Artist: David Bromberg
Hometown: Wilmington, DE
Song: "Walkin' Blues"
Album: The Blues, the Whole Blues, and Nothing But the Blues
Release Date: October 14
Label: Red House Records
In Their Words: "I wish I had been able to do this album years ago. We got rhythmic grooves that make you move. I hope people listen to it loud.” — David Bromberg
Photo credit: Doris Joosten
Artist: Bette Stuy
Hometown: Brooklyn, NY
Song: "Caveman Blues"
Album: Caveman Blues (Single)
In Their Words: "More than once, I have been in a serious relationship and have had my heart broken. Somehow, after a good cry, I always feel better. I pick my heart off the floor, brush it off, and try to love again. I guess my songs are an open confession of the blues." — Bette Stuy
Photo credit: Shervin Lainez
Artist: Cyril Neville
Hometown: New Orleans, LA
Latest Album: The Royal Gospel (with Royal Southern Brotherhood)
Personal Nicknames: The Uptown Ruler
What was the first record you ever bought with your own money?
"The One Who Really Loves You" by Mary Wells on Motown
If you were a car, what car would you be?
A souped-up low rider black 1948 Olds with tinted windows, red leather interior, and white wall tires with blinking lights on the running boards!
If your life were a movie, which songs would be on the soundtrack?
Every song Allen Toussaint ever wrote, sang, played, or produced, and the Atlantic, Stax, Philly Soul Sound, Blue Note, Chess Records, and Louis Armstrong's entire catalogs!
What kind of hat do you wear?
Tight
What's your favorite word?
LOVE!!!
If you were a liquor, what would you be?
Mint Julep
Fate or free will?
Both
Cake or pie?
Both
Sunrise or sunset?
Both
Artist: Robert Rex Waller, Jr.
Hometown: Rochester, MN
Latest Album: Fancy Free
Personal Nicknames: Rob. Rex. Bobby. Waldebeast. Professor. Dad.
What was the first record you ever bought with your own money?
Night Ranger, Midnight Madness
How many unread emails or texts currently fill your inbox?
13. I always keep 13 unread at all times. I also always leave one dirty dish in the sink when doing dishes. Superstitious, I guess.
If your life were a movie, which songs would be on the soundtrack?
“She Belongs to Me” — Bob Dylan, “Waterloo Sunset” — The Kinks, “Road to Gila Bend” — Los Lobos, “Black Rose” — Waylon Jennings, “Volver Volver” — Vicente Hernandez, “Zamboni” — Gear Daddies.
What brand of jeans do you wear?
Wrangler
What’s your favorite word?
Petrichor — the pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a long spell of dry weather. Learned that word from Paul Marshall.
If you were a liquor, what would you be?
Probably Scotch, but lately tequila.
Fate or free will?
Fate. Free will is meaningless, useless, and non-existent.
Chocolate or vanilla?
Easy, chocolate. Dark chocolate and lots of it in any form: bar, sauce, ice cream, cake, etc.
Blues or bluegrass?
Tough one. Blues or Bluegrass. Hmmm. The Hawks used to play a game in the van called Bluegrass Marathon. We’d put the XM bluegrass station on and see how long we could last. We’d go hours before somebody lost it. But those miles, those hours added up. So I guess I’m going to say blues.
Listen carefully to the soundtrack playing in Del Campo — a South American-inspired steakhouse in Washington, D.C.’s Penn Quarter that Esquire named one of the best new restaurants of 2013 — and you’ll hear a Pearl Jam song every once in a while. That’s because they’ve been chef/owner Victor Albisu’s favorite band since he first heard their debut, Ten, in high school. He related to the Seattle quintet instantly. “Being a teenager is when everything is either the greatest or the worst,” he says. “It’s the time you feel the most. Pearl Jam, as a band, reflected those extremes. I also liked that they didn’t sound like anyone else. There was a little blues underneath their Seattle sound, along with the baritone of Eddie Vedder’s voice.”
