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Tom Mason plunders the coffee house

In this episode of IPR Studio One's "Java Blend," host Ben Kieffer does his best pirate impression with Nashville pirate singer Tom Mason.

Listen in to hear Mason's sea-worthy tunes and lots of piratey banter. 

For the past half decade Tom has split his time between solo shows and Tom Mason and the Blue Buccaneers, his band of pirates who perform their original sea shanties at folk, tall ships, and pirate festivals around the world. In 2015 alone they headlined the Filey Folk Festival in Yorkshire England and played the Port Fairy Folk Festival (Australia’s biggest) the Dart Music Festival and Brixham Pirate Festival in the UK,  theMinnesota State Fair, Tennessee’s Pilgrimage Festival, and maritime and pirate festivals from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes.

In addition to the three CD’s released with Tom Mason and the Blue Buccaneers, Tom Mason has released three other CD’s of original music and the instrumental “A Slide Guitar Christmas”. He has also been a sought after lead guitarist since moving to Nashville in 1993, touring most recently with Americana actsEric Brace’s Last Train HomePhil Lee and with the OzarkMountainDaredevils’ Supe Granda. After a few years in Nashville he felt the pull of the theater, enrolling in acting classes, appearing in films and plays including “Richard the Third” with the Nashville Shakespeare Festival, and touring with the Broadway show “Ring of Fire: The Music of Johnny Cash”. Noted music critic Dave Marshwrote that “Mason is as talented  at tale-spinning as he is at fret-work”, and the Nashville Scene called him “One of Music City’s most engaging scoundrels”.  Whether in a tricorn or a cheap cowboy hat, Mason puts on a show that owes as much to Vaudeville as it does to the singer-songwriters he’s surrounded by in Music City.

Ben Kieffer is the host of IPR's River to River