Tag: blues

LISTEN: Tony Joe White, “Big Boss Man”

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Artist: Tony Joe White
Hometown: Oak Grove, Louisiana (now in Nashville)
Song: “Big Boss Man” (written by bluesman Jimmy Reed)
Album: Bad Mouthin’
Release Date: Sept. 28 2018
Label: Yep Roc

In Their Words: “At the time I was just playing electric guitar and singing. When I heard Jimmy Reed and ‘Big Boss Man,’ I went straight to the music store and bought a harmonica with a holder. I thought I bought the wrong key, but come to find out, all the blues players pull on the harmonica instead of blowing on it so it was alright.” — Tony Joe White

Photo credit: Joshua Black Wilkins

The War and Treaty Bring Their Love to ‘Healing Tide’

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More often than not, it seems, the telling of the story of the War and Treaty begins with the war, specifically a piano in the basement of one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. It is a tantalizing tale, and we’ll get to that.

But this time, let’s start with the Treaty: the moment Michael Trotter Jr. and Tanya Blount first met and two formidable talents took hold in life and in music.

“We have probably two different accounts,” Michael says by phone from Nashville, Tanya audible in the background, laughing as she agrees with the prediction.

Spoiler alert: There is to be much laughter in the ensuing chat, from giggles to hearty peals, and much weighing in from whoever doesn’t have hold of the receiver. And some tears and choking up too. It’s a real delight, everything up-front and on the table, just as anyone who has seen them perform would expect, and every bit of it captured in their new debut album, Healing Tide, a wonder of gospel-soul-country-rock-folk carried on their from-the-heart vocals, both of them capable of gale-force belting and whispered-breeze tenderness, sometimes, somehow, both at once.

It’s a love story through and through, evidenced in song titles along: “Love Like There’s No Tomorrow” (the album’s foot-stomping gospel invocation), “Are You Ready to Love Me?,” (swampy Southern soul), “Here Is Where the Loving Is” (fiddles and guitars and Emmylou Harris!) among them. And a belief that love is contagious, that it can repair the world — the boisterous title song (a bit of Ike and Tina and a lot of Delaney & Bonnie, perhaps), the steamed-windows twinkle of “Jeep Cherokee Laredo.” And in “One and the Same” they have given us unity anthem for the ages. All of the ages. And in album-closing “Little New Bern,” Michael wrote a vivid ode to Tanya’s large, loving family and the former plantation land where it began and at which all the cousins still gather with her grandparents (73 years of marriage!) every summer.

But back to that meeting: “I remember going to Laurel Lakes Park for an event, the Love Festival, Aug. 28, 2010,” he says of a day of music in Laurel, Maryland, near where each lived at the time, at which they were both scheduled to perform. “I was led under this awning and I saw this most beautiful woman I ever saw in my life.”

A “wow” is heard in the background, as if she’s never heard this before.

“And she did what any beautiful woman would have done with a slouch like me. She ignored me,” he says. “We introduced ourselves and she thought nothing of me. I thought everything of her. So I got on stage and performed, and then after I saw this woman running across the field in heels toward the stage, and it was her. She just wanted to know about my songwriting. The rest is history.”

Tanya grabs the phone: “He’s kinda telling the truth,” she allows. “Mine is the part where he says I ignored him. I was out there with some friends and a young lady working with me at the festival kind of whisked me away and said, ‘I want you to meet Michael.’ Which kind of came as he said it. It may come off as I was ignoring him. But I wasn’t. I was trying to do two things at once.”

As to her reaction to his songs, well, on that she agrees wholeheartedly.

“Oh my goodness! I lost my mind!” she says. “After he finished performing I ran over and bought six of the CDs he had and was a crazy person handing them out to people — ‘This is the best thing I’ve heard!’ He was amazing.”

And then?

“We exchanged numbers — and he would have a different account here,” Tanya says. “He lost my number! Threw it in the trash can. So I proceeded to call him and ask him if he could write songs for my brother and I. We were working on a project. I invited him over to the house. He wrote 10 songs in about two hours. He had songs ready, came over and sang them to me and we became friends, inseparable friends. And after I had a birthday party, that was September of 2010, and from there, the next day, we never separated. He moved into my house the next day.”

Michael’s take?

“You know? That’s accurate.”

Okay, then. Now let’s skip ahead to March this year, when the couple, having made their home in Albion, Michigan, found themselves in Nashville, being produced by Buddy Miller at his house — “We wanted to give Buddy Miller a chance to be discovered,” Michael says, barely containing silly giggles. “Just wanted to help him out” — and surrounded by such stellar musicians as drummer Brady Blade, fiddler Sam Bush, pedal steel and banjo player Russ Pahl and multi-instrumentalist Jim Hoke, realizing the love-filled vision they’d been honing tirelessly in the intervening years.

Oh, and there’s Emmylou Harris climbing the porch stairs, not only to add her voice to “Here Is Where the Loving Is At,” but to deliver a batch of birthday brownies to Michael one day.

“Another lady who might need to be discovered,” Michael says, not succeeding at holding back the giggles, before adding, “Everyone knows her for her singing, but people don’t know she makes the BEST BROWNIES EVER.”

The sound is a realization of an array of influences and passions, some shared ones including Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, the gospel icons the Gaither Singers and James Cleveland. A big influence when they started performing together, Michael says, was the Civil Wars — he sheepishly notes running into that act’s John Paul White and, tongue-tied, blurting out that his act was called the Civil Wars. But what the War and Treaty draw on together is distinctly their musical DNA.

“We really have different backgrounds,” Tanya says. “My mom was from Panama. I grew up listening to Calypso and opera. My dad was from New Bern, North Carolina, and we also listened to Christian music, gospel, but also secular music — Whitney Houston. A plethora of sounds growing up. My dad loved western, so some country songs. We would have a guitar player in church, or sometimes just foot-stomping and clapping. ‘Love Like There’s No Tomorrow’ comes from that. Michael comes from a Seventh Day Adventist background and grew up listening to incredible harmonies and some of his writing comes out of that. His uncle Zilbert Trotter plays organ like no one I ever heard before. We took all that and married it together and it came together with the help of Buddy Miller as a beautiful piece of art.”

Though they’d made a well-received EP, Down to the River, spawning some viral videos to match the word-of-mouth from their dynamic concert performances, this was a whole other world for them, with new expectations, intimidating ones.

“When you get those musicians in the room, they know that no matter what accolades they have, they say, ‘Lead us,’” Michael says. “I had to learn to lead. Buddy Miller is not going to let you escape that responsibility. You come in and have a vision, he’s going to hold you to it. He’s a sweet man, but he has a way to make sure you stay authentic. He’s not going to do take 17, take 18. We did two takes of everything. We had it in the first one. Did the second one because Buddy felt guilty that we had it in the first one.”

He continues, “They all wanted to see where I wanted to go — show us what you’ve got. The intimidation factor was sky high. I don’t consider myself of the caliber of those giants, but then you have to believe you belong there. I remember playing my minor 7ths and diminished chords and this and that and they were laughing, had to explain to me what I was doing. Russ Pahl said, ‘How does it feel to have millions of dollars of education, and never gone to school a day in your life?’ I said, ‘Feels pretty good, Russ.’ He popped me on the head with a wad of paper and walked away.”

The closest he had ever gotten to a music education was under the most unusual circumstances, which brings us back to Saddam’s piano. Michael, having enlisted in the Army in 2003, was sent to Iraq, scared and unprepared. He found himself in a platoon stationed in one of Hussein’s abandoned palaces. A captain heard him sing, heard the inspirational power of his voice and took him to the basement where there was a piano and told him to go at it, learn to play, make music. Not long after, the captain was killed and Michael was asked to sing at his service, the first time he ever sang a song he wrote in public.

