By Frank Matheis
The bluesman from Virginia Beach, Virginia, is a retired physician who was a student of John Cephas’. Marc Pessar now plays largely locally in the Hampton Roads, Virginia, area, sometimes at local festivals, such as the Acoustic Blues Revival for the Natchel’ Blues Network in Hampton Roads, or the John Cephas Blues Festival in Bowling Green, Virginia.
He started playing guitar at age fifteen, but only started playing Piedmont blues when he came into contact with John at a guitar workshop at the Fur Peace Ranch with Jorma Kaukonen.
Marc reminisced, [1]
“I started to study with John Cephas in 2004. I heard Cephas & Wiggins in 2000, at the Telluride Blues and Brews Festival in Telluride, Colorado, and the music just had a terrific impact on me. I was just so impressed with what John and Phil were doing and from that point on I started listening to more and more Piedmont blues, particularly to Cephas & Wiggins, and tried to pick out on my own what I could what John was doing. When I had the opportunity to actually study with John at Fur Peace Ranch, I leapt at it and actually ended up coming back three times. I traveled to the Fur Peace Ranch in Pomeroy, Ohio to study with John Cephas in 2004 and 2005. In 2006, John was approached by Jon Lohman of the Virginia Folklife Program, under the auspices of the Virginia Foundation, to participate as a teacher in their master apprentice program. That program recognizes masters of a particular traditional art or craft who are residents of the state of Virginia. They are invited to choose an apprentice and spend about 10 months trying to transmit their knowledge of what they do to that apprentice in the hope of perpetuating that particular art or craft. The apprentice must be a resident of the state of Virginia. I was very fortunate to have John call me and ask me if I would like to participate in that program with him. So for about 10 months, about every two or three weeks, I would travel from Virginia Beach to John’s home in Woodford, Virginia, and we would spend the day together, and basically would just go through John’s repertoire. He would teach me the songs from the Cephas & Wiggins songbook.
We also talked about other things as well. I learned a lot about John’s life and his approach to music and his experiences on the road and as a professional musician. So it was far ranging. In the course of that 10-month period seeing John regularly – visiting him in his home – I got to know John well. It was a life-changing apprenticeship. It came at a time in my life when I really wasn’t expecting anything like that. And so respecting John’s music as much as I did, and getting to know John as a friend, and giving me the opportunity to learn his music in depth and to spend much more time with John than I might have anticipated otherwise, it was really an unexpected blessing. We did that for 10 months, and that culminated in a joint appearance at the National Folk Festival in Richmond, Virginia. And that was sort of the capstone for the program. They gave us a nice sort of hand-pressed lithographic certificate that each of the apprentices received at the end of the program.
This experience opened up doors for me. I met so many new friends through John Cephas. Valerie Turner, the folks in the MSG trio, we’d all get together every several months at John’s home and just play music and enjoy some good food and drink. So that’s how I got to meet Valerie and Ben Turner. Valerie had been studying with John at Woody Mann’s workshop organized in New York. I met people like Rick Franklin and Eleanor Ellis, who we were just happy to host at our home – and just really good people who were in that Washington, D.C., blues scene centered around the barbershop.
John Cephas was an amazing teacher at countless workshops and festivals. He influenced a lot of people that way. You’re talking about a man who really did everything he could to keep the Piedmont blues alive. And as a teacher, incredibly methodical, incredibly clear, incredibly patient. What John would do – he would teach you his music phrase by phrase. He would never move on until he was certain that you had it under your fingers. He was just a really fine, gifted teacher and incredibly generous.”
Discography:
Marc Pessar – Heart to Heart – 2010 Patch Quilt Records – 007
[1]Telephone interview with Marc Pessar. May 15, 2017.