“David Jacobs-Strain and Bob Beach blew me away last summer at Swannanoa. As we say at home, they knocked my hat in the creek. I can’t envision the audience that could fail to take to them from the first chord and to the last. Hear them yourself as soon as you can.

Tom Paxton

David Jacobs-Strain and Bob Beach sit side-by-side on the stage.  A Pogreba guitar, built by the man who built the cannon Hunter S. Thompson was shot out of, sits loosely in David’s hands. Bob adjusts the distance to his 1940’s RCA microphone then leans over the box propped open at his side and grabs 2 harmonicas.  They are calm. Poised. The crowd has no idea what they are in for next.

David Jacobs-Strain is a striking slide guitar player and song poet from Eugene, Oregon. His deep love of blues and roots music is evident in every one of the songs he writes. He studied masters like Robert Johnson, Taj Mahal and Jackson Browne, but plays his own sound, his own song, with a virtuosity that is uniquely his. “I try to make art that you can dance to, but I love that darker place, where in my mind, Skip James, Nick Drake, and maybe Elliot Smith blur together.”

Bob Beach plays harmonica with calm fierceness. A mouth-harp maestro who swaggers into a solo like The Marlboro Man, then quietly leaves the set while the rest of us wonder what just happened and how such a tiny instrument could possibly sound like that. Bob is from Philadelphia, PA and has been a working professional musician for more than 40 years bringing harmonica, flute, and vocals to a broad scope of genres.

David Jacobs-Strain and Bob Beach are a multigenerational, bicoastal duo who have been performing together since 2010. They currently perform between 70 and 100 shows a year on both east and west coasts, delighting and bewildering roots music lovers. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Wait. Just wait until you see them live.