Lynching is a terrible stain on the history of the United States. Between 1882 and 1968, around 5,000 people were lynched, 73% of them black. It was a form of terrorism on the black community, particularly in the Southern States, with the Klu Klux Klan and other paramilitary groups ruthlessly defending white supremacy. Lynching was brutal, and involved torture, mutilation, hanging and burning.
One man who remembers the terror of lynching is Freeman Vines, born in 1942 in Greene County in North Carolina. He’s the focus of a quite remarkable book, which features a stunning set of photographs of Vines, his guitars and his environment by Timothy Duffy and input from folklorist Zoe Van Buren.
Vines is an intriguing character, who has had a colourful life reflective of the struggles and hardships of African Americans in the 20th century, and I had the opportunity to chat to him about his life and the book. But the focus of the book is on one particular aspect of Vines’s life – his crafting of guitars from a tree near where he lived that had been used for lynching. In one sense this may seem somewhat morbid, but the project serves to highlight the horror of lynching and how its spectre still hovers over America. And, indeed, the ongoing white violence that many people of colour still face.
For Freeman, having been given the black walnut wood which he had been told had come from a lynching tree, he was simply building more guitars, looking for the elusive sound he had been searching for over many years as a guitar maker. That was the holy grail, it seems, that had driven his art during his life.
But as he worked on the guitars at night, “strange things started to happen,” and the guitar work seemed to take on a life of its own and he ended up carving “some horrific figures” on them. “You had to see ‘em and play ‘em to know what I’m talking about.” About the finished articles, he told me he was glad to see them go, because “I was real uncomfortable with them around me.” The project took a considerable emotional toll on Vines; he said he was worried “about how that boy had to die,” referring to Oliver Moore, a young man who was last person to be lynched on the tree in 1930. His body was riddled with over 200 bullets.
The book documents photographer Timothy Duffy’s investigations about where the wood had come from, resulting in him meeting a woman whose great-grandfather had orchestrated the last lynching to take place on the tree. Freeman didn’t want to know the details about what had taken place, because he told me, “some of them people still live down here,” obviously anxious about relations with his neighbours.
Freeman Vines has lived with racism all his life. When he was growing up the Klu Klux Klan was very active where he lived and billboards declared “You are in the heart of Klan country: welcome to North Carolina.”
“I remember all kinds of stuff,” he told me, before going on to relate a horrific story of an old man he knew when he was a boy who was falsely accused of exposing himself to a white woman and who was abducted and dragged behind a truck until he died. “The white man,” he says, “is a dangerous man.” Even today, I asked him, in 2020? “Yeah, it ain’t no joke, man.” Racism he said, “is about the same way it’s always been.”
Tim Duffy, self-portrait
Hanging Tree Guitars is also about the photographer, Timothy Duffy, who met and befriended Freeman Vines and began to photograph the guitars he made. Duffy specializes in collodion wet plate processing for his photography, an early form of photographic processing which requires a darkroom in the field. Although invented at the end of the nineteenth century, there has been a revival of interest in the method, and certainly, Duffy’s photographs, which are a major feature of the book, are nothing short of stunning. They have an aged quality to them which entirely suits the subject matter, and you’d buy the book just for the photographs.
Duffy says that the journey he took photographing Vines’s work and pursuing the story behind the hanging tree “has had a profound impact on me, all of which I have yet to understand.” The book, then, is very much the story of the intersection of two artists, from two very different worlds, one white, one black, and both working in completely different media. The two formed a seemingly unlikely friendship, helped it seems, according to Freeman, by Duffy’s wife’s feeding him the “best rice and chicken I ever ate.” At the same time, Timothy Duffy and the book’s author, Zoe Van Buran, speak of the hospitality they received on Freeman’s porch.
But ultimately, the book is about Freeman Vines and the insight his life gives us to the past and its legacy. Freeman, whose very name points back to America’s troubled past, was born in poverty in North Carolina. His family lived on a white man’s farm where his mother worked as a “housewoman,” cleaning, washing and cooking and being paid in groceries and clothes. Vines said it was worse than the days of slavery because “you had the idea that you were free, but you weren’t.”
By the time he was fourteen Freeman Vines was doing time in the penitentiary. When I asked him about that, he preferred not to talk about the circumstances surrounding this, except to tell me that he learned to read and write from comic books in the prison library.
He started building his own guitars after playing the blues from a desire to find his own sound – “I didn’t want to sound like the average blues man.” He had heard a gospel musician play a guitar when he was young and that sound has haunted him ever since – “a most disturbing sound, but pleasing and comfortable.”
“Each wood has its own sound when you’re cutting and sanding on it, but you have to be alone to hear it.” The sound, he says, “is already there,” and all you have to do is do the carving and release it. I asked him if there was a particular wood that he liked, maybe cedar or walnut or pine, and he told me that the best wood he’d ever found was the tight-grained pine from the soundboard of a 175-year-old Steinway piano. Freeman Vines is not your regular luthier.
He built guitars for over 50 years, experimenting with woods and pick-ups, but has never yet found what he’s been looking for – “I know I ain’t never gonna find that sound, because I’m too old now.” Yet his guitars made their way into the hands of various professional, touring musicians, both blues and gospel artists. “They was ugly guitars,” said Freeman, “I didn’t even know they sounded so good until I heard them on recordings.” Freeman had never been satisfied with what he heard from Fender and Gibson electric guitars and always felt his guitars, although not finely finished, lacquered or stained, were superior.
Freeman Vines has four sisters who make up the famous gospel group, the Glorifying Vines Sisters, who first recorded in the 1970s and are still making music. Freeman went a different direction, but in the book he is quoted as saying he had been very moved by his sister being healed at a gospel meeting and was considering becoming a Christian himself. Sadly, he told me, the recovery didn’t last, but Freeman said he was still thinking about faith.
The book quotes Freeman as saying, “A person has to have a purpose to live.” I asked him what his purpose has been. For Freeman, it’s all about his work as an artist – “What excites me is wood I can communicate with.” And he’s got a new batch in, “highly figured,” which he was clearly pretty excited about. It’s a great thing, to still be excited about what you do when you’re nearly 80 years old.
The story of Freeman Vines and the hanging tree guitars is a remarkable one and a sobering one. It holds a mirror up to the troubled past, and present of America. At the same time, the book gives a quite remarkable picture of the deep engagement of two artists, Vines and Duffy, over a period of years, and the impact that had on both men. It is an utterly absorbing work, disturbing in some ways, and quite unique. Zoe Van Buren’s handling and presentation of the material is masterful and her afterword quite beautifully written.
There is a companion CD available to go with the book, 12 songs from Duffy’s archive. along with three songs performed by the Vines family, which provide a glimpse into the music that inspired Freeman Vines’s lifelong search for a tone.
The project was supported by the Music Maker Relief Foundation, which was founded by Timothy Duffy and his wife Denise Duffy and which seeks to give relief to senior American roots musicians. Hanging Tree Guitars is published by Bitter Southerner in conjunction with Music Maker Relief Foundation.
