Kenny Meeks’ bluesy Americana: “I just want my songs to make the listener feel welcome.”

Kenny Meeks makes great bluesy sounding Americana music. He has worked extensively alongside artists such as Sixpence None the Richer, Buddy and Julie Miller, and Al Perkins, and has four albums to his credit over the past 12 years or so. He’s a great guitarist and gritty singer – and an accomplished songwriter. His new album, New Jerusalem, which we had in our Best Americana list for 2016 is a very fine collection of original songs, all with a gospel flavour. Down at the Crossroads has the opportunity to talk to Kenny recently, and he was gracious enough to be very open and honest in response to our questions –

DATC: Kenny, congratulations on the new album, New Jerusalem. It’s great – chock full of very cool bluesy Americana songs, with unmistakable gospel content. Tell us a bit about how the album took shape.

Kenny: Thank you very much Gary. What got these songs flowing, and this record, was the suicide of an elderly neighbour who was a bit of a grandfather-figure to our kids (especially my boys) – which impacted our family deeply. Also, the sadness of the sudden death of my brother Paul was pretty rough.

These events stirred something in me that became a response to suffering, pain, and isolation. As I began writing songs, a little bit of my history came out. I wrote all but one of these songs through this season of grief and reflection. Also, it’s a bit of a legacy record for my progeny……a peek into my soul and my story. I’m not sure I’ll ever make another record this personal again. It’s not just about those topics, but that’s what got things going.

DATC: Tell us about the title track, New Jerusalem – what is that all about?

Kenny: It’s about the afterlife. I do believe in it, in a biblical way. I wanted to sing about it. I wanted the song to be a celebration and a proclamation. It’s also about a vision of greater unity among followers of Jesus. The absence of schisms, and unity, in Heaven. It’s for me as much as for the listener.

DATC: Mercy Pays the Toll is an interesting song. It talks about “when pain moves in to stay,” and “when this world wears us down…and leaves us tired and sore.” It sounds like there’s some personal experience in there. You ask the question – “how do we live?” What’s the answer, in your experience?

Kenny: This song is in response to the pain I was seeing around me. I’ve certainly had – and caused – my share. But people live with chronic pain, chronic poverty, chronic sadness, post-traumatic stress, or mental impairment. I don’t think I necessarily ask the question looking for an answer. I think the question is meant to be a meditation. How can we share burdens of others? Some so heavy, they think their only way out might be to take their own life?

But, I think the answer is to always love. If only love could be my default response to every situation….. and when it isn’t, we have mercy. Maybe “How Do We Love” would have been better said?

DATC: There’s a bluesy feel to your music, but it’s never downbeat. How have the blues as a genre influenced you and your music?

Kenny: Maybe the blues has been misunderstood as a sad genre. It’s not. I mean, life is sad, and the blues are certainly about life. But, I hear a lot of joy in blues music. But…there is the presence of a yearning in all music, and certainly in the blues. So, I think you’re right in a sense.

I read in a Time article about Delta music history, that lyrics like ‘I’m gonna leave you baby’ were sharecroppers speaking in code that they were going to leave their landowner for a better deal. That was the author’s take. Dunno if there’s any truth to it. But, allegory has always been very present in African American oral tradition and music.

American blues music shaped me early, through a trip to a family farm in Horse Cave Kentucky, where I wandered to the sharecropper home next door. I was real little. The neighbour was on the front porch, playing a dimestore electric guitar through a little amp with a jack-knife slide. That’s where they found me, slack-jawed, standing in front of that porch. This instantly became the music to which I would compare all other. It’s still in my mind like it happened yesterday.

I also really liked Dixieland music as a 9-year old trumpet player. My dad took me to meet Al Hirt at a record store. But, when I bought my first guitar with paper route money at 12, it would most certainly be manipulated with a jack-knife slide. When my mother passed away that same year, the blues became important to me. But, beyond sadness, maybe yearning? Some folks equate tempo with …you know – fast = happy, slow = sad. Man, the slower the better for me. And sometimes the real slow stuff is downright joyous!

