Gráinne Duffy – rock’n’roll drenched with the blues and southern soul.

Gráinne Duffy is “a powerhouse of soul and inspiration mixed with desire and passion.”

Photo: Rob Blackham

She’s played Glastonbury, and concerts and major festivals in Europe, Africa, North America and Australia, and performed on stages graced by Keb’ Mo’ and Van Morrison. She’s a fine songwriter, a top-notch guitar-slinger and has a rock’n’roll voice drenched with the blues and Southern soul. She’s Gráinne Duffy, now with five excellent albums in her discography, and with Voodoo Blues, is winning new fans all over the world.

Ireland has given the world some top-notch blues and rock artists to enjoy over the years – think Rory Gallagher, Gary Moore and Van the Man – and in Gráinne Duffy from County Monaghan, we have another one. Her four previous releases are all worth your while checking out, but with Voodoo Blues, her talent bursts out big time in ten original songs that showcase the versatility and power of her vocals, her guitar chops, and the strength of her song-writing.

Down at the Crossroads got talking to Gráinne about Voodoo Blues. It’s had a lot of very positive reviews – Rock and Blues Muse, for example, hailed her as “an emerging blues star,” and said that the album “presents her to the world as a roots music creator with a fully-articulated vision that’s ready for the big time.” Rocking Magpie waxed lyrical about the “indelible impression” Duffy makes with this “powerful new release.”

Gráinne said that she was delighted with the positive attention the album has been getting, because she’d worked hard on this set of songs. The songs are co-written by Gráinne and her husband Paul Sherry, who is a sensational guitarist in his own right.

She said that the album was a return to her rock’n’roll roots. “I had done the blues album and the Americana album. And the third album was like a live album and the fourth album was a little bit of transition. We’d gone over to America to record it and it was a bit of a change of direction for us, so I feel like I was being pulled back all the time to my rock and roll roots. And it was very simple production this time, which suits me. We just went into the studio and played everything live, and it was just four of us – bass, drums, two guitars and vocals – just kinda the way rock’n’roll should be. You know, simple and straight up. And I think the fruit of the labour is that the tracks are not overly complicated, but they’ve got the essence of what I think really is me deep down inside.”

The album was recorded more or less live, produced by Troy Miller in his Spark Studios in London toward the end of 2019.

Said Gráinne, “We just had a really simple set-up. I’d been in touch some years ago with Troy Miller, who’s a brilliant producer, and also a really great drummer. He’d been Amy Winehouse’s drummer. And just recently, I thought I’d like to work with Troy again, so I got in touch with him to ask if he’d be interested in working on this album. He said, sure. So my husband, Paul – we write together, play together – and I, we boarded a plane and went over and went down to Troy’s small studio and we got it all done. Troy got Dale Davis the bass player who had played with him for years in Amy’s band on board.

“So we recorded for two days and then I came home and did another two days and it was all done. Yeah, it was great. We had to do some overdubs in Ireland because COVID came and we had been due to go over for a final session and with the whole madness, we weren’t able to travel for it. So the last track we recorded here in Ireland.”

I mentioned to Gráinne that I keep seeing reviewers who pick up on the Ireland connection and they refer to Celtic influences on her music. That’s something I never really hear and I said I wasn’t quite sure what they mean by that.

“Yeah, I’m in the same boat as I read that! I’d love to know what they’re hearing! I think it’s nice and it’s lovely that they’re hearing something Irish, but I’m wondering if nobody told them I was Irish, would they know it was Irish? But that has been mentioned quite a few times. Some people have even said, Oh, I get a sense of the Rory Gallagher here. But you know, that’s not intended. But it’s lovely that comes out – it must be just something in the sound, I don’t know.”

Gráinne Duffy’s music for me is very much American music – it’s grounded in the blues, and it’s got hints of soul and gospel, and that’s what you’ll hear if you check out (and you should!) any of her albums.

“Oh, definitely,” she said. “Because that is really the music I listened to growing up. Particularly the blues – I would have been listening originally to Fleetwood Mac and then from Fleetwood Mac I got into Peter Green, B.B. King, Albert King, and then on into Aretha and all of that sort of stuff. So, I mean, you keep backtracking. If you get into that style of music, you keep trying to delve further back, back until you find the roots. But I would definitely agree with you, it’s definitely coming from America, the style of music that has mostly influenced me.”

Some of the songs on Voodoo Blues, like the title track, Mercy, Tick Tock and Wreck It, are solid rock and blues rock, but there’s a nice variety to the album as well. Listen to the hints of soul, and bits of gospel in Don’t You Cry for Me and Shine It On Me.

Gráinne liked that I’d heard that. “Sometimes you when you do that, some people go, Oh, it’s too eclectic, there’s too much going on. But for me, I felt like it was still held together by the overall rock’n’roll sense of the album, even though there are other influences there. I do listen to a very wide range of music, but I think the rock’n’roll sound kind of underpinned the whole thing and that kept it together.”

