The Blind Boys of Alabama’s Jimmy Carter: “I started singing for the Lord and I ain’t finished yet.”

Jimmy Carter is the oldest member of the Blind Boys of Alabama, five-time Grammy winners and Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners. He sang with the original group, including Clarence Fountain back in the 1940s when they were at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind, but was too young to go touring with them at the beginning. After singing with the Dixieland Blind Boys and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, he eventually officially joined The Blind Boys of Alabama and has been singing with them for forty years.

From the 1980s on, The Blind Boys were able to widen their audience beyond just the black community and have enjoyed tremendous success. After their 2000 Spirit of the Century album which mixed traditional church material with songs by Tom Waits and the Rolling Stones, and which won the first of their Grammy Awards, the group has gone on to stellar success, becoming living legends in the world of gospel and roots music. In many ways, they have defined 21^st century gospel.

Over the past 20 years, the Blind Boys of Alabama have worked with the likes of Ben Harper, Robert Randolph, Mavis Staples, Taj Mahal, Ruthie Foster, Bon Iver, Paul Thorn and Marc Cohn. The list goes on. Everybody, it seems, wants to perform and record with them.

Rolling Stone Magazine has called the Blind Boys of Alabama “gospel titans” and The New Yorker simply said they were “legendary.” Few would disagree.

I got the opportunity to chat to Jimmy Carter aka The Jimster for Down at the Crossroads. It was an incredible privilege to talk to a man who has gone through as much as he has, has achieved so much and is one of the most positive, cheerful people you could meet.

I asked him first of all about the Blind Boys’ 2017 album Almost Home, which was originally released by Amazon, but is now being made available to all digital music platforms for the first time in a couple of months’ time. It’s a wonderful album of mostly original songs which chronicle the lives of Clarence Fountain and Jimmy Carter. The song-writing (by the likes of the North Mississippi Allstars, Phil Cook, John Leventhal, Marc Cohn, and Ruthie Foster) is superb, the arrangements terrific and the Blind Boys’ singing characteristically wonderful. It’s an album I return to again and again.

Jimmy told me that the album is about the life he and Clarence had growing up. “Yes,” he said, “it talks about the early times of the Blind Boys. It talks about how we went to school and all that. It’s kinda like a little scene of history, you know.”

Jimmy went on to talk about Let My Mother Live, an incredibly moving and very personal song.

“Yeah, that’s a song that came straight from me. When I went to school, I was only seven years old, and I was blind. So, you can picture a seven-year old boy put in a school where he’d never been before; he knows nobody there. And I used to pray every night, oh God, let my mother live till I get through this. And he let her live until she got a hundred and three years old!

He did that for me and that’s why I love God. Everybody got their own opinion about him, but for me, I’m gonna serve him till I die.”

I asked Jimmy to tell me a bit about what he remembered about growing up as a boy in Alabama. He told me,

“When I went to school, it wasn’t a school that you’d come home every day from. We had to stay there for nine months at a time. We went to school in September and only came home in May, apart from the Christmas holidays.” It was here Jimmy first started singing in choirs.

“Yeah, I went up there and I met all the rest of the Blind Boys, and we started singing together. We had a choir, and a male chorus and we had a quartet. And the rest of it is history, my friend!”

I wondered about his visual impairment and how that has affected him and his music over the years. Jimmy was more concerned to talk about his calling to sing for the Lord.

“Well, you know,” he said, “when we started out, we didn’t sing because we wanted to be well known or famous. We weren’t thinking about that; all we wanted to do was to get out there and sing and tell the world about Jesus Christ. We weren’t thinking about no accolades or nothing like that. Because that’s what God wanted us to do.

“So, we have been blessed, we won five Grammys, we won a national Achievement Award, and God’s been good to us.”

The first song on Almost Home is the joyous Stay On the Gospel Side – “I started singing for the Lord and I ain’t finished yet.” Despite many offers to cross over and record secular songs, The Blind Boys have remained true all these years to their original calling.

“That’s right! There were a lot of them that did not stay on the gospel side. But we did. Because when we started out, we promised the Lord that we would stay on the gospel side, no matter what. And we did that. Although it gets hard sometimes, but, you know, God takes care of his own. We’re alright.”

I said to Jimmy, “Well, tell me this, when you talk about gospel music, some people think gospel music is just all about the music, but in your gospel music, it’s about the message as well, isn’t it?”

Jimmy agreed. “We have a message. Gospel is not just music, it also has a message. Somebody might say, tell me, what is gospel? When they ask me that, I say that gospel is the good news of God. That’s what gospel is.”

Jimmy Carter comes across as an incredibly positive person. My chat with him was punctuated with frequent chuckles and smiles I could hear over the phone. He told me:

“Yeah, well, you know, I’ve had my difficulties, I’ve had my setbacks, I’ve been taken advantage of at times, But it takes all of that for us to go through what we need to go through. People say, you aren’t doing anything but singing, but they just don’t know what we have to go through. We love what we do, that’s what keeps us going so much, because when you love what you do, it keeps you motivated. But it’s not easy, we have to go through a lot of difficulties.

“But by the grace of God, we’ve gone through that, and we’re still going through that, and we’re gonna stick it out until the end!”

What a fantastic attitude. I then wondered about what keeps Jimmy going, what it is about performing that has enabled him to keep on well past the time that a lot of artists might have stopped.

“I just love to go out on that stage and hear the audience respond to the Blind Boys. We go out there and say, well here we are, the Blind Boys of Alabama, and I say, I hope that we can say something or sing something that will lift you up and make you feel good. When you come to a concert of the Blind Boys, we don’t like for you to go the same way you came. We want to give you a message. When you leave us, we want you to feel differently about life.”

Despite his age and his visual impairment, Jimmy Carter frequently comes off the stage during concerts and delights audience by coming to sing right down amongst them. “Oh, I love to do that!” he said laughing.

I asked him about the Blind Boys being invited on several occasions to the White House. “Three times!” Jimmy said proudly. And what was it like singing for President Obama?

“Well, it was kinda special because he was a black president and I thought I would never see that in my lifetime. But I’ve seen it, and I’m grateful for that. We’ve sung for President Obama, for President Clinton and President Bush, and all three of them were extremely nice to us.”

The band played Free At Last at the White House on February 9, 2010.

That made me ask about his experience of the many changes in race relations in America. The Blind Boys of Alabama toured throughout the South during the Jim Crow era of the 1940s and 1950s and were a part of the soundtrack to the Civil Rights movement. And on Almost Home, they cover the North Mississippi Allstars’ Pray for Peace, which laments the changes which still need to come in the United States: “I think our grandmother would be heartbroken / To see their children’s children right back where we started.”

Jimmy said, “You know, when we started out, the South was segregated and we weren’t allowed to sing for nobody but our people. We did not know that the white people wanted the Blind Boys before we got over there. We just wasn’t allowed to give it to them. But they loved our music, and as time went on, and we got a chance to give it to them, they accepted it, they’re still accepting it, and everywhere we go we have people who come up and tell us how they have enjoyed our performances. And that’s what we like to hear!”

I just had to ask him about Amazing Grace, which the Blind Boys sign to the tune of House of the Rising Sun. I’d heard it was his favourite song.

“Yes it is. We sing that song every night. The reason why it’s my favourite song is, if it wasn’t for His amazing grace, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now.”

So how much longer does Jimmy Carter intend to keep on singing for the Lord?

“Oh, well, it won’t be too much longer, because I’m no spring chicken [laughs]. I’m gonna have to think about retiring pretty soon! But there are two or three things I wanna do before I step down!”

He then proceeded to tell me how he intended to come back to Ireland to sing for us. Sing on Jimmy Carter, we’ve loved everything the Blind Boys of Alabama have done, and we never want you to stop.

Lockdown in Italy – with Grammy nominated harmonica player, Fabrizio Poggi

Photo Mario Rota

Fabrizio Poggi is one of Europe’s finest exponents of the blues. Fabrizio has recorded over twenty albums and has shared stages with numerous top blues artists including The Blind Boys of Alabama, Eric Bibb Sonny Landreth, Ruthie Foster and John Hammond. He’s the author of four books on the blues and was nominated for a Grammy a couple of years ago, along with Guy Davis, for their Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee tribute album. He also has a Hohner Lifetime Award, and has been twice a Blues Music Awards nominee.

Fabrizio and his wife, Angelina live in the north of Italy, just south of Milan, where they’ve been sheltering over the past couple of months as Italy as suffered under the onslaught of Coronavirus.

On the 20^th February, Italy’s “patient 1,” the first case of domestic transmission of the virus was confirmed and it has gone on to kill nearly 29,000 people. Italy became the first country to enforce a nationwide lockdown in early March, but the country still suffered terribly, with hospitals overwhelmed and the virus spreading to all parts of the country.