DATC: How come the blues, with some of its associations with the crossroads and the devil and so on, can be a vehicle for gospel music?

Kenny: As for the ‘deal with the devil’ I kinda see the “Crossroads” legend, as we know it, as a deal for fortune and fame, not specific to the blues. I’m fairly certain the music we consider to be the genre called the blues was uniquely born from the music of the African American slave population in America. And if their spiritual music wasn’t the birth mother, it certainly was the midwife. So, I think the blues have more kinship with the music of the African-American church than any other genre. It seems really natural to me, in an organic kind of way. I’m not fond of obvious “repurposed” blues-Gospel music. But Rev. Gary Davis …man… that is the absolute loveliest stuff ever!

DATC: Who are the blues and other artists that have influenced you most, either musically or lyrically?

Kenny: Robert Johnson. Ray Charles (my desert island artist…just Ray…all I need…ha!) I love John Lee Hooker. I love Taj Mahal. Jimi Hendrix. Aretha Franklin. Ralph Stanley. Leon Russell. Grant Green. Les McCann and Oscar Peterson. Bob Dylan. John Prine. Rev. Gary Davis. And Duane Allman. I could go on and on (laugh). If you go back, listen to some of Robert Randolph’s mentors in the Sacred Steel tradition…oh boy. I know I’m forgetting some real important musicians that have influenced me, sorry!

DATC: Tell us a bit about yourself, Kenny – first of all, your website mentions your “migratory childhood, and blue-collar upbringing.” Explain that and how that plays into your art.

Kenny: We moved to Dearborn Michigan from Henderson Kentucky when I was 7. It was like a foreign country. So, exile, longing for the familiar surroundings of home. And the music I was hearing through this time kinda changed from country music to Motown, plus British invasion stuff and psychedelia. So the migration to Detroit brought lots of new music into my world. The blue-collar aspect is simply that my dad was a working guy. He was a brilliant mechanic, and he could fix stuff that other guys in the shop couldn’t figure out. I miss him. [Kenny’s father Alvis passed away in 1992].

DATC: You’ve been performing and writing songs for nearly 30 years – how has your music and career evolved over that time?

Kenny: Thanks!…Actually, about 40, but who’s counting? (laughs) Ummmm, pretty much same ol’ Kenny (laughs). I’m trying to learn how to learn better. And learning how to unlearn stuff I’m supposed to forget! I try to make honest music; hopefully that comes through. I think my songwriting has improved a bit. And, I learn from my kids and all the younger people I work with.

And, I’ve always really loved playing with other artists too. That hasn’t changed. I have made music with insanely talented people. Pretty humbling. If I started naming them…well, I’d leave out someone. But you know, it’s very humbling. As for my artist career, I mean, my friends know I always say “why would someone come to see me when they could stay home and listen to a Ray Charles record?” These days I sometimes play guitar for a very special lady named Sandra McCracken, whose music just takes your breath away. We’re going to play with Liz Vice next week. I’m really looking forward to that.

DATC: How do you find audiences at your shows react to the gospel feel of your songs – people, perhaps, who don’t share that faith?

Kenny: Very positive response, not unlike, maybe…a Mavis Staples audience? I think my music is non-confrontational, so the listener isn’t ‘put on the spot’. I never ‘preach’ with lyrics. Proclamation is kind of a good Gospel music method (and I guess that is a kind of preaching). Not all my music is Gospel music, but I think a song like Jesus Knows communicates that He is tuned in to you even if you’re not tuned into Him, you know?…and that’s ok. I just want my songs to make the listener feel welcome. Does that make sense? The important thing about Gospel music is to express that God loves us completely. We ARE loved. Just as we are. Nothing we could ever do could make God love us more. And there is nothing we could ever do to make God love us less. That is the grace of God.

DATC: Are your touring the album at the minute, and where will that take you over the next few months?