Gráinne Duffy, over many years, has been a talented songwriter. But the evidence here in Voodoo Blues is that she is getting even better. These are well-structured songs, with strong lyrics, far beyond some of the simplistic song forms you get in a lot of blues rock. I asked her about her development as a song-writer.

“Well, it is a craft and I suppose craftsmen and women are supposed to get better the longer they’re at it, but sometimes it doesn’t work like that. You can start off on a high and you can just be like, the Mojo’s gone. But with this record, I was listening to a lot of old blues and I really tried to pare it back and make it really simple. And sometimes I think simple is best, but it can be hard to be simple! How often do you hear a big song and you go, that’s just three chords and it’s so simple, but it’s great. But sometimes it takes a long time to arrive there. Maybe with this record, I’ve finally been able to declutter and just try to go straight to the point. That’s what I tried to do. And, what helped the song-writing on this album was I had a good sense of where I wanted to go.”

The songs are all written by Gráinne and her husband and fellow band member, Paul. Gráinne is responsible for the lyrical content and they both collaborated on the music, as they have done for some considerable time. As usual on the album there is great guitar work from Paul, who is a very accomplished player. If you go to one of their live shows, you’ll see him really cut loose, with long solos and fast runs up and down the fretboard, but here on this album, he’s very supportive of each song. It’s restrained, tasteful, and works really well.

“Yeah. I have some friends who love guitar and, they were like, come on, give us more guitar! We want to hear more guitar! We did that in some of our previous records. But this album was maybe a little bit pared back. Maybe in some places we could’ve thrown in an extra guitar solo, but I think the guitar parts which are put down are just perfect.”

I asked if Gráinne had any particular favourites in the mix of the songs.

She mentioned Mercy. “It was one of the first ones that kind of kicked off the album and let me know where I wanted to go.” This is a great showcase for Duffy’s vocal power and control, with the lyrics articulated against an insistent guitar riff and some tasty organ work. “But,” she said, “You know, another one that I particularly like is Hard Rain,” referring to the track that finishes the album, a terrific rocker, which features some mouth-watering backing vocals supporting Duffy’s soulful singing. The song obviously gives a nod to Bob Dylan, a particular hero of Gráinne’s, who told me that Bob could do no wrong in her eyes and that she’d even named her son in honour of the man. She told me she loves Dylan’s current sound and style, which for her is a bit TexMex. “I love the sound that he’s gone for recently. I think it’s brilliant.”

I mentioned another song on the album which I really enjoyed, Roll It, and suggested that it recalled for me Sheryl Crow.

“You know what, I am a big Sheryl Crow fan. I think she’s a great.” But although Roll It might possibly recall Crow’s All I Want to Do, Gráinne suggested she probably had more Gerry Rafferty in her mind with it. Others have heard John Fogerty here. Mention of these other artists and songs simply gives you an idea of the sort of influences swirling around in the background, but Roll It stands on its own two feet. Said Gráinne, “Roll It was supposed to be kind of a fun chillout.”

I said to Gráinne how much I’d loved the organ work on the album, particularly in songs like Mercy, Shine It On Me, and Don’t You Cry For Me. It’s classic-sounding rock Hammond and works really well.

“It’s fabulous. That again, is that mega-talented man Troy Miller. He plays drums on the record, produces it and plays the organ and piano as well! I don’t know how that man fits all that talent into one body, but he’s brilliant. But I love that organ work too. It’s not over or under played, it’s just, to me, spot on. But it’s lovely to hear it being appreciated by somebody else, because sometimes that can just go a little bit unappreciated.”

The great thing about this album is how very upbeat and positive it is. It puts a smile on your face. I wondered if this reflects the sort of person that Gráinne is?

“I think so. My first album, Out of the Dark, was a lot slower and sedate and reflective, and people thought I was the most depressed person in the world! And I used to think, how do people think I’m a really sad person? And Ronnie Greer, a great guitar player from Northern Ireland, lovely man, whom I collaborate with, he would always say to me, Gráinne, this record is nothing like your personality! So, I think, yes, this record is more reflective of what I am actually like as a person. I want to get up and at it, I love playing rock’n’roll and have that positive outlook in life. But it’s funny you say that it’s upbeat because I read one review where it said, this gives us hope that the blues isn’t all sad!”

That the blues is depressing is a misconception that many people not familiar with the blues often have. But the blues singer is usually singing him or herself out of the blues. A song might bemoan the state of the world or the singer’s life, but actually singing the song is a way of getting beyond the bad state of affairs.

“Exactly,” said Gráinne. “And so often if you listen to the early singers, like Ma Rainey or Mama Thornton, any of those people, they usually have an awful lot of humour in their lyrics as well.”

