Amy & Me by Bill Roper with Amy McNally

I have always wanted to be in a band.

This is not uncommon for folks of my generation who sang and played an instrument. Unfortunately, I am a male rhythm guitarist who can’t manage to sing harmony and you simply don’t see a lot of people posting “rhythm guitarist wanted”, because we are about as common as dirt. Banjo players are probably in more demand.

So I’m not in a band, other than a few occasions with the Thieving Magpies, where I hooked up with a Wild Mercy fragment lacking a Barry & Sally. And it was fun!

And I’m in a duo with my wife, Gretchen, who I love singing with, but we aren’t a band. We are “Bill and Gretchen” and that’s fine. And usually funny. And fun!

And then there’s Amy. I am so happy that this incredibly talented and hard-working fiddler wants to join me on stage when I’m playing, because it is so much fun. She’s a wonderful person too, which is a big, big bonus. And she has worked at fiddling for so long and so hard that she can play along on my songs that she has never heard before hitting the stage for a concert, which amazes me no end. This includes hitting the hard stop on songs where she doesn’t know that there’s a hard stop.

What you’re hearing here are four live concerts where I was able to get multi-track recordings to mix down – except that I have replaced some of the vocals because there were really good reasons for replacing those particular vocals. You can try to figure out which ones.

I hope that you have at least half as much fun listening to this as we did playing together.

But we’re not a band. We’re just Amy & Me.

Having fun.

(An additional note for those of you discovering this on line: in physical form this is a two CD set, 58 minutes for tracks 1-12; 51 minutes for tracks 13-23. So this is a *lot* of music.)

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