Tag: Buffalo Nichols

The Subtle Danger of Guitarist Sunny War and ‘Armageddon in a Summer Dress’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

In 2022, punk-blues innovator Sunny War moved into her late father’s house in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and began making repairs. There was no heat that first winter and the house needed a full electrical rewiring. By winter 2023, she had the money to heat the place, but as the temperature rose each night, Sunny felt a strange impulse to patrol the house in the dark, swinging her grandfather’s machete at the ghosts inhabiting the top floor.

At the start of our Zoom call interview in January, Sunny recounts the bizarre magical realism of the weeks she spent living with an undiscovered gas leak. I ask enough follow-up questions to be reassured that my friend is not still being fumigated in her own home before I allow myself to belly laugh. “I have to fix everything,” she sighs.

Sunny goes on to explain that by the time the city discovered and fixed the problem, the mood had already been set for her forthcoming album, Armageddon in a Summer Dress. I would describe the results as psychedelic and subtly dangerous.

My friend Sunny can be a little hard to read, a fact which she mentions at one point during our call. We first met at Americanafest in 2019. It was my second year traveling from New York to Tennessee for the annual roots music conference and festival. That summer I had made up my mind to bring Black artists together during the festival for our own unofficial day party. I booked Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge, cross-referenced names on the festival poster with Google image searches, and sent out a few invitations. Sunny agreed to perform, as did Tré Burt and Milwaukee folk duo Nickel & Rose (featuring Carl Nichols, the artist soon to become Buffalo Nichols). One after another we played our songs then stepped out onto the Madison, Tennessee, porch, most of us meeting for the first time. It was the greatest number of Black people I had ever been around in a professional space since releasing my debut album in 2017.

It was clear to me even then that Sunny was a star. Carl, Tré, and I were on ascendant career arcs of our own, but Sunny was out ahead somehow. She was already well known in songwriter circles for her inimitable movements on the guitar and for her punk rock roots, but it was the intensity of her stage presence that stood out to me most on that first meeting. I watched her suck in the air and light around her as she sang, quietly commanding the audience’s attention. Songs like “Drugs Are Bad” and “Shell” became spells when sung in War’s almost-effortless, warmly breathy style. She appeared peaceful in her own creative world amidst the restless energy of the festival.

2019 was also the year that Sunny founded the downtown Los Angeles chapter of Food Not Bombs, a national network of community groups addressing hunger. In interviews about the movement she was candid about having experienced houselessness herself and how she noticed the disproportionate presence of veterans on the street. She organized weekly meetups in which volunteers made meals and shared them, potluck-style, with their unhoused neighbors on skid row. When COVID hit they switched to burritos and sack lunches. On “Deployed and Destroyed,” one of the outstanding tracks from Sunny’s 2021 album, Simple Syrup, she invites her listener to spend three minutes and 54 seconds in the shoes of a 26-year-old unhoused veteran experiencing PTSD. When I listen to her sing “I still love you/ We’re still friends” I feel like I am sitting beside her. This is what Aristotle and contemporary Marxists call “praxis.”

Sunny is fearless on stage. Six years into our friendship I remain awed by the way in which she commands attention without ever seeming contained by it. Her presence has a kinetic power that you can more easily get lost in than describe. We met up in Chicago on a winter night in early 2023 when Sunny was on tour and I was in between tours. Both of us were depressed, I think. Wide, wet snowflakes were beginning to fall outside while we caught up over drinks. We bribed the DJ into letting us jump the line for karaoke and then launched into a formally unconventional performance of Destiny’s Child’s “Jumpin’ Jumpin’.” The mostly-white crowd of beer-drinking twenty-somethings were amused at first and then bored. I gave up. Sunny stayed the course, winning the audience over with mischief in her eyes.

Later that year Sunny released Anarchist Gospel on New West Records to well-deserved, unanimous acclaim. The album featured Americana heavy hitters Allison Russell, Dave Rawlings, and Chris Pierce. She also toured with Mitski, broadening her fandom to include more indie listeners. I cheered my friend from afar, mostly on Instagram, as her star continued to rise.

