Husband and wife duo celebrate 5 years of streaming concerts

HAZLETON — Joe and Dot Sweet, a husband-and-wife singing duo who perform as Two of Us, started a tradition when COVID-19 canceled a show that they were set to play.

Why not do the songs on Facebook? Dot thought, figuring people who would have attended might watch online.

They thought their online concert might be a one-off.

Instead, they kept playing, and their audience of as many as 200 people kept returning through the pandemic and long after the restrictions ended.

Every week for the past five years, the Sweets have streamed a two-hour concert from the living room of their house on James Street.

They’ll celebrate the anniversary by streaming their 262nd concert 6 p.m. Friday. This time they’ll have a live audience joining them for dinner at the Other Side in Freeland, the bar and grill where their show was canceled when COVID arrived, March 21, 2020.

“It’s not our anniversary. It’s our anniversary,” said Joe, waiving his hands to include the unseen audience, while talking about the live show on a recent streaming session.

The audience, dubbed the Saturday Night Crew after the night when the Sweets have streamed most of their shows, includes friends from throughout the Freeland and Hazleton area. But they’ve picked up followers from Alaska, Florida, Texas, Nova Scotia, England, Ireland, Scotland, France and Poland. Like the Sweets, many of the audience haven’t missed a streaming session during the past five years.

“We’re just a vehicle that brought them together,” Joe said while sitting in the living room with Dot. A sign on the wall said “Home Sweet Home.” Some of their 18 guitars were propped up on the sofa.

During livestreams, their sons Zak, Josh and Joey and Joey’s wife, Joelle, occasionally join them for songs or updates.

For holidays they put up banners and don costumes: Suspenders, Alpine hats and YuengIing T-shirts for Oktoberfest, party hats at New Year’s Eve and green garb on St. Patrick’s Day.

For a Halloween concert, Joe dressed as Uncle Fester but took the light bulb out of his mouth long enough to sing the theme from the “Addams Family” to their infant grandson, Chase, who viewers have watched grew up and is now 5, just like the concert series.

While Dot and Joe count on at least 40 people to follow the stream each week, the show at the Other Side sold all 80 tickets in three days.

“Not a seat left,” said LeAnn Kochie, who owns the other side with her husband, Jack. The Kochies and Sweets both grew up in Freeland and have known each other for years. “They’ve been playing here since 1989,” LeAnn said.

Perhaps the Sweets’ most devoted fan is Kristina Blechinger, who lives in Germany and sends jokes that Dot tries to read on the screen while singing. For the fourth anniversary, Blechinger made a 19-minute video of songs and moments from the shows.

The video starts with Joe fumbling to set the camera.

He had it backward.

“It looked like I was playing left handed,” he said, thinking back. “We didn’t know how to do Facebook.”

“Sometimes,” he said, ” the more mistakes we make the better it is.”

A few moments of video shows Dot learning a song on the melodica, a keyboard attached to a breathing tube.

Dot, who works for an engineering firm, learned to play guitar about 20 years ago from Joe, who runs Sweet Shots video production company but spent much of his life around music. He toured with Peach, a local band that stayed together 38 years, gave guitar lessons for even longer, and on GEM 99 and 100 co-hosts a radio show with Gary Danish called “Magical Mystery Tour.”

When the Sweets began singing together, they initially practiced  in the sunporch on their house’s second floor, out of earshot of their grown children.

From their years together, they’ve learned to harmonize.

They sing “Greensleeves” and Renaissance  songs in the style of Blackmore’s Night, a duo that influenced them. Covers of Blackmore’s songs have drawn some of their European viewers to the weekly streams.

The Sweets also perform songs by numerous other artists such as Fleetwood Mac, The Mamas and The Papas, The Monkees, Neil Young, Moody Blues, Eric Clapton, Simon and Garfunkel  and John Denver.

Like Joe’s radio show, Two of Us takes its name from a Beatles’ song, and the Sweets open many of their performances with Beatles’ songs.

They keep the themes of the streams positive, and the audience has done the same,

“There’s never any negative things brought up,” said Dot, who expressed her gratitude to their fans.

“Thank you from the bottom of our heart. We’ve become family,” she said. “The Saturday Night Crew is a community.”

Tune in

To watch the livestream of Two of Us on Friday at 6 p.m. go to www.facebook.com/dotandjoe/ or search for twoofus sweet on YouTube.