After almost two months under lockdown, the longest so far of any European country, Italy is now set to begin slowly easing restrictions. But the economic forecast for the country is bleak, with experts predicting a crisis not seen in decades. And in Italy’s poorer south,Living in people have been running out of food and money, with the Red Cross delivering food parcels.

A few days into lockdown, we saw images of people across Italy singing and playing music from their balconies as they came together to say: “Andrà tutto bene” (Everything will be all right). But the devastation of the virus has changed that and people are saying “Everything will not be all right.”

Down at the Crossroads got the opportunity to talk to Fabrizio and Angelina in their home in north Italy to find out what’s its been like living in Italy these past couple of months, how they’ve been coping and about the music Fabrizio’s been sending out to encourage people.

 

Gary: How are you and Angelina and your families? You’re living just south of Milan, in the north of Italy, which has been in the thick of the coronavirus outbreak for the past few months. What has it been like for you and Angelina?

Fabrizio: We are fine for now, so far. We have survived through a lot of bad things. We try to go on.

It’s very tough, we are mostly inside all day long. We have the opportunity to communicate with people through technology, but it’s hard. Most of the people we know are sick and we lost many friends.

Angelina: It is a tough time, we lost friends, people we know. We lost a very dear, deep friend who was also our doctor. Her name was Patricia, and it was very, very sad for us. She was always helping people, she was on the front line, and she died giving her life to people. Now we are not in the worst part. But it is still sad, when you go out to the supermarket, the few times you can go, and I can’t wait to come back home.

I only have some relatives, and I’m happy for that, because my parents were very old and I can’t imagine…and Fabrizio’s mother is very old, but fortunately, she’s safe. And we are happy for that.

Fabrizio: People know nothing about the future, which is also tragic, because we can’t see a real future which is in these days why I keep on playing and trying to bring a little light to people. Everything seems very dark.

Gary: What’s the situation in Italy right now? I gather things are a little better.

Fabrizio: Well it is hard to say, because the information…sometimes it’s a real mess up. One day optimistic, one day negative. The terrible thing about this virus is that we don’t know much about it. It’s hard to trust information because you don’t know who has control. So, people are sad about this.

Gary: We saw the videos of people trying to keep their spirits up singing from balcony to balcony. That was incredible.

Fabrizio: Yes, we were all over the news a lot. But probably not so many people were actually singing from balconies! From what we saw on the TV, it seemed like everybody in Italy was on their balcony singing! But that was just the media! We are not so happy as we appear.

Gary: You’ve been posting some nice videos of you singing and playing your harmonica, which have been very touching. How important do you think music can be at a time like this?

Fabrizio: Music is always important. The story of African-American music is that it was music that was born to uplift. Spirituals, blues are two sides of the same coin. Music brings people out of the tunnel, to believe, to hope for a better future.

And I want to try to play that kind of music for the people, because of the meaning inside the songs. So, playing Precious Lord or Amazing Grace or I Want Jesus to Walk With Me, is me trying to reach other people’s souls.

Gary: Some of the songs you’ve been posting are spirituals or hymns, like Amazing Grace. Is faith important right now, Fabrizio?

Fabrizio: Yes, I think that these songs contains a real message. They say, I’ve been there before you when there was no hope, just desperation – take my hand and I will walk with you gives some hope, some light, some hope for a better life some day.

Guy Davis, Katleen Scheir from Belgium and I have just recorded a version of We Shall Overcome. And we’re trying to raise funds for Doctors Without Borders.

Angelina: We choose We Shall Overcome because it has a very important message and we connected Italy, Belgium and the United States. It says that music has no borders. We had borders before the virus and now we have more borders because we have to stay at home. But music can go everywhere, can help people everywhere, all over the world. People are maybe not in the same country, don’t speak the same language, are different – but when they sing and play, they are the same.

Gary: Wonderful. Tell us about some of the music you’ve been listening to over the past couple of months – what has helped?

Fabrizio: Every kind of music that moves me and in some way touches me was welcome these past two months. I listened to everything from blues to old spirituals, from jazz to classical. I just appreciate the music because it is a wonderful gift, a gift of beauty. But all my life I’ve not just listened to blues – my ears are always wide open!

Gary: Now, I remember we met on that wonderful pre-Grammy’s concert in the City Winery in New York City a couple of years ago. Being nominated for a Grammy in 2018 must have been an incredibly proud moment for you, Fabrizio.

Fabrizio: I remember that City Winery evening very well. The best memories! And yes, I was very proud. It was like a dream come true, something I really didn’t expect. Great memories, a lot of people I love were there, and it was a great experience I will cherish in my heart for the rest of my life.

Gary: Did you ever think when you first lifted the harmonica that the road would take you there?

Fabrizio: No, not at all. If a friend of mine had come to me in my little room in the middle of nowhere in Northern Italy and said to me, You know Fabrizio, one day you will challenge the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Gardens in New York for a Grammy, I would have said, my friend, don’t kid with me, it will never happen!

And I owe a lot to the Rolling Stones. Because I discovered the blues from the Rolling Stones, John Mayall, Eric Clapton – as many people of my generation did. At that time, in Italy you couldn’t hear Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker. So, in a way, I won two times at the Grammys – once to be there, and for me it was a wonderful experience, and secondly, for the victory of the Rolling Stones – in some way, they were like my musical fathers. So, without the Rolling Stones, no Fabrizio at the Grammys!

Gary: You’re very generous, Fabrizio, because I think a lot of people felt that the record you and Guy made was much more of a traditional blues album and should have taken the award.

Fabrizio: I think for most of the journalists there, they felt that the Rolling Stones didn’t win the Grammy just for that album. They had never won a Grammy for an album, just one back in the 80s they had won for a video, but they had never won one for, Exile on Main Street or Let It Bleed, which were historic albums. So the Grammys owed the Rolling Stones an award. And that was the time.

Gary: Did you get to meet any of them?

Fabrizio: The night before at the City Winery in New York at the blues party, which you were at – someone said that Keith Richards is in town. So maybe he’ll show up. But he didn’t! But I had the opportunity to jam with some Rolling Stones musicians!

Gary: As we eventually come out of this terrible situation, what are you hoping for? Can the world be different?

Fabrizio: I hope it will be better. I hope we learn something from this tragedy, but I’m not sure. I’m not really optimistic. Musicians have been very much affected by this tragedy, and I don’t know what the future for music is. Aside from the big stars, what will happen to little clubs, to musicians who don’t have a lot of money? I’m afraid there may be dark times. And I hope that people around the world will understand that now is the time to support musicians. If not, they will not survive any more. Music may change for ever and we will lose something very important.

Too many people take music for granted, think that music is free, that musicians don’t need to pay bills. Now it’s time for us to grow up and understand that music is life. Musicians give us their talent their creativity.

Gary: Presumably, Fabrizio, not being able to perform has had a financial impact on you?

Fabrizio: Well, you know, the most beautiful reward a musician has is the clapping hands, and people who come up to you and tell you your playing was amazing. So this is a very big loss. Playing for people live on stage, connecting with them is something that can’t be done in the same way with technology.

Gary: Eventually we will come out of this. And what about for you and Angelina – what are you looking forward to?

Fabrizio: To go back our old life. And to start again to hug people! Because, yes you can communicate with your eyes, but a hug can communicate something that is hard to communicate with words. So, when some doctor tells me, OK, Fabrizio, go ahead and hug someone, that will be a very bright day!

Gary: Lovely to talk to you both, I hope you stay well. And we are looking forward to seeing some more nice videos from you.

Martin Harley – “I wanted to put out a positive message into the world.”

Martin Harley is an outstanding singer-songwriter and top-notch slide guitarist, characteristically playing his Weissenborn acoustic lap steel guitars. Total Guitar Magazine ranked him #16 in the World’s greatest acoustic guitarist poll. He has now eight albums to his credit, including last year’s Roll With the Punches, which Down at the Crossroads had as one of its top blues albums of last year.

Martin delights audiences wherever he plays in the UK and US with his hugely enjoyable brand of Americana and blues. His easy-going style, sense of fun, top-notch back catalogue of songs and jaw-droppingly good guitar work make a Martin Harley gig one you’ll remember for some time to come. As well as solo shows and with his band, he has recorded and performed on the same stage as artists like Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Beth Hart, and Gavin DeGraw.

Martin, like the rest of us, was at home with his family, staying safe, after his Roll With Punches tour came to an abrupt end in Belgium, where he was playing to sold-out audiences. Everything’s cancelled until (best guess) September. Like a lot of performing artists, this hits hard financially, although Martin was more concerned about “people who are just starting out in music or maybe just put a record out.”

Martin told me that he’s been touring consistently for over 20 years, so he was looking at this situation as giving “a little bit of downtime to write and spend time with the family. It has been very good for me so far.”