Kenny: I don’t have any shows coming up, but thanks for asking. I’d love to play some in the UK. I go where I’m invited, and that’s always such a pleasure. And it has been a pleasure speaking with you Gary. Thanks so much for your interest in my music. God bless you and yours.

 

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The Guitar Genius of Rev. Gary Davis

Ian Zack, Say No To The Devil, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2015

Ian Zack’s biography of Reverend Gary Davis is an outstanding  work – meticulously researched, thoroughly engaging and readable and written with great affection and sympathy. Zack clearly recognizes the enormous talent that Davis was, noting with some disappointment and incredulity that Rolling Stone magazine had no room for him in its list of 100 greatest guitarists. The omission beggars belief, given the personal influence that Davis had on a generation of guitarist through his teaching, and the way that his songs were covered by major rock groups like the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead.

Zack notes the comments of blues singer Larry Johnson after Davis’s death in 1972: “I admired him most for, first of all he being born blind, in the South, black, had everything against him. Everything. Nothing did he have in his favour. And he managed  to become a master musician. And then he managed to influence other musicians from here to England. And I think for him to do that, even to keep a mind good enough to do that, is something else.”

Zack carefully traces for us the contours of Davis’s life from his early days in South Carolina to the streets of New York City, where he was eventually to be recognized for the musical genius that he was. Davis stayed faithful to his calling as a minister of the gospel until he died and only in the last decade of his life was he persuaded to sing blues songs publically. Zack does not ignore Davis’s failings or the inconsistencies with his Christian ministry– his drinking, his periodic womanizing or the lewd lyrics of some of his blues material (mostly privately sung). But at the same time he doesn’t dwell on these and focuses instead on the enormous generosity of Davis and his wife, Gary Davis’s insistence for most of his life on being first of all a minister of the gospel and his immense musical talent.

It is, at times, a heart rending story, as we see Davis cope with his blindness, battle poverty virtually all his life and struggle to be appreciated during his lifetime for the amazing artist and guitarist that he was. It is inspiring as well, though as we come to understand, with one of his pupils, Larry Bezer, that “He faced adversity eyeball to eyeball and never blinked.”

Ian Zack has given us a wonderful gift in this biography – it deserves to be widely read and acclaimed. He sums up Rev. Gary Davis as follows:

“In truth, Davis was uncommonly giving, spiritual, tenacious beyond the most usual conceptions of the word, funny, charming, quick-witted, and, or course, profoundly gifted. But he was also cocky, competitive, sinful, and at times unfaithful to the religious virtues he sang about so mightily. His music, one might say, was profoundly aspirational, and if he sometimes fell short of a commandment or two, the only one he had to answer to was God.”

Easter Sunday and the Rolling Stones?

So, what have the Rolling Stones to do with Easter? Well, actually, the link is a bit tenuous – on their 1971 album Sticky Fingers, they recorded and brought to everybody’s attention a Mississippi Fred McDowell song, You Gotta Move.

You may be high, you may be low

You may be rich, child, you may be poor

But when the Lord get ready

You gotta move.

Mick, Keef and the boys may or may not have realized, but this is a song about Christian hope – it’s about resurrection. No matter who you are – man, woman, black or white, rich or poor – when the Lord’s good and ready – them bones gotta move! It’s Gary Davis Jr’s “great gettin’ up morning” when he “heard the angels singing.”

Now Jesus – we’re fine with him as great teacher – depending on your preference or politics you can have “the poor you always have with you,” “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” or “my kingdom is not of this world” or, if you’re game for being a bit more challenged, you can focus on the golden rule, “love your enemies”, “blessed are the peace makers.” So long as he’s an de-historicized prophet or philosopher, he’s pretty safe – maybe a bit profound here and there, like Aristotle or some other religious guru and worth knowing about – but once we start putting resurrection into the mix, that starts to get a bit rich for us.

Early Jesus follower Paul realized this pretty much from the get-go. “If the Messiah isn’t raised from the dead,” he wrote in his letter to a group of Jesus followers in Corinth, then “our faith is worthless.” Might as well “eat and drink,” he said, “for tomorrow we die.”

