Keswickians

By Colin Dougherty

Ralph Dammann built his first instrument, an electric bass guitar, in 1969. His second instrument became the bass he played professionally through most of the 1970’s. Ralph wanted an electric Bass that felt more natural to play – especially important for someone trained on a traditional double bass – so he designed and built his basses to hang upright and allow for greater (and easier) reach up and down the neck and, thus, better playability.

Ralph set up Dammann Custom Basses in 1997 to produce his custom ‘Vertical Bass’ in small volume. That business still exists with Ralph continuing to fine-tune the shape, balance and electronics for superior bass playing.

During the 80’s Ralph started playing the Octave Mandolin. Soon after he ordered a Mandocello, a standard four-course model, and promptly fell in love with it.

Ray Varona is a trained luthier who came to work in Ralph’s shop in 2007. Ray was looking for somewhere to hone his instrument making skills, and Ralph’s fully equipped shop was the perfect place. Both Ray and Ralph are accomplished musicians and both share a love of fine woods and expert craftsmanship.

Initially, Ray worked making Ralph’s custom basses but also spent time designing and making a range of acoustic instruments in the shop – everything from guitars to violins. Ralph’s interest in the mandolin and mandocello continued to grow and he asked Ray to build a five course mandocello. Ray, being Ray, built several and the acoustic version was a revelation to Ralph. And so was born the Dammann five-course Mandocello. Ray makes these instruments to sound full and balanced. His skill at balancing all the variables at play in the design of the acoustic stringed instrument is evident when the player picks one up.

The advantage – Dammann’s Total Control neck is a response to one of the biggest challenges that string musicians face: finding and maintaining an ideal string height for his or her instrument. Between environmental factors and varying personal preferences, it can be difficult to find an instrument that achieves optimal string height for tone and playability.

Our neck joint can be easily set to optimal action on the fly. This adjustment changes the height of the strings off the fingerboard particularly as one goes to positions up the neck. You can go from a slide setup to ultra-low shredding with just a few turns of the bolt and brief re-tuning. This also eliminates the concerns of the dreaded neck reset and helps ensure enough adjustability for healthy playing for years to come. Seasonal action adjustments are a matter of a quarter of half turn. Ray Varona worked on this mechanism (which we now have under patent application ) for five years. It sounds simple but took a lot of experimentation to get it right!

Our adjustable neck joint not only enables pinpoint control over playability but it ensures long-term playability over the course of the instrument’s lifetime. Instruments built lightly enough to be lively and responsive are also prone to changes in shape over time given the years of seasonal changes and string tension. At best, the saddle needs to gradually be shaved down and in most cases a neck reset is needed to bring the neck back in line. With user-control over neck angle, this becomes a moot point since the neck angle is adjusted with a simple turn of a wrench and the saddle can remain constant regardless of action so that the saddle can be set at it’s optimum height purely for tonal purposes instead of at a height dictated by playability needs.

Dammann Instruments can be made to accommodate whatever combination of instrument woods you like, tweaking the sound in one direction or another but the player can rely on the finished instrument to sing like no other stringed instrument he has ever heard.

January 27, 1945 – October 27, 2020

Written by Lenny Shapiro and Vicky Moon

She was known by one and all simply as Winkie, a multi-talented woman of great substance and enviable style equally at ease at a horse show, a racetrack or a printing plant, where the newspaper she founded and turned into a flourishing must-read publication came off the presses every month for the last fifteen years.

Kathleen Buchanan (Winkie) Motley died on Tuesday, Oct. 27 in Wellington, Florida. She was a long-time resident of Keswick Virginia, in the lush horse country outside of Charlottesville. She cherished and later chronicled that area for her faithful readers of Keswick Life. She was 75.

Mrs. Motley and her late husband, Hugh, lived for many years at Highground Farm in Keswick where she also adored entertaining friends and neighbors on the screen porch overlooking the Blue Ridge mountains to the southwest, with horses romping in nearby fields adding to the magnificent view.

She became enamored with horses growing up in Valley Forge, Pa., where she learned to ride and compete in a number of horse shows. She was best known on the horse show circuit with her graceful moving bay horse No Duplicate, winning many blue ribbons along the way.

Over the years, she worked with the Keswick Hunt Club along with her husband, who served as Master of Foxhounds. They also raised horses on the farm, and Mrs. Motley spent many years as the manager of the annual Keswick Horse Show each May, which benefited a number of local charities. She also volunteered on benefits for the Montpelier Steeplechase races and the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation.

Mrs. Motley was born in Wayne, Pa., on Jan. 27, 1945, the daughter of Kathleen Kern Buchanan and William Cooper Buchanan. At birth she had one eye briefly closed as if winking and from that day on, she was known as “Winkie.”

Raised at Hollow Hill Farm in Valley Forge, she grew up riding all through her childhood with her two sisters. She graduated from Shipley High School in Bryn Mawr, Pa., and Bennett College in Millbrook, N.Y. Early on, she worked for Barbara Camp at Glenmore Farm in Shadwell, Va., helping with the Glenmore ponies and teaching Bunny Camp, Barbara’s daughter, to ride.

She met Hugh Motley at Glenmore, where he was working for Clay Camp, a thoroughbred sales agent in the racehorse business. At the same time, Mrs. Motley was employed by Mrs. Camp.  They were married May 22, 1976 in Wayne, Pa. Mr. Motley predeceased her in January, 2016.

The Motleys eventually branched out on their own and were active in the horse racing community, selling racehorses raised on their Keswick farm and traveling around the country to numerous racetracks and horse auctions, including the prestigious sales at Keeneland, Kentucky and Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Mrs. Motley joined her husband in representing Taylor, Harris Insurance Services as an equine insurance specialist. And in 2005, she founded and was the owner/editor of a popular monthly newspaper, Keswick Life.