He went on, “It’s a huge opportunity, actually. I don’t normally take long periods of time off. Even if I have a couple of weeks off, I still need to keep gig fit for the songs that I’m touring from the record, whereas in this enforced period of not working, I’m just going through all the different alternate tunings from Hawaiian to Dobro. And I can just have one guitar tuned to one thing and I can spend a couple of hours each day mucking about.

“And I don’t have to think to myself, I’ve got to be really good at playing, say, Roll with the Punches, because people are going to be paying to see me. So, I’ve really enjoyed letting go of that for a little while. The creative aspect in me is really, really moving forward, and I’m letting my imagination run wild. Having said that, I should have been recording an album in Nashville this week with Sam Lewis and Daniel Kimbro which is due for release in April 2021. But because we couldn’t do that, I did a couple of songwriting sessions with Sam and that was really cool. It thought it might be difficult, not sitting in the same room, but, you know – FaceTime, couple of guitars… There’s no rushing, people have got time on their hands and it seemed quite easy to focus.”

I asked Martin about the new album Roll with the Punches, which Down at the Crossroads has as one of our best blues albums of last year and how it’s different from some of his previous work. (see our review here)

“Yeah, I feel it’s a bit more rock n roll. I knew I wanted to make a band record – the songs I was writing just wanted drums! So that’s where it started. You know, I’m more known as a lap style player, but I wanted the freedom to move on stage when I’m performing so I was learning to play bottleneck electric guitar. And so those songs just naturally were inspired by people like ‘70s Ry Cooder, J J Cale and Little Feet and all of those, and you just wanted drums! So, I found a guy called Harry Harding and we started demoing in his studio in Bristol. And it was just very natural. I would take a nice break, ride my motorbike over there, do two days in the studio, write some songs with him and then come home or continue touring. And that went on for three months until we had enough songs that we needed to go and find a studio. And by accident, at a gig with Sam Lewis, I met a crazy haired gentleman called Owen who runs Studiowz in Pembrokeshire in Wales. And he said, look, if drums are an important sound for your record, come and see me, drums is what I do!

“So we went there, and Studiowz is an old chapel. Owen runs a lot of analogue gear and he has an amazing collection of wonderful, vintage drums. He’s not too expensive and he’s super professional. We stayed at his house. There were no distractions – there’s not even a local pub. When we got there, Harry and I just sort of looked around and went, right. let’s do this. And we made most of the record between us. And then just brought people in as we needed to and let the sound unfold.

“And Harry’s a monster. He plays great guitar, he sings backing vocals on the record, he plays bass, he plays drums, he’s co-producing with me! And he’s very good at the technical aspect of things. Jonny Henderson came in for a day and he bought a lot of life to the record with the Hammond and the piano. He hadn’t heard any of the songs when he came into the studio. and did all his parts in a day.

“So, we ploughed through it really quickly and it was a lovely recording environment to be in. And there was a healthy amount of pressure – we got five days, it’s gotta be done, even though we were still writing some of the songs in the studio. So, we just pitched in. And on day five, we did go to the local pub!”

One of the things I really like about Roll with the Punches is that the album’s got a very positive vibe. And it’s got some great lines like keeping a bluebird singing in every tree and a little piece of sunshine to keep in your pocket everywhere you go. So, I asked Martin what that reflects. Is he a very positive person?

“I think I am,” he told me, “or I certainly strive to be.” “I don’t know that I am always positive naturally. It requires a bit of work, and I quite often delve into philosophy, particularly the Stoics. I have a book of meditations by Marcus Aurelius, which I was turned on to by reading Derron Brown’s book, Happy.  I find things that I discover from that to help me stay positive and move forward. And then they sort of drift into songs. You know, I saw a lot of people struggle the last couple of years in the period that I was writing…I’m just seeing a lot more mental health issues.

“But I think I am pretty positive. And I wanted to put some stuff out there that wasn’t just self-indulgent generic blues. I don’t wanna be too generic with the blues. I wanted to put out something as a positive message in the world.”

There’s a kind of gospel feel to at least a couple of the songs on the album. The lyrics of the title track remind me a bit of Eric Bibb’s Don’t Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down. And then Brother is a terrific, gospel-tinged song. I asked Martin how this sort of feel creeps into his music, given you tend to hear this more from US artists rather than UK artists.

“Well, I think two reasons. Kelly Joe Phelps was the guy who really turned me on to slide guitar playing across my lap, and his dad was a preacher, so he wonderfully bridges that gap between Delta blues and gospel. And his early records are just him singing and playing guitar. That was a huge blueprint for me. And a lot of his stuff is quite religious and he seemed to me to be very lost in the moment. I loved that whole thing. I went to see him play at Union Chapel. and had a real epiphany moment. That’s why I recently played Union Chapel because it had such an effect on me.

Photo: Michal Augustini

“And also, sacred steel. A lot of gospel players use steel guitar and they get a very good vocal quality. These wonderful moving top lines that sound like really powerful gospel female singers, a mixture of major and minor keys, and then there are these fluid runs. And yeah, that’s where that gospel feel comes from for me. It’s very lyrical. And there are great people out there doing it. Derek Trucks is a great exponent; and then there’s Lowell George with that vibrato and that vocal quality. And Robert Randolph – he’s straight out church, isn’t he?”

I wondered if Martin had heard anything from Kelly Joe Phelps who seemed to drop out of a while back after injuring his hand, but he hadn’t. But he said,

“He’s really the guy for me. He’s a complete package of great singing, great guitar player, not too mechanical. It’s all feel, he has his own sense of timing. There’s a fluidity to it that makes me feel like it’s a necessary thing for him, There’s no tension. It feels like it’s the fastest route between his heart and his fingers. And that’s a real aspiration for me – to be able to be in the moment, to be in some kind of flow where you can improvise and be authentic. Basically, do music for the reason you started doing it – you picked it up, because it felt good, because it made you feel better about the world, it gave you a release. It’s a wonderful thing. I think if you are really touched by music and you can immerse yourself in it, you’re very lucky.”

I asked Martin about the last song on the album, The Time is Now, which Martin half seriously says, in his gigs, is a gospel song for atheists, which usually gets a laugh. It’s very jaunty in one sense – “life is for the living and the time is now” – but maybe there’s some serious thinking here as well. It sounds like a song for right now.

“Yeah, I mean, it’s just saying be in the moment. We spend a lot time living inside our telephones. and looking at everyone else’s perfect pictures, people being followed and being observed. And everyone is very scared of doing anything that might be filmed or posted about or be criticized for. You know, it’s actually quite hard to be in the moment these days. The moment is constantly being captured, branded, investigated.”

Martin Harley is a master at the acoustic lap steel slide guitar and plays these lovely Weissenborn guitars. It’s not the most common way you see people playing slide. So I wondered how Martin got started with that, and what drew him to that?

“Paris, Texas, by Ry Cooder happened. I was blown away by the movie. It was just that achingly beautiful soundtrack. And that lonely three or four note simple riff on slide guitar. Just like, what is that? How do you do it? So that started it. I started wanting to make notes with a slide, to make the contact, but not with my fingers. And then shortly after that I went to live in a car in Australia for a year. And I took in 12-string with me that warped in the heat! So I started laying it across my lap, like I’d seen people do.

“And then around about the time I was just thinking about what to tune it to and what was working for me, I heard Kelly Joe Phelps. And it just snowballed into, ‘this is what I wanted to do.’  I took a step away from the regular lap playing for Roll with the Punches and that was a nice holiday. But now that I have time on my hands, I naturally gravitate back towards the lap where I am very comfortable. And my house is literally full of guitars, tuned to different tunings from Hawaiian to more gospel to dobro tunings. Any anything weird and wonderful I can find. And that’s really spurring some pretty crazy new directions!”

On the subject of guitars, I sensed we could have had a whole new conversation. Suffice it to say Martin has quite a collection of guitars then.

“I am a self-confessed guitar slut. They don’t have to be expensive or built by amazing people. I’ve a little Hoffner that my dad got from a car boot sale for a fiver. It’s just got something about it. Sounds great for certain kinds of songs. I met up with a friend yesterday who was selling some guitars from his collection. That was a very dangerous place for me to go, and I left his house with four new slide guitars! So, yeah, I am pretty bad. Now my long-suffering partner is in the background and she’s probably rolling her eyes and going, ‘You are awful at this!’ But I do try and get rid of some from time to time – honestly!”

If you want a dose of feel-good to ease the blues from the current pandemic situation, get yourself a copy of Martin Harley’s Roll With The Punches, and “let the music wash your soul.” And it sounds like the creative juices are flowing at the moment, so there’s a lot more we can look forward to in the future.

Bible & Tire: Bruce Watson wants to retread your soul.