But as he talks here, that wasn’t the part of the Iraq story he wanted to tell.

“No one knows this,” he confides. “This is special. I was singing in Baghdad once, and it was probably two in the morning, singing to the troops. And they were singing and clapping with me. And one of the soldiers on guard duty said, ‘You all gotta come see this!’ And when I looked over the gate, the Iraqis with their tea were sitting down at the gate, listening to me sing. And they were clapping and patting their thighs with me. That’s the power of music, the power of songwriting. The war stopped for at least 30 minutes.”

That’s the kind of thing he remembers as his and Tanya’s life accelerates, as success builds and the demands grow — not least being having to spend more time away from their child.

“I’ve cried on the road and broken down,” Michael says. “We travel with our son, but time has now come where we have to leave him with someone for two or three weeks at a time, all for the call of the mission and honoring our life.”

That mission. That call.

“I’m singing with my wife, songs I wrote for us, and we’re on the road and helping bridge humanity in our way. Toughest thing we have to deal with is leaving our son. But no one’s calling us derogatory words.”

He cites a couple of rough epithets that in past have been hurled at many from various directions.

“No one is doing that. There are no signs that you have to drink from the black water fountain. That’s not happening,” he says. “We are blessed that we have not faced it that way. We have a multi-cultural band that reminds folks of what we have overcome. I’m not here to promote the black race or white race, but am genuinely invested in unifying the human race. I do believe there ain’t no better thing in life. I’m almost coming to tears just thinking about if Dr. King’s dream can be a reality daily. We make sure at every concert that everyone hugs each other and tells each other they matter, black or white, foreign or domestic. We are all human beings.”

As the song says, with equal grace and power, we are all “One and the Same.”

Tanya puts it simply and profoundly: “This project is an act of love.”

Photo credit: David McClister

Coming Around: A Conversation with Andrew Duhon

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Andrew Duhon took a winding road to get to False River, his first album in five years. The New Orleans musician endured a crushing breakup that prompted the new suite of songs, then came up dry while looking for the right producer. Finally, the tide turned when he met Eric Masse, who ultimately helmed the sessions in his East Nashville studio, The Casino.

They both had a lot to live up to, as Duhon’s prior album, The Moorings, received a Grammy nomination for best engineered album. However, with touring band members Myles Week on bass and Max Zemanovic on drums, Duhon immersed himself in False River. With Masse’s guidance, the dynamics of Duhon’s voice are never drowned out. Instead, on thoughtful ballads and exuberant songs alike, his compelling baritone effortlessly converges with the band. He caught up with the Bluegrass Situation during a coffee break in Nashville.

I’m curious about the studio vibe for this record. How would you describe The Casino to somebody who’s never been in there?

Well, it is a garage recording studio, but of the finest standards. They did a good job to build it out and get some good sound in there. But as [Eric Masse] said, and I appreciated on our first phone call, he said, “You know, I call it The Casino because I gamble with artists’ careers.” He laughed immediately and I laughed. But I appreciated that because in our first phone call he made it very clear that he understood the gravity of what he was taking from me to create.

I think I could have gone much safer routes to put these songs down in their immortal form, but he helped us make a much bolder record and take some chances that I’m sure we wouldn’t have otherwise. On the first day of recording, he said, “We’re in Nashville right now and there’s 150 records being made today that are the singer-songwriter Nashville records. We can make one of those or we can make something else. We can make something different. We can try to make a cool record that’s never been made.” And there was no doubt that’s what we were there to do.

Well, that’s an interesting comment about the so-called Nashville songwriter record because that isn’t what you do at all. Have you ever lived here?

No.

No, so you wouldn’t even be that.

I did make my first record here. And you’re right, I think coming from New Orleans there’s more than osmosis from that place than from Nashville. But certainly I think I was first inspired by the stories in country songs. I would credit that as a reason why I’m trying to be a songwriter and not a poet. There’s something really special about the American songbook, so to speak.

What area of country music in particular are you thinking about?

Well, I remember that in my dad’s van, it was George Jones and Garth Brooks. Not everybody I was listening to was writing the songs, but there was an adherence to the story and they were really serving the song. So I appreciate that craft, for sure. … But I do enjoy, for the moment, only recording the songs I wrote myself. I’m open to the co-writing idea or recording other songs that just speak to you. But so far it’s been really a validating path to just figure out what I want to say.

Yeah. It seems to me that you figured it out, too.

No way, dude. I think I’m figuring out that I’m on the right path. You know, it still feels like I don’t see any rest stop up ahead or anything. It feels like, OK, if there’s two months, three months that go by where there’s not a new song to add to that path, then I start wondering what am I doing: “OK, wait, I’m out of balance, I need to go back to songwriting and stop putting on the business hat every day.”

I guess what I mean by that, it seems like you’re able to articulate after that breakup what was in your mind and that you were able to convey that on the record. Would you agree?

Oh, sure.

And I like “Comin’ Around” because it seems like you’re saying “Alright, I’m coming around to something better.” And then you explain where you’ve been, which I thought was an interesting way to structure that record. What was your frame of mind when you wrote that song?

Yeah, it has that little wordplay about the element of the spherical nature of the world, right? And this cute idea that if you walk in one direction you’ll end up back where you were, theoretically speaking. So to go away from something, but to be coming around in that physical sense, spherical sense, but also in a figurative sense like, “I didn’t like tomatoes as a kid, but I’m comin’ around.”

I love the idea that maybe coming around on that heartbreak means I’m coming around to that person – or I’m coming around to the idea that I’m just not going to be with that person. I like that there wasn’t really an answer in that song necessarily, but moving forward, what’s going to be the answer? At the time when I wrote that song, that’s what I needed. I needed to know that the only way back to her way straight ahead. I needed to go far enough away to really get an answer.

I wanted to ask you about melody. I think a lot of songwriters get asked about their lyrics so much but how much time do you spend on melody, making the songs stand apart?

I think I wander blindly through the dark when it comes to melody. I don’t think it’s innate to me, what a catchy melody is at all. I think I probably struggle to write something catchy. I will try things and especially on the road, I’ll try a lot of different interpretations. It was great for those years on the road with this band because they were always listening and I can hear them grunt with pleasure sometimes if I tried something they liked. “OK, grab that one and put that one in my pocket.”

And I think a lot of melodies were honed that way specifically, just improvising a new rendition of the same song and coming up with a new idea. … But then again, you know, the track is just another rendition that you sang. The producer picked his favorite version and I’ll sing it differently next time. I don’t always adhere to the same melody and I love the idea of writing a catchier melody, but it’s not my focus.

I think a lot of the music that I like has a sense of motion to it. That’s your life, basically, it seems like. Are you ever in one place for more than a couple months at a time?

No, that’s right. I love traveling songs myself, but not so obviously a traveling song, necessarily. But I think since getting out of college, it just started with me sleeping in my car and getting shitty shows that paid just enough to get gas and a meal and go to the next spot. But I thought that was going to introduce me to some new place that I hadn’t grown up in and I wouldn’t just be a product of my raising or the place that I grew up. I would find this new place.

And I learned two things since then. One, that I’m really lucky to be raised in New Orleans because that is a very special place. The other thing is, I think travel is more about changing everything around you while everything inside stays the same. So you really get a sense of “How do I react to all these different things?” You learn what’s in there, more than all these things that are changing, and you only get a snippet of.

