For Adia Victoria, the blues are not just a genre of music or a set of formal elements. She lives the blues. In her life and work the blues are a mode of creating, a river-tradition into which she steps with each performance, and a way back into self-acceptance. Adia has traveled the world and infused her unique songwriting with Paris and New York as much as with her home state of Tennessee.
Adia has released three studio albums, working with producers like T Bone Burnett and The National’s Aaron Dessner. In her climb to indie stardom she has remained laser focused on interpreting the blues tradition for contemporary audiences.
My conversation with Adia came shortly after we finished a whirlwind North American tour this spring, and it felt like we were back in the tour van just shooting the shit. Transparent and hilarious, Adia challenged me to go as deep in conversation as she does in her songs.
Artist:Larkin Poe Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee Song: “Blood Harmony” Album:Blood Harmony Release Date: November 11, 2022 Label: Tricki-Woo Records
In Their Words: “‘Blood Harmony’ came together after Megan and our mom and I all read Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, which is about the ways we perceive the passage of time. There was just something about the sweetness of all three of us reading the same book, and then being able to talk about how it related to our love for each other and our love for music. Of all the songs I’ve ever written, I’m particularly proud of this one; I cannot wait to sing it loudly with all of our chosen family out on the road.” — Rebecca Lovell, Larkin Poe
“We’ve always been tenacious about following our gut, and that’s really served us well. With my playing on this record, I trusted my own process and my own voice more than I ever have before, and when I listen back it sounds so much more like me. There’s a lot of power in that.” — Megan Lovell, Larkin Poe
Singer-songwriter and guitarist Gordie Tentrees didn’t begin his career as a globe-trotting performer until he moved to a vibrant, supportive music city – that is, Whitehorse, Yukon. In a town of approximately 40,000, there’s long been a bustling musical economy, one that supported Tentrees even before he had released any recordings.
Place – whether rural northern Canada, or the far reaches of New Zealand or western Europe or Australia – informs so much of Tentrees’ writing and music-making, especially on his most recent release, 2021’s Mean Old World. With a global perspective and a local level of care, he unspools big, often daunting political and social questions with humor, intention, and aplomb. Child welfare, Indigenous rights, solidarity, working class issues, and more are packaged in tidy honky-tonking, blues-inflected, string band songs, making these sometimes gargantuan pills that much easier to swallow.
That Tentrees prioritizes community, building bridges, and human connection in his music makes it that much more compelling. He uses his rural, multi-ethnic hometown as an entry point, a doorway, through which he not only brings folks into his own world, but brings his world to them, too. And in doing so, even with an album titled Mean Old World, he reminds us that living on this earth doesn’t always have to be so forbidding, exclusive, and mean. BGS connected with Gordie Tentrees via phone, while he picked up his Indigenous daughter from school on his bicycle, to discuss this recent album.
BGS: I wanted to start by asking you about place. I’ve been obsessed with place these days, especially as it relates to music and music-making. I was struck by the fact that you didn’t begin songwriting or performing until you moved to the Yukon. How did moving there inform your music-making? To me, it feels like there’s a strong sense of place on this record.
Gordie Tentrees: Well, I blame the Yukon – I credit the Yukon as well as blame it [Laughs] – for the path I’m on. It is a good conduit and supportive community that encourages the arts. Writing songs and playing an instrument is something that’s seen as a valued occupation, one that’s sort of embraced and lifted up. It’s not hard to get on the stage here. Early on, when I started playing, I hadn’t even made my first record yet and I was headlining some northern festival stages. [The Yukon] really gives you a chance to get on a stage and expose yourself to audiences like that. I really believe if I had lived anywhere else in Canada or the world I wouldn’t have been given so much time on the stage.
The other thing is that a lot of people spend their time creating art here and writing songs here – there are a lot of songwriters here. It’s a highly valued thing. I live in a community full of writers and songwriters. That’s really supported and endorsed. You can knock on someone’s door if you want to learn an instrument and they’ll show it to you. There aren’t barriers for those that are aspiring to be songwriters or musicians. It’s quite wonderful.