When I ask about her memories of that album cycle, Sunny enthusiastically recalls the younger audiences who discovered her music. She expresses gratitude that a 14-year-old at a Mitski concert, someone who “actually is into music for the first time in their life, in the way that you are when you hate your parents and all you have is music” would become a fan. A lot of journalists described her as an “emerging” artist or a songwriter soon to be one of the most beloved in Americana. But for those of us on the fringes of the format, Sunny had been the best around for a minute and the momentum of her career spoke for itself.

Sunny’s latest album, Armageddon In A Summer Dress, comes out on February 21. I ask her to describe the new record in her own words. “Silly,” she responds. I ask if there is a genre descriptor for her music in general. She says, “No.”  I am going to follow the artist’s lead and not do her album the disservice of describing it too much. I will say that Armageddon In A Summer Dress is her seventh full-length effort and contains her most inspired vocal performances yet – and some of her finest lyrics.

There is a haze hovering in the top layers of some of these tunes. The winding guitar melodies often weave themselves into the vocal lines, but sometimes they go their own way. I ask her if audiences are reacting to the Black anarchist content of her songs differently than they did the last time she released a folk album with transparently leftist politics. “I don’t feel like people pay that much attention to my lyrics,” she responds. Her primary musical concern, she reflects, is playing the guitar. And in any case, the best way to metabolize these songs is by listening to them repeatedly.

Sunny, Carl, Tré, and I have remained loosely intertwined in the years since that first Americana kickback. We have toured together. We run into each other at festivals and in thrift shops. Tré and Sunny were roommates for a time and in the summertime can be seen riding bikes like cousins in Sunny’s recent music video for “Scornful Heart.” I interview my friends periodically.

We all continue to embody aspects of the blues tradition while resisting categorization. Sunny continues moving patiently through her own cycles of living, transforming, creating in darkness, and then telling the story. She leaps unexpectedly from now to the future and then doubles back to sample tradition, inviting you to keep up. Her lyrics are disarmingly empathetic. Like all great artists, Sunny moves in her own time, less concerned with debating the canon than she is with creating the future. She looks back on the nights she hunted ghosts with her grandfather’s machete joking, “That wasn’t me!”

There is great integrity in Sunny’s storytelling, which means that no matter how long it has been since we last spoke, she will catch me up quickly when we meet again. I ask her who the narrator of “No One Calls Me Baby” is, trying to signal that I am a feminist who recognizes women writers as authors beyond the world of autobiography. But she quickly tells me that the narrator is her and fills me in on the past few months of her life. She has been single for over a year, and has been learning to enjoy the alone time in a house she owns. We commiserate about being single, but we are both leaned back by this point, looking down on loneliness together. “No one calls me baby anymore/ I hold my own hand now…”

One of my favorite things about Sunny is that whether she’s playing a dive bar or a sold-out theater, everyone walks away dazzled. She is just as warm and entertaining sitting across from you in her home. She accompanies herself.

Find more Sunny War Artist of the Month coverage here.

Photo Credit: Joshua Black Wilkins

Three Chords and… Authenticity?

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

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In country and roots music, authenticity is treated like the most valuable currency of all. Maybe that’s because the genre has always been caught between the fiction that this music is frozen in amber and the reality that it has always borrowed liberally from current musical trends in order to have commercial value. The earliest popular country music was an amalgamation of regional music from rural white artists, music stolen wholesale from Black and Indigenous artists, and plenty of nods to prevailing pop (i.e., urban or non-rural) trends – looking back at the places young laborers and listeners that had been drawn to cities came from, and the exciting present and future they found themselves in once they arrived.

Can anyone or anything truly be considered “authentic” in America, a country whose identity is built on masking fundamental historical truths?