Paul tells us he knew a load of people who’d seen the risen Jesus, apart from himself, and everything stood or fell one this fact. Paul and other people in the first century may not have shared our scientific worldview. But they knew dead when they saw it. Dead men didn’t get up. Dead was dead.

But Paul and his friends had seen Jesus raised from the dead and their Jewish theology led them to the conclusion that this fact meant that Jesus followers – those in-the-Messiah, as Paul puts it – could hope for a similar outcome at the last. Christian faith revolves around resurrection – the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus followers. Nowhere does the New Testament encourage a hope for a disembodied existence after death in a heavenly city in the sky. Christian hope is much more earthy, tangible – it’s about the hope for a new world, a transformation of the here and now and a share in that through resurrection. This sort of hope is the impetus for Jesus followers to live as if that day had already arrived, focusing their lives on the justice, peace and love that Jesus taught about.

This is why Christians celebrate Easter Sunday – God raising Jesus from the dead means everything has changed; something fundamental in the universe has shifted and each of us can be a part of it. No matter who we are – as Fred McDowell said – rich or poor, a women or a policeman, whoever – we can have a share in God’s future. When the Lord get ready – you gotta MOVE!

 

Johnny Cash and Luther Dickinson: Ain’t no Grave

Rev Gary Davis

Songs about death and dying are common in the blues. Not surprising, given the toughness of life for African Americans in the southern states under Jim Crow during the early decades of the twentieth century when the blues grew up. Infant mortality was high, life expectancy low, disease common and healthcare practically non-existent for many. So death was an ever-present reality – families losing children, children losing a mother or father, neighbors aware of the pain of bereavement suffered by their friends. Today we expect our full three-score years and ten and then some, and until we start heading towards that point, most of us don’t have to attend too many funerals. But, sooner or later, we all have to face it – “I gotta walk that lonesome valley, I gotta walk there by myself, Ain’t no one can walk there for me, I gotta walk there for myself.”

The reality of death in the early days of the blues is highlighted by the traditional song, sung by Rev Gary Davis and many others since, Death Don’t Have No Mercy. It’s a particularly mournful blues, as befits its subject matter:

Death don’t have no mercy in this land,
He’ll come to your house, he won’t stay long
Look in the bed and find your mother is gone – Death don’t have no mercy in this land.

The song covers all the family members – mother, father, sister and brother and says starkly: “Death will leave you standin’ and cryin’ in this land.” Those of us who have lost those near and dear to us know the numbness that comes when we’re left “standin’ and cryin.”

Here’s a version of the song done by Jorma Kaukonen and Hot Tuna:

The Roman Empire of first couple of centuries in which Christianity grew up was one where the great mass of people in the urban centers lived generally impoverished, uncertain lives, where disease claimed the lives of many, and where, again, infant mortality was high and life expectancy low. In a situation where the old pagan gods offered no comfort beyond this life, Christianity emerged with news of a God who had become human and had risen from the dead, and who now offered the same prospect of resurrection to believers. Not only that, but that this resurrection-life-to-come could begin to be experienced in the here and now. This is part of the explanation of the growth of the Christian church over these early centuries. Christianity offered hope – in the midst of harsh, difficult lives, there was hope – hope that things could be better within the new community of faith, sharing and love, hope for beyond the grave and hope for the world to be transformed.

One of the songs that gives expression to this hope is Ain’t No Grave Can Hold My Body Down, originally written and recorded by “Brother” Claude Ely, who was a singer-songwriter and Pentecostal holiness preacher, born in 1922. The song, strictly speaking, isn’t a blues song, but to my mind, it fits right in with the gospel blues we see from Blind Willie Johnson right up until the present.

Ain’t No Grave has been recorded by Odetta, recently by Charlie Parr and Crooked Still (featuring in the vampire TV series True Blood) and, of course, famously by Johnny Cash on his American VI album, released not long after he died. The album is a record of Cash’s faith during the last months of his life.