It goes back to a line that I read in a homework assignment in English class in high school which was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Self Reliance. And the line was, “To believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men — that is genius.” And that was a new idea for me. To me it said, “Wait a minute, so if my quest in life is to go and seek out the goal, wherever it is, maybe it’s not out there. Maybe it’s in here. And that was a special moment. And I think it introduced me to my artistic will.

Yeah, well you have to have that to be an artist or a songwriter. I would think you have to believe you can say something in a way specific to you but also that someone else would enjoy.

Without a doubt, that is true. Without that theory, I’m wasting my time.

Photo credit: Hunter Holder

Sometimes It’s a Whisper: A Conversation With Liz Vice

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Despite never having desired a musical career, Liz Vice set about answering a higher calling with her 2015 debut album, There’s a Light. She spread a message of inclusivity and love, even while self-doubt, impostor syndrome, and a hellacious tour threatened to upend her very sense of self. Making it to her sophomore album, Save Me, therefore became an incredibly personal celebration—a heady reminder about how faith in something bigger than yourself can serve as a beacon in this messy world.

Across Save Me, she touches on personal topics (the illness that very nearly ended her life when she was younger, the crippling doubt that got in her way at the start of this journey) while looking outward to the community. On “Brick By Brick,” she reminds listeners about the central tenet, “Love thy neighbor,” as a rippling synth takes the brooding gospel track into a clarion call for kindness. No matter what listeners’ relationship with faith, religion, or belief might be, Vice’s message is as old as time – and more necessary than ever.

There’s this saying I’ve always appreciated: “Sometimes the wrong train gets you to the right station.” Here you set out to pursue film production, but life led you to music instead. How do you feel about your journey?

It’s always, “What the hell am I doing? How did I get here?” It’s only been four and a half years; I still wonder. I feel like this record is so different, it’s so much more me because it does involve my storytelling abilities, and working with somebody who’s also a great storyteller—Micah Bourne. I get to use aspects of film—storytelling—but instead of the camera, it’s with a melody. It’s still hard, but I think about, man, production’s really hard. You’re not getting paid much, you still get treated like crap, and I was typically the only brown person on set.

Which has its own complications.

Oh, one hundred percent.

Besides the opening cover song, the other tracks are all originals. What did your writing process look like this time?

I wrote with Micah Bourne, a spoken word artist, and Dana Halferty, who I met on set. I was listening to music, and I was like, “God, I’ve never written a song, and I’m terrified to do this thing that I feel like you’re calling me to do. Am I doing this out of a religious mindset?” Honestly, I don’t think Jesus would be very religious. We can’t earn our way into his good side, so am I doing this because I feel like he’s given me an opportunity to reach people and remind them that they’re loved? Or am I doing this because I feel a sense of religious duty?

Slowly, I feel like He’s been undoing this mindset of religious duty. The first time I ever heard this was when I was playing a blues festival—it was like my fifth show ever playing in front of an audience. This was the first time I got so nervous I cried. I sat on my couch and I felt God say, “I’m not asking you to save them; I’m just asking you to sing over them.” There have been so many shows where people say, “Oh my gosh, like I’m an atheist but I love your message. It’s something we can all relate to.”

You said you got more personal on this album.

“Baby Hold On,” I wrote that after one of the worst tours I’ve ever been on; I was like, “I’m done.” One of my drummers had to be sent back because his mom got sick out of nowhere, and then she ended up dying three months later. Then I fell down the stairs and broke my toe and had to drive three hours to sing in New Hampshire with my foot elevated on Vicodin.

It sounds like a testing ground, like “How much do you want this?”

I’m like, “I don’t want this!” This broken foot, and one of my drummers who I freakin’ adore, his mother passes away. This comes after our suitcases were stolen in San Francisco and then a month prior to that I got in a car accident—my friend’s car was totaled and I had a herniated disc. I’m just like, “God, I don’t want this. You have the wrong person. I told you I wasn’t strong enough, I told you that I didn’t want this bad enough” So having this real Moses moment. I listened to “Baby Hold On” and as soon as the “oohs” came in with the choir I started to cry. Sometimes I feel like it’s the words unsaid that hit me the most.

Even if you have a contested relationship with faith or you don’t believe in anything, there’s such a good message about kindness and community on Save Me.

Right, and I also think that we make God so small. He’s not logical, he’s not realistic. There are things I will never understand, and I have to let myself be OK with that. It’s not just me and God, me and the Bible, it’s me and people around me. … Everyone has a story, and it might not fit into this pretty package that we want it to fit in.

Even [Plato’s] Allegory of the Caves, I love that story. These three men are hanging from shackles and they’re living off the shadows of the world, and then one actually goes in the world to experience it, and he’s like, “Oh my gosh, so that shadow is this, and that shadow is this,” and the other prisoners beat the hell out of him. It’s like, how many times do we choose to live off of the shadows instead of the actual source?

Especially with social media, which might be the biggest metaphor for living off the shadows. What was a big turning point for you on this album, a way out of the shadows into the truth?

I want to be OK in my body. Once I can accept that I am a created being and there’s beauty in all that I am, even my deep voice that sounds like I smoke cigarettes every day and I don’t at all. Once I can love myself for who I am in a whole way, I really do believe, if you love yourself, you can love other people well.

Absolutely. I think that’s where it needs to start. In order to look outward, you need to start inward.

That’s one of the top commands—love God with all your soul and with all your might, and love your neighbor. If you want to love God, you have to love your neighbor. That is a sign you love God because He made them too. I’m not perfect at that, but what does it look like to start the conversation about what it actually means to love your neighbor?

How has your connection to God changed since moving from Portland, Oregon, to New York City?

I love living in New York City, and the reason why is because of something I didn’t necessarily get when I lived in Portland, like diversity.

Yeah, there’s that.

For the lack of nature, people try to tell me, “You can go to this park or that park,” and I’m like I literally lived at the bottom of an extinct volcano [in Portland]. I lived by the Gorge, where you drive 20 to 30 minutes east and you’re seeing waterfalls and canyons. I’ve lived here for a year and half, and already so much has changed since I moved here, so it really is like a constant recalibrating—like GPS—of how do I silence my mind, how do I connect with a spiritual being who doesn’t tend to work in a way that most would want to—with fireworks and earthquakes and raging fires? Sometimes it’s a whisper and you have to lean in more, but you have to position yourself in order to hear the whisper.

It’s got to be an interesting practice to explore. As you said, in the city you have this greater sense of humanity to remind you of something bigger.

No one looks at each other on the subway so it’s perfect for people-watching. I see every shade of people next to each other, and so many different languages, it really feels like heaven to me. Even though this place can be a hot mess, I just look at it and I think, “Man, God is in love with this city.” Even people who don’t even know Him! I love it here. It hurts so good.

Photo credit: Katrina Sorrentin

Steve Dawson, ‘Hale Road Revelation’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Solo acoustic guitar is classic and captivating. There’s a balance to be struck by the guitarist, a wisdom that informs a picker that to make instrumental acoustic guitar as engaging as it can be, a less-is-more approach is often the best strategy. For audiences that aren’t entirely comprised of six-string aficionados, a tune written for the guitarist’s own enjoyment might swiftly sail over the heads of all but the most learned listeners. It follows, then, that the most masterful artisans of solo, unencumbered flat-top box reel in their audiences with the down-to-earth, simple beauty of the instrument.