At one point, in our little community of 40,000 people – Whitehorse, Yukon, where I live – we even had up to 25 music venues at various points, all happening. One thing about Whitehorse that not many people know is that it has the highest number of musicians per capita that actually make a living from music in Canada.
As much as the Yukon has informed your music-making, you travel so much and you play so many shows all around the world, so while there’s this strong sense of place in this album, Mean Old World, I do sense that it’s also informed by your travels. “Danke” clearly references this. How has the cross-pollination of the Yukon and your travels created the musical aesthetic you have now?
I think that’s attributed to what I do, as far as being a performer and musician. I get to go to different parts [of the world] because I’m not just a songwriter and play various instruments. For example, if I play in English-speaking countries they like the songs and the stories. Countries where English is a second, third, fourth language they rely more on melody and stuff like that, so if you have a show that sort of hits people both ways, it allows you to travel as much as I have. Which I really sort of figured out early on, you can play in all these different markets and do different things because you’re not just a one-trick pony.
As far as playing different genres, there are so many genres of music here in the Yukon; it goes from jazz, blues, and hip-hop to funk music. I get often put into a country festival, bluegrass festival, or a folk festival as the guy who’s kind of on the edge of all those things. But it also touches on all those things. That’s allowed me to travel all over the place and sort of steal genres from all of the artists that have inspired me, whether it’s Southern and Delta blues music or Eastern Romanian dirges.
We are The Bluegrass Situation, so I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you about the bluegrass influences I hear on Mean Old World. I wonder where they stem from for you? It sounds like that type of rural bluegrass that is genre-less and draws from many influences.
Because I’m a guitar player, I’m drawn to flatpicking. I went, “Okay, bluegrass, this genre is like high-speed chess.” Like high speed math along with jazz. We have a local bluegrass festival up here so it’s all around. String band music is quite popular up here. Where I live in the Yukon you’re exposed to it from the jazz scene to the bluegrass scene. If you know music from those genres at all, that’s sort of enveloped and absorbed by the people who live here.
I wanted to ask you about the stories that went into “Mean Old World” and “Every Child,” not only your own experience in foster care, but also your experience of raising your Indigenous daughter and how that’s informed these songs. Partially because I think these are really heavy sort of big topics, but the way you approach them feels very grounded and very real.
It was all inspired by one song that I wrote, the title track, “Mean Old World.” The song was really about the best interests of every child, which I believe are health, safety, and happiness. Regardless of your background, politics, or the current state of the world, I think those are the most important things. That song is inspired by that, following my journey as a foster child from a broken home and going through the social services system and then also becoming a foster parent to our daughter six years ago. We had no idea [what we were doing], it was a really educational experience. Where I live in the Yukon, 50 percent of the community is Indigenous. I’m not Indigenous, my background is actually Irish. We’re very lucky that we’re educated and exposed to these experiences and our families and our communities – Indigenous or non-Indigenous – are affected by it. So we come together and support each other.
Through my daughter, being a parent of a female is one thing. It’s difficult for females in this world, [especially] one with brown skin. I think I keep it really simple and I think about what she faces every day and how she would get passed over or looked upon as a child that might need more work or more time, even if she was ahead of everybody else, because of the color of her skin and because of her background. Once that’s in your home, and you’ve experienced that, it’s pretty alarming! At the same time, we’re so grateful that we’ve had this experience and have realized that as parents we are here to bridge the gap between my daughter and her birth parents and her birth family. To build that human capacity to bridge that space that’s been created due to trauma.
You also bring a lot of lightness – levity, humor, and joy – into your music-making. Why is that important to you in the context of these kind of bigger, sometimes daunting topics?
When I was a kid, humor was a defensive coping mechanism to get through all the darkness. There were always pretty dark situations that were absurd, and if you could bring some light to it, it always made it easier to deal with. I felt like I was a witness and a passenger to my broken childhood and an observer. I watched it all and would kind of make light-hearted jokes about it even though it was painful, to get through it. I find that humor is my constant companion, also recognizing that even though I use it a lot I still have to deal with some of the reasons that I use it.