While artists like Zach Bryan are hailed for their “authenticity,” the vast majority of the current class of mainstream country and Americana artists grew up in suburbs, in postmodern America, in the internet age, and are graduates of major colleges – like Nashville’s Belmont University or Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Their experiences are also authentic, of course, to each individual artist – just as Bryan’s initial motel room demos are electrifying for the soul he brought to them. But these origins bring up questions around how country and Americana construct “authentic” narratives, especially to market roots music.

Still, it’s noticeable that certain types of creators are automatically considered “authentic” country artists – and they often match the complexion of the first generations of country singers, when “race records” and “hillbilly music” were originally split and whose most famous individuals wore cowboy cosplay on stage.

We want to tip you off to some real Good Country music: Music that portrays life in its complexity and a deep appreciation for one’s roots, whether they lie in the Bronx, rural Arkansas, or anywhere else on this rich blue marble we live on. Because authenticity in country doesn’t necessarily equate to rurality, to back roads and red dirt and farm trucks; real country music is real not because it’s built to be “authentic,” but because it’s honest.

Hurray For the Riff Raff

Hurray For the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra is from a little bit of everywhere, but the Bronx is where they grew up and the punk houses of the Lower East Side raised them. Between their jazz artist father and picking up a guitar as they rode the rails, Segarra’s approach to folk music began with a traditional bent and has since exhaled into an expansive approach, as with their astonishing 2022 album Life on Earth. Their upcoming album The Past Is Still Alive finds Segarra focusing more on twang, but their philosophical core has always remained the same: breathing life into unspoken pain and empowering people that society would like us to forget.

Amythyst Kiah

Amythyst Kiah’s music is a powerful force. Inspired by the blues and old time music, Kiah uses her art to prop the furnace doors open to make way for blasts of grief and abandonment. Kiah grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee and picked up the guitar while attending an arts magnet school. She fell in love with old time music at East Tennessee State University and never looked back.

I first saw Kiah in 2016 at Karen Pittelman’s Queer Country Quarterly, her first show in NYC. Karen introduced her by remarking, “trust me, she’s going to be famous.” When Kiah belted her powerful alto, we all knew we were in the midst of greatness. Kiah’s most recent work on Wary + Strange (2021) takes us in a more experimental direction, but her exploration of alienation – like a toy in her hands – informs her music no matter what she’s plugging into her pedalboard. Kiah’s “Black Myself,” originally recorded with supergroup Our Native Daughters, fiercely proclaims her love for herself and her ancestors.

Willi Carlisle

Willi Carlisle has seen a thing or two in his travels across the lower 48. Carlisle cut his teeth musically in DIY and punk rock, but his search for queer role models and love for poetry drew him to New York City. With disgust for the elitism of the poetry scene there – and their mockery of his roots in the Midwest – Carlisle went searching for a life of words in folk music.

Carlisle has a knack for painting complex portraits of down-and-out characters, refusing to be drawn into simple narratives of left and right, red and blue. His stunning “When the Pills Wear Off” from the upcoming Critterland demonstrates Carlisle’s ability to turn the personal into the political – and back into the personal again. This is not the blind invective of JD Vance, but the realization that only empathy can build bridges between people who think they have nothing in common.

(Editor’s Note: Willi Carlisle is BGS’s February 2024 Artist of the Month.)

ISMAY

ISMAY (née Avery Hellman) has spent their whole life around folk and bluegrass music – their grandfather is one of the founders of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival. As a contestant on Apple TV+’s short-lived My Kind of Country competition series, ISMAY is very much a representative of roots music’s vanguard. With their sparse arrangements and winsome vocals, ISMAY’s music feels like deconstructed folk music. They understand the core elements of the sound thanks to a lifetime immersed in it, and they create something wholly unique from its constituent parts, as we hear on “Point Reyes.” There, ISMAY’s contemplative vocals are orbited by a gauzy cloud of pedal steel and gentle finger-picking. ISMAY’s upcoming album Desert Pavement speaks to their sense of place: all of their music is enamored by nature. “Golden Palomino” illustrates ISMAY’s love for their rural California upbringing, guiding us to realize how much our natural and inner worlds inform each other.