Juno Award-winning musician and producer Steve Dawson demonstrates his familiarity with this balancing act on “Hale Road Revelation,” a tune that simultaneously conjures Chet Atkins and the Delta on his forthcoming album, Lucky Hand. Like most virtuosic instrumental music — especially of contemporary, vernacular-adjacent, folky varieties — “Hale Road Revelation” has a linear trajectory, not worrying itself with circling back to cover ground it’s already explored. This is no A part/B part tune, but rather, when Dawson does reference a melodic hook or theme that you’ve already heard go by, he teases listeners’ ears with slight deviations and derivations. His playfulness, and deft combination of finger picking with bottleneck, never toes or even attempts to cross the line into esotericism or self-absorption. “Hale Road Revelation” itself is its own driving force, another indicator that not only could Dawson balance interesting ideas and accessibility, but he’s also motivated chiefly by giving the tune the effort, energy, and care it deserves — without an inkling of heavy-handedness.

 

Dom Flemons: Many Pieces to the Puzzle

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It’s fitting that Black Cowboys, the latest record from writer, storyteller, historian, and songster Dom Flemons, was released on Smithsonian Folkways, the non-profit label arm of the eponymous museum and its Center for Folklife — the album plays and reads like a museum exhibit in musical form. This collection of songs, from traditional Western folk melodies to African slaves’ field hollers to Flemons’ timeless originals, celebrates the heritage of African American cowboys in the Wild West.

The existence of black cowboys has largely been omitted from the greater historical record, relegated to forgotten dime store novels, dusty biographies, and seldom-sung songs. The commercial narratives that took the nation by storm in the last century, such as Wild West rodeo shows, singing cowboys, and myriad television shows and films, largely centered on whiteness and white heroes as the keystones of the pioneer West. Flemons understood the larger, more complicated picture — in part due to his African American and Mexican American heritage and growing up in Arizona. With this record and its exhaustive liner notes he brings these integral stories, these neatly interlocking puzzle pieces of black identities shaping the American West, out into the mainstream.

When I listen to this record and read through the liner notes it strikes me that the crux of the entire project is revisionist history and figuring out how to undo it.

One of the things I’ve found most interesting about the issue of revisionist history is that it creates even more weight to the work of people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, because you start to understand why they were working for civil rights and first-class citizenship, compared to second-class citizenship. Up to that point, no matter how far you got in the status as a citizen, you could not be considered a first-class citizen if you were an African American person. This becomes extremely prevalent when speaking of early Western history. To put a black person on the same level as a white person was taboo up until even the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Nowadays it’s really hard for people to grasp that concept. When you aren’t in control of the narrative, you’ll find there are holes in it. My notion has been to add and to elevate different parts of the narrative so that when you bring all of the narratives together you get a truer picture of what the history is supposed to be. That was part of the reason I felt that this album was very important to get out there.

Being from the Southwest, I know that it’s a diverse community. The story isn’t just black and white. There are the Native American populations as well as the Mexican American populations and the different refugee groups as well. The Southwest and Western culture tends to have a very diverse population, because the open expanses of land give a lot of room for people to build a new life for themselves. Where there aren’t a lot of people, you don’t want to upset your neighbor, because they could help you in your time of need. When you read about the cowboys you start finding that the ideas of discrimination and segregation in the classic sense break down in certain situations where, because of the lack of numbers, everybody had to be working together. That called for a brotherhood and a kinship between all these different cultures, in a way that is very unique and is very reassuring, especially in modern times when it seems that the whole world is connected, but we still feel like, “Why have we never been able to get along?” But you find in different situations along the way people have figured out how to work together and get along with each other just out of necessity.

Are people surprised by the concept of the album? I can just imagine someone saying, “Black cowboys? That’s a thing?” How do you unpack for people that black folks have been everything and everywhere, just like white identities?

It’s a matter of perspective and a matter of representation in the mainstream. When it comes to cowboys, three things happened. First, you had the birth of dime store novels, sensationalized Western fiction that were written by people [back East]. They took Western stories and created a sensational picture of Western culture. It’s interesting to read about these too, because you do have several pulp novels that feature black cowboys in them, so you still have a bit of that culture in there.

The second wave was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. It was the first internationally recognized Western program. [Buffalo Bill] was definitely a Confederate-leaning individual, even though he was part of the communities in Kansas that fought against slavery. Buffalo Bill, he had black friends, he had Native American friends, he was good friends with Sitting Bull. But at the same time, ideologically, when the Wild West show went out there [on tour], it painted Buffalo Bill as a white savior, at the forefront of all of this. With it being presented at Madison Square Garden and all over the world, including Australia, Germany, England, France, and Spain it painted the picture of Western American culture being a white phenomenon and having white heroes that are in the forefront. That’s the second level.

The third thing that really cemented the image of the cowboy in place were the singing cowboys: Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, and a whole slew of other folks following behind — like Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music. That set the stage for the cowboy being a white man in a cowboy hat and chaps, saving the day. It caught on with the adults and the kids, and the kids carried on these same traditions. Once you see that sort of representation and there’s no narrative that conflicts with that, there’s no need to consider that there might be a different narrative.

Now we’re over a hundred years down the road from all three of those things. The idea that black cowboys are representative of cowboy culture is something that’s been chipped away for many years. When it comes to representation and African American culture in the West you’ll find that there are a lot of pieces to the puzzle.

How do you take an album that might come across as a “time capsule” or historic novelty music and show it’s more than just a bridge to yesteryear? How do you view this music today, in a modern context?

There was one thing that really set this off. At first I faced that problem. Of course, I had my interest in cowboy music in general; I love Willie Nelson, Marty Robbins, Riders in the Sky, etc. That interested me in general, but I came into this particular issue as I started trying to make this into a compelling narrative so that people won’t just pass it off as nostalgic music.

I was talking with my father about one of the cowboys I was reading about, a fellow by the name of Nat Love, who was one of very few black cowboys to write an autobiography. He worked out of this town called Holbrook, Arizona. Then he became a Pullman porter working on the railroad lines. The history of Pullman porters was what we would call a catalyst for the early civil rights movement. One of the main Pullman porters, a man by the name of A. Philip Randolph, started the very first all-black union called the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Black people who were Pullman porters were able to elevate themselves socially, because they began to know the most prominent white patrons from traveling with them. At first they just worked for tips, but then they wanted to work for a salary, so A. Philip Randolph helped the porters raise their wages.

The porters were also the connecting point between every black section of town in the United States. When it came to delivering the all-black newspapers and when it came to 78 RPM records, the porters had supplies that they would sell to people. They connected the North, South, East, and West of the United States. Later on, in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, Randolph was one of the people who helped Martin Luther King Jr. organize the bus boycott. My father told me that; he was a porter for a chair car, the local/regional train car.

Seeing that someone like Nat Love was a cowboy and later a Pullman porter connected this ancient story of dusty old cowboys on the range into a very modern African American context. That was how I connected the narrative so it would be modern. This gave me a strong sense of why we don’t think about black cowboys. White cowboys continued to ranch and become proprietors on their ranches. But of course in the African American community nostalgia, looking backwards, thinking about the old home place is a whole different story. Cowboy music is connected to country music and one of the biggest parts of country music is nostalgia. In the African American community, nostalgia has always been a double-edged sword.

When I hear you talk about your connection to your music, the dots seem to connect pretty directly, but you’ve put in time, done the research, given it care, and given yourself an in-depth education. How do we make it as easy as possible for people to also trace those threads without all of the rigorous work you put in? Or do you think that work is necessary and maybe something everyone should experience?