One of my favorite writers from early on was John Prine. I heard him in my house when I was a kid, and the way he can use heavy subjects: “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes.” Everything from that ranging to, “Swears like a sailor when she shaves her legs.” That kind of humor in his songs is something as a kid that I grew up knowing was possible. You can use humor for these heavy subjects. I have a song on my last record called “Dead Beat Dad.” I felt it was ahead of its time because it shocked the audience, at least until I had them in my hand. I would shock them, a little jolt. Just to push them, give them a little poke. Now that song, those taboos are more behind us now. I want to take people down those roads, but I also want to bring them back, usually with humor.
The quality of the music, being that sort of honky-tonk country meets a back porch jam, really communicates that your priority is establishing these relationships with your audiences so you can have these bigger conversations.
A lot of my audience is a rural audience, teaching, sharing with them that yes, you can grow up in those places and it’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay, you’re going to be okay. You’re going to grow and it’s never too late to learn. It’s just never too late. Once you stop learning, that’s when we’re all in trouble. I’ll have these conversations, most of my audience is rural communities and they’ll expect me to do this hillbilly, honky-tonk, “hold my beer while I kiss your wife” nonsense and I can open the door with that and then they’ll be like, “Wait a minute, he’s not singing about beer, he’s singing about… Whoa!” I love having that effect. I love going through that doorway.
I recognize my role when I go around night to night in whatever country it is, I realize I walk in and I can lift, change, alter a lot of people’s lives in a short amount of time. I can do it over and over again, repeatedly, and I get to go to bed at night and go, “Wow. That felt pretty good.” I’m really enjoying it. I’m enjoying it more now than I have in the sixteen years I’ve been doing this. I feel really grateful that there’s a place for me – I feel like there’s more of a place for me now than there’s ever been. I’m just so lucky. I get to be a small helper in a larger community.
Artist:Janiva Magness Hometown: Detroit, Michigan Latest Album:Hard to Kill (Fathead Records) Personal Nicknames: J
Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?
Truthfully, it is impossible to choose one because there have been so many over the course of my career. And I am a homework kind of person, so my habits are when I do find someone I am deeply moved by, I study them and THEIR influences. So I see it as generations of artists all kinda influencing each other. For example, Bonnie Raitt at certain point early on was a huge influence for me, not just in her music, but in the fact that she was a female bandleader who musically has ALWAYS done what she wanted and refused to be one-dimensional. I love that and it was super empowering for a young girl and young woman to see and hear. And her early blues influences and songwriter influences and friends are all very important for me — Sippie Wallace to Lightnin’ Hopkins to Son House to John Prine!
Otis Rush was another one, for his playing and singing and no-holds-barred approach to both. I was a 14-year-old kid the first time I saw him live. It was truly a spiritual experience for me. B.B. King similarly, who had heavy gospel influences in his singing, whom I saw the same year… what a great year! I was in my early 20s the first time I saw what we used to call a “Three-Way” — James Brown, Martha Reeves and Etta James. Etta’s greatest influence was Johnny “Guitar” Watson and gospel music! Etta was the opener on that show and her performance alone was like four years of college education in one show! She sang and held that stage as if her life depended on it — and I believed her! Another profound lesson in “this is how it’s done.” Priceless.
What has been the best advice you’ve received in your career so far?
I was advised pretty early on that I needed to have control of my own instrument. Especially if I wanted to make sure I could do my job to the best of my ability. That means taking care of my instrument so I can sing and carry the story of the song with ease, so I can connect with the audience. It also means not abusing my voice. Doing warm-ups and all the disciplines singers have to do to keep in good form. Secondarily, if I expected the other musicians to bring their best, I had better bring mine! All the great vocalists I admire have full command of their instruments and their bandstands. It is too difficult to get respect otherwise.
Also to keep my personal life off the bandstand (with the players). Super important for me. Now that doesn’t mean I can’t put whatever is happening with me personally INTO the music. I think that IS right to do, at least for me. But romance on the bandstand/within the band is trouble — it always has been for me so I had to quit that practice and it has served me well!
In terms of songwriting advice, the best advice I have gotten is to keep writing, writing, writing and then edit, edit, edit! Asking myself how can I say it truthfully with fewer words? That is easier said than done for me. Sometimes it’s real hard work but always worth it!