Catfish Keith is a wonderful guitarist and a fine exponent of acoustic blues. With his resonator and vintage-sounding guitars, and a fine ear for wheedling out old blues and folk tunes that he can re-work for a modern audience, he’s been entertaining people all round the world for nearly forty years. He’s been nominated for Grammys and Blues Music Awards on a number of occasions, has headlined major music festivals, and appeared with legendary artists like John Lee Hooker, Ray Charles, Robert Cray, Koko Taylor, Taj Mahal, Jessie Mae Hemphill, and Johnny Shines.
His latest album, Catfish Crawl, is a wonderful eclectic mix of material from Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Blake, Furry Lewis, Johnny Shines, Jessie Mae Hemphill, the Carter Family, the Nassau String Band and others, as well as some original material. It’s great fun, the guitar work is outstanding and Keith’s arrangements of the songs are masterful. Check it out, you’ll enjoy it!
We were delighted to get the chance to chat to Keith and ask him about the album and his life in music. First of all, I had to ask – where did the name Catfish Keith come from?
“Well,” he told me, “I got called that when I was a young fella. For a brief period of time, I lived on a sailboat in the Virgin Islands. I’d just left home and I’d never really seen the ocean before, but I had a friend who had a sailboat and he let me crew on it. So I was down there, living on the boat and we used to go fishing with this guy and he would say, “Hey man, you are nothing but a catfish swimming around.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but every time I’d see him, he’d say that.
“So, a handful of years goes by, and the time came for me, when I was maybe 22, to do my very first album. Using my given name, (Keith Daniel Kozacik) proved to be very cumbersome and people didn’t know how to spell it. So, I thought, well, if I’m going to change my name now is the time to do it. So I decided to go with Catfish Keith, because, you know, it kinda made me part of the blues animal kingdom! Now some people call me Cat and some just call me Fish!
What’s more, Keith told me, the song Catfish Blues, had been very formative for him. The song has been recorded by many artists over the years, including Honeyboy Edwards and Muddy Waters but it was Robert Petway’s original version, recorded in 1941, that had really turned him on to the sound of the National guitar, making him want to play a resonator.
I asked Keith about Catfish Crawl, his 18th album, which I’ve been listening to and enjoying enormously.
“I recorded it at a place called Flat Black Studios, which is not far away from where I live, run by a guy named Luke Tweedy and it’s just a nice place to record. It’s an old converted barn and I’ve gone there for about five or six of my albums. I think I took nine guitars – I have a lot of guitars! – and set them all up in the studio. And over the course of four or five days, I would go in for about three or four hours and record a handful of songs and I just kept at it until all the tracking was done and then we mastered it. The way I work, I’m well prepared when I go in the studio.
“I have 20 or 30 songs I could try. And then I go ahead and go through them. And if they don’t work after two or three or four cuts, I just move on to the next one. And so pretty quickly it reveals if a song’s truly ready or not. I guess I used 13 songs on that album and I like to use a number of different guitars just to vary the sound. Some songs I’ll play slide guitar, usually on my baritone Nationals. And I play a lot of the little handmade guitars, including the Santa Cruz Catfish Special and guitars by Ralph Bown, who’s a British guitar builder.
“There’s a whole bunch of great luthiers that have made guitars for me kind of in a vintage style. People like Dale Fairbanks at Fairbanks Guitars, Tony Klassen at ARK New Era Guitars, and Todd Cambio at Fraulini Guitars And I really love those guitars and I love to showcase them. In Luke’s studio you get this wonderful, wonderful sound, and it’s really easy to work.
“From my repertoire maybe several months before I’m going to do a record I’ll list out fifty or a hundred songs that I love and I want to do. I’ve written some too, and I’ll spend two or three months before the studio date, just crafting and honing and practicing and working on songs. It’s all about kind of doing the homework, so when it’s time to record I’m ready to go. And that’s the way I’ve worked for years and years.
“Most of what I do is solo – that was always my vision for the music. The music I loved the most was the quirky, weird, beautiful treasure trove of songs where one person and an instrument could make all the sound, a complete and whole beautiful orchestra. Finger picking guitar and all the roots music, but heavily based in country blues. And of course, I also do songs from the Islands and I do some jazzy things, and songs that come from old time country and fiddle tunes, you know, kind of the whole full bag of American roots music. And that’s always really inspired me.”
Keith benefited from there being a lot of really gifted musicians and songwriters and old-time musicians in Iowa when he was growing up – people he could see performing live and learn from. Then, whenever he started playing professionally, he got the opportunity to tour all over the US, which gave him the chance to meet many of his heroes, first generation blues artists, like Johnny Shines, Homesick James and Honeyboy Edwards, who, although getting pretty old, were still alive. He got the opportunity to meet and play with the likes of Jessie Mae Hemphill, John Cephas and John Jackson and Henry Townsend.
“I’m 58 years old now but when I was young, in my early twenties, quite a few of those old guys were still around. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was very, very lucky to have that direct link and friendship. And get to know the culture of it, as well as just learning music from old records. So, that really brought it to life and made the music even more real and more important. Those musicians are like my musical grandparents. But then there are also those that are one generation older than me, whom I’ve known and learned from – like Dave Van Ronk, Paul Geremiah, John Hammond and Roy Bookbinder. These are all guys that I still know, and we’re still good friends. And they were huge influences as to how you get out there and actually take the music to the world.”
What, I wondered, drew him to the blues and the sort of traditional music that he plays?
“Well, you know, when I was a real little kid my mom had records in the house and I remember we had a Leadbelly record and we had Odetta and Joni Mitchell and Johnny Cash and Gordon Lightfoot, Joan Baez, stuff like that. My mom liked to collect records and she loved folk music and the blues. So that was when I first heard it when I was a little kid. And then when I was about 12 and started playing, there were quite a lot of people playing acoustic guitar especially at summer camp, and there were camp counsellors who would play guitars and sing all these songs by the campfire.
“And then I used to go to folk mass or hippy mass in my Catholic church back in the ’70s. And once they found out that I liked playing guitar they got me playing in the church band. I barely knew any chords, but they put me right on stage. And we’d play songs for all the parts of the mass, you know, the Amen and all that. So when I was coming of age, there were a lot of acoustic guitars around being played. And that made me start to teach myself guitar. And I just love the sound of acoustic guitar.”
Catfish Keith, Johnny Shines, Madcat Ruth 1987
Listen to any Catfish Keith albums and you’ll pretty quickly realize what a jaw-droppingly good guitar player he is, finger-picking complex patterns and sounding like there are about three guitars in play rather than just one. That was what attracted him to the acoustic guitar – hearing the complexity of players like Paul Simon, then Leo Kottle and John Fahey. Listening to this sort of stuff as a teenager was what drew him in, rather than the pop songs his class mates were listening to. He was much more attracted to the music of James Taylor, Jim Croce, Simon and Garfunkel. Anything, really that featured acoustic guitar.
“But when I started hearing these old blues, it really grabbed me and I was inspired to not only learn the guitar, but, sing as well and make the whole world of music and really that’s what’s fuelled me ever since.”
As he listened to all these great acoustic guitar players, Keith began to wonder where did they got their music.
