He gets a moanin’ tone, he makes it grumble and groan
When he gets to pickin’ and a-pluckin’ the strings
He can make a deacon do the buck-and-wing
—from Guitar Rag
by Merle Travis
Now that he’s seeing patients during regular office hours instead of patching up and reviving them in emergency rooms, Alan “Doc” Rogers supposes he should be composing more of his own folk music for his sideline as a singer-guitarist.
“I’ve only written three songs in my life,” Rogers, who lives in New London, said last week. “The muse doesn’t come knocking very often.
“I guess I don’t have any angst.”
Now in his late 60s, Rogers does have a deep well of folk, blues and old-timey music from which to draw for the gigs he plays at farmers markets, coffeehouses and senior centers around central New Hampshire. On Saturday morning, he’ll share the wealth at the Stone Arch Bakery in Lebanon.
He started building his repertoire during his teens in Haddonfield, N.J., at the behest of a guitar teacher who steered him toward the work of the likes of Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, Merle Travis and Chet Atkins.
“I had been listening to Peter, Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio on hit radio,” Rogers recalled. “Once I heard these other guys, I said, ‘That’s it for me.’”
During his late teens and early 20s, “it” sounded better as a life’s work than following in his father’s footsteps.
“I was the son of a family doctor,” Rogers said. “Whenever we went to a ballgame or some other public event, there would be an announcement over the PA: ‘Doctor Rogers: you’re needed such and such.’ I swore I’d never be a doctor.”
After playing around Philadelphia and later at ski resorts around the Colorado Rockies for several years, and figuring out that it was “hard to scratch out a living” as a folk musician, Rogers accepted a summer job in an emergency room, which his father arranged for him, and “I was hooked.”
Rogers went on to earn a degree from the University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine in Biddeford, Maine. He moved, with his wife, Maureen, to central New Hampshire in the late 1980s. While working first at the former Newport Hospital and later Valley Regional in Claremont, he kept music on the back burner until he hit his 50s, when he met a friend, Rick Amidon, while they were playing senior baseball in the Concord area. They formed the duo Loose Change, and began performing in the Concord area. In the process, he got to know northern New England performers, such as David Surette of Berwick, Maine, Tom Pirozzoli, of Goshen, N.H., and E.J. Tretter, of Enfield, with a similar interest in the genre.
Once he returned to performing mostly solo, around the same time he left emergency medicine a few years ago to open a three-day-a-week family practice in Newport, Rogers found himself playing fewer shows in bars and other nightspots and more at farmers markets, art festivals and senior centers.
The first transition came more easily than the second.
“I always was leery of those venues, of old fogies,” Rogers said. “The first time I did a senior center I looked out and thought, ‘Wait a minute!’ My peer group was staring back at me.”
His peers, as well as younger audiences, sometimes talk him into playing his interpretations of the Beatles, the Eagles and the Grateful Dead in between his regular renditions of Atkins and Watson’s Windy and Warm and Hurt’s My Creole Belle. So it’s hard to surrender to angst.
“I’ll keep seeing patients until they throw me out of my practice,” Rogers said. “And I’m never going to stop playing music.
“Too gratifying — both of them.”
Alan “Doc” Rogers performs at Stone Arch Bakery in Lebanon on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Best Bets
More than 50 Dartmouth College students unveil their skills in animation, 3D fabrication and digital performance tonight, during the sixth annual Dartmouth Digital Arts eXpo at the Black Family Visual Art Center in Hanover. The expo begins at 7 with screening of animated films in Loew Auditorium. Interactive installations will be displayed in the atrium gallery from 7:45 to 8:30. And between 8:30 and 10, digital performances using music and projection will include the college glee club accompanying projections of virtual opera scenes; the Dartmouth Brain Orchestra developed by the school’s digital musics program and the Thayer School of Engineering; and a variety of audiovisual works. Admission is free. To learn more, visit dax.cs.dartmouth.edu/.
In the first of a series of concerts benefiting the restoration fund for the spire of the Strafford Town House, Linda B & The Barn Cats, made up of alumni from the former Dr. Burma ensemble, rock Barrett Hall in South Strafford on Friday night at 8; tickets cost $10.
Next in the series, the Burlington-based soul-music band Dwight & Nicole will perform at the Town House on June 3. Admission is $20 in advance and $25 at the door. To reserve tickets (seating is limited to an audience of 200) and learn more, visit atthetownhouse.org.
The Dartmouth Dance Ensemble performs to works of Bartok, Byrd and Bieber during recitals at the Moore Theater in Hanover on Friday and Saturday nights at 8. For general admission tickets ($10 to $15) and more information, visit hop.dartmouth.edu or call 603-646-2422.
Hartford native Jes Raymond leads The Blackberry Bushes into the Skinny Pancake in Hanover on Saturday night at 8.
On the theme of “Draw the Circle Wide,” the Juneberry Community Chorus performs a Memorial Day concert at the First Congregational Church on Thetford Hill on Monday afternoon at 4. While admission is free, donations are welcome. To learn more, visit uvmusic.org.
The BarnArts Center for the Arts stages six performances of the Sarah Ruhl comedy Dead Man’s Cell Phone between Wednesday night and June 4, at the barn of the Barnard Inn. From Wednesday through June 2, shows are scheduled to start at 7. To reserve tickets ($10 to $15) and learn more, visit barnarts.org or call 802-234-1645.
Looking Ahead
The Acadian trio Vishten will perform traditional music of Canada’s Prince Edward Island and Magdalen Islands at Chandler Music Hall in Randolph on June 2 at 7:30 p.m. The concert was rescheduled from its original date of March 11. For tickets ($10 to $25) and more information, visit chandler-arts.org or call 802-728-6464.