What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?
I always do vocal warm-ups — 15 to 20 minutes with a recording of my vocal coach and steam for my voice. Super helpful. It allows me the flexibility I need with my instrument. I will eat high-protein food one to two hours before having to sing. It’s pretty much like a holy time for me. I just stop all the “outside world” distractions and B.S. and focus on the music. It’s wonderful and sets me up for the right kind of focus before singing. I also cut off the phone calls/texts/emails during that time for basically the same reason. “Don’t bother me, I’m singing!!”
What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?
I always struggle with songwriting. Maybe it’s part of the ritual for me. I don’t know… But when my first marriage ended, it was a pretty brutal time, understandably. Gary Nicholson, who is a good friend, told me, “You’re gonna get some good songs outta this…” “Ugh,” I thought, but he was right! Writing the songs for my 2014 release, Original, was hard, particularly the song “When You Were My King.” I was not yet divorced but in that purgatory state of separation-knowing-its-dead-but-not-done-yet. I suppose because the song articulates that very moment of the cut, when it is undeniably clear the marriage is over and time actually stands still. You see all of it. The love. The regrets. The wishes and the sorrow. You can’t take any of it back. That song is a Polaroid of that brutal, poignant moment. I am wildly grateful for my co-writers Andrew Lowden, Lauren Bliss and Dave Darling, for their delicate touch with me during such a difficult time — which allowed that time to also be wildly creative, and Original was born!
How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?
I don’t really see it as hiding. I think of it more as how to get the story across. I want to be sure to get the meat of the story across when writing — right? SO is that best articulated as ”you” or “me”…? That’s all. At the end of the day, it’s all me anyway if I am writing on it, or singing someone else’s songs trying to bring myself to the story. I do think of it as becoming the character in the song or the storyteller, if you will. But if I am covering someone else’s material, I am doing so because I deeply connect with the tale being told, I mean it’s personal to me. If it’s not, I don’t have the first desire to sing it because I think the real job is about connection. For that to happen, it has to be real or the audience can tell, that is my experience.
Blues musician Cristina Vane has lived many lives. She grew up in Europe listening to an eclectic mix of emo, pop, and rock. She came to the U.S. to study comparative literature at Princeton before moving to Los Angeles to pursue her songwriting career. Determined to get her music out there on her own terms, Cristina embarked on a life-changing solo tour that took her across the United States. She slept in her tent, took in the majesty of the National Parks, and learned more about American culture than most Americans learn in a lifetime.
Vane’s new album, Make Myself Me Again, is a sonic homecoming that showcases her remarkable talents as a guitarist, songwriter, and vocalist. Ever a student of the blues, Cristina pays homage to her forebears while telling her own stories with vulnerability. Some of the highlights of our conversation include central New Jersey deli memories, tour stories, Cristina’s approach to finding the perfect guitar tone, and a roundabout journey to identity.
Artist:Charlie Musselwhite Hometown: Memphis, Tennessee Song: “Rank Strangers” Album:Mississippi Son Release Date: June 3, 2022 Label: Alligator Records
In Their Words: “As a child growing up in Memphis, I was first attracted to the field holler blues I heard along Cypress Creek in my neighborhood. A few years later led me to the country blues players I heard on guitar in my neighborhood, in downtown Memphis and on Beale Street. And I haven’t stopped being attracted to this style of guitar some call country blues. When I was 13 my dad gave me his old Supertone guitar. I was already fooling around with playing blues on harmonica, but I loved the sound of acoustic blues guitar, too. I clearly remember sitting in my bedroom in my mom’s house and making an E chord on that guitar and then putting my little finger down to turn that E chord into an E7 chord. And when I played that chord with the blue note added and heard that for the first time, something inside me went ‘ahhhhhhhhhhh….’ That ol’ E7 chord grabbed me and I knew I had to have more of THAT!! …
“Besides blues, I’ve always been a fan of all music that seems to me to be ‘from the heart.’ For this reason I’ve long been a fan of The Stanley Brothers. Their version of ‘Rank Strangers’ resonated with me so much I felt like I had to play it for myself. I love the lyrics. I’ve Blues’d it up for y’all.” — Charlie Musselwhite (from the liner notes of Mississippi Son)
Artist:Kenny Neal Hometown: Baton Rouge, Louisiana Song: “Mount Up on the Wings of the King” Album:Straight From the Heart Release Date: May 20, 2022 Label: Ruf Records
In Their Words: “It was a great pleasure to have recorded with a very talented young man that is a couple of generations under me. Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram is playing the real blues. It’s in his heart and soul and he’s also the future of the blues. When Eric Harper came to me with this idea, I listened to the lyrics but didn’t feel like this was a song I should do. So I suggested he look for someone younger. That’s when Kingfish’s name came up. We thought about it for a day or two, and decided I’d like to change the lyrics on the song so Kingfish and I could do it together. We both thought that was a great idea.