“This music, when you listen to it, you can’t help but tap your foot. You can’t help but feel good.”
Bruce Watson

Bruce Watson is the general manager of Mississippi record label, Fat Possum, as well as Big Legal Mess Records. Courtney Marie Andrews, A.A. Bondy, Jimbo Mathus, Alvin Youngblood Hart and Alex Rose are just some of the artists on the labels, as well as legacy recordings by the likes of R.L. Burnside, Fred McDowell and Junior Kimbrough.

A recording engineer and producer, Watson is steeped in roots music and, along with Matthew Johnson, he’s worked at Fat Possum to acquire an impressive back catalogue of music, including material from Al Green, Ann Peebles, and Townes Van Zandt.

In his mid-50s, Bruce Watson is pressing on with a major new project. He wants to introduce an Americana audience to black gospel music. To do so, he’s established a new label, called Bible and Tire, which seeks to promote both older artists and new ones, all the while breathing new life into the genre.

We got chatting to Bruce to find out what it’s all about:

Gary So I wondered if you could maybe just tell us a little bit about Bible and Tire and how it’s different from Fat Possum. What does it aim to do?

Photo: Jim Weber

Bruce Well, I guess it started when I moved to Memphis four or five years ago. We were opening up a vinyl manufacturing plant and I bought a 150-year-old building and put an office and a recording studio in it. And I kind of looked around and thought, what am I going to do here that’s different? Now we’ve done the blues thing. There are plenty people doing kind of a neo-soul kind of thing. And hip hop is really not in my wheelhouse. Modern country, I don’t really care for too much, and the garage rock thing was being done by Goner Records.

So, I just kind of looked around and I started noticing how much talent there was in the gospel community around Memphis. About the same time, I was fortunate enough to buy the masters to the D-Vine Spirituals catalogue. We’d been buying gospel masters was for a while – we had acquired the rights to Designer Records probably about 10 years ago and did a box set on that some years ago. And then we released the Pitch / Gusman recordings from the stuff down in Georgia.  And we did Bishop Manning and the Manning Family, we’ve done Theotis Taylor. So, there was quite a bit of gospel stuff here.

So anyway, I wanted to put together a label that was solely based on gospel. But there’s always confusion, when I say, oh, the name of my record company is Big Legal Mess! So I decided to come up with a label that’s a little more friendly, and with Bible in the name. And I wanted a label that was just solely releasing gospel music.

Gary So, where does the word Tire come in?

Bruce Well, it’s just like a play on words. It’s like something I saw one time on a roadside stop and it was always in the back of my mind. Bible and Tire, yeah, kind of like “retread your soul!”

The first two things I released were Elizabeth King, the reissue records from her D-Vine Spirituals stuff. And then I did the Sensational Barnes Brothers, who are younger guys from Memphis who I’d been using as back-up singers on a lot of stuff I was producing. They were really strong, with a gospel background. Their father was a well-known gospel singer in the city and their mother had been a background singer for Ray Charles, a Raelette.

Gary I’ve listened to their album, which is fantastic.

Bruce Yeah, man, they’re great. It seems like gospel music started changing in the late 70s and it became more modern in a way that it’s really easy to blame it on five string basses and synthesizers. But, you know, it was deeper than that. People were trying to keep up with the times. But the stuff that I record, I really try to take it back. So, if there’s gonna be an organ on it, it’s going to be a Hammond organ. It’s gonna be a Fender P bass. And we try to record it so it sounds like it was recorded in the 60s or 70s.

And sometimes that means me using my own group of studio musicians like we do on the Barnes Brothers. And the Barnes Brothers is all songs from the Designer Records catalogue.

So the next thing I did, which is coming out the end of April, is the Dedicated Men of Zion, from Greenville, North Carolina. They’re amazing. But instead of the Designer catalogue, we use songs from The D-Vine Spirituals catalogue. They came down and made a record with my band in Memphis. So that’s the next release. And we’re also working on a full-length Elizabeth King. Oh, she’s still amazing after all these years. She sounds great. She’s getting close to 80 now and she’s got 13 or 14 kids, 30 or 40 grandkids, but she’s awesome. You know, she just toured France as a replacement with the Como Momas when one of them got sick. And that’s really the first time she’d been out of the United States. Anyway, we have high hopes for her.

We’re releasing a JCR Records compilation. JCR Records was the catalogue where Pastor Shipp said, well, if you’re not good enough to be on Divine Spiritual, I’m gonna put you on JCR. This is my favourite stuff. It’s really raw, it’s not right, it’s totally messed up. I love that kind of stuff. We’re calling it the “first shall be last and the last shall be first!”

So that’s coming out probably June, July. And then we have a D-Vine Spirituals boxset and documentary that is coming out hopefully in the Fall. It’ll all depend on how fast I can get the documentary finished. There’s a lot of things going on! I just got back from North Carolina and we set up a mobile recording studio in a small town called Fountain, and recorded eleven gospel groups in eight days. So, we’re doing a North Carolina Sacred Soul record compilation, and a documentary that goes along with that as well. And this stuff is so raw. It wasn’t recorded in a studio, it was recorded in a 100-year-old building. We just put some blankets up on the wall. But this stuff is amazing. There’s so much talent in that part of North Carolina, it’s ridiculous. So, we got a lot going on!

Gary Yeah, you sure have.  And what is the audience that you think you are appealing to here, Bruce?

Bruce You know, that is the big question. I’d obviously like to appeal to a younger audience. What’s going to have to happen is these guys are going to have to get out on tour. We’re going to have to get this out of the church and into the rock clubs and into the theatres. You know, when we did Fat Possum in the early days, blues was pretty much stuck in the blues club. And we took guys like R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough out on tour with Iggy Pop and Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion, the Beastie Boys. And that opened those guys up to an entirely new audience. So, with this stuff, too – take it out of church. And we’ve already started that. There’s a good quote in the recent Vice magazine article about us that said that gospel music is so deeply entwined with black music that there’s no reason that the same audience that goes for hip hop and rap and country can’t embrace this.

You see it on a much larger level with, you know, Kanye’s gospel records, regardless of what my opinion might be of that. I’m not crazy about it, but I’m glad.

Gary I mean there’s so many genres and subgenres of what you might call Americana these days, you got to think that if you can get the music out there, there’s going to be an audience for it.

Bruce That’s kind of what I’m hedging my bets on. Of course, the music’s got to be good. That’s a big right part of it. But I think we’re on the right track as far as that goes.

Gary So what would you say is the power of gospel music? Why has it got the potential of appealing to a wider audience beyond the church?

Bruce Well, man, I’m not particularly religious, let’s say that. But this music, when you listen to it, you can’t help but tap your foot. You can’t help but feel good. And I’ve always tried to work in music that moves me. There’s not a whole lot out there now that moves me. But this actually moves me. I’m really kind of doing something based on emotion. I always just follow the music. It moves me and I hope that will move other people.

Gary That’s a very refreshing thing to say, Bruce, in these days of spreadsheets and numbers and all of that.

Bruce Well, we’ve been fortunate to have been in business for 30 years, so we can kind of branch out and try to experiment. So it’s nice when we have the luxury to do that.

Gary When you talk about gospel music, you’re looking at a sort of 60s, 70s sound, but for for some of the artists you’ve talked about, for them, the Christian content, the lyrical content is very important. So how does that play out when you take it out of the church into the clubs and concert halls?

Bruce Honestly, so far we’ve only done two or three shows. But it’s been amazing, really. Because it’s something different. It’s not like your typical indie rock thing you can see almost every single night. It’s something different. And people will come out for that, especially if it’s raw and emotional. I just think it really hits a nerve.

Gary That’s very interesting. And I understand you have a collaborator in Pastor Juan Shipp. I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about him.

Bruce Pastor Shipp is Memphis born and bred. He was a postal employee, but he was also a part-time deejay and he saw the need for a Memphis gospel label. The honest truth is, he wasn’t very happy with the production aesthetic of Style Wooten who owned Designer Records. So Pastor Shipp started D-Vine Spirituals as a reaction to that. He founded a recording studio called Temple Recording Studio that was owned by a guy named Clyde Leopard, who was a Sun Studio artist and engineer, in downtown Memphis. It’s a studio you don’t hear much about, but all the D-Vine Spirituals stuff was recorded there.

Rev. J Shipp (Photo: Jim Weber)

Anyway, Clyde and Pastor Shipp became really good friends. And basically, Clyde taught Pastor Shipp how to record, so Pastor Shipp started the label. That was around 1968 until about 1977 or 78 and he released around 150 singles during that time. He eventually shut down the label in the late 70s and went on with his life.

Clyde Leopard had the master tapes. I found out about Pastor Shipp and D-Vine Spirituals from a friend of mine named Mike Hurtt who’s a collector and a writer. He wrote the liner notes to The Soul of Designer Records boxset for me. Mike found Pastor Shipp about seven or eight years ago and asked him about the masters. Well, Clyde Leopard had passed away and the bank was in the process of foreclosing on his house, but Mike and Pastor Shipp managed to get the master tapes and save them within 24 hours of the house being in the hands of the bank! Anyway, eventually after some years, I was given the tapes and I called Pastor Shipp and introduced myself.