It wasn’t until the Vs. tour on April 8, 1994 that Albisu had a chance to see the band live at the Patriot Center at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. It turned out to be a momentous evening beyond what he could have possibly imagined. As he was making his way to the venue, he began hearing a shocking rumor: Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain had been found dead of an apparent suicide. It seemed too impossible to be true, but when the Seattle fivesome took the stage, it was confirmed. “Eddie Vedder was crying through the whole show and was clearly affected by it,” Albisu says. “It was rough, but it firmed up this bond I had with Pearl Jam.”
Since that intense inaugural experience, the award-winning chef, who has cooked for Michelle Obama on multiple occasions, has seen the band 15 times. “You know you’re going to get everything they’ve got for as long as they’ve got when you see them live,” he says. “They give back to their fans.”
To take a break from helming the kitchen at Del Campo or one of his Taco Bamba taquerias in nearby Virginia — where you’ll also hear plenty of Pearl Jam playing — Albisu has gone to shows in D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, Chicago, and Amsterdam — and he has a t-shirt from every one. In the Dutch city, he had the chance to meet bassist Jeff Ament at the Ziggo Dome in 2014. “It was a great experience for me,” he says. “I just talked to him. I didn’t ask him to sign anything; I’m not that guy.”
The best gig he may have seen was this past April at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center, when the band opened by playing Ten in its entirety to mark their 10th consecutive sold out concert at the venue. “It was the unicorn of shows,” says Albisu.
He was thinking about his favorite shows when he created this playlist. “It’s my ideal set list,” says the chef, who hopes to see the band when they play gigs in Chicago and Boston this August. “They do 32-33 song concerts, so this is in the realm of possibility. When I go to a Pearl Jam show, it’s a profound thing for me. This may be overstating it, but it’s like going to church.”
Photo credit: Rey Lopez
We've teamed up with the good people at Pickathon to present a season's worth of archival — and incredible — videos from the Pacific Northwest festival's Lucky Barn Series. Tune in every fourth Tuesday of the month to catch a new clip.
The third episode from the Spring season of the Lucky Barn Series features blues man Little Freddie King rumbling and rocking through "Tough Frog to Swallow." After pulling off a leg split that would make Chuck Berry proud, King talks about the first records he ever bought: Lightnin' Hopkins, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, and Albert King. Of emulating Hopkins, King says, "I couldn't play just like him, but I loved his style … I got pretty close to him, but I couldn't reach him."
Pickathon comes back to the Pendarvis Farm in Happy Valley, Oregon, from August 5-7, 2016. Recent additions to the festival lineup include Mac DeMarco, King Sunny Ade, Thao & the Get Down Stay Down, Joseph, Ry X, Cory Henry, Promised Land Sound, Town Mountain, Myke Bogan, Blossom, Caleb Klauder & Reeb Willms, Open Mike Eagle, and Chanti Darling. Tickets and the full lineup are available now.
Click here for more, and stay tuned for another wonderful season of Lucky Barn videos.
Photo credit: Todd Cooper
In July, 1954 — the same month that Elvis Presley unleashed his first two world-changing singles — a Scottish-born singer and trad-jazz musician named Lonnie Donegan released a cover of “Rock Island Line” with backing on washboard and bass. Inspired by the African-American singer Lead Belly, Donegan explains the rules of the rails in his spoken-word intro and includes the shouts and cries of the engineers. Though he strums his guitar in a persistent rhythm to evoke the chug and drive of a freight train, the song picks up speed along the way, finally achieving a breakneck momentum as Donegan’s high-pitched vocals grow wilder. It’s a remarkable performance, studious to the point of mimicry, yet reckless like a runaway train.
It took two years, but the single finally caught on and started climbing the British pop charts in 1956. Donegan followed it up with a full-length album, An Englishman Sings American Folk Songs, which became a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic. In its wake, a series of like-minded folk acts starting popping up all over Britain: young men and women well-schooled in American folk music yet too irreverent and too wiley to be classified as traditional. Emphasizing ingenuity and spontaneity, they played rhythm guitar almost exclusively, along with whatever instruments happened to be on hand: usually kazoos, banjos, washboards, tea cabinet bass, and assorted homemade noisemakers. This was closer in spirit, if not in sound, to the rock 'n' roll coming out of the American South.