Claude Ely’s original version of the song is bright and jaunty, whereas Cash’s is sombre, sung by a man who knows he’s approaching the moment of truth – and yet it still manages to capture the essence of defiant hope that infuses the song.

Rick Rubin, who produced the album recollects a conversation in May 2003 with Johnny Cash soon after his wife June had died:

I’d never heard him so distraught. And he said, ‘You know, I’ve been through tremendous pain in my life, and I’ve never felt anything like this.’…

…He sounded so weak, so beaten, and I’d never really heard him like that before. I’m not sure where the question came from, but I said, ‘Do you feel like somewhere you can find faith?’ And when he heard that word, a switch went off in his head, and he answered in a strong voice, ‘My faith is UNSHAKABLE.’ And the conversation changed after that. So he had tremendous faith, he didn’t really have fear and he already was dealing with pain; I think he had acceptance. When he knew he was going to die, he was calm and matter of fact about it, and…that was it.”

Johnny Cash died in September of that year, sustained by the faith expressed in Ely’s song:

There ain’t no grave can hold my body down.
There ain’t no grave can hold my body down.

When I hear that trumpet sound
I’m gonna rise right outta the ground
Ain’t no grave that can hold my body down.

Well look way down the river and what do you think I see?
I see a band of angels and they’re coming after me.

There ain’t no grave that can hold my body down.
There ain’t no grave can hold my body down.

Cash’s voice is that of an old man, and yet is clear and convincing over the sparse instrumentation. The recording is both sobering and powerful.

The CD was released in May 2004, three days before what would have been Cash’s 78th birthday. A video to accompany the song was created with the help of professional and amateur artists, and fans of Johnny Cash. Within four months a quarter of a million people had contributed illustrations:

In some ways, the video attests to the enduring power of art and the fact that Johnny Cash lives on through the legacy of music he has left. That wasn’t what the song meant to Cash, however. An integral part of Cash’s Christian faith was the hope of resurrection. This has been the case since the very earliest days of Christianity. Within twenty years or so of the first Easter, Paul the apostle told the Jesus-followers in Corinth – “if the Messiah has not been resurrected, then your faith is useless.” Paul didn’t think there was much point in following someone who had simply brought a new philosophy to the world – such people were ten a penny in Paul’s day – one more dead philosopher or would-be Messiah was neither here nor there. The point was, though, Paul, along with a load of people he actually knew, had seen the risen Jesus – and he goes on to explain that the Messiah’s resurrection was the “firstfruits” – the first and the guarantee – for believers who “fall asleep,” in other words who die. The Messiah’s death and resurrection brought a “new creation” which Christians could share in – the new life of the Messiah infusing Jesus followers right now and then raising them to life at the last. This is the Christian hope, this was the essence of Cash’s faith, this is what Ely’s song expresses.

Finally, here’s a terrific updated version of Ely’s song, written by Luther Dickinson after the death of his father – Ain’t No Grave.

When that day comes, when death comes my way
I would hope to be as brave
As he was on judgement day.

Fighting the devil: What you selling, You know I ain’t buying!

Joe Louis Walker in his song Soldier for Jesus on his ablum Hellfire continues a biues tradition of fighting with the devil.

The devil makes an appearance relatively frequently in the blues. Tommy Johnson famously reported that he’d sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for guitar-playing chops. The same myth, of course, was ascribed to Robert Johnson. One of Johnson’s songs features the devil as a major character. In Me and the Devil Blues, Johnson answers the devil’s knock on his door and goes off with him – “me and the devil, ooh, was walking side by side”. The result of this walk with the devil was – “I’m going to beat my woman until I get satisfied”. It’s an appalling lyric, but clearly Johnson knows that such action belongs to the darker side of life, exemplified by his walking companion.

The first appearance of the devil seems to have been in Clara Smith’s 1924 song, Done Sold My Soul to the Devil. Not long after we have Charlie Patton’s Devil Sent the Rain, where he says in a song about berievement, “Good Lord sent the sunshine, devil he sent the rain”. A straightforward idea here about the source of good and evil.

