Musician takes heretical approach to music

Local guitarist Doug Sheresh released his first album of original work in November and is already at work on his second.

The music on the first album is described easily by its title, "Pretty Things Floating By." Sheresh, who takes an intuitive approach to music, plays an instrumental mix of Americana, blues and international music.

Sheresh had taken the traditional music classes as a youth in public school but his real musical education began when Everett resident Bob Nelson became a family friend.

"Bob Nelson has been a Pacific Northwest folk singing legend for the past 50 years or so," Sheresh said. "He sings a lot of folk songs; knows thousands of folk songs. He put together an archive that he had recorded of local folk singers and gave it to the University of Washington. He knows a lot of good authentic folk music."

It wasn't long after Sheresh's father, an artist, met the musician that Nelson would gather friends and show up at their home for a hootenanny or alternately invite the family to his home.

"One hoot led to another," Sheresh said. "I grew up in this environment of constant music. Not so much in my family, but lots of people my family had contact with. We had lots of hoots and sing alongs."

A hootenanny, according to Sheresh, is traditionally a group of folk musicians who sit around and take turns either collaborating or alone to sing folk songs.

"I grew up with hootenannies," Sheresh said. "They were part and parcel of my every day experience. I assumed that everybody in the world had hootenannies or something. Apparently not only do a lot of people not have hootenannies, but a lot of people don't sit around and sing. In my family, we would find excuses to bring people together to sing because it was fun."

When Sheresh was 15, he had a guitar with a bent neck and steel strings. The action was an inch and a half off of the fret board.

It didn't slow him down, he says. He would strum and sing at the top of his lungs.

"The fact that the guitar and my voice were out of tune?" Sheresh laughed. "Details."

"This guitar is a piece of crap," Nelson told him. He took Sheresh and his young life's savings, $110, to the music store, where Sheresh purchased a Lyle Classical guitar.

"The amazing thing is that it would stay in tune," Sheresh said.

The hootenannies did the same for his voice.

"That was where I learned to hit notes," Sheresh joked. "I was singing long before I was hitting notes."

Nelson taught him Wild Flying Dove, a song by Tom Paxton.

"I played the straight folk version of that and everything else," Sheresh said. "It was years later that I started modifying and realized that it could be fun."

But first Sheresh enlisted at 17 in 1973 and served two years in the military.

"I was shipped overseas and hanging out in the barracks, a big four story building," Sheresh said. "At the end of it was a big stairwell. If you went in there with an acoustic guitar, there was a beautiful echo. I would go there at night and sing these sad lonely heartbroken folks songs that had the guys in the barracks sniffling."

And asking him to play another. He began to give his performance more thought.

What could I do with my voice and delivery? he wondered. What kind of effect am I after?

That's when his interest turned to the blues.

A couple decades passed before Sheresh saw Nelson again. In that time he had adapted to a new sound, his own.

"When I came back, I played a slow blues version of Wild Flying Dove," Sheresh said. "Nelson looked at me like 'You can't play it like that!'"

Getting that look on Nelson's face would become a challenge.

"It's kind of fun to watch Bob simultaneously freak out and be appreciative," Sheresh said. "It just kind of messes with his day. Every time I would come back for another hoot at Bob's place, I would play another different bastardized version of Wild Flying Dove. The last time, I did this really slow bawdy style of blues for this otherwise innocuous folk song. My mother told my wife, 'That does it, I'm disinheriting him now.'"

Thus he became the Musical Heretic, a self given moniker.

"It's the name of my website and the way I approach music," Sheresh said. "I don't believe in all that chicken scratch and scribbling and writing things down on paper. Music is not paper."

"I've listened to paper, it doesn't sound good," he joked.

Because he doesn't read music, his approach has been intuitive.

"I listen to the guitar and listen to the sound that I want, to the style of delivery I want instead of worrying about how it is supposed to be played. I listen to a song and think about what I want it to feel like."

He admits that not all his music is about feeling good.

"Like most musicians I'm schizophrenic when it comes to music," Sheresh said. "Sometimes I just want to play really pretty instruments and sometimes I want to play blues and bang on the guitar and scream at the universe, 'You suck!'"

He's saving that for the second album.

Sheresh counts Kris Kristofferson and Paul Simon as musical influences. He and his wife, Beth moved to Skamokawa in 2004.

On February 2nd, he will spend an hour on KMUN's folk show singing the blues. His album is available on cdbaby.com and can likely be picked up in the usual places around the county, including Tsuga Gallery and Redmen Hall.

Links: http://www.musicalheretic.com or http://www.cdbaby.com/dougsheresh7