Well, I think technically everyone should work through all of that. That’s something that I would like to have happen.

Especially since there are so many of us who haven’t had a choice but to put in that work.

Absolutely. [It all started for me by] being a big fan of Texas country blues music, which is part of my grandfather’s culture. It was very natural to listen to people like Lead Belly, Henry Thomas, and Lightnin’ Hopkins even. All of that stuff is black Western culture from the descendants of these cowboys. I wanted to bring that stuff into a single room. I also went to the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, and I met several of the cowboys. Don Edwards, a legendary cowboy singer who has spent a lot of time talking about the influence of black cowboys, told me about how all the black cowboys were called black vaqueros. He told me about Mexican vaqueros and how they were the original cowboys. It opens up Spanish and Mexican culture being part of Western culture starting three hundred years before the time period we cover on the album. That’s a piece of the puzzle.

It’s obviously a very complicated and complex puzzle, but it’s not necessarily more complicated than just the narrative of America we’re already familiar with — the melting pot of cultures and backgrounds. It’s a matter of putting those pieces together. You’re adding more colorful pieces to the puzzle they already have half-built in their heads.

Overall, I really wanted to be able to give Black Cowboy 101. Like the quote from Mike Searles that I used in the introduction. When people think of the birth of the West they think of it as the birthplace of America. If you think of it as only white America, you would get the impression that only white people are true Americans and everyone else is an interloper. If you start adding these other people — Mexican vaqueros, African American cowboys, and even Native American cowboys — you get a better sense that it’s not only the birthplace of America, but it’s always been multicultural, from the beginning.

Photo by Timothy Duffy

Bringing It All Back Home: A Conversation With Luke Winslow-King

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Luke Winslow-King has been drawn to the blues since he was a kid growing up in Cadillac, Michigan. At 14 years old, his namesake blues band was playing clubs and festivals around the Midwest. Whatever he lacked in life experience, he made up for it with prodigious guitar work and an easy stage presence. Yet any lingering innocence would have eventually fallen away following 15 years of living in New Orleans, spiked with a couple of international tours.

Now in his mid-30s, Winslow-King’s pedigree in the blues is far more defined after enduring a divorce, the loss of his father, a couple of friendships falling apart, and the deaths of more than a few musical influences. In other words, he’s no longer just a boy with the blues. In fact Blue Mesa is Winslow-King’s first new album since he moved back to Cadillac from New Orleans last year. Considering what he’s been though, his writing offers a streak of hard-won optimism in songs like “Better for Knowing You” and “After the Rain,” elevating Blue Mesa beyond just another breakup record.

At what point during the making of this record did you move back to Michigan?

It probably was right after we recorded it that I moved to Michigan. I went on tour for three months, so I didn’t live anywhere. Then I moved to Michigan after the tour. I was in transition at that time. I’ve spent the better part of 15 years in New Orleans. Some of that time was spent in New York or on the road, but I’ve been in New Orleans pretty solid since 2001 or 2002. I learned a lot; the city has been great to me. It’s been an incredible place to get my career started. I’ll enjoy going back there soon, but I’m just ready for something else right now.

Was there a moment where you said, “All right, I’m changing”?

Yeah. I went through a divorce there and did some editing as far as my friend group goes. Now I just want to be in a place with nature and family so I can focus on my career in a different way. When I’m home, I’m off. When I’m on the road, I’m on the road. In New Orleans, you come off the road and you’re in this music scene where you’re playing every night or every other night when you’re home. It’s nice, man. I’ve been enjoying fishing, and bowling, and canoeing, and cross country skiing. It feels real to be back home. I’m enjoying it.

Has that helped your creative mindset?

I think so. I’m feeling less pressured to write and do business and just being like, “You know what? This is my life.” I’m going to follow it through and do the best I can. If people like it, cool. If they don’t, then someone else will. just keeping at it and trying to keep it real rather than force anything. I think that’s how the record comes off a little too. I quit telling the band what to do and just let them do what they do best. If I didn’t like it I would tell them but usually I was just like, “Sure. Sounds great, let’s go for it.” I think there’s a certain breath of freedom in it.

You’ve got a lot of tasteful playing on this record. How did you learn the skill of not overplaying or just ripping through your songs?

Just listening, and years of playing, and learning how to speak through the guitar. The guitar doesn’t necessarily have to sound like a guitar. You can speak a language through it or sing through it. My guitarist Roberto Luti, who is not touring with us because he’s back in Italy, is my guitar maestro. He is our unicorn for gathering the spirit and learning how to be very tasteful and minimalist on a guitar. I’ve learned a lot watching him too.

How did the Italian recording sessions for this album come about?

Well, we were hitting the road pretty hard in Europe this summer for eight weeks or something like that. We had a five-day break in the middle of it and we were in Italy anyway. Roberto is from there, so he knew people who owned a really nice studio. It ended up being this cool getaway up in the mountains in Tuscany. We had the tunes ready enough. We had to rehearse a little to get ready for the session but the tunes were at that perfect point where they weren’t over-rehearsed.

We caught a really cool moment, which is really important in a session. We were comfortable with each other and the material. We all needed a break, but we were still excited about the music. Everyone was laid-back. This is the first album where I’ve kept all my live vocals. Usually I go back and do an overdub session, which a lot of people do, but it felt nice to be like, “This is natural and real.” All the takes on the solos and guitars are live. There are keyboard overdubs and edits here and there, but it’s mostly all live.

It makes sense to do it that way, rather than get it so perfect that it’s too polished.

There’s a sweet spot – you obviously have to know the songs well enough. I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan and listen to records like Desire. You can tell the rhythm section has maybe never heard the song before. It makes for an awesome recording. Everyone is on their toes.

You had a blues band when you were a teenager in Michigan, right?

Yeah. I grew up in northern Michigan and I started the Winslow-King Blues Band when I was 13. We played a few music festivals. My parents used to go see me play at bars on the weekend. I’ve come back to a sound that’s a lot more similar to what I was playing when I was 14 years old, which is like an electric trio with a Stratocaster playing blues. The difference is I’ve lived between then. I’ve explored folk music. I had classical string quartets on my first album. New Orleans jazz was mixed in there for a while. I tried jazz, a lot of different styles.

Now I’m playing original music that I can stand by. There’s a lot more diversity in it, of course, but it feels good to come full circle and be back to my roots. A lot of my friends back home were like, “When are you going to rock again? I remember when you were young you used to rock.” Even my dad was like, “I liked it when you rocked.” I’m back to that, so it feels good.

I wonder what that’s like for people who remember you as a teenager, and now you’re back home as an adult. They have to reevaluate you and you have to reevaluate them at this stage. Has that been the case for you?

Well, that’s what’s so great about going home and being back with your old family and friends. It’s a very understanding reevaluation. You are who you are. The friendships go beyond whatever music you’re playing or what notes you’re playing. I’m glad to be back home and have salt-of-the-earth friends. My best friend was a logger and now is a sand miner; my other best friend is a fishing guide and snow plow truck driver in the winter. It’s cool to have friends who are concerned with normal daily life. You can go fishing and hang out and not have everyone be into cool music everywhere you go.

This album has very cinematic moments too. A lot of it felt like it could be placed in movies on the closing credits. Are there soundtracks or composers that you consider primary influences?

Yeah. I’m a huge Ry Cooder fan. That’s one of his things that he’s been known for and made a career out of. I’m also a big fan of Neil Young’s soundtrack for the Dead Man movie. I’ve always really liked that and listen to that in the van sometimes. I went to school for classical music and I’ve always loved great classical music. I also love Clint Eastwood. I’ve been watching a lot of Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone movies and hearing that stuff too. It’s not necessarily stylistically what I want to do but I love how evocative some of those sounds are and how much they bring the listener to the setting. It would be cool to be able to do that in my own way with my music.