“I always had that kind of bookish curiosity. I loved going to the library as a kid – I’d find books about country blues, like the Samuel Charters book, and I found pictures of Charlie Patton and Blind Blake. So I just sort of started studying. And the libraries had the old records too. They had Blind Blake records and Fred McDowell and Memphis Minnie, and all those wonderful country blues. So, I would check those out and study them.
“I would befriend blues record collectors and go to their houses and ask them to play the blues records so I could record them on my boombox on cassette tape. Then I’d study the recordings. I loved the music and I felt like I was finding a hidden treasure.”
Once he began to discover all this great music, Keith began to practice incessantly. Malcolm Gladwell says it takes at least 10,000 hours practise to get professionally good at something. Keith says he’s put in hundreds of thousands of hours, just playing all the time as a young man. And he still does:
“I still play guitar a lot. I can leave it by for a while, but then I’ll go and play for hours and just enjoy taking the journey with the guitar. I do what I called daydream guitar play. I’ll just lay in the bed with the guitar and I won’t even think of anything in particular. I’ll just pick the guitar up and start playing and see what happens. And sometimes I’ll make a whole new song and sometimes I’ll just play and enjoy whatever journey I’m on until I have to get up and walk around.”
Keith has a unique sound, honed over many years, which is a result of his superb guitar chops, his in-depth knowledge of the musical canon and by the way in which he approaches re-interpreting an old song – he doesn’t just copy the way a song has been performed but he first internalizes it, allows it to become part of him before he begins to arrange it in a way that keeps the vintage vibe, but makes it sound new and alive.
I went on to ask Keith about something I’d noticed in Catfish Crawl, that I thought was a bit unusual. Here and there, you hear him using harmonics, which is not something that you often hear in country blues playing. But it adds something pretty nice to some of the songs.
“Yeah, you don’t really hear it within country blues. I listened to a lot of kinds of guitar playing and when I was a young man I heard a jazz guitar soloist playing in a lounge, and he would do all these finger style sort of standards. And then all of a sudden, he’d do a whole chorus that was in just in harmonics. And when I saw him, it just made my hair stand up. It made me realize if I could get some of that sound that I would extend the range of the guitar and it could stretch the possibility of the sounds, you can add colours and textures.
“So I took some of his technique. And there are other jazz players like Lenny Breau who had his own harmonics sound. And then, you hear it in rock and roll guys like Eddie Van Halen. It’s different, it’s more frenetic and it’s all electric guitar, but it’s the same technique. And harmonics were also used in Hawaiian music for lap style playing. I studied hard on all those harmonics, just so I could add some different colours to what I was doing. So I could take a really simple melody, and then if I want to, I can play the entire thing in harmonics, or I can add little skanky harmonic notes that add a little texture in the middle of a song.”
Catfish’s Nationals
Keith has been a endorser of National Reso-phonic guitars since the 1990s and has recently had a signature guitar made by Santa Cruz. I was keen to hear about his guitars. First he told me about Nationals:
“Well, it’s a very distinctive sound, a beautiful voice that really occupies sort of a cultural place. Nationals really captured my imagination when I heard the Hawaiian guys, like Sol Hoopii, who plays lap style and tricones, and then Son House and Blind boy Fuller and Booker White. But I have to credit Son house. When I was a teenager and I was into finger picking, I was already finger-picking pretty good. But then I found a Son House record – the Father of Folk Blues record he did in 1965.
“I got it in the cutout section of the record store. I don’t know if you remember that record stores had this section where the records were cheaper and they had the corners of the cover snipped off. The records were half price or a third of the price. And there were always some real treasures in the cutout bin. The Son House record was one of those records where I put it on and I was like, wow, what is that? And then I had to listen to it again because it really sorta threw me. It was like this sort of drunken banjo and garbage can sound together, and it really went with his moaning voice and it was very deep.
“And the poetry of some of those songs…He did a song called Death Letter, and one of the lines was, “It looked like 10,000 was down in the burying ground, I didn’t know I loved her until they laid her down.” You’re only 15 and you’re hearing this stuff! It was so heavy and unforgettable. It would draw me in and the sound of the slide was like the sound of a human voice. So I guess all those things are what drew me to the sound of National guitar. And I use a whole bunch of them a bunch of different ways, but it’s really part of what I do.”
Then there’s the Catfish Special from the Santa Cruz Guitar Company, based in…yes, you’ve guessed it…Santa Cruz, California. Keith told me he’d meet the Santa Cruz people at the big annual guitar show, NAMM, in Los Angeles, when he was helping at the National booth. In due course they offered to do a signature model and asked him about the specification.
“I was hypnotized by these little, all-mahogany guitars that they made, so I said, let’s try a mahogany guitar. Richard Hoover, the head honcho and guru took me through his own wood pile at his factory and showed me this one kind of mahogany from Guatemala and it had this sort of shimmering figure to it. That was it. And I think the guitar fits a funny little niche. So they made this guitar for me as my signature model and got Catfish inlaid on the peghead, and little bubbles inlaid on the fingerboard, so it’s fun to look at as well as really fun to play. And it’s probably the finest instrument I’ve ever had.
“And you know, as you play an acoustic guitar the tone gets better and better. I feel so lucky that I was able to get with Santa Cruz and I’m so charmed by everything that they do. It’s just a wonderful company.” [Check out the Catfish Special here.]
We’d had a great conversation and could’ve chatted on much longer, but I wanted to know finally about how the pandemic is affecting things for Keith, Clearly live performances are out for the time being.
“Yeah. Unless your audience is standing out in the field! But all the venues where people sit right next to each other, which is almost all of them – that model might take a while to come back. And a lot of those venues are gonna probably fold. There’s a place here in Iowa city that I play in, it’s been there for 58 years and they finally had to throw in the towel two or three months ago. It was really the nexus of folk music and alternative rock and all kinds of stuff in the heart of Iowa city. It’s hard to imagine the town without that place, it’s been such a part of the culture of the town. I think there’s a lot of places where the same thing is happening all over the world. I don’t know how we come back from that.
Keith went on to talk about his love for performing and the loss that has been.
“I really didn’t realize how much I love it, traveling all over the world. It didn’t have to be 300 gigs a year, but it was certainly a hundred plus, and we would always go to the UK and Ireland, Europe and all over the USA. But this March, everything died as far as that goes and I’ve had to cancel and reschedule things two or three times. So yeah, it’s been difficult. We would have done my 50th and 51st overseas tours this year had we had played. It was going to be my best year ever. But like with everybody, things got postponed. We’ll see what happens next year, here’s hoping.”
For artists and venues alike, these are difficult times for sure. We can all just hope that we get to the point where people like Catfish Keith can get to safely perform and entertain us again before long.
Happily for Keith, he has his wife Penny beside him as his manager, sound engineer, and President of their label, Fish Tail Records. “She’s been right by my side through all of this, since day one. It’s not just me. It’s the both of us, that make the band. She knows how to make the music sound powerful and big, and she knows what is right. She is a lot smarter than me, and we do this journey together. I love her with all my heart, and none of this would be possible without her.”