Buffalo Nichols

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more devastating songwriter or guitar player than Buffalo Nichols. Nichols, like many teenagers before him, picked up a guitar and played his way through the hip-hop and hardcore scenes in his Milwaukee hometown. He found himself drawn to blues music as he began to dig into his mother’s collection and connect with Cream City’s West African community. Nichols and musical partner Joanna Rose made a mark on the Americana scene with their duo Nickel and Rose, shining a harsh light on the ignorance on full display in the community’s supposedly liberal refuge on the song “Americana.”

With his most recent solo album The Fatalist, Nichols brings all of his experience to bear on a remarkable collection of songs that combine elements of all of his musical loves. On his rendition of the classic “You’re Gonna Need Somebody On Your Bond,” Nichols’ guitar becomes an extension of his own body with lightning-fast licks. Buttressed by electronic drum samples and a haze of synths, Nichols shows that music is at its most vital when it is rooted in the past and embraces the future.

Ally Free

Ally Free is one to keep your eye on in 2024. They write in their bio that they see music as the universal language that can bring people together, and that’s clear on their versatile 2019 album Rise. From the nu metal-inspired chugging of “Fool’s Gold” to the craftsman’s approach to “Fast Train,” Free isn’t embarrassed to draw from any inspiration to make a damn good song. Free’s rich alto gives their music depth: from their performances, it’s clear that this is someone who has lived a lot of life. Free is one of the newest members of the Black Opry and has taken a few steps out of their Huntsville, AL hometown to playing more shows around Nashville. Here’s hoping that means the rest of us get to hear more from this remarkable performer soon.

William Prince

William Prince’s voice carries a warm, earthy timbre that is wholly unique. Prince grew up on Peguis First Nation (in what is now Canada) and is well-versed in the travails of people living under oppression. But that experience is translated into patience and warmth, a gentle perseverance that can only come from a keen observer. Prince’s stark breakout album Reliever (2020) has given way to the warm Stand in the Joy (2023), which details the travails and victories we most often find in daily life. “Tanqueray” is a gorgeous example of Prince’s dynamic, a story of two improbable lovers finally coming together to make it work.

Sabine McCalla

Sabine McCalla is readying for a breakout 2024. McCalla’s music is steeped in the sounds of New Orleans, which she has made her home. McCalla has performed with others, but her performance on Offbeat Magazine’s OnBeat Session from September 2023 shows us she’s ready to step out on her own. For now, we have her 2018 EP Folk, which sports arresting songs that feel timeless. Maybe it’s the gentle groove in her music that feels like the stately flow of the Mississippi River – discordant with the immediacy of her lyrics that protest violence and oppression, as demonstrated by “I Went to the Levee.”

Margo Cilker

Look – Margo Cilker is literally a cowboy, okay?? Isn’t that what you imagine when someone mentions “country music” and “authenticity” in the same breath? But Cilker’s music glorifies a life of searching, not a mythologized America of white picket fences, so you can also picture the quintessential Nashville executive saying, “We like cowboys, but no, not like that.”

Cilker’s latest album, critical darling Valley of Heart’s Delight, is nostalgic for her family orchard in California’s Santa Clara Valley – but not without a heavy dose of reality. “Mother Told Her Mother Told Me” caution the listener not to become too attached to any one place – and the cost of leaving it behind. Cilker’s impassioned “With The Middle” cuts to the core of her work – a weighing of the contrasts between pleasure and pain and yearning to find common ground between the two.

Brittany Howard

Brittany Howard transcends pretty much everything – except the act of exploration with wild abandon. Having gained notoriety as the lead singer of the retro soul band the Alabama Shakes, Howard seemingly will not rest until she’s drawn with every musical crayon in the box. In her recent interview with NPR’s Jewly Hight, Howard cracks that she grew up in a trailer and would still be perfectly content to be working the land somewhere. But her music has led her elsewhere, perhaps everywhere. Howard has teased a few songs off her upcoming album, What Now, with the title track featuring hooky grooves and propulsive energy, but it’s “Red Flags” that astounds with its jarring drum loop, woozy vocals, and disorienting production that demonstrates how much mastery Howard has gained in her craft as an artist and storyteller.

