Tommy Emmanuel, with Anthony Snape and Pam Rose

[rlmacklin]

This concert was Sunday night at the opulently refurbished Tennessee Theatre in Knoxville TN. (I always expect Marie Antoinette to appear on stage and say "What? the people have no bread? Then let them eat cake!)

Anthony Snape (born in Tommy E.'s hometown in Australia) opened the show and he told of getting his first guitar with an instruction book showing how to string the guitar correctly and properly tune it.  Of course the instruction book was by Tommy Emmanuel.
Anthony is a singer/songwriter who first appeared in America with Tommy in 2008 at this same Tennessee Theatre in Knoxville.
Anthony now lives in Nashville TN.

Pam Rose is a 4th generation Tennessean who lives just outside Nashville and has been nominated for Grammy Awards on a couple occasions.  She and Anthony Snape have written a song or two together and performed one of those and then Pam did more of hers before Tommy came on stage.
Pam at a later point said she had tried but was unable to make it as an independent singer/songwriter and so confessed to accepting recompense from an entity which required she plug a commercial product at each show.  This song began with a long litany of "health" complaints of each and every sort, and soon it became clear the song was pushing "Omnivia" as supposed to help each of the ailments, except if you suffered from ... you guessed it - any of the same litany of complaints or ailments.
The "Omnivia" song - what a great satiric number. 
I told her later that she should add a line to her song -
that "you shouldn't take Omnivia if you are allergic to placebos."

Tommy Emmanuel has had several "specials" on PBS public television, often shown during the fund-raising drives.
He is a master guitarist and grew up playing imitating Chet Atkins songs (among others) he heard on the radio in Australia.
So Chet Atkins was Tommy's "hero" in a way and they both worked to get guitar music of their eclectic nature to more countries around the world by touring and teaching.
Tommy performed numbers including his Beatles medley and a request for his version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow".

What was Tommy's most interesting new composition was "Trails," which Tommy started writing after hearing a Native American tribal Chief play flute at a concert in Utah.  Tommy figured out how to transpose the  distance between notes on the flute over to his guitar and went on to try to create a work that captured the history of Native Americans.
(Tommy has done extensive work with the Native American Society since his time in the States.)

I thoroughly enjoyed this show which ended with Anthony and Pam joining Tommy for a couple more numbers.  Tommy came back solo for the single number encore.