How much can one man pack into one lifetime? In the normal scheme of things, not remotely as much as Paul Jones has. From incredible success as the singer in Manfred Mann in the 1960s, with chart-topping hits in the UK and US, like Do Wah Diddy Diddy and Pretty Flamingo, to lead roles in musicals and plays on London’s West End, to acting in films and on TV, presenting the Blues Show on BBC Radio for over 30 years, and singing and playing harmonica with his Blues Band for the last 40 years – and, “don’t forget songwriter,” he gently chided me, when we chatted recently about his life, the blues and faith.
Now in his eighth decade, Paul Jones is still going strong. He told me that next year is scheduled to be “the most gig heavy year out of the last ten or fifteen,” with shows all round the UK with the Blues Band and the Manfreds, a reformed Manfred Mann. Where does he get the energy from? “Oh,” he said nonchalantly, “I have energy! I always have. I enjoy what we do.”
That enjoyment and zest for life came across in spades during our conversation. I asked him, first of all, of all the things he’s done along the way, what does he consider himself most successful at. Singing was the obvious thing he said, because of all the Manfred Mann hits, the West End musicals and the other bands he’s been a part of. “But from, from my point of view,” he said, “I like being a harmonica player as much as I like being a singer.” It’s the one thing he would choose out of all he’s done, if forced to.
He’s been a top-notch harmonica player for a long time, and has played a long list of major artists, including Joe Bonamassa, Van Morrison and Eric Clapton, as well as his own bands.
What was the most challenging of all the things he’s done? Although in his acting career, there were some straightforward roles where the play was good and he had a top-notch director, sometimes, “at the other end of the scale, there’s stuff where you really have to dig deep.” Although he enjoyed the acting, he’s left that behind – “Things have changed and there’s very little I would want to be acting in now.”
Jones presented the BBC Radio Two Blues Show for 32 years, as well as broadcasting on Jazz FM and the BBC World Service. He told me he thoroughly enjoyed his years with the Blues Show.
“All credit to Dave Shannon, who was the BBC producer who invented the program in the first place and actually offered it to Radio One. They turned it down saying, no, that’s music for old people. You want to go to Radio Two. So we did, and it worked. The program survived for 32 years with me at the helm. And it still exists with Cerys Matthews.
“At the beginning Dave Shannon wrote most of the script. I was allowed to make some additions, which kind of suited me. If, for instance, we were talking about somebody that I had a personal knowledge of, then obviously that would be of interest to the listener. So that was fine. I could do that. And then after a while Dave said, ‘Just talk about this record yourself. You don’t need me writing stuff for you.’ And so I said, ‘Okay, I think I can do that.’ Well, actually I knew I could do it because before I was at Radio Two, I had about three or four years of the World Service so I obviously knew how to present the program.”
I asked Paul about the many artist interviews he’d done on the show. Were there any that particularly stood out for him?
“Van Morrison stands out. He was one of the first people that I interviewed – I had interviewed him previously for the World Service before the blues program came along. I concentrated mainly on that wonderful double album that he recorded in 1994, A Night in San Francisco. He was absolutely brilliant, tremendous guest. I remember doing that interview with Van, because people had warned me, he’s not easy. And actually, Van did sort of throw me a curve ball here and there, but I enjoyed it. And Junior Wells was notable.
“But the very first person I interviewed in my life was Memphis Slim. At that point I was still an undergraduate in Oxford. I noticed that he was in the UK, and with the confidence of youth, I got in touch with the organization for which he was touring. I’d just been asked if I would write on musical subjects for a magazine called Oxford Opinion, which was just starting up – we’re talking round about 1960, 1961. So they said, yes, okay. And Memphis Slim was staying in a rather nice hotel, not far from Trafalgar square. So I went to visit him and I think he thought I was very young. I was still spotty!
“But I, you know, I got a nice interview out of him. I remember he said that he thought it was not entirely fair that Ray Charles was a lot more successful than he was! And, of course, at that time, Memphis Slim was having a lot of commercial success with a couple of albums that featured not only him, but Matthew ‘Guitar’ Murphy – wonderful guitar player – and he also had terrific horn players in those times as well. They were some of the most successful, the most commercially slanted things that Memphis Slim ever did.
“So he sticks out. I never interviewed him again, although I did play on an album that he made at Ronnie Scott’s in London.
“Several times I interviewed Taj Mahal. He’s an artist I admire greatly because he’s never been entirely easy to categorize. And I kinda like that and I’m impressed by it, but he does have a wonderful voice. And he has lovely sort of style on guitar when he chooses to do that. And, of course, he plays harmonica and percussion and all kinds of stuff. I’ve interviewed him several times – the last time was when he came over to Britain with Keb’ Mo’ in 2018. They came in and did an absolutely marvellous interview.
“I’ll tell you one more, Gary. There’s an absolutely marvellous, wonderful jazz singer called Cassandra Wilson. And she sometimes does Robert Johnson songs and things, and always surrounds herself with absolutely stunning musicians. She’s wonderful. And she came in for an interview and somebody said, she’s very nice, but she is very serious. And one thing you mustn’t do is compare her with anyone else because she might get very difficult. She had a marvellous album out at the time and she’d done a song, I think it was a self-written and an absolutely wonderful piece of work. And I played the track somewhere about halfway through the interview. And I said as it came up, I don’t know if I should say this, but as I listen to that, surely I can hear just a teeny bit of Nina Simone. And she said…’I love Nina Simone!’
“And one more somebody warned me about was Koko Taylor. What a great artist and absolutely part of blues history. And the person who warned me was actually her manager and the boss of her record label, Alligator Records, Bruce Iglauer.” [Check out our interview Bruce Iglauer about his book, Bitten by the Blues].
“We had run into Bruce and Koko Taylor in Chicago. Bruce had warned me in advance, ‘She’s in a filthy mood. And you can have 20 minutes if you’re lucky.’ Now I actually think that Koko Taylor was tremendous, great artist. Anyway, I had all my Koko Taylor facts and all my Koko Taylor records lined up. And she came in and sure enough, she had a face like thunder and she was really just barely tolerating me. Well, I just told her what I thought of her, and I played the records and I told her what I thought of the records, and then I asked her some questions. And after about 25 or 30 minutes, Bruce said to me, ‘Well, Paul, I think that’s about it.’ And Koko turned round to him and said, ‘Shut up, Bruce, guy knows what he’s doing!’
“So I’ve had some marvellous interviews. I’ve always liked interviewing people over all these years – I’ve loved all the people that I interviewed.”
I then asked Paul about his relationship with the blues, which he’s been immersed for nearly all of his life. What is it about the music that really resonates with him?
“Well, like so many people of my generation and background, you can blame Lonnie Donegan for a lot of it. I was a jazz fan by the age of 14 and was listening to everything from Nat King Cole to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and by the age of 17, 18, I was into modern jazz. However, alongside that along came Lonnie Donegan. I think I was still only 14 years old when Lonnie Donegan did this wonderful recording called The Rock Island Line. And I heard him being interviewed on a radio program. The presenter said, ‘What an extraordinary song. What on earth made you write this?’ And Lonnie said, ‘No, no, I didn’t write it. I got it from Lead Belly.’ And the presenter said, ‘Who?’ It was Lead Belly – Huddie Ledbetter, of course, a wonderful folk blues artist.