Samantha Crain

Few artists in the last decade have shown the same growth and versatility as Samantha Crain. A part of the rich Tulsa music scene that has given us John Moreland, John Calvin Abney, and M Lockwood Porter, Crain follows a road all her own. Under Branch & Thorn & Tree (2015) found Crain exploring the pride and trauma of her Choctaw heritage through folk-inspired music. In 2017, Crain broke her own mold with the quirky indie-pop album You Had Me at Goodbye (2017.) Since her 2020 album, A Small Death, Crain has been playing in the spaces in between, utilizing woodwinds, pedal steel, pianos, and guitar to create a woozy soundscape as her spacious, gravelly voice helps us stay anchored in the real.

Nick Shoulders

Nick Shoulders rounds up the list with his commanding All Bad. While Shoulders’ music leans traditional sonically, it’s anything but. The Fayetteville, Arkansas singer begins his album with phaser blasts and a menacing invitation to a “conversation,” and that conversation is explicitly about all the “country” stylings that deserve to be thrown in the trash heap – and the many, many qualities we need to hold on to and claim for ourselves: grit, honesty, love, and togetherness. “Won’t Fence Us In” and “Appreciate’cha” speak to this theme most clearly, but the way Shoulders approaches the classic country canon with loving irreverence reminds us that we never have to be weighed down by tradition.

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Photo Credit: Margo Cilker by Jen Borst.

Buffalo Nichols Champions Blues in the 21st Century

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Singer-songwriter and instrumentalist Carl “Buffalo” Nichols loves and treasures the blues, but he acknowledges that his vision of what the music can and should do differs greatly from that of many performers he’s met in the field. Indeed, Nichols, whose brilliant new LP, The Fatalist – his second for Fat Possum, which dropped September 15 – doesn’t mince words when he discusses the issues he faces and the things he wants to see change in regards to the music, as well as attitudes held by many in positions of authority in regards to its promotion and distribution. 

“I tell folks I’m a songwriter initially, because when you say you’re a blues musician, then there’s a whole bunch of stereotyped impressions that you’ve got to get beyond,” Nichols said during a lengthy recent phone interview with BGS. “There was a period there a couple of years ago, right after George Floyd, where for a time there was this sense, or at least it was being said, that the blues community needed to change, we needed to diversify, to become more relevant and reflective of things happening in America. But now that seems to have passed, and we’re back to the same old thing. There’s too much conservatism among the older crowd, who often are in control of the blues radio stations and who are responsible for why the music isn’t more widely heard and accepted. And there’s too many artists just putting the same stuff out there.”

Nichols is among a growing number of African American artists anxious to smash idiomatic barriers regarding not just blues, but American music, period. He is a master at carefully paying attention to traditional values like keen storytelling, soulful delivery and expressive lyrics, while also utilizing contemporary elements and devices. The Fatalist includes a stunning cover of Blind Willie Johnson’s majestic “You’re Gonna Need Somebody On Your Bond.” The LP’s first single, Nichols’ robust baritone soars through the message of salvation with vigor, driving home both its urgent intensity and evocative theme. However, Nichols also says the song epitomizes another part of the dilemma he faces regarding broadening the blues’ appeal.

“That one kind of gets caught in a double trap,” Nichols continued. “On the one hand, you’ve got religious lyrics, then on the other you’ve got the blues sensibility. So, while the traditionalists who know Blind Willie Johnson love it, it has a hard time getting past the gatekeepers, because it also has some contemporary production touches. That’s kind of the double struggle you face. You’ve got the white traditionalist and conservative types who are dominating the blues marketplace, then when you’re trying to reach the Black audience, you’ve got what they call the ‘urban contemporary market.’ Because it’s blues they won’t play it.”