We met, hit it off and worked out a deal, where I would be partners in D-Vine Spirituals and JCR. So then we started transferring all the tapes. We’d take two days a week and transfer a hundred fifty tapes. And the stuff is amazing. D-Vine Spirituals is one of those labels that you don’t really hear much about, only hardened gospel people know about it. But it really has some of the best stuff I’ve heard as far as black gospel is concerned from that period.

So you would listen to this stuff and go, oh, my goodness, I can’t believe no one’s ever done anything with this stuff! So anyway, Pastor Shipp and I became business partners. We put on a big show at Crosstown Concourse in Memphis, a night of Memphis soul gospel. And it was very successful, with about five or six hundred people turning up. People going crazy! We had the Barnes Brothers; we had four or five of the old D-Vine Spirituals artists who are still around. There was Elder Ward. Elizabeth King, the D-Vine Spiritualettes, and Reverend John Wilkins. It was a big night.

Gary John’s the son of Robert Wilkins, right?

Bruce He is. I made a record of him probably about ten or twelve years ago and he’s really good. It’s been a great partnership. He’s co-producing the new Elizabeth King record. And they go back for years, and he’s kind of acting as a manager for her right now.

Gary Now just to clarify, Bruce, obviously, there’s a whole genre of the blues that you might call gospel blues from Willie Johnson through to Robert Wilkins and, you know, right on through to potentially Kelly Joe Phelps today. Is that something that comes onto your radar with Bible and Tire or are you really just looking more at the 60s, 70s sort of gospel stuff?

Bruce I’m totally open. I haven’t found any good gospel blues that interest me. But I’m not limiting things. And if I find a great white gospel singer, I’m going to do that. To me, I always follow the music, But if it’s on Bible and Tire, it’s going to be gospel. If it’s good and I feel like I want to do it, I don’t really care what gospel genre.

Gary Very good. So tell me this then, Bruce, how do you manage to be the general manager of Fat Possum and then have the energy and the time to get a venture like this up and going? It sounds like quite an enterprise.

Bruce I’m still at Fat Possum. But as far as some of the day to day management, I’m not having to deal with that. I don’t have as many irons in the fire as I used to and my focus is really on this right now.

 Gary Excellent. That’s fantastic, Bruce. I wish you all the best with it.

Brooks Williams celebrates his career – but the best is yet to come

“He’s a lovely player, a lovely singer, and a great writer – the real thing.” Martin Simpson.

(Photo: Arlene Avery)

Hailing from Statesboro, Georgia, Brooks Williams is a singer-songwriter, jaw-droppingly good guitar player, and consummate performer, whose music melds blues, Americana and folk into a heady soulful mix. If you’re one of the lucky ones to have seen Brooks Williams playing live, you’ll have come away feeling good, with a huge smile on your face. If, by any chance, you don’t  already know Brooks Williams, you’ve sold yourself short – start delving into his excellent back catalogue of around 30 albums immediately.

He’s graced stages along the way with Taj Mahal, John Hammond, Maria Muldaur, Shawn Colvin, Paul Jones, David Bromberg, and more recently toured with Guy Davis and Hans Theessink. His guitar and bottleneck slide playing is legendary; he’s got a sweet, but versatile voice, and is a great song-writer with a ready wit. Watch out too for those covers he does from the blues and jazz back-catalogue as well as more recent stuff, where his reinterpretation of the songs breathes new life into them.

He tours the UK and the US relentlessly and is just about to embark on a tour promoting his album, Work My Claim, which celebrates Brooks’s 30 years as a performing and recording artist.

Gary: So, Brooks, the new album: Work My Claim, is a celebration of 30 years recording and performing. You’ve chosen 12 songs from throughout your career, (plus 4 bonus songs when you buy the CD). You’ve recorded something like 23 solo albums to date, aside from collaborative work – so a lot of songs written and recorded over the years – how did you choose just 12 songs?

Brooks; It was a difficult process. I actually spent a whole year going through the old material. You know, once I finished Lucky Star, I immediately turned my attention to this project because I knew I needed to reacquaint myself with the old songs. So, I spent about a year going through the various albums, listening and then trying to play the songs, seeing which ones felt like they were still relevant. And which ones I was interested in. Because a lot changed over 30 years. But it really was a labour of love to go through those songs.

It was great to reconnect with things and so interesting to find those true moments. Like there’s a track on the record, You Don’t Know My Mind, which is an old Leadbelly track. But when I originally learned it, of course, I didn’t know it was a Leadbelly track because we didn’t have the Internet and there was no book at the library that would help you. People at the local record shop were a good resource, but they didn’t always have all the information. I learned this track from someone on the road, just picked it up while I was travelling around and I re-created it from memory. And of course, I got it wrong. But I like it. And it shows how robust a blues song can be.

Anyway I went through all these songs and I felt like, well, if a song doesn’t want to speak to me now, maybe it’s just one that will continue to exist as it was done 20 or 25 years ago. And those are songs that I’ll still happily play in the gigs. If someone says to me, oh, I’d love to hear this old track from 1993, I’m happy to do it. I just didn’t feel it needed a place on a recording because it’s already got one.

Gary: Yeah, that’s very interesting. But isn’t it a wonderful thing, Brooks, to feel that what you’re doing as an artist has developed and there continues to be great value, and increased value, as time goes on?

Brooks: I feel like the same person who is, you know, sitting in the studio 30 years ago thinking the best was yet to come. And I still feel that now. So, I’m sitting here speaking to you and I’m actually holding a copy of the CD in my hand and thinking it really looks good. I’m so proud of the songs – but I’m still thinking, oh, Gary, I can’t wait for you to hear the songs I’m writing now! And so to always have that sense that there’s the next bit coming. And I really feel that what I’m doing is part of something that’s alive. And I don’t mean that as a reflection just on me. I just mean that music is a very alive thing. And I found a way to sort of swim with it or grab on to it or…jump on board that train.

Gary: You know, I was talking to Rory Block a couple of months ago and she’s just turned 70, I think. And she was fantastic. She said, oh, you know, I feel like I’m just getting started. And I thought that was wonderful. Having turned 60 a couple of years ago myself -which, incidentally, I still can’t believe. And hearing that was very refreshing. And hearing what you’re saying is very refreshing as well, because I know you’ve passed that landmark!

Brooks: Yes! I passed that landmark a year ago now. And I can’t believe it either!

Gary: But that’s a very positive thing to say for sure. Now you’ve got a couple of covers on the album. You’ve mentioned the Leadbelly one. And there’s Dave Alvin’s King of California and Duke Ellington’s I Got It Bad – all great songs. So why did you include them and not other originals?

Brooks: Well, as part of the process I just sent out the call through email, through social media, to people who listen to my music. And I said, this is the project that I’m working on and I would love to hear what your top five songs are. And number one for every single person who sent a response back was King of California. And so I knew without a doubt that that was going to be on there.

And I knew the Leadbelly song would be on there because I felt as though that was such an important milestone for me. To take an old blues song, but to not do it in in the style that people are familiar with and yet stay true to the song. So I kind of figured that had to be there.

And then I Got it Bad. That came about because I went in the studio to make this record and I probably recorded near on 30 tracks digitally. I recorded way more than I needed and it was very apparent straight away that, you know, some of them just didn’t have any extra life in them. They sounded fine but just didn’t have any extra life. But likewise, when I did, I Got It Bad, that one was a real standout performance. I was in the studio with the engineer, Mark Freegard, along with the studio owner, and both of them said, wow, that was really something. And I was already shifting to the next tune. But they said, hang on a second – can we go back to that? We’d like to hear that again, because you kind of went somewhere we’ve not heard you go before. And so it really was their calling it to my attention that made it be on the record.

Sometimes I was using songs I knew well just to stay warmed up in the studio. So even if I wasn’t going to use them, I thought, well, if I sing a couple of takes of this one and I know it well – and I do know the Duke Ellington song really well – I thought this will just be a bridge for me to get to the next song. But in this case, this one stuck. On probably more than two occasions I said to the various people working with me on the record, oh, well, I’m not going to put that one on. And every single time I did, everybody came back to me and said, please put that on!

There were some other songs that didn’t make the record. For example, I have a really enjoyable version of Gambling Man that I did with Hans Theessink. But I thought, well, there’s nothing I would do on this recording that’s going to be better than that. And there were some tracks from my Shreveport Sessions, which I really loved. And even though I recorded them again, it just didn’t feel like they needed to be there. You know, it was one of those gut feelings. And the other thing is that over the course of 30 years, one’s point of view changes. And so there are certain things that I wrote about in earlier years that didn’t seem quite as relevant now or maybe if I were to think about them now, I would think about them differently. I didn’t try to work with those songs.