“Anyway, I used to go to a second hand record shop in Portsmouth where I lived, and on Saturday mornings I would take my little amount of pocket money and I would I would buy a 78 – I think 45s were just coming in about then. I would buy a Humphrey Littleton record or a Count Basie record and I was already listening to singers like Jimmy Rushing in those Count Basie records.
“Then in first term at university, I went down to stay with my parents for the Christmas holiday in Plymouth where my father was captain of Plymouth dock yard. And I went into a record shop – Pete Russell’s Hot Record Store. I thought that sounded really hip. I mean, nobody used the word ‘store’ in those days except in America. So, I went in there a few times during that particular Christmas vacation, and about the fourth time I went in, Russell said to me, ‘You like blues, I suggest you should listen to this.’ And he put on the record, and it had wonderful electric guitar – most of what I’d been listening to had been acoustic guitar. And not only that, but it had a harmonica. I said, ‘What is this?’ And he said it was a 10-inch LP on French Vogue records by an artist called T-bone Walker. And I looked at it and I saw that the harmonica player was called Junior Wells. I went out of Pete Russell’s shop with that album and then I went to a music shop and bought a harmonica.
“And eventually, not long after that, I heard Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson and Big Walter. I’d already heard Sonny Terry by then. Although I was impressed, he didn’t make me want to play; Junior Wells made me want to play.”
Paul Jones became a Christian in the early ‘80s and his faith is central to him. So, I wanted to know about the relationship between blues and his Christian faith. People have referred to the blues as the devil’s music and there’s all the mythology linked to the blues about the crossroads, mojo and so on. What was his take on all of that?
“Well, one of my favourite interviewees – I can’t absolutely say for definite whether this was Pop Staples, or Clarence Fountain from the Blind Boys of Alabama, but one or other of those two eminent gentlemen – wonderful singers, and in Pop’s case, great songwriter as well, but just two absolute icons of gospel – one of them said to me, ‘What is this devil music stuff? Devil ain’t got no music, except what stupid people give him.’ And that’s right. Because if the devil could make music, then he would be doing something that was true. But as Jesus said, he’s a liar! He’s the father of lies. So, if he did anything, if he actually invented anything or created anything himself, he wouldn’t be a liar. No, all he can do is mess around with stuff that’s already been created and make lies and try and mess people up. So that’s what I think about the phrase, the devil’s music.
“I actually loved gospel music throughout my years of atheism and believe me, I was a serious atheist. I was brought up in a Christian family, we went to church as a family and it was real. At a fairly early age, I was discovered to have a fairly usable voice, so I was drafted into the local cathedral choir, and I actually began to take Christianity seriously. But at that stage – I was probably slightly younger than 14 – some very, very bad behaviour on the part of a Christian turned me against Christianity entirely. And I decided since I was never going to be a Christian, as long as I lived I should be an atheist.
“But in all my years of atheism, I liked gospel music. And in particular I liked early Mahalia Jackson, the records that she made the Falls-Jones Ensemble, which chiefly had a piano and a church organ, and sometimes a rather jazzy bass and drums as well. Boy, that woman’s voice! In 1958 I remember going to see the film Jazz on a Summer’s Day and Mahalia sang The Last Mile of the Way. So here I am, an atheist collecting Mahalia Jackson and Blind Boys and The Swan Silvertones, and things like that. I liked The Swan Silvertones because Claude Jeter had an almost falsetto voice and reminded me of quite a number of soul singers who did the same thing. And I used to walk around singing falsetto all those gospel songs like Smokey Robinson or somebody like Eddie Holman might sing.
“I loved all that stuff. I remember when I was doing a play in New York on Broadway, and I used to walk from my apartment to the theatre, singing the whole way. And at one point I was singing something by Smokey Robinson, Tears of a Clown or something like that. And this guy passed me and he stopped and turned around and said, ‘Righteous man, righteous.’ I just loved that music. So, when I finally became a Christian, I had all these albums I could pick out and listen to.”
We turned from talking about the blues to talking about Paul’s faith, which he said means “everything” to him. I asked him about deciding to follow Jesus – whether looking back, some things had happened along the way that were stepping stones, or whether it was a very sudden thing. He told me how important discovering the work of a 19th century German landscape artist had been in starting to unravel his atheism. As the Blues Band began to take off after 1979, and they started touring in Europe, it had tremendous success, with large audiences cheering, clapping and stomping their feet as the band came on stage. Paul was only too aware from the height of his success in the 1960s, when his life had gone badly off the rails, of the dangers of getting into a fantasy world of fan adulation where you could begin to think that was the only reality.
Paul told me he needed to “Get out from the centre of that maelstrom of his own success and popularity,” and that visiting art galleries whilst on tour allowed him to do that. And it was there that he discovered the spirituality of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. “When I look at them now, I don’t know why I didn’t become a Christian right there and then,” he told me. But he went on to explain what brought things to a head for him as far as faith is concerned:
“In 1982, Richard Eyre, the director of the National Theatre [in London] called me up and asked if I wanted his ticket for Guys and Dolls’ opening night, because he hated sitting in the audience on his own opening nights. So I sat in the best seat in the house, right in the centre of the stalls. And it was absolutely wonderful, and I’m a man who did not like musicals. By that time I had actually been in one or two, usually Lloyd Webber’s or something like that, but I didn’t really like musicals. And here I was absolutely blown away by this musical.
“And there was this one girl in the cast who really caught my eye. Anyway, about five or six weeks later, Richard rang me again. And he said, “My next production at the National Theatre is going to be the Beggar’s Opera. Would you like to come and play Macheath, the highwayman?’ So I soon found myself in the Guys and Dolls company. And the beautiful girl was in it! So, to cut a long story short, I fell in love with her. In October of that year [1982] – about 9 months after I’d first gone along to see Guys and Dolls – I wound up in Guys and Dolls as well, because Ian Charleson, the actor who was playing Sky Masterson, decided to leave. So I found myself playing Sky Masterson, and then the girl who was playing smaller roles in Guys and Dolls and Beggar’s Opera was suddenly promoted into lead roles in Guys and Dolls and Beggar’s Opera, so there we were, playing opposite each other, and life started imitating art, and we fell in love.
“So, fast forward to 1984. We were still at the National. And something happened where Fiona began to think she was missing something and she really need to do something about it. She was doing a play at the BBC on the radio, and when she finished, she came in to do the evening show at the National. So, she knocked on the door of my dressing room, and she said, ‘Don’t laugh, but I came out of the BBC and I went into that church just opposite the entrance to the Broadcasting House. And I just opened the Bible, and I read something about Jesus and eternal life.’ Turned out, of course, it was John 3:16.
“So she said, ‘I’m going to that church on Sunday,’ and I said I would go with her – partly motivated by the fact that I didn’t want her to go anywhere without me! But also partly because I’d been following these Caspar Friedrich paintings, and they’re so obviously Christian and so powerful. So we went to that church, All Souls, Langham Place, and we thought, this is absolutely marvellous.