Still, Nichols is making some headway on the scene, both critically and in terms of gaining followers. He says he’s seeing a lot more young folks in his audience, as well as more Black fans. Though his appeal and notoriety don’t yet match that of a Christone “Kingfish” Ingram or a Shemekia Copeland, Nichols is steadily gaining more attention and acclaim. He opened several dates last year for Valerie June, another marvelous Black performer whose music incorporates classic and current sounds. He stands prominently alongside other rising blues stars like Gary Clark Jr., Marquise Knox and Eric Gales. The Fatalist reflects the vision and scope of a 30-something performer whose background includes at various times being in a grindcore band (Concrete Horizon), and playing folk and Americana, while also being part of a duo in Milwaukee (Nickel & Rose) with bassist Johanna Rose. His disenchantment with an Americana scene he considered overwhelmingly white and less than encouraging to his artistic vision led him to Fat Possum.

“I really felt it was important at this stage to have a label behind me,” Nichols said in response to a question about why he chose to sign with Fat Possum. “While it’s not the type of thing where we’re sitting down and trying to pick songs for radio, it is a thing where they’ve been very supportive and encouraging. They’ve provided me a place and a forum for what I want to do, and they appreciate my vision and are doing all they can to help me.” 

The Mississippi-based label was once widely celebrated for its championing of hill country blues greats R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, but in recent years had drifted far away from that model. Buffalo Nichols, his debut release, was the company’s first blues outing in two decades. It set the stage for The Fatalist, whose eight songs reveal a strong songwriting focus Nichols says is indicative of both personal growth and his desire to use the blues form to do more than rip through scales and display great individual musicianship. “I’ve been a guitarist for 20 years, but it’s really only been the last 10 that I think I’ve really grown as a songwriter,” he continued. “Being able to express myself is a challenge, and using the blues to do it is what drives me.”

There’s no question that The Fatalist doesn’t necessarily adhere to the standard blues formula, and that’s setting aside the presence of drum machine tracks and enhanced sonic quality. Its song sequencing and overall lyrical flow are edgy and compelling.

Standout cuts like “Love Is All” or “The Difference” offer contrasting views of a relationship. The former is optimism grounded in the wisdom of admitting that even good guys can go astray, while the latter spotlights a breakup that doesn’t so much place blame as document the painful end of something that was once glorious. There’s also the hard-hitting opening number “Cold Black Stare,” and the triumphant finale, “This Moment,” that features special guest vocalist Samantha Rose. The album has a sonic clarity and power that puts it in a league with anything done at a state-of-the-art studio in Nashville, LA, or New York, yet it was recorded in Nichols’ home – and he produced it. The decision to cut it there is also part of a larger career change that Nichols made last year, when he moved back to Milwaukee after spending years in Austin.

“In some ways it’s harder for me now being back home,” Nichols said. “But in other ways it’s good, because now I have to do it myself. I don’t have the machinery or the apparatus or the surroundings that I would have in Nashville or Austin or LA. It’s like it was when I was growing up. I’m being responsible for my own music now, and that’s a good thing creatively, even if from a business aspect sometimes there’s a struggle.” 

Buffalo Nichols is now in the midst of an extensive tour, with the American portion running through mid-December, then a European leg beginning in early January and continuing through mid-February (for now). While being adamant about not setting goals, Nichols says he definitely has things he wants to accomplish career-wise.

“For me, I always want to look ahead, I want to progress as a songwriter and a guitarist,” Nichols concluded. “I don’t ever want to make the same music over and over. I don’t want to be predictable. I want to contribute something original, something that when I’m gone people will look back and say that this was something fresh and inventive that Buffalo Nichols made.”

Photo Credit: Samer Ghani

Basic Folk: Buffalo Nichols

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

Milwaukee singer-songwriter Buffalo Nichols returns to Basic Folk today to talk about his new album, The Fatalist, out this September from Fat Possum Records. We picked up where Nichols’ debut album left off, traveling the world hot on the heels of the blues. Following a profound tradition can be just as frustrating as it is romantic. In his years on the road promoting his self-titled debut album, Carl aka Buffalo has witnessed how the blues can be a home base for listeners’ nostalgic, back-in-the-good-old days, artistically stagnant, patriarchal tendencies. He wants none of it. The Fatalist is an offering to the gods of change, of self-awareness, of integrity.