In 1927, Sam Collins recorded Devil in the Lion’s Den – “yon’ comes the devil, we gonna set this town on fire”. The song is about the unfaithful, ramblin’ gambler and it seems clear to Collins that, although he’s boasting in such behaviour, it nevertheless is to be associated with the devil.

Skip James

In Skip James’ famous Devil Got My Woman, he moans about losing his woman and claims it was the devil who stole her away from him. He feels so bad about this state of affairs that now he’d rather actually be the devil than “that woman’s man”. James is not the only one to implicate the devil in a failed relationship – Piedmont bluesman Brownie McGhee sings about a lover who wants to poison him, shoot him and hit him with a blackjack. The song is called  Dealing with the Devil.

What’s going on here in these early blues songs? There’s clearly something of seeking a certain noteriety by some of these artists, mixing a reputation for rambin’ and drinking and womanizing with talk about the devil. But beyond that, in a genre that focuses on life’s injustices, hardships and disappointments, is the recognition that there exists in the world good and evil, and that human beings at times are at the mercy of forces greater than themselves, be they inner impulses and addictions, unjust structures in society or ill-treatment by others.

Moving on a few decades, Rev. Gary Davis gives us I Heard the Angels Singing, where the singer goes down to the valley to pray to get to the place where the angels are singing. On the way he meets the devil who tries to prevent him from praying. In the end however, the “Holy Ghost” gives him the power to resist and he gets to hear the angels singing. Eric Bibb has recently done a terrific version of this song.

Bang up to date we have Joe Louis Walker in his recent release, Hellfire – terrific album, by the way – with Soldier for Jesus, which takes a similar theme where the singer is opposed by the devil in his attempt to be a follower of Jesus. Walker’s fight as a soldier for Jesus is against the devil. He recognises this is a fight “all the time” and alludes to the temptations of Jesus where the devil offered him all the kingdoms of the world if he would fall down and worship him – “And I was staring him eye to eye, He said, “I’ll give you anything”. Like Jesus, Walker tells the devil “I say what you selling, You know I ain’t buying”. Victory in the battle, according to Walker, comes by falling “down on my knees to pray, I have my Bible in both hands”. Result? – “you know the devil done took off and ran”.

The problem of evil in the world, whether we want to personify it as the “devil” or not, is obvious to us all. It was obvious too, to the various writers of the Biblical literature, where we see God’s good creation corrupted and human beings held culpable for the evil which becomes part of the world. The New Testament, essentially, tells the story of how God finally deals with the problem of evil in his world through  the death and resurrection of Jesus. Although many Christians recently have become very focused on certain theories of atonement, the idea that seems to have been most important to early Christians was that of Christus Victor – Jesus as the one who brings victory over evil. In Jesus’ death and resurrection, God was dealing once and for all with the problem of evil in God’s world. The odd thing here for a world used to the power of violence and sheer brutal force is that this victory was won by suffering, humility and love. It was this that God vindicated, by raising Jesus from the dead.

The call for Jesus followers is to seek to implement this victory of God over evil in the same way – by suffering love. In the end, it is this that has more power than any tyrant or totalizing empire. And it is this power that in the end will see God finally put the world to rights and deal finally with the problem of evil.

Rev Gary David – heard the angels singin’

In the meantime, we all face the devil day after day – whether it’s in the injustices we suffer or see around us, or in our our personal struggles with doing the right thing or with our own desires and addictions. The good news is that it’s possible to be personally free – to hear the angels singing, as Rev. Gary Davis put it – through God’s power. Paul in his letter to the Romans in chapter 6 gives us a inspiring vision of what’s possible for us. But it’s also possible to see real change in God’s world here and now – through the power of forgiveness and love. And once we orientate our lives around forgiveness and love, we’ll find, as Joe Walker says, “you know the devil done took off and ran”.

Joe Louis Walker with “Soldier for Jesus”