“A few weeks later, the phone rang one afternoon, and it was Cliff Richard. And he asked us to come and hear a man called Luis Palau speaking at White City Stadium in West London. I hummed and hawed a bit, so Cliff said, ‘Tell you what, when the evening’s over, I’ll buy you dinner!’ And do you know something, he was just doing what God told him. God told him to get as many people from show business as possible into that stadium. And he invited over 130 people! The night that Fiona and I were there, we were not the only show business people there, there were some other very well-known people.
“And Cliff bought dinner for all of us. So I was pretty impressed by him at that point! Essentially, we gave our lives to Jesus that night. It wasn’t just what Luis said, it was what God said through Luis. And we just looked at each other, and we said we have wasted enough of our lives, let’s not waste any more.
“The next day I telephoned All Souls and asked if we could get married in the church – and they said no! And this lovely guy – who actually conducted our service of blessing, and with whom we’re still friends and are godparents to his three daughters – explained that because I was divorced, the Church of England couldn’t marry us. So we got married in a registry office on a Saturday, and then on the Sunday we went to All Souls and had a great service of blessing with a wonderful black gospel choir, and a large contingent of actors and directors from the National Theatre. We had a wonderful day, and we always celebrate our wedding anniversary on the 16th December, the day of the blessing.”
I wondered how Paul’s faith had developed and matured over the past 36 years, what his faith means to him, and he told me that it meant everything to him.
“Really, for the rest of my days, getting people into the kingdom is my priority. The Bible calls it ‘bearing fruit.’ That’s what both Fiona and I want to do.”
Paul Jones has had a remarkable life, and after nearly six decades as a performer, has clearly no interest in retiring – “retirement is a dirty word, as far as I’m concerned. We usually just refer to it as the ‘R’ word!” He was a breath of fresh air in our conversation, full good humour, full of stories from his rich and varied experience, clearly in love with life, and still inspired by the faith that dispelled his atheism all those years ago. If he’s appearing on a stage near you, or you hear of him coming to your town to tell his story along with his wife, Fiona, don’t hesitate to go and see him. You’ll not regret it.
[interview slightly edited for clarity and length]
Prakash Slim is a country blues musician and educator based in…wait for it…Nepal. His remarkable story is straight out of the history of the blues.
He was born in 1980 during the rainy season in a field in the small village of Lamatar, just south-east of Kathmandu in Nepal. Nepal is a country of 28m people, situated between India to the south and China to the north. It has eight of the world’s highest mountains, including Everest and a very ancient culture.
Prakash’s village saw its first electric bulb in 1983 and its first automobile in 1995. Although Nepal is now one of the fastest growing economies in the world, much of the country remains very poor – around one third of the population lives on under $3.20 a day and the GDP is only around $30bn (compare that to South Korea, with a similarly sized population and a GDP of $1.6tr.)
Prakash’s father passed away at a young age, leaving his mother to provide for three children by working in a neighbour’s field. Food and clothing was scarce and the annual festival was much anticipated by Prakash, when an uncle would gift him a set of new clothes. Life was tough.
So, perhaps it’s no wonder that Prakash has gravitated towards the blues. He’s lived the blues, growing up in a rural village with significant hardships, and the road to the future paved with considerable difficulties.
After becoming an accomplished guitarist and playing in a number of bands in Nepal’s lively rock scene, Prakash has become an acoustic bluesman, with Robert Johnson and Mississippi John Hurt as his guiding lights. He’s now a recognized, internationally affiliated Artist/Performer and Educator of the Blues with the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund in Mississippi.
The recent lockdowns because of the pandemic have enabled Prakash to play in a number of international blues events, so we were delighted at Down at the Crossroads to have the opportunity to chat to him:
Gary: For someone born in rural Nepal to become a blues artist sounds like an amazing story. Tell us briefly how you first started playing the guitar and how did you get started performing.
Prakash: Well, I was raised by a loving, loyal family but we had very limited means. I went to a public school where, instead of desks and benches, we had mats made of straw. When I was young the only ambition I had was survival. Ambition, as far as I was concerned, was a privilege for rich kids.
I was interested in music from a young age. I’d play music by drumming against a water container and sing songs all day. Music drew me in. My most prized possession back then was a bicycle that my sister gave me after she landed a job. Now I wanted to learn and play the guitar but I didn’t have the money to buy one, so I sold my bicycle to buy my first guitar. I told my family that a friend had taken it for a few days! But anyway, I got the guitar and started playing.
For two years, I searched for a mentor who could teach me everything I needed to know about music theory. Finally I found a teacher, and even though he lived 10 kms away from my home, my passion for music was so great that I never missed a lesson. Come storm or rain, I always arrived ahead of time and ready to learn.
I worked hard at my music for a number of years and was able to join my mentor, the legendary C.B. Chhetri’s band and gigged in a circuit of restaurants playing mostly rock music. I kept busy playing lead and rhythm guitar and bass, and doing vocals for various bands throughout Nepal.
Gary: Given your background, growing up with very little, is there a particular resonance for you with the blues, in their original setting in the struggles of black Americans?
Prakash: There are a lot of differences between African Americans and me, but, it’s true, we faced difficulties in life like education, economic depression, and discrimination. So many of the social issues are similar.
Gary: What blues artists did you first encounter, and which ones are important to you?
Prakash: I liked to listen to Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and many other rock blues artists. For over 12 years I played in rock bands and I’ve tried to give the songs I play an urban blues feel. When I first heard B.B. King’s recordings I was eager to learn the magical intervals: sixths, ninths, major and minor thirds. I wanted to learn his bee-sting vibrato technique. Then when I heard the country blues artists like Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Bukka White, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Blake, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and many others, I knew this was the style that most spoke to my heart. So, now these country blues legends are the most important to me.
Gary: Has where you live been an advantage or disadvantage in pursing your art?
Prakash: Well, that’s an interesting question! My life experiences, including my hardships and struggles, are reflected in my music. I really want to express my experiences and feelings through the blues. But then, the limited access I have to instruments, equipment, sheet music and online music other than YouTube is a real disadvantage for me.
Gary: What sort of interest in blues music do you find in Nepal? Is there any resistance to it as Western music? Is it confined to Kathmandu?
Prakash: Well, we have a history in Nepal of the blues that goes back three decades, so I don’t think there’s any real resistance to the blues as western music. Some well-known blues bands are still active. People are interested in the blues but most people think that the blues start with B.B. King and Eric Clapton. Very few people know country blues, all the early stuff which is root of the modern music. Blues in Nepal, for sure, is centred in the capital and major cities and really, we have very few platforms and venues for the blues.
Gary: Are you able to make a living with your music?
Prakash: It’s very hard to survive as a musician in Nepal. It’s difficult to convince people how important music is for all ages and walks of life. For musicians of all genres, of course we have some pubs, restaurants and hotels to play. But for me, there is not much of a platform as a country bluesman.
Gary: How did you get your nickname, Prakash Slim? That’s a very cool blues name!