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One of the major achievements of this collection of eight songs is the seemingly effortless sonic collage that comes second nature to hip hop but is less discussed in roots and Americana. From a Charley Patton sample to “Ali Farka” Touré-influenced fingerpicking to tasty 808s to contemporary songwriting that wrestles with what it means to be a good man in 2023, The Fatalist tells a story about the present, while keeping the past close and eschewing sentimentality. This sense of being in conversation with storytellers of the past is a pillar of what I would call the Black Art Tradition, and it is part of what makes Buffalo Nichols one of the most exciting artists in blues music right now.

Photo Credit: Samer Ghani

The Show On The Road – Buffalo Nichols

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

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.

 

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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.

Photo Credit: Merrick Ales

From Ray Charles to Yola, These 12 Black Voices Command Our Attention

Posted on by Editor

In recognition of Black History Month, we have compiled these 12 features from the Bluegrass Situation archives to reexamine the breadth and sheer talent that Black artists are bringing to the roots music community. For additional stories, and to hear much, much more music, check out our Black Voices page on BGS.

 

Ray Charles

The musical and cultural impact of Ray Charles is extraordinary and spans the pantheon of American popular music. He was an outstanding multi-instrumentalist (though best known for piano and alto sax), vocalist, bandleader, songwriter and composer in the non-lyrical sense. His innovations include helping craft and popularize the secularization of gospel music, now otherwise known as soul, and bringing new attention and expanded audiences to country music, which was the earliest idiom he loved and played before blues, jazz, R&B, or soul.

Though his earliest material was heavily influenced by Charles Brown and Nat “King” Cole, Charles (full name Ray Charles Robinson) quickly developed a highly stylized, immediately recognizable singing and playing approach. He became an expressive, evocative vocalist, one of the finest interpretative singers of all time, and a skilled improviser as an instrumentalist, able to deliver intense and memorable melodic statements or energetic solos while heading either small combos or large bands. Read more.

Robert Finley

 

Depending on how much attention one pays to labels, singer-songwriter Robert Finley could accurately be called both a blues and soul vocalist, even though he’s also performed plenty of gospel, and has a passionate faith that is often reflected in comments about his unlikely emergence as a national figure in his 60s.

“You can’t call it anything except the hand of God a lot of what’s happened in my life,” Finley tells BGS. “For me to be recording and performing now, to have met and established a friendship with a young white guy like Dan (the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach), and to be in the studio now recording and singing these songs when that’s what I’ve always wanted to do all my life, well it’s just God’s hand in my life.” Read more.

Reggie Harris

The joy and hope evident in Reggie Harris’ 2021 release, On Solid Ground, stem from a rooted sense of perseverance and from his intentional decision to face each and every moment, in the moment, and to find hope within each. It’s why such heavy topics don’t feel gargantuan or burdensome as they make appearances and anchor songs on the album. Harris, watching the social, political, and racial reckonings that bubbled onto the sidewalks and streets of every city in America over the course of the last year, didn’t sit down or give up in the face of the unclimbable summit of translating that reckoning into song.

Instead, Harris draws upon the wisdom, insight, and hope given to him by his own elders and communities throughout On Solid Ground. In choosing to keep himself open in each moment, Harris found himself receiving inspiration, nuggets of ideas and stories, glimpses of songs and arrangements in so many of those moments, simply because he was there, with a still heart and still soul, to receive them. Read more.

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram

 

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram seemed to come out of nowhere with his 2019 Alligator Records debut, Kingfish. At 20 years old, the native of Clarksdale, Mississippi, emerged as a fully-formed guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter and was quickly hailed as a defining blues voice of his generation. Since then, he’s toured the nation, performed with acts ranging from alt-rockers Vampire Weekend to Americana star Jason Isbell to blues godfather Buddy Guy.