Thus was born skiffle, a short-lived scene with a lasting influence.
The word itself has a long history that reveals the concerns of its mid-century practitioners. Skiffle originated in the 1920s as a word to describe wild, impromptu jazz that mixed blues, ragtime, and folk. When Donegan and a few other musicians began playing sets of folk tunes during their trad-jazz shows, he called them “skiffle breaks,” borrowing the term from the semi-popular ‘30s jazz act the Dan Burley Skiffle Group. Eventually, the break would become the entire show, with Donegan and his small outfit often improvising their covers.
After the success of “Rock Island Line,” skiffle groups came out of the woodwork, with trad-jazz musicians migrating to this more lucrative market and kids picking up guitars for the first time. The Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group enjoyed a hit with a cover of Elizabeth Cotton’s “Freight Train” featuring Nancy Whiskey on vocals. A London outfit called the Vipers Skiffle Group — later known as simply the Vipers — rivaled Donegan as the trend’s guiding light, thanks to a string of smash singles like “Cumberland Gap” and “Don’t You Rock Me, Daddy-O” (which was produced by George Martin, later known as the Fifth Beatle). America even produced its own skiffle star, Johnny Duncan, who was born in Oliver Springs, Tennessee, but found fame in the clubs and charts of England with his 1957 hit “Last Train to San Fernando.”
As Rob Young writes in his indispensible 2010 guide to British folk music, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, “Skiffle’s accelerated swing rhythms and domestic equipment — kazoos, harmonicas, comb and paper — placed music-making in the hands of the amateur, as well as opening up a conduit for the dust-bowl and rust-belt blues and folk poetry of Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly to be siphoned into British ears.”
Like the trad-jazz scene and like the blues revival of the following decade, skiffle was a result of Britain’s obsession with American traditional music. During the post-war years, even as many musicians strove to define and preserve a specifically English folk tradition in pubs and social clubs, much of the country looked west for musical inspiration, finding it in the music made by poor Americans often in rural settings. Granted, those folk songs could be traced back to European sources, brought over by immigrants generations before and gradually mutated over the years, but by the middle of the 20th century, the music sounded distinctly American.
What distinguishes skiffle from imported jazz or blues is its emphasis on labor and class. Most of the main skiffle hits were about workers’ laments: engineers and linemen, sharecroppers and cotton pickers, migrants and chain gang prisoners. Weirdly, skiffle was viewed as largely apolitical at the time, a harmless fascination with another country’s past. However, the subject matter of these songs reinforces the populism that lies at the heart of all folk music, which likely made it more appealing to everyday Brits, especially teenagers.
As Alan Lomax noted at the time, “At first, it seemed very strange to me to hear these songs, which I had recorded from convicts in the prisons of the South, coming out of the mouths of young men who had suffered, comparatively speaking, so little. But I soon realized that these young people felt themselves to be in a prison — composed of class-and-caste lines, the shrinking British empire, the dull job, the lack of money … things like these. They were shouting at the prison walls, like so many Joshuas at the walls of Jericho.”
Skiffle left a mark on an entire generation of men and women who picked up guitars and created some of the best music of the 1960s. The list of musicians who started out in skiffle is long and impressive: Jimmy Page, David Gilmour, Ritchie Blackmore, Pete Townshend … even Cliff Richard. Van Morrison was not only a huge fan of the genre, but also recorded an album with Lonnie Donegan and Chris Barber in the late 1990s. And one obscure skiffle group from Liverpool eventually changed its name from the Quarrymen to the Beatles.
The craze lasted barely five years, replaced by the screams and shouts of American rock 'n' roll, which offered similar freedoms and pleasure. Skiffle remains a brief chapter in pop history, but its lasting influence belies its short life. Although it remains obscure today — unknown by pop fans and often overlooked by folkies — the genre reinforced the idea that popular music is often best left to the amateur, the unschooled, the self-taught: those artists who innovate intuitively, without anyone telling them what they can’t do.