“The vibes were so perfect being in Memphis at the great Willie Mitchell’s studio and recording with his son, Boo Mitchell. I brought the tracks to Memphis from my studio, Brookstown Recording Studio in Baton Rouge. Boo Mitchell and I have a lot in common; we both come from a musical family. And when I was recording there I felt this energy from all the great people that have recorded there and the one that sticks out in my mind is Mr. Al Green. “Love and Happiness.” Couldn’t get any better than that.
“Just to sit down and have conversations with Kingfish, I was having déjà vu. Because I was doing the same thing at his age, asking questions from older blues musicians like Muddy Waters, Big Mama Thornton, Bo Diddley, Junior Wells, and John Lee Hooker. … I was also curious at that age about the blues. We just had a wonderful time talking. I had recorded the tracks to the song a few months earlier not knowing what I was going to do with it. I just had it in the can and it fell right in place with the ‘Mount Up on the Wings of the King’ lyrics. It was a piece of cake doing the whole project. Everything ran real smooth. No more than two takes on vocals and guitar, and in some cases, only one take. You can just feel it when it’s right, so if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. This documentary will be a big part of history for generations to come; it’s called passing the torch.”
This week on the show, we talk to a startling new talent placing a gut-punch into the folk and blues scene, the Milwaukee-raised and now Austin-based singer-songwriter Buffalo Nichols.
Growing up learning on his sister’s dreadnought guitar and then traveling widely through West Africa after high school drinking up the sounds of the kora and percussion players in Senegal, Carl Nichols began finding his voice and playing style in the haunting open and minor tunings first heard from bluesmen like Skip James, who he covers in his remarkable self-titled debut collection. Buffalo Nichols, which came in 2021, is a stark departure from what Carl would call the cheery “opinionless beer commercial blues” that has come to dominate the genre. Nichols’ work is often sparse and direct – just a man with his guitar and a microphone. The stories told in standout songs like “Another Man” and “Living Hell” don’t flinch from comparing how the experience of his elders a hundred years ago in the South may not look much different from men like George Floyd dying on that Minneapolis pavement. Is there catharsis or hope in the songs? Are they a call to action? Maybe that’s up to us to decide.
Carl will admit that it can be tricky trying play his songs like the searing album opener “Lost And Lonesome” in loud bars where people may just want to have a good time and not dive into the backroad history of racial injustice and institutionalized police violence. Thankfully his writing doesn’t hide behind niceties and the recordings aren’t veiled by sonic artifice – Nichols speaks directly to the isolation and danger of being a young Black man in America, and trying to navigate the unease of bringing his stories to an often mostly white Americana-adjacent audience. Even more upbeat numbers like “Back On Top” call to mind the ominous juke-joint growl of John Lee Hooker, bringing us into dimly lit scenes where even late-night pleasure may have its next-morning consequences.
If there’s one thing we learned during this taping, it’s that Carl doesn’t want to just “write songs to make people feel good” – but he does want to tell stories that make the isolated and lost feel less so. Maybe that is the most important function of music truly steeped in the blues tradition: the ability to transform pain into progress. The messages may not be what people always want to hear, but the groundswell rising behind Carl’s stark timeless tales is indeed growing. With recent appearances on Late Night With Stephen Colbert, NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts and big time dates like Lollapalooza on the books for the summer, folks will be hearing a lot more from Buffalo Nichols.