Are there any filmmakers other than Clint Eastwood that have affected the way you see your art?

I’ve watched all five Rocky movies and all the Rambo movies this winter, I’m embarrassed to say.

No, don’t be embarrassed. Rocky won an Oscar.

Chris Davis, my drummer, is a huge, huge Rocky fan. We just went to Philly and ran the stairs while we were there. Honestly we’re in this Stallone phase. Roberto, our Italian guitarist, always says ‘Stallone-ay’ which we love. Honestly, Rocky is a really inspiring movie. I appreciate that Stallone did that movie on a shoestring budget and was inspired to make it himself. Right now Rocky has been what I’m all about. It’s that underdog mentality. Even though everyone makes fun of Stallone and it is so cheesy, and some of the acting is so terrible, there’s a really beautiful sentiment in that movie about going the distance.

 

Photos by Victor Alonso

The Heritage of New Orleans’ Jazz Fest

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Three hundred years ago just about now — May 7, 1718, so legend has it — representatives of the riches-minded colonial French Mississippi Company decided that a malaria-infested swamp in the crescent bend near the base of the river for which it was named would make a great place for a port settlement. Nouvelle-Orléans they called it.

Thanks to them, over the course of the next couple of weekends, not too far from that original settlement, you can find a spot where, depending on how the breezes are blowing, you will be able to hear five, six, maybe seven kinds of music all at once. This is music representing cultures from all over the world — from Haiti, from Mali, from Cuba, from Brazil, from Nova Scotia, from the bayous and prairies just a few hours away, and from Congo Square on the edge of that former swamp. Music originated by escaped slaves, by French refugees booted out of Eastern Canada, by Irish dockworkers, by free people of color and landed aristocrats, by Baptist celebrants and Catholic congregants and European Jewish immigrants. Oh, and of the indigenous tribes who were there long before the Europeans. Blues, gospel, country, rock, salsa, merengue, Celtic, hip-hop, bounce, rara, R&B, Cajun, zydeco, klezmer, funk, brass bands’ Mardi Gras Indian chants, and real Indians’ pow-wow chants. And jazz, of course, both traditional and modern, just for a start.

And while you’re standing there, in that same spot, you can savor the irresistible aromas of cuisine from just as many traditions, all blended together in ways that have come to be associated with this place, which we now know as New Orleans … though that’s a different story … or a different part of the same story, perhaps.

That spot is in the middle of the Louisiana Fairgrounds which, part of the year, is a horse-racing track, but for the last weekend in April and first in May, has for decades been the site of the famed New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. And this year, the event is marking the city’s tricentennial with a valiant attempt to showcase and celebrate all of the many cultures that made this city like nowhere else in North America, really nowhere else in the world. Technically, that’s always been part of the mission of what people refer to as JazzFest — its baker’s dozen of stages spread around the grounds hosting artists with connections to that heritage.

This year, that specific mission will be concentrated in a tent very near that mid-Fairgrounds spot. Most years, a Cultural Exchange Pavilion has hosted music, art, crafts, and workshops devoted to a particular country or culture with historic ties to New Orleans. Cuba was spotlighted last year, Belize in 2016, and Haiti, Mali, Brazil, and Native America among others featured in recent years. For the tricentennial, all of that is being squeezed into the pavilion, an ambitious, but fitting focus.

The late, great singer Ernie K-Doe was fond of saying that, while he wasn’t positive, he was pretty sure “all music came from New Orleans.” Hyperbole from a man who called himself the Emperor of the Universe? Well, a little, maybe. A more accurate statement might be that pretty much all music came to, and through, New Orleans. Heck, after hosting its first documented opera performance in 1796, the city was known as “the Opera Capital of North America” through the next century. And, if you roll your eyes when JazzFest announces its big name artist headliners — a crop this year including Aerosmith, Sting, Beck, Rod Stewart, Lionel Richie, and LL Cool J — well, how many of them would be making the music they make, if not for the powerful influences of music tied to the heritage of New Orleans and the surrounding region?

It was all pretty much in place, even before the city’s single centennial, as cultural historian Ned Sublette notes in the introduction to his definitive 2005 account of those first 100 years, The World That Made New Orleans.

“New Orleans was the product of complex struggles among competing international forces,” he wrote. “It’s easy to perceive New Orleans’ apartness from the rest of the United States, and much writing about the city understandably treats it as an eccentric, peculiar place. But I prefer to see it in its wider context. A writer in 1812 called it ‘the great mart of all wealth of the Western world.’ By that time, New Orleans was a hub of commerce and communication that connected the Mississippi watershed, the Gulf Rim, the Atlantic seaboard, the Caribbean Rim, Western Europe (especially France and Spain), and various areas of West and Central Africa.”

And with all of that came music, gene-splicing and mutating through the years, from the drumming, dancing, and singing of slaves, given Sundays off, gathering in what became known as Congo Square (in what is now Louis Armstrong Park, just across Rampart from the French Quarter) to the backstreets and brothels of the Storyville district down the street where Buddy Bolden and Armstrong played their horns and Jelly Roll Morton worked the sounds of Latin America — “the Spanish tinge” — into roiling piano adventures through the collision of rhythm & blues and country-blues in the years just after World War II that brought about the birthing of rock ’n’ roll in Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Studios right on the other side of Rampart.

As Sublette put it: “The distance between rocking the city in 1819 and [Roy Brown’s] ‘Good Rocking Tonight’ in 1947 was about a block.”

At the same time, that distance is a trip around the world. This year, it’s all in one little tent.

A few highlights of note from the Cultural Exchange Pavilion lineup:

Sidi Touré — The guitarist, singer, and songwriter from Bamako, Mali, is one of the leading figures in modern Songhaï blues, roots of which became American blues and its variations via slaves brought across the Atlantic and, in turn, influenced by American blues and rock.

The Cajun/Acadienne Connection — A special collaboration between descendants of French settlers relocated to the Louisiana bayou prairies after being booted out of Eastern Canada by the conquering British in1755, and descendants of those who managed to stay in Canada. The former is represented by the Savoy Family Band, Marc and Ann Savoy standing among the leading forces in the revival of once-oppressed Cajun music and culture joined by sons Joel and Wilson, who have brought their own vitality to the form. The latter comes via Vishtèn, a young trio from the resilient Francophone community on Easter Canada’s Prince Edward Island which mixes French Acadian and Celtic influences with overt nods to their Louisiana “cousins.”

Cynthia Girtley’s Tribute to Mahalia Jackson — The formidable Girtley, who bills herself as “New Orleans Gospel Diva” offers her homage to New Orleans’ (and the world’s) Queen of Gospel and force in the Civil Rights Movement who, two years before her death, was a surprise performer at the very first JazzFest in 1970 in Congo Square, singing “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” with the Eureka Brass Band, followed by a formal concert the next night in the adjacent Municipal Auditorium, which now bears her name.

Tribute to Jelly Roll Morton with special guest Henry Butler — New Orleans-born Butler has long been one of the leading keepers of the flame of the city’s great piano traditions, an heir to such greats as Prof. Longhair and James Booker. Here, he is featured in a set honoring Morton who, if not the inventor of jazz (as he was wont to boast himself), was one of its key innovators and promoters in its formative years.