Dewi Peter's Skiffle Group outside Kayser Bondor, Pentrebach C.1957. Photograph courtesy of Clive Morgan.
Simply put, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes is a living legend. As the last of the Bentonia bluesmen taught by Henry Stuckey, he is carrying the torch for this much-beloved rural blues tradition. Holmes was born in 1947, and his parents owned and operated the legendary Blue Front Café. The oldest still-operating juke joint, it is considered the birthplace of Bentonia Blues. Skip James and Jack Owens popularized these dark acoustic blues. Holmes took over the Blue Front Café from his parents in 1970 and has been busy spreading the music ever since. He’s pushing 69 years old and showing no signs of slowing down. On June 17, he is releasing his latest album, It Is What It Is.
Congratulations on your upcoming release, It Is What It Is. I want to ask specifically about the first song, “Buddy Brown.” It has a much harder and distorted sound than you are usually associated with. What brought about this change and did recording at your Blue Front Café affect how you approached these recordings and the overall sound?
Recording at the Blue Front Café was normal to me. I’ve been around the Blue Front Café my whole life. My parents started it when I was only 1, but I’ve been skipper of the ship for the last 46 years. It’s where I learned to play and where the Bentonia Blues grew. I’ve recorded here before. As far as that particular song, I wanted to play a song to show what I had learned from Tommy West. He lived in Bentonia, but he played hill country blues. So I played a little hill country blues in the Bentonia style.
Your vocals sound amazing on these tracks. How do you keep it in such good shape?
I don’t know. It just comes natural, I guess. I would say I get my singing from my mama. She used to sing gospel songs when she was cooking and things.
Seeing as you and your siblings spent much of your childhood at the Blue Front Café, did it operate as a juke joint from the beginning or did the live music come along later? Have the blues always been a part of your life?
I’ve been around the blues all my life. I couldn’t necessarily go into the Blue Front when I was a kid, but I was around it for as far back as I can remember. Now, historians who keep track of these things say that the Blue Front Café is the oldest surviving juke joint in the state of Mississippi. It’s never been closed. Back in the day, there were also juke houses. Jack Owens had a juke house for a long time. I believe Skip James had one for a short time. But the Blue Front Café has been a juke joint from the start.
Let’s go back to the beginning, when did you start playing music?
The first guitar I picked up belonged to Henry Stuckey. It was around 1957, but I didn’t play too much then. I didn’t start playing in earnest until the early 1970s.
I’ve read that you were the last person taught by Henry Stuckey. He has taken on a mythical status over the years. My understanding is that he served in the military and learned the open E-minor tuning from Bahamian solders. When he came back to the States, he was almost like Johnny Appleseed, but he was spreading this new guitar technique and sound instead of seeds and trees. What was your relationship like with Stuckey? Was it a formal tutelage?
I didn’t have any formal lessons from Henry Stuckey. He lived in the original Blue Front Café after my parents moved it into town in the early 1950s. He would sit on the back porch and play guitar, and I would play and carry on in the yard, when I wasn’t working. I would sit and listen to him play. That planted the seed in my mind and put that sound in my ear. Like I said, I picked up his guitar and messed around some playing.
I’ve read that you were friends with Jack Owens and Bud Spires. Did they have any advice or help out when you were starting? Was there anyone else that took you under their wing?
How much time do you have? Jack is the man! Jack, Bud, Cornelius Bright, Tommy West, Cleo Pullum, and others would come to the Blue Front Café to hang out and listen to each other play. I guess you could say that I sort of got drafted into it. Jack realized that there weren’t many younger players of the Bentonia blues and he wanted to keep it going. He understood the music better than anyone, but he couldn’t tell me to play an A or E or whatever. But he was determined for me to learn how to play.
We would sit there and he would tell me, “Watch my hands.” He would play and then want me to do what he just did. We’d spend many days at the Blue Front Café doing just that — watching his hands. Watching Bud and Jack play also helped me learn to play the harp. I can’t play it like Bud could, because no one could, but I play a little harp on my new record. The other guy who taught me to play was Tommy West. He was a hill country blues player and helped me learn how to use the low E as a bass string. He could play with the best of them.
