8 minute read
Doug Kees:
MAKING MUSIC, TEACHING MUSIC, LOVING THE MUSIC LIFE
Written by JENNIFER LONDON
Photographed by RICK DIAMOND PHOTOGRAPHY
NO. 1 BEST LOCAL MUSICIAN/BAND
Doug Kees has been voted Coweta’s Best Local Musician for the past five years, demonstrating the incredible talent that he possesses.
Yet, it’s the relationships that fellow musicians have developed with him, and the musical instruction bestowed upon his students, that prove what a beacon his music and energy are for this community and his fans.
Kees started teaching private guitar lessons in April 1989. What began as an endeavor to teach for six to eight weeks turned into 11 years.
By the year 2000, with lessons growing to 90 a week and his teaching space outgrown, Kees moved his business, Musicology, to its current location at 48 Spring Street in downtown Newnan. He brought in more teachers, encompassing a variety of musical instrument lessons and teaching all ages, starting at 4.
His poetic nature guides his vision and perspective.
“You’re going where you’re supposed to go, just sit in the canoe and float,” says Kees. “I thought I just need to lay back and I’m gonna wind up down river where I’m supposed to be – and it was definitely that.”
Over the summer, Musicology offers Rock Band Camp, which runs for five mornings with two dozen high school kids and concludes with a performance at the Alamo where students showcase what they learned in the week.
“They’re unfreakingbelievable,” says Kees. “They’re not doing easy songs.” Kees gives this advice to students dreaming of a music career: “The main thing is to learn to do as many things in the industries as you can. The reality is all the people I know who are actually making a living doing just music, they do a lot of different aspects of it.”
Songwriting and Sweethearts
In recent years, Kees has been recording instrumentals.
“A lot of times, I’ll do an Instagram post,” he says. “I’ll get up in the morning, get a cup of coffee and noodle.”
Initially, he recorded solo acoustic music, then he added a full band.
His wife, Nicole Andrews-Kees, comments: “He did the song ‘Sweetheart’ for me. He’ll write songs for me or about things happening in our lives. It’s pretty aweinspiring because he has so much talent, but he’s so modest and humble about it. He’s definitely someone who conveys how he’s feeling through written language.”
According to Andrews-Kees, there are stacks of handwritten notes that her husband has written to her since they started dating in 2014.
“I feel like his songwriting, even though there may not be words to the music, that’s still such a strong expression of who he is, whether through music or through written word,” she says.
Kees has recorded several new songs set to release in September. His new songs, as well as previously released music, are available on Amazon, Apple Music, Spotify and iTunes.
“The reason for doing these songs in September is just the satisfaction of creating,” Kees says. “People respond to it in a way that’s positive and say good things about it and it makes them feel a certain way, and so it’s just a gift to hopefully lessen the ugliness out there.”
Kees says watching the reaction to his solo work has been interesting.
“It’s all instrumental, and I think a lot of big truths are beyond words,” he says. “I think a lot of times what separates people is trying to verbally define what we think or how we perceive things. I think regardless of people’s philosophical or political or religious point of view, people respond the same to just pure music, and I think it’s been interesting to see that.”
On tour with Michelle Malone
Along with his solo acoustic work, Kees routinely performs with fellow musician Michelle Malone, a singer-songwriter popular in the Atlanta music scene for years.
“Most of what we do is Michelle Malone’s music and she has 17 to 18 albums and a 30-year career,” says Kees. “We play either as a duo or four- or five-piece band. She and I probably do 150 shows a year, which is tremendous.”
Kees and Malone began working together in 2017 doing the reunion tour for her first band, Drag the River.
“It worked out well,” says Malone. “He fit right in like a glove, and learned the parts from the record. That was our first time playing together. I asked him to play on my record, it came out in 2018, called ‘Slings and Arrows.’ He played quite a bit of guitar on that and, again, we just seem to work well together. We’re very simpatico.”
Malone tells of the moment the lightbulb went off when she heard Kees play “Autumn Leaves” on guitar: “I love Christmas and I love classic Christmas music, and not everybody can play that stuff. Well, guess who can? Doug! He’s just able to fulfill all these very different roles in the same way that I can sing them, right? He can play them and, apparently, it was just meant to be.”
That lightbulb moment segued into The Hot Toddies, a trio consisting of Malone, Kees and upright bassist Robby Handley performing classic Christmas music with a punchy vibe. From Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve, the group performs at venues throughout Metro Atlanta, playing Christmas tunes from the late 1940s, ’50s and ’60s with a jazzed up, rock-and-roll sound.
Kees also performs with Malone in a group they call Canyonland, which covers 1970s music from California’s Laurel Canyon, including tunes from Jackson Browne, The Eagles, and others of that era with the same LA vibe.
“Michelle and I had been out there playing for three weeks up and down the coast, and we flew home March 2 of 2020,” Kees recalls. “We had Pacific Ocean and Big Sur and everything in our heads, and then stayed home for a year and she started writing songs with that sort of on her. So her album “1977” was very much that, and so it has a lot of that vibe and Canyonland kind of grew out of that.”
Malone reflects: “I’m just glad that we’re playing together. He wants to play music with me, and we get along so well, and he’s so amenable to all the things that we have to do. He’s very flexible, so he’s just wonderful. When I bring him songs that I’ve written, he seems to know what to do with them, and we work so well together in the studio as well. We can really finesse what we both hear. I just can’t say enough wonderful things about Doug – and not just how well he plays and how well we get along, but how well we work together.”
Learning from a guitar hero
Nashville-based singer-songwriter, producer and musician Adam Wright fondly recalls guitar lessons in Newnan from his teacher Doug Kees.
“When I met Doug, I think I was 12 years old,” says Wright, the son of Newnan residents Lamar and Cathy Wright. “I’d heard a Chuck Berry record and flipped out and said ‘I have to have a guitar.’ At some point, my dad hears about Newnan Music. I walked in there, and Doug changed my life.”
Wright calls it “the most formidable” time in his music development.
“I was still sort of soaking everything up and my fingers were just sort of learning how to do everything, so to have a guy like him instructing me in all of that made all the difference in the world,” he says. “For those of us in a small town in Georgia in the ’80s who wanted to be a part of the music that we heard on the radio and in our tape collection, I mean he was a godsend. He was the conduit to the magic of music, particularly rock-and-roll for me that just seemed unreachable. It was even more fantastic that he just looked rock-and-roll. He had this really long red hair and he wore rock-and-roll clothes and he played guitar like our guitar heroes. He showed me what was cool about music and what was not cool about music and what was important.”
Wright, who penned four of the Top 50 most played tunes on Bluegrass radio in 2021 and had top tunes on the charts this year also, relishes the fact that he’s been able to perform live with his teacher.
“I’ve done some shows with him in Newnan and he’s come up to Nashville a time or two and sat in when me and my band were playing, so we have performed together but we’ve not been on tour together,” Wright says. “We have worked together professionally but most of our relationship was student-teacher and then, you know, friends.”
Stay tuned
On Sept. 13, Kees will perform at Below the Neck (in the basement of Redneck Gourmet) in Newnan, and he’ll play at Napoleon’s in Atlanta on Sept. 14.
Jonathan Hickman, a Newnan attorney and filmmaker with JWH Productions, plans to release a short documentary on Kees, also in September. The documentary will be linked on Kees’ website at dougkees.com and on YouTube. NCM