So in the end, if there was going to be too much deconstruction, I thought, well, I’m so far away from the original, there is no sense in going with this. So, that played a big role in which songs made it.

Gary: You completely reworked Whatever It Takes from Lucky Star, didn’t you?

Brooks: Well, interestingly enough, when I write songs, I write two or three completely different versions of the same song. And I mean completely different tunes. So, the version that you hear on Work My Claim, that’s how I originally wrote the song. And somehow when I was recording Lucky Star, it didn’t seem like it had a place there. I was really kind of struggling with it. So I ended up with a completely alternate version, which is what you hear on Lucky Star. And that’s pretty much how all my original songs work. It’s a bit of a rod to my own back because it makes double the work for everything. But sometimes I don’t know what feel I’m going for until I actually go there and sort of sit in it for a while. Kind of live in that groove and those chord changes. And the basis of all this is, I start with lyrics first. And I write almost the complete lyrics without any music. By the time I get to the music, the lyrics are pretty well set. And then I have room to move.

Gary: Now, looking at this group of songs Brooks, are there one or two that mark particular points in the Brooks William story? Pivotal points maybe?

Brooks: I actually think that’s true for every song there. As I look at the list of songs, every song was important in its time. And it did something that helped take me to where I am now. So every song has a place.

Inland Sailor was the first song that I ever recorded that actually got a fair bit of radio play. I don’t really understand why it did. But that one really propelled me and actually it’s the song that took me to Ireland for the first time. It was getting played and somebody rang me up from Belfast and said, you know, we would like you to come here and play. What’s it going to take to get you here? And it opened up all kinds of doors all over the UK and Ireland. And then also in Canada. That was a real important song for me.

And the song Mercy, Illinois was the first song that I wrote that was a straight-ahead narrative song. And that was a real important turning point, because I was very young and I was looking for a kind of a local idiom, I was trying to capture that Midwestern feel. And that song ended up being one that people focused on. Acoustic Guitar magazine interviewed me about it and I ended up doing the tab and the music and the chords. And it was such a big deal because no one had ever heard of me at that point.  So, every song kind of has a place in there. Each song just turned the game around at that point.

Gary: Very Interesting. And of course, a song like Frank Delandry has got its own story.

Brooks: Yeah. Well that song has been very important to me because not only is it a narrative song but it also it tells a story about a guitar player, Frank Delandry from New Orleans, who one day just mysteriously disappeared and was never heard from again. And so, his memory lives on in legend, not that dissimilar from the legend of Robert Johnson. And so that’s a great story in itself. But one of the things that was so interesting about that song is that it’s probably the first of my songs that when people would hear me play it, they would want to play it too. That had never happened before. People would actually be sending me recordings of them playing at their local acoustic club!  I never had that happen before.

And then the thing I love about it is that it’s firmly set in that sort of sub-delta region of New Orleans. It’s so set in place and time. Which is a place and a time musically that has had the biggest influence on what I do. And so, I felt like I was paying homage to my elders, so to speak. I think it’s important for us to do that.

Gary: Yeah that’s true. And it’s a very appealing song, Brooks. People warm to it very readily. Now, you had some fine musicians who worked on the album with you?

Brooks: Yeah. I was so lucky. Gary, I was making the record and I put out the call to loads of people – to all my friends. And unfortunately, there were so many that were on the road, who were busy and couldn’t come and be part of it. But what I’m so pleased about is a friend of mine called John McCusker, a lovely Scottish fiddler, was able to join me. He had been on tour with Mark Knopfler all last year, and was only home in Scotland for two days. And he spent one of those days recording my album! I’m absolutely blown away by that because, you know… Mark Knopfler, Brooks Williams…come on! But I was so honoured that he prioritized me. And the same for Christine Collister – I’ve been a big fan of her singing for years. And I’ve always thought that her voice and mine would sit really well together. And she just was so generous and did a beautiful job.

And I was so delighted that I got to work with a couple of young players as well, a fiddle player from Bristol called Aaron Catlow. I met Aaron on tour in Europe last year, and I just loved his playing. And I thought, wow, this is fiddle that’s kind of folky on the one hand, but it’s kind of bluesy – that Papa John Creach kind of kind of thing that used to happen with Jorma back in the day. And yet kind of jazzy and had a Stephane Grappelli feel as well. So I was so delighted that he was able to play. He’s a very big part of this record.

And then I called on my favourite piano player, a young fella from up in Newcastle, called Phil Richardson. He’s a wonderful piano player. And when I was on tour in Germany, I met a wonderful blues harmonica player called Ralf Grottian. It was tricky to meet up with Ralf, but it was good to get him on one or two tracks anyway.  And then my old friend from the USA by the name of Jim Henry, whom I made a record with back in the 90s, was able to remotely add some mandolin and some vocals.

And it was just so great that that I was able to put all these pieces together. So, I knew from the beginning, Gary, this was gonna be an acoustic album and I knew it was going to be an acoustic guitar album. I certainly had my resonator guitar and my cigar box guitar there. I had the mandolin there. But I knew once I got started that something was happening. And whenever I recorded anything with those other instruments, it just didn’t feel right. It felt very reminiscent of when I started. We only could afford, all of us in my peer group, one nice guitar. And I remember going into a guitar shop and looking at a National and thinking, oh, one of these days I’m gonna buy a National. It took me years! But I remember all the music that I created in those early days was on one acoustic guitar. So I almost felt like I was going back to my roots in that way as well.

Gary: Brooks, you’re going to go on tour to the U.S. again in March. Then you’re back in the UK and touring for months. I’m looking at your schedule, it just looks – I mean, I’m tired just looking at it! How do you have the energy to do this, Brooks? [Find Brooks’ tour schedule here]

Brooks: I have loads of energy when it comes to playing and singing! And I look after myself as well. But I know that come the end of the year, I’ll be ready for a nice, long holiday.

Gary: Brooks, thank you so much.

[slightly edited for clarity and length]

 

 

Acoustic Guitar Maestro Mary Flower is Livin’ With the Blues Again

“A national treasure in your own back yard.” Jorma Kaukonen

Mary Flower is an amazing acoustic guitarist who specializes in Piedmont-style finger picking with dashes of Delta, ragtime and jazz. A finalist in the National Finger Picking Guitar Championship, she is also a three-time nominee for a Blues Music Award and many times a Cascade Blues Association Muddy Award winner. Living Blues magazine said that she “Marries acoustic blues with touches of ragtime, folk, and jazz…the interplay is always interesting, often provocative, and sometimes breath-taking.”

She has eleven recordings and performs regularly in the United States and abroad, including appearances at the King Biscuit Blues festival, the Vancouver Folk Festival and Prairie Home Companion.

As well as her recording and song-writing, Mary Flower is a renowned guitar instructor, teaching at festivals and guitar camps, and hosts her own guitar camp, Blues in the Gorge, each year near Portland, Oregon. In addition, she has developed five instructional DVDs and been part of the Blues in Schools program.

With a great deal of care and creativity, she brings to life older blues and roots music, and composes songs that sound like they firmly belong in America’s great roots music tradition. She recently released her eleventh album, Livin’ With the Blues Again, a 12-song set that comprises instrumentals which showcase Mary’s guitar chops, blues and gospel songs and some Mary Flower originals. Down at the Crossroads got to chat to Mary about the album and her music.

Gary: I’ve been listening to your new album quite a lot over the last the last week or so. And I’ve really enjoyed it. I mean, it’s the blues, but it’s kind of uplifting as well. So I wondered if maybe you could tell us a little bit about it, how you decided what songs would go on it and maybe a bit about the recording process.

Mary Flower: Well, I have to tell you that this was a fairly quickly recorded CD and also I didn’t have a lot of time to plan. I know people who have spent a year to record an album and I found out maybe a month and a half, I’d say, before recording times that I was going to do it.

I was approached by the Little Village Foundation, which is…I call them angels. They find people that they want to record for them. And then they record the whole thing and do the artwork and pay for everything, and then give you CDs. I was extremely lucky to be chosen for this project. They recorded five albums about the same time and the release date for all five was the same. So we did a five act concert down at the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley, California.

Jim Pugh is a Hammond B3 player, who has played with a lot of groups, including with Robert Cray. And he decided to do something that would get him off the road and do something good for people. So he started the Little Village Foundation which is based somewhere in California. Anyway. So I had very little time compared to what a lot of people have when they do a project. I just kind of chose songs that I thought that I knew well enough to be able to pull off in the studio fairly well without having to think too hard –  songs that I’ve been playing that I knew fairly well. I wrote a couple of extras before I went in and I did a couple of repeats from older albums.