I asked Gráinne about not being able to tour the album at the moment, which has got to be disappointing for her.

“Yes, it is. When the album came out, we were like, all right, what can we do to celebrate the release of the album? Normally you do press that day or that week. And you’d be going up to do a gig, a launch night, and then a few more shows. But this time it was just “Right, will we light the fire?” This is so strange. And, because we feel like we’ve arrived at a nice place with this album and it is quite up tempo, we felt it would have been exciting, fun to go out and play. So it really felt like a bit of a disappointment. But we’re hoping there has to be some sort of a silver lining to the cloud. We’re hoping that maybe people take time to actually listen to the record and get to know it, and when we go to play they’ll really appreciate us.”

I wondered if the band has any major events planned, at least tentatively, given the ongoing pandemic situation.

“Yes. Well, bookings have come in for festivals for this year, but they’re all saying with that they are still unsure. So we think it’s going to be the summer or September by the time we get back to play. We’re a wee bit nervous about booking things because we’ve had to cancel so many travel plans. So we’ll just take it one step at a time.”

One final thing I wanted to ask Gráinne about was that I noticed on the album sleeve they were supporting a charity called We C Hope. What is that about?

“I lost my sister-in-law to cancer,” she said. “So we decided to put We C Hope on there if people wanted to donate towards cancer. It’s a foundation we support.” We C Hope aims to help children who suffer from retinoblastoma, a highly curable form of eye cancer – unfortunately every 85 minutes, a child dies from curable eye cancer, mostly in economically less developed countries, where awareness and access to timely, appropriate medical care is very limited. We C Hope seeks to “create a bright future for all affected by childhood eye cancer.” Check out We C Hope at https://wechope.org/

Voodoo Blues is one of the stand-out rock and blues albums of 2020 and ought to bring Gráinne Duffy to the attention of music fans all over the world. She is a quite special talent, and you ought to hope she has the opportunity before long to demonstrate that on a stage near you.

 

 

Music Books for Your Christmas List

Christmas is coming, and if you’re a music fan, you’ll want to drop a few hints to Santa. Here are seven books you’ll definitely want in your stocking:

Michael Corcoran, Ghost Notes: Pioneering Spirits of Texas Music

What a sumptuous feast of a book this is. Coffee table sized, lavishly illustrated, and utterly engaging, it oozes quality from the standard of the writing to the beautiful quality of paper. With Corcoran’s engaging stories highlighting the careers and contributions of a wide variety of pioneering Texas musicians, you begin to realize how important and formative Texas is for American music. Top of your Christmas list. Read our review. Buy it here.

 

Annye C. Anderson, Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson

Memories of Robert Johnson from Annye Anderson, Johnson’s almost sister, which introduce us to the Robert Johnson we never knew. A wonderful evocation of a time and place. For any music fan, and particularly if you’re a blues fan, this book is a must-read.

Read our review here.

Buy it here.

 

Adam Gussow, Whose Blues? Facing Up to Race and the Future of Music

Blues harp master and professor of the blues, Gussow, asks an important question of every blues fan – who do the blues belong to? Expertly and sensitively written by a man who has spent his musical career learning from and playing with black musicians.

Read our interview with Adam Gussow here.

Buy it here.

 

Ian Zack, Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest.

Ian Zack’s biography of Odetta is masterful, as he charts the life of this seminal cultural figure who helped spark the folk revival and became a vital part of the protest movements of the 1950s and 60s. She was on the front line of the struggle for equality in America, combatting racism through her music and actions. An important book and a great read. Full review to come.

Check out also Ian Zack’s excellent biography of Rev. Gary Davis, Say No to the Devil. Here’s our review.

 

Freeman Vines, Hanging Tree Guitars

Freeman Vines, born in 1942 in Greene County in North Carolina is the focus of a quite remarkable book, written by Zoe Van Buren and featuring a stunning set of photographs of Vines, his guitars and his environment by Timothy Duffy. 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. Don’t miss the companion music album. Read our interview with Freeman Vines. Buy it here.

Gary Golio & E.B. Lewis, Dark Was the Night: Blind Willie Johnson’s Journey to the Stars

Another beautifully illustrated book (by E.B. Lewis), and cleverly written by Golio, guaranteed to engage the interest of small children. That’s no small feat, given the harshness of Willie Johnson’s life, a man blinded as a child, who lived in poverty and died penniless in the ruins of his burnt-down home. For parents who’d like their children to encounter something of America’s musical heritage, this, really is a must-buy. Highly recommended. Read our review. Buy it here.

Gary W Burnett, The Gospel According to the Blues

It’s been out for a while, but no matter – it’s mine and I’m gonna recommend it! “The Gospel According to the Blues is at once a primer in American music, culture, and race and religious history. Gary Burnett moves deftly from lyrics to theory and back again, from Blind Lemon Jefferson to the insights of contemporary scholarship. Highly readable, thoroughly researched, and with deep respect for the art form on every page. For best results, read with scratchy vinyl recordings of the masters as accompaniment.” An interview with the author and more details here.

