From right: Jody Davison, Chris Kuntz, Tim Bauman, Terry Leatherman. Joe Leatherman is hiding amidst the drums. My keyboards were parked behind Jody.

Tonight, the Anchor worship team hosted the evening at the Seekers Coffeehouse in Fort Wayne, one of those coffeehouses around which a new church is starting. They have a very nice concert area, and every Thursday, a different worship team hosts the program. We did it last September, and then tonight. The schedule is to play for an hour, then have an open-mic situation where three other acts can do 15 minutes worth of stuff. But as it turned out, nobody else showed up tonight, so it was just us. Sweet.

We winged it. With all the Easter stuff, we just didn’t get a chance to practice before tonight’s gig. But everything went great. We have a big repertoire of songs, and have done them enough that we shouldn’t require a lot of practice. However, Joe, our 13-year-old drummer, hadn’t done a number of those songs before, so that was an issue. But he did more than fine. Joe is the son of Terry Leatherman, one of our guitarists. Joe’s really good, already.

Chris, our leader, did the “Cartoon Song” (I’m not sure that’s what it’s actually called) on his acoustic guitar. The song features a lot of voices from cartoon characters, and he did them great. Brought down the house. We’ll need to have him do it some Sunday morning. It was just him and Joe.

A couple months ago, I downloaded a bunch of versions of “Mustang Sally” from iTunes, versions by Buddy Guy, The Commitments, the Sugar Beats, Chris Raymond, Joe Cruz, and some other guys I hadn’t heard of. I burned them all onto a single CD and gave a copy to both Tim and Terry, our guitarists. Knew they’d enjoy it. I later suggested that they write Christian lyrics to it…and both of them did. So tonight, we did their versions of Mustang Sally. We hadn’t practiced this at all, and they didn’t have chord charts for it. Terry told me it was A, D, and E, and that’s all I needed. I play two keyboards, a full 88-key Roland and a short Alesis, which I use primarily as a bass (since we don’t have a bass player). I quickly settled into a nice, slow blues groove with the bass, and then threw in some high organ highlights on the lower keyboard. Just made it up as I went. It was wonderfully fun.