For the recording process we had an engineer who’s a great guitar player. And mostly the other people on the recording are Little Village artists, except for Susie Thompson, who’s a friend of mine. And so it was people I’d never met or played with before. And they just kind of brought ’em in and the Sons of the Soul Revivers were phenomenal to work with. Three guys. And they didn’t have to even think about the parts. They knew exactly what to do and they sounded really, really good. They’re incredible. Anyway, it kind of all worked out.

Gary: I wanted to ask you about your singing, because I thought your singing on the album was very good. Clearly you’re known for your finger picking prowess – and the album is bookended by two lovely instrumentals. But do you have a preference between just playing guitar or playing and singing?

Mary Flower: Yes, I do. I would prefer…well, let’s put it in terms of songwriting. Would I rather write an instrumental or lyrics? l’d certainly rather be more guitar centric than being called the singer songwriter. Writing songs is a really difficult process for me lyrically. And, you know, I can sing or not sing, but I’m happy to not be singing if that’s an option. And I love writing instrumentals. I’m passionate about that. Particularly writing instrumentals that sound like an old song. Piedmont style blues or something.

Gary: But take Living with the Blues Again, which is a Mary Flower original. When you talk about, you know, struggling maybe with writing lyrics, I just thought the lyrics on that were very strong. And some were quite amusing. And then you have “this old country’s in a terrible mass, there’s lying and cheating, hitting and tweeting…No more kindness, my friend.” Which sounded to me awfully like a comment on your tweeter-in-chief.

Mary Flower: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, what else could it be? It was definitely a political connotation. I’m not really a political performer or someone that talks a lot about politics. But I did find that that fit in well to that song. But my audience is not going to be insulted by that – they’re pretty much in agreement, I think. But yeah. That was exactly what that was all about. And I thought it was a very gentle way to say something. You know, as opposed to some people who are just…have more guts than I have!

Gary: I thought that was nicely done in the song and so, you know, I think your lyric writing on that one came through pretty well. It kind of reminded me of a Chris Smither, song in some ways, because he’s quite clever with his lyrics as well.

Mary Flower: Yeah. Well, he’s a real lyricist. But I just find it difficult to get inspiration. If I go to a retreat where I have nothing to do but write, I can write a song! But daily life – there’s so much to do. I get distracted. and I always have to be dragged away from my house, far away from civilization to write! But I can do it when forced to!

Gary: And there are some very cheerful spots on the album. There’s A Bright Side Somewhere, which is an old gospel song, which has been done by all sorts of people. I discovered recently another nice version of that by Ry Cooder.

Mary Flower: Oh I didn’t know he did it.

Gary: Yeah, but yours is a great version. And then River of Joy. Both seem to me to be quite hopeful or inspirational songs at a time when there’s a lot of pessimism around, you know, you say “the world’s all rough and tumble, There’s a great unrest” and so on. How important are those sort of songs, those kind of upbeat songs, in times like these?

Mary Flower: I think they’re critical. I have some hope because it’s gotta turn. It’s worse than it’s ever been, but it’s gonna turn around. And I think people like being hopeful. River of Joy is one of the two songs that I had previously recorded. I had written that after 9/11 – it was my response to that. So it kind of felt like it was time to do it one more time. I’m not a religious person, but gospel music is quite moving to me. I just feel like it lifts me up.

Gary: It’s such a big part of American roots music isn’t it?

Mary Flower: Yes, it’s huge. I’m a big fan of good gospel music. And that song Bright Side I thought was a Reverend Gary Davis song until I realized it’s an old Methodist hymn. And the guys that I sang with knew it quite differently. And they kind of had to relearn the structure of the song. Everybody’s got their version of it.

Gary: So, let me ask you a little bit about your guitar playing. Obviously, you’re very skilled. You’ve been a finalist in prestigious competitions and so on. And so how did you get so good, Mary? Were you self-taught? Did you have teachers? How did you get to the skill level you have?

Mary Flower: I am completely self-taught. I grew up in a small town where nobody played guitar. And, you know, it was during what we call the folk scene of the 60s, late 60s, and all I heard were the commercial renderings from people. I didn’t really understand the roots of the music until I went to school at Indiana University, which has probably the greatest ever ethno-musicology school in the country.

John Cephas

And a lot of musicians came there and, as I began to dig a little bit deeper, I realized that some of the Peter, Paul and Mary songs, were written by Reverend Gary Davis. I started hearing the roots. And as I got older, I began to delve into the people who played the early country blues and early Piedmont style blues. Then I met John Cephas, who is one of my heroes. And John Jackson, two Piedmont style players. I spent time with both of them, not really learning from them, but playing with them, you know? And as I went around to these guitar camps, which were really fun, I learned. I mean, I watched other people. I watched how they taught. I watched how they play. And that really helped me in the beginning. And then I kind of found my own way.

But I try to not copy. I mean, unless I decide I’m going to do a note for note version of somebody’s song. I try to kind of use their style in a way with my own playing, with my own writing. And I turn it around a little bit. I try to never steal. I mean, you won’t hear me sound too much like Robert Johnson, although I could if I wanted to. Plenty of people that do that. I try to make it my own, I guess.

Gary: So how do you do you do that? When you’ve identified a song that you think that might work for Mary Flower, how do you go about the rearranging, reinterpreting?

Mary Flower: I try to be true to the form and perhaps play it in a different key, make my own arrangement. But keep it recognizable. I don’t want to take it too far away from where a song was written. But probably the hardest thing for me is if I’m learning a song that was recorded by a man. Many times I can’t sing those lyrics or I can’t sing it in the key that they recorded. So, I’ve got to make some changes. All of that can be a bit of a struggle. It’s really hard to take a song and make it mine if it’s written by a guy. And so many times it is.

Gary: Do you ever change lyrics then so you can sing it?

Mary Flower: Yes, I have been known to do that! If I were doing a Robert Johnson song, I can’t sing, “I’ll beat my woman until I’m satisfied.” So yes. I’ve been known to change a bit here and there.

The other problem is understanding lyrics from the recording. That can be super hard and I get really frustrated. You’d think this song must have lyrics on the internet. Wrong! Because they couldn’t understand the lyrics either! So, yes, it can be really hard to find the correct interpretation of the song.

Gary: A good example of that is Blind Willie Johnson’s Latter Rain. Because if you go and look for the lyrics of that, you’ll find all sorts of strange things because Johnson was a Pentecostal and there’s a bit of Pentecostal theology that read a text in the Old Testament about the “latter rain” falling on the crops which they took to refer to the Spirit falling in the last days. So that’s what the song’s about, because Johnson’s Pentecostal movement felt that they were in the days of the latter rain of the Spirit coming down. But unless you understand that you would misinterpret what Johnson is singing, which sometimes can be difficult. So that’s a prime example of a prime example of what you’re saying.

Mary Flower: Yeah. And there are so many dialects as well. In the Southern States, it’s really hard to understand those guys so much of the time.  Another positive point for writing my own!

Gary: So if someone was starting out on a journey wanting to play acoustic blues guitar, people who come to your to your workshops and so on – who would you advise them to listen to?

Mary Flower: Well, I would say Blind Blake, because he is the top of the heap as far as I’m concerned. I know maybe seven people who can imitate him well, who can play just where he’s playing. But if I want a gentler approach, I would start with Mississippi John Hurt, whom everybody loved because he was a sweetheart. Although his songs sound easy, they’re not really, but they’re a good place to learn. And I’d also say Elizabeth Cotton, who also had a gentler approach. And, you know, she wrote Freight Train, which is very cool.

These guys teach you pattern picking, and how to incorporate a melody. But when people try to learn syncopation, that’s what throws everybody. It’s so complex. And really the guys who play that are really imitating a piano, and it’s easier to play syncopation on a piano than it is to play it on a guitar. So that’s what tends to throw people.

That’s kind of what I spend a lot of time teaching in these workshops because a simple melody isn’t very interesting. People have to learn to vary it from measure to measure. But John Hurt, he is a great place to start.

Gary: Very good. Who then are the guitarists that you like to listen to these days?

Mary Flower: Well, I don’t do a lot of listening, and I’ll tell you why. I hear music all the time. I mean, I had a four-hour rehearsal yesterday with my little string band! But of course, Ry Cooder.  And then some of my friends who are not maybe nationally known or internationally known. Pat Donahue is one of my favourite players of all time.

I still hear people say to me, “You know what, you’re so good. Why have we never heard of you?” That’s why I get on tour. And Pat’s another one of those. Even though he was on Prairie Home companion for years and had millions of people listening to him every week. And then there’s Paul Geremiah whom I knew. Sadly, he’s had a stroke and I don’t think he can play anymore right now. But he was the best of the best when he was touring. These are some of the top, top guys. Oh, and John Cephas and John Jackson I guess I should put it in that category, as far as heroes of mine go.

Gary: So let me ask you a little bit about the blues. You’ve been nominated for Blues Music Awards, and a lot of your music revolves around the blues. What is it that attracts you to this music, Mary?