Prakash: Well, when I finished some serious blues research funded by the Mount Zion Memorial Fund in Mississippi, Dr. T. DeWayne Moore gave me the name. Prakash “Slim” Papa Pokharel. But when I got some international platforms, many friends suggested that I go for something shorter so we settled on Prakash Slim – “Prakash” represents Nepal and “Slim” represents the land where the blues began.
Gary: Tell us about your work in promoting blues music in schools.
Prakash: Well, blues is not only the music but also a culture. Without knowing its history, blues would be incomplete. We can empower and educate people through the blues. Knowing about the blues helps race relations and makes aware people of social issues. I’ve been teaching blues in schools here for some time now. My students know very little about black communities in the US and the problems they faced. I teach them that blues is an experience of life. I also teach them to play instruments and how to write song lyrics. I’m very happy that some of the students from grade three and four have now started playing slide as well! This year I did a blues exhibition in one of my schools. So, blues education is very important and I feel proud to be a part of it.
Gary: You recently collaborated with a friend of mine, Fabrizio Poggi in Italy. Tell us about that. [catch our recent chat with Fabrizio here]
Prakash: Well, Fabrizio Poggi is a renown Italian blues harmonica player and Grammy nominee. He and his wife Angelina and I connected as friends when I did an interview for Blues Radio International. Both of them are great human beings!
After talking for few days, Angelina said to me, “Why don’t you and Fabrizio do something together? I really would love to see you playing together. It would be a great message of hope for the world. A musician from Nepal and another from Italy? Why not? The coronavirus won’t let us leave our homes but we can travel all over the world through music.”
So, I was very excited and happy to do play with a legendary blues artist. I asked if we could do a favourite number of mine, a Robert Johnson song. I will always be grateful to Fabrizio and Angelina for this opportunity.
Gary: Prakash, tell us about your ambitions and hopes for the future.
Prakash: I really want to establish myself as an acoustic bluesman. I hope one day to play the blues with a National guitar in Mississippi. I consider that the sacred land of the blues – the blues Mecca. I want to spread blues in every corner of the world.
Gary: How has the coronavirus pandemic affected Nepal and has it affected your music making?
Prakash: We are all living in different and strange times. Nepal was not much affected by the pandemic in April and May, but we now see the number of affected people and deaths starting to go up. So, of course, yes, it has affected my music making badly. Schools and colleges are closed and all the venues are too.
Gary: Thanks, Prakash. We wish you well in your music making and every success in the future. Hopefully we’ll hear a lot more from you!
“A rare talent of such sheer genius” Blues in Britain
Not so long ago, Dom Martin was busking in the streets of Belfast. Now he’s just won the Acoustic Act of the Year award at the UK Blues Awards, on the back of a well-acclaimed new album, Spain to Italy, a Radio 2 Blues Show session with Cerys Matthews, and a sell-out UK Tour along with appearances at major Irish/UK Festivals.
Dom is a skillful player of intricate blues-infused finger-picked guitar and is a fine singer in who invites comparisons with Rory Gallagher and John Martyn. Spain to Italy is a top notch album, delivered with passion and considerable musical aplomb by Dom and his band. It consists of mostly original numbers and a couple of blues covers and is a combination of finger-picked blues, blues-rock and just beautiful songs.
He’s an acoustic blues artist whose star is clearly in the ascendancy and Down at the Crossroads was delighted to have the opportunity to chat to Dom, who’s been sheltering in his home these past few weeks during the coronavirus lockdown.
Gary Dom, you’ve just won that Acoustic Blues Act of the Year in the UK Blues Awards. Presumably you’re quite pleased about that.
Dom Well it’s a little bit of recognition. Just even to be nominated – there were three categories I was nominated in, and that to me was above and beyond. I couldn’t believe it. But it gives me great confidence that I’m heading in the right direction with my music. Like, there’s progress being made. To me, that means a lot.
Gary And you’d won a European Blues Award last year as well. Best Acoustic Solo Act?
Dom Yeah. That was a complete shock. Last August I was on tour and was pretty busy when I heard that I’d won something. So when I saw what it was for, I was like, wow, that’s amazing. How did that even happen?
Gary When you think about those awards, those categories. how would you categorize yourself and your music? Acoustic blues might describe it, but then when I’m listening to your album, there’s more than just blues there and there’s more than just acoustic as well.
Dom Yeah, it’s a really difficult question, actually. It’s hard to put a finger on it, but I would say, alternative blues, maybe alternative folk blues. But I really haven’t given it much thought, to be honest. Things just come to me in music, with the strings and the guitar. I just kind of sit down and figure out little bits and pieces and make songs out of them. But I wouldn’t call myself necessarily blues one hundred percent of the time.
I’ve obviously been heavily influenced by the blues. But I love Bob Dylan and all those folk types. John Martin, of course, and Neil Young. But they’ve all dabbled in the blues themselves. So, it’s hard to describe what my music is.
Gary But clearly, blues is a big part of what do you do. The blues have been drawing people in for the last hundred years or more. What is it about the blues that still draws people in, still draws you in?
Dom Well, I think it’s just the feeling I get from either listening to it or playing. The struggle you hear in other people’s songs. I can identify with that. And maybe that sounds strange, because I’m a fairly positive person. I don’t tend to write songs that are depressing or sad. I just like the vibe of it. I like writing songs in in a blues kind of way, but basically I’m a happy person.
Pop music – like Ed Sheeran and stuff like that – it’s kind of happy go lucky. You can dive in and out of it and it’s easy. But the blues, it can be difficult to listen to sometimes, but strangely, I get more a better feeling from listening to blues than I do from listening to happy songs.
Gary That’s the nature of the blues, isn’t it? There are two sides of it. There’s the singing about the difficulty and the hard times. But then it’s almost like the singer sings himself out of it. You know that old blues standard, Trouble in Mind. The singer is really depressed but then manages to say, “sun’s gonna shine in my back yard some day.”
Dom Definitely. But when I say to some people that I play the blues, they kind of shrug – “Oh, you don’t play that, do you? That’s so depressing and sad.”
Gary Now you’ve a couple of nice covers on the album, Leadbelly and Blind Blake, and when I was listening to you on the Green Room show at the weekend, there was a song that you were doing that was a minor key blues, and I thought, there are echoes of Skip James in that one.
Dom You know, I haven’t listened to a lot of Skip James, although I do have some LPs. I’ve dipped in and out of in a lot of different artists, people like Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf, but Skip James is one that I’ve yet to actually just sit down and really just get a couple of hours and really listen to the music.
But maybe on some kind of subconscious level, all that listening to music in the background does shape what I play and what I come up with. But I do try and be as original as I possibly can, because I don’t like plagiarism or anything like that. If I play somebody else’s song, I always say, this is a Robert Johnson song, or whatever, and make sure people are aware of who wrote it.
Gary Most of the songs on the album, though, are originals. So tell us a bit about writing songs and how long you’ve been doing that.
Dom Well, I started writing very young, but I don’t think it was very good! That said, I sold my first song when I was 13. I sold it to my dad for £13.50! And I’ve still got the contract somewhere! He bought the rights to the song. It was just something he drew up for a laugh.
