By Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

In the week leading up to Christmas, the acoustic music community in New England and beyond was reeling at the news of the loss of David Surette, a masterful multi-instrumentalist, prolific performer and beloved teacher. A longtime resident of coastal New Hampshire and southern Maine, Surette died at the age of 58 after a long battle with cancer.

In the fingerstyle guitar world, Surette was renowned for her superb solo arrangements of Celtic tunes, as heard on albums Country roads and Trip to Kemper and taught in the book Down the Brae: Celtic Fingerstyle Guitar (Mel Bay). On other solo projects, like the 2010 album Sun Dog, he shared original instrumentals that took his hat off to British guitar legend John Renbourn (“A Lot of Sir John”), ragtime, blues and slack key.

Surette played Froggy Bottom Guitars since the 1980s (and in fact first met Froggy Bottom luthier Michael Millard in college).

In addition to the guitar, Surette was a fan of the mandolin, citrus and bouzouki. He highlighted the mandolin in a Celtic setting on his album The Green Mandolin, and as director of folk programs at Concord Community Music School in New Hampshire, he has led a long-standing annual mandolin festival. In 2020, he publishes the collection French and Italian airs for mandolin and violin.

Beyond his solo work, Surette was a versatile orchestral musician, playing counter dances, accompanying fiddlers, and more. For more than 30 years he has performed with his wife, singer Susie Burke, sometimes joined in recent years by their daughters, Juliana and Isa Burke. Isa, violinist, is a rising star of the folk scene with the trio Lula wiles.

I crossed paths with Surette for the first time in the 90s, when he became a collaborator of Acoustic guitar, write about traditional Breton music, fingerpicking and flatpicking techniques, etc. (See one of his lessons on the Carter-style guitar here.)

Over the past few years he and I have reconnected through our mutual love for the Grateful Dead and have had a few opportunities to perform together, as part of my acoustic collective Dead to the Core and as fellow instructors at Ashokan Guitar Camp. Surette’s duo with multi-instrumentalist Steve Roy, known as Steve and Dave Play Dead, brilliantly translated the music of The Dead into a guitar / mandolin combo, as thousands of Dead fans have discovered through the world through their video of “China Cat Sunflower / I Know You Rider”, recorded in 2020.

“We would find ourselves in a lot of musical situations where we were both playing somewhere between lead and rhythm in some kind of conversation, and we never felt like the train was going off the rails,” Roy said of their collaborations. “In fact, it was like an all-terrain vehicle that was completely comfortable when it was off the tracks.”

Surette undoubtedly had some serious instrumental chops, but what stood out was his humility, kindness and dedication to music. It was all about the song and never the spotlight, and in the outpouring of tributes to Surette on social media, dozens of musicians and alumni recalled how he uplifted the playing of everyone around. from him.

“He was so generous and generous, and he always went out of his way to support the other people he played with,” said Roy. “Even when he was playing solo, his goal was to serve the music rather than show off.”