Mary Flower: Well, there’s so many different kinds of blues. The Chicago style was mostly electric, and I’m not really interested in that. I’m interested in the Piedmont style because it is complex and challenging. And oddly enough, it was played mostly by blind men. Go figure on that one! They were phenomenal. But I don’t know – it speaks to me, it’s got an edge to it. And I can write songs that work in that genre. I mean, I can write folk songs if I need to. But I really like the challenge of trying to make it sound like it’s an older song.

Gary: This is music that’s been around for a long time, that does seem to have an enduring appeal. Generation after generation discovers something fresh in it and it seems to have that continual attraction and pull.

John Jackson

Mary Flower: And I also think that the people who are really good at it have been working all their lives toward getting it right. That to me is worth a lot right there. Let’s put it this way – there are not a lot of jerks playing this kind of music! If they are, they don’t last. They are people who are putting their best foot forward and being true to the to the genre.

Take John Jackson, the Piedmont style player from Virginia, who is no longer around, and was probably the closest thing to John Hurt. He lived a fabulous life. And I think everybody was so touched by him. He just had a halo around his head! He played this music and spoke with an accent that nobody could quite understand. But he was such a great guy. And that really appeals to me and speaks for something.

Gary: Yes, that’s very interesting that you say that, because over the last two, three years I’ve talked to quite a lot of blues musicians…like Eric Bibb, Chris Smither, Rory Block, Hans Theessink, Luther Dickinson and quite a few others. And they’ve been generous with their time in talking to me and never critical of other people. So, yes, I think you’re right to say that. [when you’re finished here, check out the interviews by clicking the link]

Mary Flower: Oh, by the way, I’ve invited Eric to teach at my camp next year, and we’ve had Michael Jerome Brown in the past. He’s a wonderful player.

Gary: Yes, he’s a fantastic player. I saw him touring with Eric Bibb in the last year. And he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the blues and blues history.

Mary Flower: Yes, he taught at my camp and made a big impression a couple of years ago. So hopefully we’ll get Eric Bibb next year. And it look like we might have Jim Kweskin  for the jug band-y stuff. Anyway, that would be quite a year if I can get who I want.

Gary: So tell us about your teaching, Mary, because I know that’s a big part of what you do.

Mary Flower: Well, I have my own guitar camp that happens here in early October. And it’s been hugely successful. We’re going on our seventh year, I think. And I bring in three nationally known people, and then get 50 students. So teaching is something I love to do. And it also balances me out. I don’t have to be on the road all the time. And I teach at other people’s guitar camps as well.

My camp is called Blues in the Gorge and it’s in the Columbia River Gorge at a place called Menucha. There’s something on my home page of my website about the dates for next year, which is early October. [check it out here] It’s 5 days – three intense days. And it’s a lot of fun. Everybody who comes is gracious. A lot of these camps turn into party camps, but that’s not what this is. People take it seriously and a lot of really great, great people show up for it.

Gary: That sounds fabulous and a lot of fun. Mary, it’s been lovely talking to you. Thanks so much for your time.

Drew Holcomb is slaying the dragon

Photo: Ashtin Paige

Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors is an Americana band based in Nashville, which has been performing and recording since 2006. They have now released six very fine albums, choc full of good tunes, good musicianship and good feeling. Along the way, they’ve played on stages with Ryan Adams, the Avett Brothers, John Hiatt, Needtobreathe and others. Last year Holcomb relaunched the Moon River Music Festival in Chattanooga which had sold out crowds and featured artists like Margo Price, the Avett Brothers, Mavis Staples, Jason Isbelland Brandi Carlile. 

The new album from the band, Dragons, is an upbeat, infectious affair, with songs co-written by Lori McKenna, Natalie Hemby, Zach Williams of The Lone Bellow, producer Cason Cooley, and Ellie Holcomb. You’ll find yourself humming along, tapping your toes and generally the better for having listened to it. It’s an assured slice of sunny Americana. That’s not to say it’s in any way trivial – Holcomb says he has never worked harder on his song-writing than on this album, and the lyrics are in turn wryly amusing, clever, poignant and serious about themes like grief and getting older.

One of the album highlights is You Want What You Can’t Have, featuring Lori McKenna. It’s got an infectious rhythm and tune, but Holcomb says it deals with the “fight for contentment in a world of comparison, greed and dissatisfaction.” And then there’s the title track, Dragons, an out and out country song with an inspirational message which evokes the spirit of Holcomb’s grandfather – “Go swimming in the ocean on New Year’s Day, Don’t listen to the critics, Stand up and bear witness, Go slay all the dragons that stand in your way.” Good advice – but maybe I’ll not plunge into the north Atlantic just after Christmas!

We talked to Drew about the album:

DATC: Drew, the new album, Dragons, is terrific. One of your best, for me, up there with my own favourite, Good Light. You’ve said it was largely inspired by the quote, “Always be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Drew Holcomb; I think there is a lot despair, apathy, and hopelessness in our world today. There is also too much “othering” and marginalizing. I find empathy and loving the stranger to be a baseline moral value that we must cultivate in our lives. I want my music to be something that brings people together, while also not being escapist. I think telling my own story is the way to do that. 

DATC: Can you tell us a bit about, first of all, writing the songs on the album (I gather some were co-written), and then the recording of the album?

Drew: I wrote “Family” and “See the World” first, by myself, then started writing alongside other friends who are artists and songwriters. Lori McKenna, Natalie Hemby, Sean McConnell and others. 

DATC: The first song, Family, is a great opener, a joyous celebration of family, even though “it ain’t always pretty, drive you insane.” How important has family been to you?

I have over thirty cousins, dozens of aunts and uncles and I grew up 5 doors down from my maternal grandparents. I am the 2nd of 4 children and we have 3 of our own now. Family is very important to me. Family has been a majority of the cast of characters in my life. 

DATC: You’ve got some great collaborators – as well as Ellie, you have Lori McKenna, The Lone Bellow and Natalie Hemby. Can you say a bit about working with these artists and why you had each one on these particular songs?

Drew Holcomb: I usually don’t co-write but decided to give it a try this record, and it was mostly with people who I already love and trust. We had a great time. “Dragons” for instance was written with Zach Williams from the Lone Bellow, and it all started about a conversation about the big personalities of our grandfathers. The writing with these friends was very narrative and personal.

DATC: You Want What You Can’t Have is a jaunty, toe-tapping song, but it’s got a bit of a punch, with “we want the spark, but we don’t want the burn, we want the love, but we don’t want the hurt,” doesn’t it?

Drew Holcombe: Yes it does. “Some people stay up all night, praying for a child of their own…” is also a gut-wrencher. Lori and I wanted to say something unifying and universal and stinging while also looking in the mirror. Saying hard things to the world while preaching them to yourself always makes the medicine go down better! 

DATC: And Maybe kind of continues the theme with “everything is never enough…maybe we’re not supposed to try everything.” It’s a pretty explicit comment about the consuming, individualistic society we’ve become. You don’t shy away from making that sort of serious point in your songs. How much is that informed by your faith and how do you tread the line between that and not wanting to be overly explicit?

Drew Holcomb: I honestly don’t think about the “line,” I just write what I want to write and let the chips fall. This song, “Maybe” was written about a conversation about the never-ending pressure to be interesting on social media. Sometimes what we need is less, not more. 

DATC: I love the positivity of title track, Dragons – can you say something about the background to that song?

Drew Holcomb: My grandfather was a pretty legendary guy… He was a surgeon during World War Two, took his family to Kenya for a year in the late 60’s to do surgery there, he loved to play golf, tennis, fish, hunt and do taxidermy. He died about 17 years ago and this song is about a dream of him coming back to give me advice. 

DATC: You’ve just organized another Moon River festival – tell us something about that and what the festival is all about.

Drew Holcomb: It’s really just about great music, a great location, and community. We have been doing it for 6 years, and it keeps growing and getting better and better. It has sold out in a day for the last two years. This year was especially fun for me because we had Brandi Carlile headlining and we closed the festival with John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” together. 

DATC: More generally, Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors have become pretty successful, but I’m sure it’s been a tough ride at times. Did you ever feel like giving up?

Drew Holcomb: All the time… Making your living as a creative person is a roller coaster of self-doubt, high highs and low lows. There have been many times in the last 15 years I have thought about giving up. The travel is brutal, the sleep, eating etc. on the road is hard on your body, and you are opening up your soul on stage every night in hopes that the crowd reciprocates, which is not always the case. 

DATC: Finally, Drew, what sort of music does Drew Holcomb like to listen to and who, would you say are your favourite songwriters?

Drew Holcomb: I listen to lots of things. I would say my favorite bands of the last 15 years have been Avett Brothers and Wilco, but I honestly listen to everything. 

DATC: Thank you Drew!