Ry Cooder is quick to put something to rest as he talks by phone from his home in the hills above Pasadena, California.
Yes, he and Taj Mahal went a full 54 years between recording projects together — from Cooder playing on Mahal’s 1968 solo debut, which grew from them co-fronting the band Rising Sons, to right now for the duo album Get on Board: The Songs of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. The thing is, in the decades that harmonica master Sonny Terry and Piedmont blues virtuoso Brownie McGhee worked regularly together, from 1939 to the early 1980s, they were often at odds, sometimes not even speaking to each other off stage.
But no, there were no rifts between Cooder and Mahal, no disputes, no bad feelings that kept them apart.
“Nothing like that!” Cooder insists. “No, no, no!”
The time between projects?
“Musicians, you know,” Cooder says. “He travels around all the time.”
Yet, in other regards…
“It’s funny,” says Mahal, on a separate call between tour stops, “because we’ve actually become the men that we admired. We’re the new version of it, you know? So, it’s like full circle. It’s a wonderful thing to have really accomplished that, to be in a life in music.”
The way Cooder and Mahal have become the men they admired, presumably, is in the role of elder statesmen keeping traditions alive. They are honoring and, in highly personalized ways, refreshing the music with deep ties to past generations and cultures. That full circle — global circumnavigations, really — has seen them explore a wealth of music and cultures, from Cooder’s key role in Cuban group Buena Vista Social Club projects, to Mahal’s drawing on the Afro-Caribbean roots of his musician/arranger father. Their individual efforts include collaborations with musicians from Africa and India, just for starters. But with this album they each go back to where the sparks for all that first happened.
For Cooder, it started with the first Terry/McGhee collaborative recording, also called Get on Board, a key release in the essential catalog Mo Asch created on his Folkways label. In fact, the new tribute album not only uses the title but has cover art that is an homage as well. The full title of that 1953 album was the now archaic Get on Board: Negro Folksongs by the Folkmasters.
Sonny Terry had come to some mainstream recognition as part of the original cast of Finian’s Rainbow on Broadway in the late 1940s, and as a pair he and Brownie McGhee were featured in the Broadway productions of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Langston Hughes’ Simply Heaven. They were also championed by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Harry Belafonte, among other prominent supporters. But for young Cooder, this record was a discovery marked by its vibrant energy, with Terry and McGhee joined by one Coyal McMahan on vocals and percussion.
“It’s a great record,” Cooder says. “You’ve got the mysterious Coyal McMahan on bass voice, sort of a church bass, and maracas. They should have kept him on. I don’t know why they didn’t. He added a whole other quality to it. I don’t know who he was and nobody knows at this point.”
The new album features three of the eight songs on the Terry/McGhee set — “Midnight Special,” “Pick a Bale of Cotton” and “I Shall Not Be Moved.” Its remaining songs are part of the icons’ other recording and live repertoire, from the reverent “What a Beautiful City” to the carousing “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” to the double-entendre “Deep Sea Diver” to the down-and-out “Pawn Shop Blues.”
Adding their own touches to the songs, Cooder and Mahal recorded mostly live in the living room of Cooder’s son, Joachim, who also played various percussion instruments and bass, sort of filling the McMahan role (and more). They didn’t seek to recreate the originals. What they did do, was have fun.
“That was the intent,” Cooder says. “I mean, it seemed to me that we could pull it off and keep that feeling that those guys had back then. I don’t want to say ‘jolly,’ but foot-tapping, nice music. They had gone for a white audience, I’m pretty sure, at that point anyway. So, you couldn’t very well play very dark music at white people in those days. They wouldn’t know what you were talking about, what it was for. By the time they started recording together, I guess, black popular music had changed radically.”
Cooder is conscious of the radical changes since then in music and culture, in particular noting “Pick a Bale of Cotton.”
“They’re still really good songs,” he says. “And I think people will like hearing them as much now as they liked hearing them back when Brownie and Sonny did them. It’s a different time now. Of course everybody’s consciousness is totally different. I mean, everything is different.”
