By Emily Miller
REXBURG — Music will ring through Rexburg’s Porter Park Monday, July 31 at 7 p.m. as the sun sets behind the beautiful Beehive Pavilion. The community is invited to bring their blankets or chairs and some comfortable dancing shoes and enjoy a free concert from Jack Harrell & Friends, and Finch & The Magpies.
Harrell, of Rexburg, will be joined by local musicians Rebecca Harrell, Arik Durfee, and Robert Tueller to perform classics from The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Supertramp and others, and they’ll throw in a few originals, too.
Finch & The Magpies from Orem, Utah, will then take the stage, sharing their unique take on traditional folk, bluegrass and Celtic music. The band features Marissa Giles on the concertina, Clyde Ellis on the fiddle, and Brock Pate on vocals and guitar.
Giles says the formation of the band was a natural progression of three musicians who “all wanted to play the same kind of music in the same kind of way.” Together they’ve created a unique sound that incorporates guitar into the more traditional reels and jigs, and best of all, they really enjoy playing together.
“I can look over to my right and Brock is smiling and I look over to my left and Clyde is smiling and I’m like, ‘Yeah! This is fun!”
Giles has been a musician since her youth, playing piano, guitar and bass guitar, but picked up the concertina fairly recently. It was a new skill she learned, whiling away the hours during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was kind of an impulse buy during quarantine,” she says. “I had never seen it before. A stimulus check had just come in so I impulse-bought a $500 concertina.”
Pretty soon, she was playing in a band called The Reel Folk alongside Ellis, who is a classically trained violinist turned fiddler. Giles says that while Ellis had formal training throughout his childhood, the magic happened when, as a teenager, he realized how much he actually enjoyed playing the intstrument.
“He has been playing the violin since he was young,” Giles says of Ellis. “His parents put one in his hands when he was a kid. He had a teacher who was like, ‘I think you would like fiddling,’ and he set him up with some old-timey fiddlers from Flagstaff (Arizona). He has just really grown with his music. In his teenage years, he actually got into it for himself, not because his parents made him.”
GIles and Pate agree that Ellis’s high-energy fiddle playing is a big part of what makes their band so fun to play in, and so fun to listen to.
“He’s got a lot of energy,” Giles says. “He loves to dance. He used to be one of the elves at one of Santa’s workshops, so he’s got a little bit of a theater flair.”
If they’re lucky, he’ll dress in character.
“When the kilt comes out, he starts to play faster than I can keep up with,” Pate says.
After a stint playing with The Reel Folk, Giles and Ellis decided to branch out and create their own concertina/fiddle duo, but it didn’t stay a duo for long. They met Pate at a gathering at a Provo library and quickly saw that he was a perfect fit.
Pate is a Brigham Young University student, originally from the Asheville, North Carolina area, who, like the others, has been a musician since his youth.
“I wasn’t a super social kid,” he says. “Playing guitar gave me something to pass the time with. I listened to a lot of bluegrass records with my grandfather, so that’s how I got into bluegrass music.”
Around the same time, Pate says, indie-folk music was growing in popularity, which he enjoyed and which led him to other styles of music.
“From that love of folk music grew my interest in Celtic music as well,” he says.
Finch & The Magpies promise a fun, high energy show and encourage people to bring their dancing shoes.
For more information on Finch & The Magpies, follow them on Instagram.
