Song of the Day 10/29: Jerry Douglas, “Patrick Meets the Brickbats”

Guest post by Nathan Arizona

I basically know only three things about this song called “Patrick Meets the Brickbats.”

• It has a funny title.

• It has something to do with trains.

• It has Jerry Douglas playing the dobro.

This last one is all you really need to know. Douglas is probably the best dobro player anywhere, or certainly the most respected.

He makes albums under his own name that generally fall into the category of alt-bluegrass. He has played on about a million records by other people, He’s been a staple of Alison Krauss’ band. All this has earned him a place in both the Bluegrass Hall of Fame and the Country Music Hall of Fame.

I only know about the trains because of the video. Jerry and his band start things off in a train station. They miss the train that would take them to a concert. Then we see them at the concert anyway. It has something to do with a very long electric cord.

I have no idea where the title came from. But there is a life-size brick sculpture of a locomotive that’s become a tourist attraction in England. Twenty of the bricks are hollow so bats can fly into the empty inside of the train. I’m not making this up. Some people think the sculpture is weird and wasn’t worth the £760,000 it cost to build. You might say they throw brickbats at it.

I doubt that Douglas knows about this sculpture. He might know somebody named Patrick who might have been a fan of trains.

Here’s the snappy video. The mandolin player is Sam Bush, another high-profile bluegrass wizard.

The dobro is a resonator acoustic guitar invented in the late 1920s. Metal cones inside made the music sound louder and also gave the guitar a distinctive sound, akin to a Hawaiian lap steel. Country musicians were early adopters.

You can get a close look at Douglas playing the dobro on this version of George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” from his most recent album, “The Set.” He’s joined by longtime members of the Jerry Douglas Band.