Gary So you’ve been writing songs for quite a long time. What is the process like, does it come easily to you? Do you knock ’em out or do you have to refine them or what?
Dom That’s a difficult question to answer. I mean, you can’t really just say, OK, today I’m going to write a song. It doesn’t work like that for me. Take Easy Way Out for instance. I wrote it in five minutes when I woke up one morning and I didn’t have to change any of the words or the way it was sung. I wrote all the lyrics in five minutes – done!
And then I didn’t write anything for three or four months after that. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t think of anything, I wasn’t inspired by anything at all. So, it’s kind of like that, it comes and goes, and it’s strange and I don’t understand it and I have no knowledge about it. But one thing I try to avoid with songwriting is making everything rhyme! Sometimes I do it, but I’m very conflicted about it. But sometimes you just have to finish a song!
I’m incredibly hard on myself with songwriting. It typically takes me a very long time. The songs on the album weren’t written for an album. There was no deadline. It was just that I had written a handful of these songs and one day I decided to go to the studio and try and record them. And it was just really inexperienced, rushed, you know? Let’s just record something and see what happens.
Gary You must be pretty pleased with the reception the albums had. A lot of people have made fantastic comments about it.
Dom Yeah, honestly, I’m in shock. I’m in complete and utter shock about what’s been going on over the past two or three years. But I’m really critical of myself. I haven’t actually listened to the album back to front. I think once when it was finished, I listened to the individual songs, but not in any particular order. I’m happy with it, but I’ve moved on from it.
Gary Dom, give us a brief synopsis of your career. Things have obviously taken off over the last couple of years.
Dom So I used to live in Antrim in the north of Ireland. And I knew I could play guitar. I knew I could do gigs and play for four or five hours a night, So that’s what I did and that was all well and good. I met my wife there and we decided after a few years that we’d move to Belfast and I’d try to get some more gigs. So, we moved to the city but after going around to all the bars and festivals in Belfast, I got maybe one more gig. That was it – nobody would give me the time of day, I hadn’t two pennies to rub together – I still don’t! But for years it went on like that. I ended up busking in the city centre for a few quid to get something for the electric and gas.
Then out of the blue, Blast 106, one of the radio stations in Belfast, called. My drummer friend knew the guy who did the show, Big Chris. So we went down and played one of the songs which is now on the album, The Rain Came, and they recorded it. Before we played, it was all dance music, you know, rave music. And all of a sudden, we come on with our little folky blues and it’s just so bizarre.
What then happened was a guy called Ray Alexander heard this and we got a gig at an open mike night in Holywood Golf Club. So my drummer and I went, and we sat with other musicians having a talk and a couple of drinks, and we were due to be on last. But nobody was left when we got up to play – it’s late on a Monday night and everyone’s gone home! But we gave it our all, we don’t care, we’re gonna play some music!
Anyway, Ray recorded some of the stuff we did that night and he phoned Fenton Parsons, who is now my manager, and said, you got to check these guys out. Dom Martin can’t get any gigs. Could you help? So Fenton went and found a video of our performance of The Rain Came from the radio show and he loved it and wanted to meet me and see what he could do for me. The guy’s an absolute legend. He helped me when nobody else would, so I owe him an awful lot. I’m very loyal to that man.
Gary So you’ve been getting a steady amount of gigs over the last year or so?
Dom Yeah. This past year, two years, I’ve been pretty much flat out. And I love it. I play every gig like it’s my last, give it my all.
Gary But I guess things have come to a bit of a standstill at the moment?
Dom Yes, but it’s all just gone online. I’m doing something about once a week and there are little festivals, online gigs and stuff. But apart from that, I’ve just been writing songs and trying to come up with some fresh material. So, whenever this is all over I’ve got something new to play.
Gary Very good. Now, tell me about the guitar work on the album – there’s quite a bit of electric guitar going on there. Is that all you?
Dom Yeah, it is. All the guitar on the album is me, apart from a little tiny bit on Luka I think. That was Richard Brown, who is very, very good. He did a bit on that and maybe one of the other songs, but everything else is me. I got my first electric guitar just four years ago, so I haven’t been playing electric guitar that long. But I don’t find it much different than acoustic. I play them both exactly the same. It doesn’t make a difference to me. It’s just a bit smaller and there’s no hole in the middle of it! And that’s about it.
Gary How did you get started playing the guitar and did you start young?
Dom Oh yeah. When I was born, my father picked me up and he held me over a guitar. And I was just kicking it and scratching it and hitting it, and it’s just been a whole lifelong thing. It’s all I’ve done my entire life.
Gary Is there music in your family then?
Dom My dad played. In fact, he was the best guitar player I’ve ever seen. He was great. He didn’t just play – he was like another thing altogether. It’s hard to explain. He just had this certain charisma about him. The way he played was so articulate and just, you know, perfect. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s impossible to replicate. He was just a one of a kind of talent.
And my dad wrote these songs which I now have. And I’ve been trying to play them, but it’s still too difficult for me. It’s too hard because he’s passed on. And it’s just impossible for me to get into that, to play my dead father’s songs now. But I’ll get there with some of the songs. They’re just beautiful. But I can’t even touch them at the moment, you know?
Gary So sometime down the line, Dom, that could make for an interesting album.
Dom I know. Definitely, whenever I’m ready to do it. I’ve got the lyrics right now here in front of me and I’m just shaking as I look at them. But I believe in these songs, they need to be heard. Because they’re the most beautiful, beautiful things I’ve ever heard. I owe so much to my dad.
Gary Now, you’ve released a song to support the NHS. Tell us about that,
Dom I wrote a song called Mercy. And when the Corona virus hit, it was like there was no mercy for anybody. I’m not big on doing stuff technically but I felt we had to do something. But what could I do? Well, I do music, and so I thought, if I make a GoFundMe page where people can donate and then they get the song, I’ll just give all the money to the NHS. But at least it’s something, it’s better than just sitting around, even if it’s a small thing.
Gary Good for you, Dom. Brilliant. So have you just been playing your guitar and spending time with your family over the past few weeks?
Dom Yes. I’ve loved just spending time with my kids and my wife. A lot of people were joking at the start of this – you’ll be stuck at home with your family, it’s gonna be awful. But for me, it’s been the complete opposite. It’s just brilliant. It’s just been fantastic.
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 21st 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.
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 20th 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 is an outstanding singer-songwriter and top-notch slide guitarist, characteristically playing his Weissenborn acoustic lap steel guitars. Total Guitar Magazineranked 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.
“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.
“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.
By the time he was fourteen Freeman Vines was doing time in the penitentiary. When I asked him about that, he preferred not to talk about the circumstances surrounding this, except to tell me that he learned to read and write from comic books in the prison library.
The book quotes Freeman as saying, “A person has to have a purpose to live.” I asked him what his purpose has been. For Freeman, it’s all about his work as an artist – “What excites me is wood I can communicate with.” And he’s got a new batch in, “highly figured,” which he was clearly pretty excited about. It’s a great thing, to still be excited about what you do when you’re nearly 80 years old.
