“Whistling Milkman” (1976) – Dave Evans * Written by Dave Evans * LP: Take a Bite Out of Life * Produced by Stefan Grossman * Label: Kicking Mule
The British guitarist Dave Evans found a following among U.S. fingerpickers through two albums on the Kicking Mule label: the all-instrumental Sad Pig Dance (1974) and the half-vocal Take a Bite Out of Life (1976). What set Evans apart, first of all, were his ten fingers, which accommodated his fully-constructed guitar arrangements like the gears and wheels of a clock. Evans’ left hand worked just as hard as the right hand did – no ten-minute unfretted musings passed for compositions in Evans’s world. His tunings, too, varied extraordinarily while his handmade guitars rang with a sweet warmth you’re unlikely to hear elsewhere. His “Whistling Milkman,” which I’m linking to here, could have made for a cheerful children’s TV show theme. (The song appeared on Take a Bite Out of Life although the video link attributes it to a later reissue of Sad Pig Dance that included instrumentals from its successor.) By the early eighties Evans had gone off to Belgium to devote his life to lutherie.