Buy it here.

Vika & Linda – bringing some joy to iso(lation)

Vika and Linda Bull are two roots artists that may not have come across your radar. You ought to remedy that straight away! They are two sisters, based in Melbourne, who have been singing, harmonizing and rocking for many years, delighting audiences in their Australian homeland. Along the way, they’ve supported the likes of Billy Joel and have performed with Iggy Pop. The sisters are members of Paul Kelly’s band – Kelly is a hugely successful Australian rock music singer-songwriter and guitarist, whom a Rolling Stone writer claimed to be “one of the finest songwriters I have ever heard.”

Vika and Linda released a new album this year, called Sunday (The Gospel According to Iso, a fabulous album of rootsy, bluesy gospel songs and we got chatting to Linda about it.

But first of all, because a lot of people in the US and Europe may not be familiar with Vika and Linda, despite their success in Australia, I asked Linda how she would characterize their music?

“Well,” she said, “we’re very hard to pigeonhole. We love harmonizing together and singing together and we cover a lot of different genres. We don’t like being pigeonholed. But I think it’s basically roots music is where our heart is – and harmony. Vika and I have got very different tastes, Vika is more rock and I’m a bit more country. And in between we can cover blues, soul, R&B and gospel. And we love to do that. We love to just sing together – regardless of the genre, we just love singing together.”

Turning to the new album, I wondered what “iso” means. Turns out it’s Australian slang for “isolation.” Linda told me:

“Because we made the album in isolation in the first phase of lock-down in Melbourne, not knowing then that we would have two. The background of the record is that we’ve been singing gospel music for probably about 35 years now.” She and Vika have made a few gospel-tinged recordings along the way, but “this one in its entirety is kind of the next step. We had restrictions with lock-down, so we made it minimally. And I think gospel music actually works really well like that. It works really well when you have very few instruments.”

The album is something of a gem, really pared back, largely featuring the wonderful harmonizing of the two sisters, and backed mostly by piano with those lovely sort of gospel chords that you get with the piano.

“We have piano all over it, in every track, and our musical director, Cameron Bruce, is a beautiful piano player. We’ve worked with him in Paul Kelly’s band, and he took charge of everything with us, helped to select the songs with a lot of zoom meetings. Cameron arranged the songs and then sent them back to us as files and we sang over the top.”

The Gospel According to Iso has 13 gospel songs (with a bit of latitude, we’ll count Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water and Chuck Berry’s Downbound Train as gospel!), mostly old traditional songs or spirituals like Sinnerman, Walk With Me Lord and Jesus on the Mainline. The album kicks off with a rockin’ version of Claude Ely’s Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down, and once you hear these two sisters harmonizing, and the bluesy vocals, you know this is an album you want to hear. The high quality is sustained throughout, and even though the arrangements are relatively sparse, there’s a nice variety to the way each of the songs is handled.

The album, Linda told me, all sprang from a weekly Sunday sing-song that she and Vika started to do when everything stopped in Australia early in the year. “I went out on Facebook and Instagram live every Sunday morning at 11:00am and we did one gospel song. That grew in popularity to the point where we thought we could make a record. We’d just ring a friend, they played guitar, we’d sing over the top, and we thought we could make a record like that.”

Why, I wondered, did they choose this particular selection of songs?

“We had lots of gospel songs in our back catalogue that we’ve been singing over the years, but we wanted to do something new. So I dug into the gospel collection that I had amassed over the years and we had about 70 songs from all different sources. Then we whittled it down and the focus was mainly just to do something that meant something to us and bring a bit of joy because it was pretty sort of sad over here – and everywhere.

“But we wanted also songs that people knew. So we have Bridge Over Troubled Water and Amazing Grace. But then there are other songs that we thought, we’ll just throw those into the pot because we love singing them – songs by Mahalia Jackson and so on. That’s how it came together.”

It’s a great selection of songs, but I particularly like Rosetta Tharpe’s Strange Things Happening Every Day. It’s got a very distinctive Rosetta Tharpe feel about it, with both the piano and guitar work echoing her original version. Linda said she liked Rosetta’s “rock and roll attitude. That’s kind of right up our alley.”

The other song I asked about was Elder Curry’s Memphis Flu. Curry was a singing preacher and guitar player who preached fiery sermons through his songs, backed by the barrelhouse piano of Elder Beck, and featured the stomping feet and clapped hands of his congregation. Recorded in 1930 for Okeh Records, Memphis Flu refers to the flu’ season of 1929 which was the worst since the 1919 pandemic. Death rates were very high, particularly in the Memphis region. The song is often thought of as the first rock’n’roll record and the original is a toe-tapping rocker all right. But Curry’s lyrics are pretty harsh. For Curry influenza was a manifestation of God’s wrath at sinners and there was little compassion for the large numbers of people who’d died as a result of the flu’.