According to the paper’s masthead, “every month, we bring you lifestyles in Keswick and its environs, from the scoop of a party and horsey happenings to practical advice on making the most of your garden, preserving land and updates from the surroundings!”

She had an eye and passion for the nuances of typeface and design, which spilled over into her publication. She later utilized this talent while helping her daughter, Sheila, with wedding invitations, menu layout and place cards for her event business. It was always extremely attractive and appropriate.

As a long-time member of the Keswick Hunt Club, Mrs. Motley helped with the renovation of its kennels and recently was immersed in the building of a new custom barn for the hunt. She helped raise funds and provided many of the finishing touches herself.

Mrs. Motley also was what Sheila described as “a true horse show mom, giving me a childhood filled with weekends traveling to horse shows with ponies, competing and spending time together.”

In recent years, Mrs. Motley also spent the winter season in Wellington. She helped her daughter and son-in-law, Mathew, with their popular Wellington business, The Clubhouse Restaurant at Palm Beach Polo and Sheila’s thriving event-planning business, Sheila Camp Motley Event Design.

During the work week, Mrs. Motley wore her signature pared down uniform of choice—perfectly pressed blue jeans—“topped” off with an endless choice of white shirts that stretched across an immaculately organized closet. For evenings and weekends, her wardrobe choices were unassuming and elegant solid colors and always accessorized by an opera length of pearls held together with a family bar pin of diamonds.

Mrs. Motley is survived by her daughter, Sheila Camp Motley, and her husband, Mathew William Allen; a grandson, Collins Camp Allen; a sister, Deborah Ann Buchanan, and two nieces and a nephew. She adored spending considerable quality time with her beloved grandson Collins, often taking him for golf lessons.

A celebration of Mrs. Motley’s life will be held at Highground Farm in the spring. Donations in her name can be made to Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation, which funds veterinary research projects specifically for the benefit of all horses (821 Corporate Drive, Lexington, KY 40503) and the Little Keswick School, P.O. Box 24, Keswick, VA 22947.

By Keswick Life

ETIQUETTE FOR RUNAWAYS (Blackstone Publishing; August 18, 2020; hardcover/ e-book/ audiobook) by debut author Liza Nash Taylor is a sweeping Jazz Age tale of regret, ambition, and redemption inspired by true events, including the Great Moonshine Conspiracy Trial of 1935 and Josephine Baker’s 1925 Paris debut in Le Revue Nègre.

1924. May Marshall is determined to spend the dog days of summer in self-imposed exile at her father’s farm in Keswick, Virginia. Following a naive dalliance that led to heartbreak and her expulsion from Mary Baldwin College, May returns home with a shameful secret only to find her father’s orchard is now the site of a lucrative moonshining enterprise. Despite warnings from the one man she trusts—her childhood friend Byrd—she joins her father’s illegal business. When authorities close in and her father, Henry, is arrested, May goes on the run.

May arrives in New York City, determined to reinvent herself as May Valentine and succeed on her own terms, following her mother’s footsteps as a costume designer. The Jazz Age city glitters with both opportunity and the darker temptations of cocaine and nightlife. From a start mending sheets at the famed Biltmore Hotel, May falls into a position designing costumes for a newly formed troupe of African American entertainers bound for Paris. Reveling in her good fortune, May will do anything for the chance to go abroad, and the lines between right and wrong begin to blur. When Byrd shows up in New York, intent upon taking May back home, she pushes him, and her past, away.

In Paris, May’s run of luck comes to a screeching halt, spiraling her into darkness as she unravels a painful secret about her past. May must make a choice: surrender to failure and addiction or face the truth and make amends to those she has wronged. But first, she must find self-forgiveness before she can try to reclaim what her heart craves most.

LIZA NASH TAYLOR was a 2018 Hawthornden International Fellow and received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. The 2016 winner of the San Miguel Writer’s Conference Fiction Prize, her work has appeared in Microchondria II, Gargoyle Magazine, and Deep South, amongst others. A native Virginian, she lives in Keswick with her husband and dogs.

More on the Author: The farmhouse where Liza Nash Taylor lives in Keswick, Virginia, with her family and dogs was built in 1825, and it is the opening setting of ETIQUETTE FOR RUNAWAYS. She writes in the old bunkhouse, with the occasional black snake and a view of the Southwest Mountains. In 2018, Liza completed the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Art and was named a Hawthornden International Fellow. She was the 2016 winner of the San Miguel Writer’s Conference Fiction Prize. Her short stories have appeared in Microchondria II, (an anthology by the Harvard Bookstore), Gargoyle Magazine, and others. ETIQUETTE FOR RUNAWAYS is her first novel. Look for her second, a stand-alone sequel, in 2021, also from Blackstone Publishing. For more visit, lizanashtaylor.com.

Early Praise for ETIQUETTE FOR RUNAWAYS

 “Assured, exotic, heart wrenching, Liza Nash Taylor’s Etiquette for Runaways is that rare debut novel that combines a story that sweeps from continent to continent and age to age without sacrificing the deeply personal story of one tormented woman. Taylor’s May Marshall is the new woman of a previous century, a jazz dolly with a scarred past and a hungry heart who wants forgiveness from the only one who cannot give it–herself.” — Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean

“An utterly absorbing tale of the trials of being a young woman of independent spirit during the glamorous but harsh years of post-WWI America, when the yearning for personal freedoms clashed with the heavy hand of prohibition, politics, and social mores. I could almost taste the smoky, moonshine-laced air of the speakeasies, and feel flashes of fringed tassels on my skin as I read. Beautiful and immersive writing!”— Natasha Boyd, USA Today bestselling author of The Indigo Girl