The slogan for the old print Yellow Pages was to “Let your fingers do the walking.”
It’s a piece of advice Toby Walker takes whenever he picks up a guitar. For the past few decades, Walker has created a reputation for himself as one of the finest roots music fingerstyle guitar virtuosos.
His talents have taken him all over the United States, Canada, the UK and Europe and will bring the Brentwood native back home when he takes the stage at My Father’s Place in Roslyn.
Over time, he’s crafted a raconteur-like approach to live performing where sharply honed musicianship evolving into different genres blends with the guitarist’s natural storytelling ability.
“What I’ve done in the past is play maybe three or four songs and tell a story,” he explained. “People are really enjoying the stories. I thought about it and decided to take a lot of these complex guitar pieces I’ve been playing with some songs and interspersing a lot more stories. I’m tapping into fiddle tunes, some jazz arrangements, blues arrangements—these are all instrumentals. While the songs are pretty much blues/swing-based, I’ll throw in an arrangement of a Beatles song or of ‘Little Martha’ by The Allman Brothers. There’s even a Celtic tune. It really covers a broad spectrum.”
Having picked up a guitar when he was about 14, Walker started out playing birthday parties in classmates’ basements.
The attention he was receiving quickly convinced him music was going to be his chosen path (“I was listening to all kinds of music, so I was just kind of fooling around with it. I found I had a natural rhythm and talent for it. People were noticing and when you’re 14 or 15, that’s a big deal.”)
Walker’s desire to learn the blues led him from being a teen with a keen appreciation of B.B. King to diving deeper into Chicago blues icons like Hubert Sumlin, Buddy Guy and Otis Rush.
Taking inspiration from blues and ragtime guitarist Roy Book Binder, who traveled around the country in a camper, Walker started taking trips down South to learn his craft at the feet of masters including Etta Baker, R.L. Burnside and Othar Turner.
And while he spent much of his 20s playing gigs and giving guitar lessons at a local music store (a talent that eventually became a cornerstone of his being a full-time working musician), economics forced him to take a page out of the John Prine playbook and get a job as a mailman. His landing in this vocation was a scenario straight out of a traditional blues song.
“The music store I was teaching at closed and I didn’t even realize it was closing,” he recalled. “I showed up and the doors were locked. At that point, I lost that. I lost my apartment and the girl I was within two weeks. I was living out of my car for about two or three weeks—scrambling around. I decided to apply to be a mailman because I figured—what the hell? I could do that and got a job delivering mail.”
Walker spent 17 years working for the post office before officially quitting in 2004. But during this time, he was always playing, composing, giving lessons and working on his own music (“You know how many songs I wrote just walking around thinking about the lyrics?”)
Walker’s knack for teaching eventually led to local singer-songwriter Patricia Shih suggesting that he take his talents to a student audience. The pivot he made evolved into what became a four-part curriculum called The Great American Migration in Blues Music. It’s a successful side hustle that Walker has been bringing to myriad middle and high schools for two decades-plus.
“It just worked out really well,” he said. “I go from showing slides from my travels, telling them stories and tying it into what they learned about the Great Migration, sharecropping and the Depression. I teach them how to write in a blues verse before they’re broken up into about 10 or 11 groups of five or six kids each. They’re then given topics or choose their own topic about homework or whatever it is that gives them the blues.”
He added, “I give them the music they have to write it to, and that whole period, they’re working on their songs. Each group comes up and sings the lyrics to their songs while I’m playing a guitar. It hits on a bunch of disciplines—history, collaboration with your peers, social studies and it also gets into performance and what it’s like to write and perform like a group.”
Toby Walker will be appearing on April 25 at My Father’s Place at the Roslyn Hotel, 1221 Old Northern Blvd., Roslyn. For more information, visit www.myfathersplace.com or call 516-625-2700.