Linda said that when she stumbled across the song, she thought how perfect it was for the current situation – but “the lyrics were very direct. So we tweaked them a bit in the choruses. It’s a gospel song of course, but you’re not going to die if you don’t go to church! But we thought the song was perfect for record. We weren’t sure whether people would love it or hate it!”

Actually, you can’t help but love Vika and Linda’s version, driven by a rollicking barrelhouse piano. The amended version of the song is well-chosen, actually, so timely, and with a great message talking about the epidemic getting the rich and the poor alike, and saying that it’s going to get a whole more if you don’t listen up and behave. Wear your masks people!

I asked Linda if there’d been any sort of pushback against science and wearing masks in Australia?

“There was a bit of a pushback. Yes, there were marches and demonstrations and anti-mask-wearing demonstrations, but all in all, you know, in the middle of all this, there was a black lives matter movement, and people were very observant of wearing a mask and they still went out and protested, so people in general were pretty good. No one loves wearing a mask or being told what to do – I get it, you know, but the result was good.”

Talking about black lives matter, the spectre of racism is something that we’re all increasingly aware of these days. What, I asked Linda, has been her experience in Australia, with her Tongan background?

“Well, yes, we have dark skin. So obviously we look different. So we have experienced a certain amount of racism, but nothing like our mother experienced.” The sisters’ mother came to Australia during the White Australia Policy, which from 1901 basically sought to forbid or restrict people of non-European ethnic origin, especially Asians and Pacific Islanders, from immigrating to Australia. It was only legally disbanded in the mid-1970s.

The racism encountered by Linda and her sister has been “nowhere near as much as the previous generation. So it’s getting easier in some ways, but we feel very strongly about being treated equally, and why shouldn’t we? We are respectful, but we are direct, so I always say we stand up for ourselves.”

The sisters are half Tongan – Tonga is a Polynesian neighbour of Australia, and it’s a heritage they feel proud of.

“Polynesian culture is very strong in our family. And the way they sing – when they sing in church, time pretty much time stops, it’s so beautiful. That’s how we were raised. We were raised listening to the Tongans sing in church, and that’s where we get our voices from. Because they taught us, our mother taught us.”

From listening to Linda and Vika, I’d sure love to visit one of those Tongan churches.

“Everyone we take cries when they see the Tongans fire up…as soon as you walk into the church and they start singing and they get into it, how can you help but not be moved?”

The album finishes with a beautiful, unaccompanied Amazing Grace. The slow tempo and the pure quality of the voices make it an appropriately emotional end to the album. There’s something about this song that seems to appeal to almost everybody, so I asked Linda what she thought it is about gospel music that has such a wide appeal even to people of no faith?

“I think that it’s uplifting and it’s one of those sort of genres that you can lean on when feeling a bit down, or when you could do with an uplift. It lends itself naturally to that sort of universal feeling. You know, we all want to live a little bit better sometimes. Although we grew up in a church and had a very religious upbringing, we think this music is for everybody. And I think that we love singing it because for us, it’s a release. I think it’s ultimately our aim with a gospel record to make people feel better, whether they believe or not.”

Sadly, with the restrictions still in place because of the pandemic, the Bull sisters haven’t been able to go out and play on the road. But, Linda told me, they can’t wait to sing these songs to a live audience. Hearing these two sing these songs live is going to be some experience. I just hope I get the opportunity to hear them.

Adam Gussow and the Brotherhood of the Blues

He’s a top-notch harmonica player whose playing, American Harmonica Newsletters says, is characterized by “technical mastery and innovative brilliance that comes along once in a generation”; he’s been nominated for a W.C. Handy award; in a career spanning over 30 years, he’s played major blues, jazz and folk festivals, and on stages with Bo Diddley, Buddy Guy, David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Otis Clay, and Johnny Winter; he’s the subject of a popular and moving Netflix documentary, along with Sterling Magee, the other half of the duo Satan and Adam; and he’s a popular harmonica tutor with students all over the world benefitting from his online video lessons.

And if that’s not enough, Adam Gussow is a professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, where he teaches courses in American and African American literature, the blues tradition, southern autobiography, and, would you believe it, the literature and culture of running! He’s the author of a number of award-winning blues books including a memoir of his days playing with Sterling Magee, a novel, and Beyond the Crossroads, which was voted “Best Blues Book of 2017” by the readership of Living Blues. And one which enhanced my own understanding of the blues greatly when I read it a few years ago, Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition, which won the Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature.

So, with this rich background as a blues historian, blues artist, blues mentor and teacher, Adam Gussow clearly has a thing or two worthwhile to say about the blues and its history and tradition.

