringtowncenter.blogspot.com, follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/sstowncenter or on Facebook.