Are there any younger acts that you enjoy?
Other than a handful of guys like Bobby Rush, Leo “Bud” Welch, Gip Gipson, Little Freddie King, Big George Brock, and a few others, most everyone else is younger! I like a lot of blues. I enjoy blues musicians who genuinely love the music. I like to invite people to play at the Bentonia Blues Festival. This year, from June 13 through June 17, we’ll have music at the Blue Front Café every evening. Then, on Saturday, June 18, we have the main day of the festival out at my farm just north of Bentonia. It’s an all-day event with real country blues from Bill Abel and Cadillac John Noland, Randy Cohen, McKinney Williams, Lightnin' Malcolm, Leo, Roosevelt Roberts, Wes Lee, David Raye, and the Blues Doctors. We also got Mike Munson and Dave Hundreiser from Minnesota and Tito Deler from New York. It’s going to be a great festival. These guys can play.
Are you working directly with any younger artists?
I’m not rushing him, but I’ve been teaching my grandson, EJ Fox, how to play in the Bentonia style. I’ve shown lots of people a few things here and there over the years. Chris Bradshaw from Bentonia is good. Jack taught my nephew, Larry Allen, a few things, but hasn’t played in years. He’s been coming by the Blue Front Café to play, and I’ve been helping him remember what Jack had taught him.
Do you have any advice or words of wisdom for up and coming musicians?
Pertaining to old-school blues, for it to continue, someone needs to learn it. You don’t have to love it, but you need to appreciate the blues as a foundation. You can’t do much on the guitar without learning some blues licks. Now, you have to practice every day. And you need to develop your own signature sound so that way people will know it’s you when they hear it.
Photo credit: Lou Bopp
Artist: Willy Vlautin (of Richmond Fontaine)
Hometown: Portland, OR
Latest Album: You Can’t Go Back If There’s Nothing to Go Back To
Personal Nicknames: Hatchet
What was the first record you ever bought with your own money?
"Kids Are Alright" by the Who
How many unread emails or texts currently fill your inbox?
176
If your life were a movie, which songs would be on the soundtrack?
Ennio Morricone’s songs
What brand of jeans do you wear?
Levi's
What's your go-to karaoke tune?
"Big City" by Merle Haggard
If you were a liquor, what would you be?
I wish I would be Cententario tequila, but mostly I would be Old Crow.
Poehler or Schumer?
Poehler
Chocolate or vanilla?
Vanilla
Blues or bluegrass?
Blues
Artist: Matt Flinner
Hometown: Pueblo, CO
Latest Album: Traveling Roots
Personal Nicknames: For a while when I was growing up, my nickname was "Bob" (my dad's name). In England, where I am right now, it's "Simon" (from a Mike Myers character on Saturday Night Live). I call Ross Martin, our guitar player, "Pollock," and Eric Thorin, our bassist, "Francis Bacon" … for reasons that are maybe best left out of this article.
What was the first record you ever bought with your own money?
A 45 of Steve Martin's "King Tut" when I was about seven years old. I loved that record! I had nothing to do with the banjo or bluegrass at that point (and neither did that record), but when, years later, I played on Steve Martin's The Crow album, I thought it was sort of bringing things around full circle.
How many unread emails or texts currently fill your inbox?
3,792
If your life were a movie, which songs would be on the soundtrack?
I think this changes constantly, but the low D-string on a banjo played over and over again would be my underlying soundtrack. To me, it's sort of a cosmic note that brings well-being to myself and the world around me.
What brand of jeans do you wear?
Levi's
What's your go-to karaoke tune?
"The Chicken Dance"
If you were a liquor, what would you be?
Akvavit
Poehler or Schumer?
Schumer (You mean Chuck, right?)
Chocolate or vanilla?
Chocolate
Blues or bluegrass?
Bluegrass — especially bluesy bluegrass
Photos one and three by Mark Woodland and Mike McGrath, respectively, courtesy of the artist.