Jupiter & Okwess — Hailing from the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s capital Kinshasa, dynamic singer Jupiter Bokondji and his forceful band have become an international force in modern Congolese music, as it’s taken to the global road recently, gripping audiences at festivals and clubs alike in Europe and North America.

Kermit Ruffins’ Tribute to Louis Armstrong — Trumpeter and singer Ruffins became a star as a teen, helping lead a new generation of NOLA street musicians with the Rebirth Brass Band in the ‘90s, and has continued as a local favorite through his solo career (plus wider exposure via featured spots in HBO’s Treme, among other things). His love for and debt to the one-and-only Satchmo has always been a core presence in his playing and gravelly, good-natured vocal approach.

Leyla McCalla — The cellist, banjoist, and singer emerged in the second version of the Carolina Chocolate Drops alongside Rhiannon Giddens. Settling in New Orleans and starting a family, she’s dug deep into Haitian and Creole roots in her colorfully wide-ranging solo albums, showing herself a visionary, talented artist in her own right.

The East Pointers — Another young trio from Canada’s Prince Edward Island, this group draws more on the British-Celtic traditions, but with the distinct character of its home. Their latest album, What We Leave Behind, explores the sadness of young people leaving the island to seek work and wider horizons elsewhere.

Lakou Mizik — This Port-au-Prince group has been called the Buena Vista All Stars of Haiti, as it was formed after the devastating 2010 earthquake around a vibrant core of Haitian musical elders joining with rising youngsters. Their 2017 JazzFest performance was one of the year’s highlights.

Photo of Congo Square courtesy of New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival

Black History Is Roots Music History

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To celebrate Black History Month, we’re taking a moment to revisit pieces that celebrated the creativity, music, and identities of artists of color over the past year.

Plenty of wisdom has been handed down in our Counsel of Elders features:

Jimmy Carter of the Blind Boys of Alabama spoke of faith and singing about reaching the end of the journey: “People ask me, ‘You’ve been doing this for almost seven decades, what keeps you going?’ I tell them, ‘When you love what you do — and we love what we’re doing — that keeps you motivated.’”

Soul singer Lee Fields had advice for staying positive without losing one’s realism: “I do believe that love is out there today, true genuine love, and I think a person should always keep that in mind. Stay positive.”

Then there’s 75 year-old singer and hit songwriter Don Bryant who has only just released his second album, so he knows a thing or two about perseverance and second chances.

Two of the past 12 months have been anchored by roots music legends:

Blues super-duo Keb’ Mo’ and Taj Mahal released TajMo, so we marked the occasion by designating Keb’ our Artist of the Month for May. The album just won a (well-deserved) Grammy.

Country hit-maker Charley Pride held down the Artist of the Month slot in September, when we pointed out that, even now, in his 80s, he is unafraid to shake things up.

Then, there are the cover stories:

With her record, The Order of Time, Valerie June defies labels, spanning blues, bluegrass, soul, folk, rock, and more, gathering pieces from each to build a kaleidoscope that showcases the long undercurrent of history running through each.

Trombone Shorty is intent on keeping the culture and music of New Orleans alive, but without redundancy: “When I grew up, I was listening to brass bands and I was listening to New Orleans hip-hop, so that is a part of my culture. I started, then, playing my horn to hip-hop beats and rock beats. It’s part of knowing where you come from, but trying to move the music forward.”

Black Joe Lewis doesn’t revive rock ‘n’ roll, he just shows the world it’s still alive — and, as a classic form of American music, it should have a seat at the Americana table, too.

For Chastity Brown, making music is like a therapy session: “The music reflected itself back to me and, in one part, let me know I was quite broken, and in another part of [Silhouette of Sirens], let me know I wasn’t that way anymore.”

The historical context of Black identities in roots music is best supplied by, well … Black identities in roots music.

New York-based Black string band the Ebony Hillbillies expertly laid out the diverse history of bluegrass and old-time music in a Shout & Shine interview.

Scholars Doug Seroff and Lynn Abbott have worked together for nearly 40 years researching the history of African-American music in jubilee, quartet, vaudeville, ragtime, and early blues music.

We dove into the history of the Georgia Sea Island Singers, who have featured a rotating cast over the years and continue to share their rich history of West African descent, with performances at presidential inaugurations and other public ceremonies.

By working through a deep-rooted musical heritage, Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou uses the language of the past to inform the present, serving up a direct response to the current political climate.

In her album, Freedom Highway, Rhiannon Giddens examined the cyclical struggles of the victims of injustice that suffer throughout history … slaves, children, Black men, and more. We spoke to her about it.

Lesbian, Americana artist Crys Matthews is a native of the South and the daughter of a preacher. She understands and appreciates the myriad ways her background informs her ability to help others empathize with those with whom they might assume they have nothing in common.

Let’s not forget about all of the incredible music:

Birds of Chicago sang one of our favorite songs for a Sitch Session.

Ben Hunter & Joe Seamons released A Black & Tan Ball with Phil Wiggins and built the album on friendship, their commitment to celebrating the wide range of American styles available to any songster, and the joy of sharing those musical styles across generations.

Benjamin Booker’s “Truth Is Heavy” was featured as a Song of the Week this past June.

And Rhiannon Giddens had a Song of the Week, too.

One of our new favorites, Sunny War, sings to her younger self — and all young children today — about the challenges of life.

Guitarist Hubby Jenkins can do more with just his voice and guitar than some folks do with an entire band.

We hosted a number of wonderful artists on Hangin’ & Sangin‘, as well:

Johnnyswim had us laughing for the whole half-hour … and invited us over for dinner, to boot!

The aforementioned Keb’ Mo’ turned on the charm in a big, big way.

Acoustic soul singer Jonny P touched on the importance of positive representation.

Hopping over from the UK, Yola Carter blew our minds with her incredible voice and spirit.

During AmericanaFest, Leyla McCalla talked us through the history of Haitian-Americans.

And last but not least, there have been several stellar Mixtapes, too:

Singer Bette Smith remembers her big brother and his love of soul music with this playlist.

Contemporary blues guitarist Ruthie Foster gave us an introduction to the blues with a dozen foundational tracks upon which a blues novice might begin to build their love of the form.

Our friends at the Music Maker Relief Foundation are working hard to preserve traditional, vernacular American music, especially traditional blues.

Living Your Passion: A Conversation with Larry Campbell & Teresa Williams

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Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams have been married for nearly 30 years, but they only turned their private song-making into a public affair with the release of their 2015 self-titled debut. (Though, before that, they played for seven years in Levon Helm’s band.)

Last year, they returned with their sophomore effort, Contraband Love, a darker affair that takes a hard look at love’s pocks in order to reveal its pearls. Original folk-driven songs like “Save Me from Myself” explore a strong relationship’s balm, while the title track promises to keep fighting past the hard-bitten instinct to keep love at bay. Williams’ voice leads the charge on the verses, while Campbell joins her on the harmonies, their voices showcasing their lengthy partnership together. The admiration and respect the couple exhibit for one another — and for the opportunities they’ve been given to live their passion in tandem — only adds to their music-making journey. As they’ve learned, not everything happens quickly. But some things are worth the wait.

You’ve been described as being a riskier slice of Americana. How do you see yourselves pushing against its status quo?

Teresa Williams: Are we pushing against the status quo of Americana? [Laughs] I guess we’re just not thinking about it and letting the chips falls where they fall.

Larry Campbell: That’s pretty much it.

TW: I don’t think that’s a good plan, if you have a trajectory. You just have to take the music as it comes.