Down at the Crossroads was pleased to get chatting to him recently, and I suggested, first of all, that 2020 had been quite a year for him, with a new book being published, a new album being released and then, of course, that Netflix film.

He pointed out that the film had come out first of all at the Tribeca folk festival back in April 2018, but began to show up on Netflix last year. At that point, his email box blew up with lots of people he’d never heard from telling him how much it had touched them. If you haven’t seen it, don’t hesitate, it’s a great show and tells a remarkable and heart-warming story.

It charts the story of Adam’s relationship with Sterling Magee, beginning with his 1986 Harlem street jams with “Mr Satan,” at a time of considerable racial tension, and stretching through the next 23 years as they became a touring duo, were included in U2’s Rattle and Hum documentary, and released a number of albums before Sterling Magee mysteriously disappeared. What happened next is remarkable and I’ll not spoil it for those who haven’t seen it.

Adam said he had nothing to do with the way that director V. Scott Balcerek told the story but that he was pleased with the way it turned out. The film begins with Adam meeting Sterling on the street and beginning to jam, but what the film doesn’t explain is that Adam by that stage was an accomplished harmonica player. He had been tutored by Nat Riddles, a New York blues master. “Nat Riddles was a very important figure in my life, my mentor, and I had been a busker in New York, played solo, then played with two different guitar players, and then spent two months in Europe in the summer of ’86. So there was a whole lot of dues paid.”

Overall, though, Gussow said, “I think V. Scott Balcerek did a really good job and the proof of the pudding is that people again and again, say ‘it brought tears to my eyes.’”

He went on to explain the importance of that more sentimental aspect of the film, by mentioning Martin Luther King’s ideas about the beloved community, the interrelatedness of humanity. “I think,” he said, “there’s a lot of people who imagine that that idea just kind of somehow faded away. And I think that what our film does, is that it offers a kind of story, a narrative, living proof of that forged long-term brotherhood kind of relationship. And I think it gives people hope with all of this identity politics stuff.”

“I think that Sterling and I were kind of race rebels in some way, playing on the streets during a rough period of New York history in which young black men died. There’s no question that it was a rough time and he and I were out there, and he was very conscious, and he helped me be conscious, of the way in which we were offering a kind of a living image of brotherhood… after a while I sank into the woodwork. It was like I was just a part of the street scene. And all the guys who hung out around us…I was just wanting to be one of the guys. But what I would say is that 99.9 times out of a hundred, the response that I got, when people came up, and it wasn’t like they were praising me, it was more like it was a chance for them to talk, even connect in some ways.”

Gussow talked about what had happened in December 1986 in New York when a white mob in Queens had severely beaten three African Americans who’d been stranded when their car broke down, one of whom had been killed whilst trying to flee. Gussow had been away in California for a couple of weeks and when he came back in early January, he found Sterling and began to play on the street with him again. “At least two hundred people came up to give us, to shake my hand, which is to say, people were saying, basically, not only are they not associating me with the whiteness out at Queens that had killed this black guy, they were saying, we’re glad you’re here…we have a partnership. What’s going on in Queens can’t touch the brotherhood that you all are putting out right here.”

I asked Adam about his new book, called Whose Blues? Facing Up to Race and the Future of Music, in which he contrasts and discusses two opposing views of the blues. One he calls blues universalism, where there’s “no black, no white, just the blues,” with a recognition that the blues is played and appreciated globally. And the other is “black bluesism,” which insists that the blues is black, and wants to resist cultural appropriation and to ensure the trauma of black communities which is inherent to the blues is properly safeguarded. It’s an important question, and one which Gussow deals with in a thought-provoking and sensitive way. He has, after all, come face-to-face with the issue in his long-standing engagement with black blues artists over many years; and, his in-depth knowledge of the blues and the social history of the blues gives him the tools with which to open up the discussion for the rest of us.

I asked him who the book is aimed at and he suggested there were several.

“One audience is probably white, Anglo, American blues aficionados, blues fans and blues musicians…What I’m determined to do is to think about the way that we talk about the music and to sort of educate. My generation of blues players, and I’ll say white blues players, came up at a time – and I know many musicians who fit this mould, including the guys a generation or half a generation ahead of me, like Rick Estrin and Kim Wilson, white harmonica players – came up at a time when, if you’re going to learn the music, you were in predominantly black or all black contexts, some part of the time you were in bands backing up African-American players, and you were getting all of this mentoring, all of this understanding. If you’re Paul Oscher, you were in an all-black context in Chicago.

“And there’s a number of us out there who had that sort of training, which is to say we can’t think about blues without thinking about African-American mentors, teachers, friends, who you’re on the road with. It’s your family. So that’s how we grew up. That’s how we learned the music. That’s how we think of the music. And so, you know, the phrase blues is black music obviously has a kind of weird paradoxical resonance for us, because on the one hand, we know the guys we learned from, we have played with. We also know that we’re a part of it though.