That’s part of the point, not to let the music that inspired them get lost.
“It just feels like old times,” Cooder says. “I have those records from when I was a little kid, so I can dig it. I remember how it used to make me feel listening to the record, how tremendous it was, how exciting it was.”
The circle for Mahal goes back to the early 1960s, when he was a student at the University of Massachusetts.
“There was a whole network for folk music and blues and bluegrass and country and all that old-time stuff in and around the Northeast sector,” he says. “I was like 19, 20 years old. And those guys were coming through and playing at local coffee houses. You could get to see them quite a bit. And I thought they were just an incredible powerhouse duo.”
A couple of years later, Mahal, who had started playing on the folk circuit himself, encountered a guitarist with a great feel for blues.
“I said, ‘Well, where the heck did you learn how to play like that?’” Mahal remembers. “And he said, ‘Well, you know, I took some lessons from this guy out in California named Ry. I said, ‘Do you think that guy might like to be in a band?’ And he said, ‘Well, he’s only 17 years old.’ I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ And I said, ‘I guess I have to go to California.’”
And he did. When they connected, a love for Terry and McGhee was one of their bonds. Cooder, too, had seen the duo play a few times by then, the first coming when they played at the opening night of the Ash Grove, a Hollywood club that would become the center of the California folk and blues scene.
“My mother took me down there,” Cooder says. “I was 13 or so. I sat there and watched them. My gosh! It was something to see the whole thing come to life. You know, it was a tremendous impression when you’re young like that.”
And when they’re not-so-young. (Cooder just turned 75 and Mahal will be 80 in May.) They first chatted about teaming for a project after Cooder joined Mahal at the 2014 Americana Music Honors & Awards at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium on Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues,” a staple in the Rising Sons repertoire and a standout on Mahal’s 1968 album. That latter version, which featured Jesse Ed Davis on electric slide guitar, is reputedly the recording on which the Allman Brothers’ rendition was modeled.
When Cooder suggested an album honoring Terry and McGhee, Mahal was, well, on board. “Those guys are foundational titans,” Mahal says. “Here’s a guitarist and harmonica player that spanned 40 years, at least.”
But these musicians are also largely forgotten, which adds a sense of mission to this project, to rekindle interest in the guys whose recordings and concerts meant so much to them.
“If you stood on a corner and did an exit poll and talked to a million people, none of them would know who they are,” Cooder says. “They’ve been completely overlooked. I don’t know anybody that’s ever heard of them or remembers who the hell they were, except for musicians who have made it a point to keep certain things in mind. It’s like bluegrass. If you keep Bill Monroe or Reno & Smiley in mind, it’s that kind of thing. That’s how you live, and that’s how you evoke things, this memory that you have of these records.”
Artist:Larry McCray Hometown: Saginaw, Michigan Song: “Down to the Bottom” (feat. Warren Haynes) Album:Blues Without You (produced by Joe Bonamassa and Josh Smith) Release Date: March 25, 2022 Label: KTBA Records
In Their Words: “Albert King, Albert Collins and B.B. King really had the most influence on me because, in my mind, they were the greatest of their generation at playing the blues. And it took them their whole careers to achieve minor milestones in the business. So, if it took the greatest players their entire career to make it, who am I to complain about having to walk in their footsteps? I feel totally reborn, with a whole new career, and I’m optimistic about what the future holds. But truthfully speaking, sometimes I do wish it would have happened 30 years ago. I would have been much more qualified for the job at that age than at 62.
“I met Joe when he was in his early 20s, and I met Josh when he was about 13 out on the road touring. My first impression of both is that they would do exactly what they did by becoming the alpha figures in the pack among all the other guitar players out there. I never thought that either one of them was impressed with anything that I played because I am old school. I was really surprised when I found out that they wanted to work with me. It was very difficult at times — sometimes I even felt very self-conscious having to play before someone I respected to this level musically. But it felt good to be working with old friends that I knew and whose opinions I valued and trusted so much.” — Larry McCray
Photo Credit: Arnie Goodman
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