LC: Yeah, the stuff we write and perform, ideally, it comes from an organic place where what we’re creating is a mixture of all our influences and, because of the genre that Teresa and I have both been attracted to most of our lives, what comes out fits in the Americana theme. But the goal has never been to make music that can be called Americana music.

TW: They called us Americana! We never did.

Right, I can see how the narrative springs up after the fact.

LC: Levon [Helm] affectionately called Americana “the trash bin of rock.”

TW: It’s a nice haven for all the outcasts, I think. I’ve heard Mary Gauthier say, “This is my tribe. I love my tribe.”

That’s perfect.

LC: Then, by that definition, it pushes against any kind of status quo. The beauty of it is, there really is no status quo for Americana. It’s a big tent. I would hope the underlying requirement to be placed in that category is complete artistic expression and, if you’ve got that, then you’re welcome in.

As opposed to a more commercial approach?

LC: Right.

TW: Or maybe if you’re trying to achieve what you think will go over. Like, “Oops, probably not smart.”

“Save Me from Myself” is such an interesting take on the love song. Can you tell me a bit about where that came from?

LC: It is a love song. We’ve all known people, or been people at times in our lives, who find it very difficult to face our own shortcomings. To me, it’s the idea of unconditional love, where you’re allowed to go through your own personal misery and someone will stand next to you and try to help you through it, but if nothing else, just be there for you. That’s a fascinating facet of love. I’m dabbling with that theme in that song and in the title song, “Contraband Love.” I’ve had issues in my life where I didn’t necessarily like the person I was. The idea that someone would still be there for you, while you’re trying to get all this stuff sorted out and get your stuff together, that’s just fascinating.

You also covered Carl Perkins’ “Turn Around,” which feels like an interesting companion piece to “Save Me.” One is pleading for help from a lover, and the other is offering that very thing. How has time been reshaping your own understanding of love?

LC: Wow.

Big questions today!

LC: Well, Teresa and I have been married for almost 30 years now.

That’s amazing.

TW: Especially in this business.

In the business, but also in this day and age. People don’t put in that kind of time anymore.

TW: It was a little later … I had just turned 32 when we got married.

LC: And I was 33. We’d been through a lot of the experiences that people have that they eventually regret and which causes the relationship to fall apart. We had exhausted most of those experiences. When we got married, it was a really good time in both of our lives where we both understood who were individually, and we both understood the other.

TW: We’ve been through enough to recognize … people use the word soulmate, throw that word around pretty loosely, but it truly felt like, from the first day I met Larry, that was it. What drove us musically was very similar, and that was a huge part of the attraction.

LC: What Teresa and I have between us, we’ve experienced so many facets and aspects of what love is — that it does change and it does morph. But there’s sort of a rock underneath it all. The longer you go, when you’re in a healthy relationship, the firmer that rock gets. I think both of us in this 30-year journey have really done the best we could to treat this relationship with the respect that it warrants.

TW: The irony is that neither of us was looking for marriage at the time.

Isn’t that always how it happens, though?

Both: Yeah!

TW: The day I met Larry, I was putting myself out on a limb, musically. When people talk about meeting the right person, I always say, “Do what you love and keep putting yourself out there with what you love to do.” I think that’s really part of it.

Larry, you’ve mentioned in another interview that songwriting isn’t an easy form of self-expression for you and, after your self-titled debut, you had to get comfortable with what you and Teresa were as a duo. How did you set about doing that?

LC: From my perspective, Teresa has always been a front person, in one respect or another; she was comfortable in that role. For me, I was always a back-up musician, and I was always comfortable as a studio musician or producer. From the first day we met, we would sing together for the love and the fun of doing it.

TW: Especially down in West Tennessee with my family and the local people there.

LC: It took me a long time to develop an appreciation for the notion of being out front and being a singer with original material. I would’ve never been able to develop this, unless I’d done it with Teresa. Fortunately, we had an incubator, which was with the Levon Helm band. He wanted everybody to step up front and do something. That gave me the opportunity to try that stuff with Teresa in public. There are people that are born to get out there and sing and throw themselves in front of the crowd, and it’s taken me an evolution to make that happen, for me to be comfortable. I get such fulfillment out of doing this thing with Teresa that that’s the point, rather than the point being wanting to be up there in front of someone.

It sounds like quite a gift. Talent can, in its own way, take people away from each other, and when you were playing with [Bob] Dylan that did happen.

TW: Yeah, it took its toll. But, at the same time, when I would be out there [visiting Larry on the road], we’d sit in the back of the bus after shows and play music, and Dylan’s manager said, “You guys oughta be making pay off what you have.” I’m not sure it really occurred to us before this. I kinda felt icky about a husband-and-wife team, for some reason. I grew up in the cotton patch — literally, working in the cotton patch. And it felt like [a creative life] was some other cast of people that did that thing out in the world.

Right, it’s such a big thing to think, let alone achieve.

TW: Yeah, like you can’t get too big for your britches. I hate to admit that, as I feel like a strong female.

What’s so interesting about both of your stories is, you didn’t set out looking for this, but you found it together. I love that circularity, that life could bring you what you needed.

LC: When Teresa and I made our first record, and it was starting to kick in that we were going to do this project — this Larry & Teresa thing — I had this feeling that just doing it makes it a success. We’re not going to be JAY-Z and Beyoncé. That’s okay.

TW: [Laughs]

“My Sweetie Went Away” and “Slidin’ Delta” are such fun songs because they stretch the bounds of what you do in more regional ways. I know, Teresa, you grew up in Western Tennessee, and you’ve both been in upstate New York. Is there a region that you feel most drawn to, musically?

TW: I realized, on stage some nights, that almost all the songs we’re singing — except the ones Larry wrote — are the ones from Tennessee. Larry was in New York, going to hear all these world famous artists, these rock ‘n’ roll artists and bluegrass artists passing through New York City. He had a friend who was getting him into the Fillmore East when he was 12. I’m so jealous! I’ll joke; I’ll say, “We weren’t getting that. They weren’t coming through the cotton patch.” But we were getting the music from the dirt, I like to think.

The people that Larry was hearing in New York, they were recirculating our music back to us. We’re technically in the Delta, where I’m from. We’re on the edge of it, so it’s kind of inevitable that Larry and I … I felt like the dirt met the city. His sensibility is from down there, too, obviously. He spent a couple of years down in Jackson, Mississippi, which is the only reason I thought it was okay to marry him. If he hadn’t spent that time, the cultural divide would’ve been too big.

It all feeds into the title: Contraband Love.

LC: Yeah. And what Teresa’s saying about the groups I was seeing in New York — Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead and Cream and Jimi Hendrix — all these bands, they had mixed with the cutting edge of rock ‘n’ roll in those days. But beneath that, rock ‘n’ roll did grow out of the South. It came out of all those influences: the country music, the gospel music, the bluegrass music, the old-time music, and the blues of the South. And I was always attracted to the distillation of rock ‘n’ roll. When I was growing up and I would hear someone like Doc Watson and Bill Monroe or Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters, that stuff would ring a bell in me even more than the rock ‘n’ roll I was seeing constantly.

TW: It was like the roots. And the bluegrass, too. Where I was located, we had the blues. We were getting the music coming up from Muscle Shoals. I’m right in the middle of all of that. We’d come in from the fields on Saturday, and we’d listen to Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs — they had their Saturday evening show. And then daddy was playing this stuff in the living room after supper, and that’s how I learned. I wouldn’t even have to go to school: I’m doing what I learned at my parents’ feet.

Photo credit: Gregg Roth