“So there’s a paradox there. So, what we don’t want to hear is that phrase and think you’re trying to tell me I don’t have a right to play this, to carry on a tradition that I was mentored into with somebody who trained me and valued the training he gave me…those guys would often talk about these younger white musicians as their sons.

“But there’s a younger generation that didn’t have that experience at all. And as blues goes around the globe, there are cultures in, it could be Ireland, it could be Chile and Argentina, where there’s no African-American presence to speak of. And so somebody might hear the phrase, blues is black music, and really not even feel the tension that I feel. Really not even get it. And so part of what I’m trying to do is speak to that audience. And I’m trying to say, let’s go back, at least before we move on into the future of this music, let’s go back into that.

“Before we go to the future, let’s go back and understand how the music really came into being with all of the paradoxes – one of my favourite little anecdotes is that in the 1920s, you get this handbook basically for would-be white blues singers written by two African-American blues songwriters that is saying, you must empathize with the lowdown feeling. The music is full of paradoxes, but there’s no question that it has a sort of black Southern identity in some profound way.

“It’s in the language, it’s in the call and response. So I want to make sure that everybody is grounded in that. And that was where, as somebody who taught blues literature, I was invested in saying, here’s how thinking about W.C. Handy can help you. Here’s how thinking about blues conditions, blues feelings, blues expressiveness, the blues ethos, here’s how those concepts can actually help ground you in this. And so that’s one of the audiences and I didn’t want to push that audience away from the music at all.”

Adam’s second audience, he says is the Corey Harrises of the world, black American artists who feel somewhat possessive about the music. “I want to say, I understand that. I want to think critically about the phrase, no black, no white, just the blues. I’m trying to understand what the people who use that think they’re saying. And why people who don’t like that, don’t like it. Maybe diffuse a little bit, I’m trying to see things from a range of perspectives.”

The third audience, he says, is academic readers, people who might be teaching the music. “So that’s why in some of the chapters I talk about the way in which I teach the blues. And my hope would be that those chapters might be of interest to people who teach the blues or are thinking about the blues. It may be in a school context and might help people think a little more clearly about stuff.”

That’s a very interesting section of Whose Blues? where Gussow talks about the worldwide interest in the blues, particularly in his own area of harmonica. He introduces us here to harmonica players around the world who have been keen to learn from Gussow’s library of video tutorial material at www.modernbluesharmonica.com, some of whom have become accomplished players.

In conversation, Adam talked more about blues around the world, noting the role that B.B. King had playing the blues in around 55 countries and seeding the blues in places like Japan and Russia, African American blues artists going to play festivals in Europe, the British blues explosion in the sixties, and the role of American and British radio stations over the years. The blues has truly become a worldwide phenomenon.

In the book, Gussow says, “These are in the process of mastering the music as best they can and making it a part of their own developing cultural inheritances. Should we celebrate this change or condemn it? Should we embrace the postmodern globalization of the blues as a kind of progress, a victory for blues music as a cultural form, or critique that global spread as a crisis of cultural expropriation and dilution, a tragic erasure of the burdens and meanings of black history into the very fabric of music?”

The reality is, Adam told me, that if we were to do “a census of all of the people in the world who listened to blues today, and all of the musicians who played the music, we’d find that African-Americans are the least part of it these days. But in global terms they’re still there. They’re not irrelevant at all. In fact, a lot of the images, the music, the language – everybody knows Hoochie Coochie Man, I’ve got my mojo working, right? And those are all that kind of hoodoo stuff that goes directly back to sort of African rituals. That’s blues music.”

Gussow seems keen to, as he says, embrace the globalization of the blues, but at the same time wants to ensure the blues history, its tradition, its feeling is not lost. And he wants to ensure that the African-American presence is still felt.

Zora Neale Hurston

Which was why he says he thought it was important to talk about blues literature in his book. One of the interesting things you’ll find in the book is the considerable amount of discussion Gussow has about blues writers, as opposed to just musicians: Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston. I would hazard a guess and say that most blues fans don’t know them at all. Gussow suggested to me that “blues is more than music,” which you discover when you read the blues literature, including authors he doesn’t deal with in the book, like poets Sterling Plumpp and Tyehimba Jess.

So, as well as acknowledging the reality of people responding to, and wanting to listen and play the blues around the world – and encouraging that, and welcoming that – Adam Gussow is anxious that the way in which the blues is rooted in Black history is kept to the fore.

“Blues is history. Blues is survival tools. It’s a site of memory. I try to make this point in my book, of memory for the traumas of slavery and Jim Crow. Blues indexes the sufferings of Jim Crow. And it’s a way of connecting with that history. And I think it’s so important that we not forget that, that we not imagine blues as just music. I don’t think of blues as just music. I think it is a music, but it has a power that’s deep, and it has some deep magic in it that I’ve certainly felt as long as I’ve been alive.”