Theater/Performance Art
Old Church Theater in Bradford stages auditions on Saturday and Wednesday for its August production of Mad Gravity, William Missouri Downs’ comedy about a couple whose very different sets of parents meet for the first time — at the same time that a comet is heading straight for Earth. Casting of the play, which will run Aug. 11-13 and 18-20, is for two men and three women. The auditions start at 2 in the afternoon on Saturday and at 6:30 Wednesday night. For more information, visit oldchurchtheater.org or call 802-222-3322.
The Theater Guild of Zack’s Place, the community enrichment center for young adults with developmental challenges, perform their adaptation of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web on Wednesday night at 5:30, at the Woodstock Town Hall Theatre. While admission is free, donations are welcome. To learn more, visit zacksplacevt.org.
Wednesday is the deadline to enter the third annual Vermont Issues Playwriting Contest. Aspiring dramatists with connections to Vermont should submit scripts of at least 45 minutes, built around social concerns, either by email or snail mail to the Chandler Center for the Arts in Randolph. The entry fee is $20, and playwrights are welcome to submit a second script for $15. Judges with theater experience will evaluate the scripts and choose up to five finalists, who will be notified by Aug. 31, with each receiving $100. The finalists all will receive staged readings in the Chandler’s Upper Gallery between September and next May.
For applications, registration forms and more information, visit chandler-arts.org.
Music
The Blackbird duo of Rachel Clark and Bob DeMarco perform Celtic music on Friday night at 7:30, at the Norwich church of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Upper Valley. Admission is by donation.
The Adam Ezra Group plays a set of roots rock at Pierce’s Inn in Etna on Friday night. Admission is $45 for the performance alone, which starts around 8:15 p.m., and $65 for listeners partaking of the barbecue that starts at 6:30. For tickets and more information, visit piercesinn.com or email piercesinn@valley.net
Dartmouth College senior Jessica Tong solos on Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, during the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra’s performance at Spaulding Auditorium in Hanover on Saturday night at 8. Conductor Filippo Ciabatti also will steer the orchestra through Debussy’s La Mer and Ravel’s Bolero. To reserve tickets ($10 to $20) and learn more, visit hop.dartmouth.edu or call 603-646-2422.
Bar and Club Circuit
Ted Mortimer plays guitar in the tavern of the Lyme Inn tonight at 6, and on Wednesday night at 6 at the Canoe Club in Hanover.
The central New Hampshire-based Kid Pinky performs the blues at Taverne on the Square in Claremont tonight at 7. Singer-songwriter R.C. Thomas visits from the New Hampshire seacoast on Friday night at 7.
Paul Asbell sings and plays the blues at the Skinny Pancake in Hanover tonight starting at 8; admission is $12-$14. Over the coming week, the Sunday lineup at the Pancake features bassist Dave Clark leading a pickin’ party from 3 to 6 in the afternoon, and a performance of Americana by Stuart Ross and the Temp Agency from 7 to 9 in the evening. And on Wednesday night at 7:30, Bow Thayer plays his weekly set of Americana on Wednesday night at 7:30.
The folk duo Bobbi ‘n Me appears in the tavern at Jesse’s in Hanover on Friday evening at 5.
Pianist Gillian Joy commands the keyboard at the Canoe Club in Hanover on Friday night at 6, and guitarist Bruce Gregori takes the stage on Tuesday night at 6. On Monday night from 5:30 to 8:30, Marko the Magician performs his weekly sleight-of-hand.
British singer-songwriter Rupert Wates performs his mix of acoustic, folk, jazz, vaudeville and cabaret at the Sunapee Community Coffeehouse on Friday night at 7, downstairs at the Methodist Church in Sunapee. While admission is free, donations are welcome. To learn more about this season’s series, visit sunapeecoffeehouse.org.
Acoustic rocker Chris Powers kicks off the weekend of music at the Salt hill Pub in Lebanon on Friday night at 9. And on Saturday night starting at 9, Soulfix dishes out a stew of swing, funk and rock.
The Boneshakerz rock Hanover’s Salt hill Pub at 9 on Friday night, followed on Saturday night at 9 by bluesman Arthur James.
Groovesum evokes 1970s rock and funk during its appearance at Salt hill Pub in Newport on Friday night starting at 9. And on Saturday night at 9, country musician Ben Fuller debuts at the venue.
Acoustic rocker Chris Powers performs at the Salt hill Pub in West Lebanon on Saturday night at 8.
Soulfix sets the rhythm for dancing at Skunk Hollow Tavern in Hartland Four Corners on Friday night starting at 9.
About Gladys pulls into Windsor Station on Friday night at 9, followed over the coming week by the Gully Boys on Saturday night at 9, by the Mike Parker R&B duo on Tuesday night at 6 and by The Cosmonautz next Thursday at 7:30.
Open Mics
Jim Yeager hosts an open mic at ArtisTree Community Arts Center in South Pomfret tonight at 7.
Ramunto’s Brick & Brew Pizza in Bridgewater hosts an open mic starting at 7:30 on Thursday nights. Participants get a free large cheese pizza.
String players of all ages and abilities are welcome at the weekly acoustic jam session at South Royalton’s BALE Commons on Friday night from 6:30 to 10.
Joe Stallsmith leads a weekly hootenanny of Americana, folk and bluegrass at Salt hill Pub in Hanover on Monday nights at 6.
Bradford’s Colatina Exit holds an open mic, Tuesday nights at 8.
Jim Yeager hosts his weekly open mic at Hartland’s Skunk Hollow Tavern at 8:30 on Wednesday night.
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.