Adam Gussow’s deep experience of the brotherhood of the blues, forged through decades playing with Sterling Magee and other African Americans, is on the one hand able to transcend race, but on the other it is rooted in the historical reality of the blues as a complex response to the context of social and political oppression of African Americans. That seems to me to a good pointer to the future. The globalization of the blues just is. But we need voices like Adam Gussow’s to keep us mindful of the reality of the blues.

Since call and response, as Gussow explains, is a key part of the blues, it’s appropriate, I think, to conclude with this joint statement – first the Black Arts Movement spokesperson Larry Neal (in italics), then Gussow’s commentary, echoing and expanding on Neal’s pronouncement.

“The blues were shaped in the context of social and political oppression…the blues are basically defiant in their attitude toward life. They are about survival on the meanest, most gut level of human existence. They are, therefore, lyric responses to the facts of life…These blues are not sorrow songs but survivor songs: the soundtrack of a spiritual warriorship that refuses to say die. These blues wrest far more than their share of swaggering lyric joy out of an evil world, inscribing personhood and sustaining the tribe in the process.”

Whose Blues? Facing Up to Race and the Future of Music by Adam Gussow, is published by University of North Carolina Press.

Happy Birthday W.C. Handy (and me)

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Acclaimed “father of the blues,” song-writer and band-leader W.C. Handy was born this day 137 years ago. He’s an important figure in the history of the blues – the first real superstar, through his sheet music compositions, his 1914 St. Louis Blues, and his claim to recognizing the “world famous blues note.”

And, whatdayaknow, I share a birthday with W.C. Handy! Handy, of course, is credited with recognizing the blues for the first time in the plaintive slide playing by a man on his guitar at a station in Tutweiler, has a statue in a park named after him in Memphis, and his compositions are played to this day.

Me, I was a member of the winning sprint relay team in the Belfast primary schools’ interschool competition at Dunmore dog-racing stadium in the late ‘60s and am the proud author of this blog.

But, of course, I’ve one thing going for me over Mr. Handy. I’m still here! Though with each passing birthday, you’re painfully aware of the passing of time. You’ll never be in the sprint relay team again, your hair gets thinner and just about every muscle group in your body heads south. As Jackson Browne says,

Time may heal all wounds
But time will steal you blind
Time the wheel, time the conqueror.

But, there’s no point is dwelling on that too much, I reckon. I like the attitude of acoustic blues master, Rory Block, who’s now over 70 and who told me when I spoke to her a while back:

“Getting older or passing years is only what you make it. You know, you may make a disadvantage of it, but honestly, I don’t go there. I see it as an advantage. Now maybe I’m crazy, but I see it as a real opportunity to know more, to do more with what you know, to feel more…your fruit ripens! And to me it’s like I don’t feel old. What are you talking about? I’m more clear that this is what I was put here to do. You know, really, I see it that way. And man, I’m just getting started! I don’t feel a limitation at all and I don’t feel old – my goodness, not at all!”

So, as I celebrate my something-somethingth birthday, I’m with Rory. There are books to be written (a new one coming out soon); albums to be reviewed (though I’ll never keep up with the prolific and quite wonderful Rocking Magpie); guitars to be played; family and friends to cherish; grandchildren to greet into the world; and a big old hurting world in which to try and make a small difference (with God’s help).

Bob Dylan’s Forever Young from his Planet Waves album in 1974 – which, incidentally, someone gave me as a birthday present – hits the right note, I think:

May your heart always be joyful
May your song always be sung
And may you stay forever young
May you stay forever young.

And now, to help W.C. and me celebrate, here are a few blues songs.

Louis Jordan and his Tympany 5’s big band Happy Birthday Boogie gets the party started. “Happy birthday to you, and I hope you have many more”

Sammy Mayfield gives us a more bluesy version of the song.

And B.B. King has his Happy Birthday Blues, with a bit more blues feeling

And check out this bit of fun from Chris Kramer and the Beatbox, who hopes all our dreams come true.

And finally, it’s not the blues, but it’s a celebration, and it is Bruce Springsteen. Written for his wife Patti, but now dedicated to everybody who’s having a birthday today:

So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart. (Psalm 90:12)

Hanging Tree Guitars

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 20^th 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.

Find out more at www.hangingtreeguitars.com All photographs by Timothy Duffy.

 

 

Catfish Keith is keeping the vintage vibe, but making it new and alive.

“The real acoustic blues king” Rock ‘n’ Reel

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 50^th 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.”

Now – go buy Catfish Crawl!

Paul Jones: Life, the blues, and faith

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 19^th 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 16^th 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]

Nepal’s Prakash Slim has been living the blues

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!

Acoustic bluesman, Dom Martin: I play every gig like it’s my last.

“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.

Gary Thanks, Dom. All the best for the future.