In the midst of all this success, just as his career was taking off amidst over a year of non-stop touring, he lost his mother, Princess Pride Ingram, a devastating blow that the young man had to overcome. All of this life experience is reflected on Ingram’s second album, 662, named after the area code for his North Mississippi home. Read more.

Amythyst Kiah

 

When Amythyst Kiah was a teenager in the suburbs of Chattanooga, Tennessee, she wanted to be “the guitar-playing version of Tori Amos.” Locked away in her room with her headphones pulled over her ears, pouring over liner notes and listening intently for every nuance in her favorite records, she found solace in the way Amos told her darkest secrets in her songs and how she turned that vulnerability into something like a superpower. It made her feel less alone, especially as a young, closeted Black girl in a largely white suburb. Tori Amos helped her survive adolescence.

Kiah didn’t grow up to become any version of her hero. Instead, she simply became herself. Her new solo album, Wary + Strange, ingeniously mixes blues and folk with alternative and indie rock, devising a vivid palette to soundtrack her own songs that tell dark secrets. It’s one of the most bracing albums of the year, grappling with matters both personal (her mother’s suicide) and public (the struggles of Black Americans). “Now, when I’m in my mid-thirties,” says Kiah, “it’s amazing to make a vulnerable record and then have people at my shows tell me that my music helped them heal, helped them get through some hard times. To have someone connect with my music is really powerful.” Read more.

Keb’ Mo’

Keb’ Mo’ enjoyed a career milestone as he received a Lifetime Achievement in Performance Award from the Americana Music Association in 2021. Presented at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the award joins a list of distinctions that include five Grammys and 14 Blues Foundation Awards. But in typically understated fashion, Mo’ (a.k.a. Kevin Moore) downplayed the latest honor during his Artist of the Month interview with the Bluegrass Situation.

“Well, for me I guess it represents the fact I’m getting old,” he said with a laugh. “But sure, you are honored whenever you get that kind of recognition from your peers. But I’ve still got a lot that I want to do and I’m still looking ahead.” A huge indication of that is his outstanding new LP, Good to Be. It is both a tribute to his background growing up in Compton, California, and a celebration of some 11 years in his current hometown, Nashville. Read more.

Buffalo Nichols

 

As the first solo blues artist signed to Fat Possum Records in 20 years, Buffalo Nichols faces high expectations. But on his self-titled debut, the musician (whose given name is Carl Nichols) more than meets them, stitching Black history and musical traditions with current events and experiences to craft the sonic equivalent of a quilt. And the story it tells is an important one.

Nichols was born in Houston and raised in Milwaukee, but when he got the urge to roam and the money to do it, he took off, immersing himself in creative scenes across Europe and West Africa. Although he’s been based in Austin since the fall of 2020, Nichols channels the Delta, North Mississippi and Chicago through his nimble fingers or resonator slide while wrapping his warm voice around words that cut to the core of oppression, and the many forms of heartbreak it causes. Read more.

Chris Pierce

 

Chris Pierce has cultivated a significant following in the Los Angeles area and beyond, usually writing soulful and emotional songs that have populated fifteen years’ worth of albums and appeared in TV shows like This Is Us. But in 2020, accompanied by little more than his 1949 Gibson J-45 (“Blondie”) or his 1973 Martin D-18 (“Doriella”), the California native recorded the album American Silence with a mission of social activism against racial disparities.

Pierce gained a love of language from his mother, an English teacher who taught at-risk youth. She introduced him to the lyrical writings of Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss, as well as essential writers like Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman. The economy of words in all of those authors is immediately evident in original compositions like “American Silence” and “It’s Been Burning for a While,” where Pierce gets his point across directly, and with power. His convictions are never more optimistically presented than in the album’s closing anthem, “Young, Black and Beautiful,” which details the experience of maturing from a cute little kid to a perceived threat. Read more.

 

Allison Russell

 

Within the songs of her new album Outside Child, Allison Russell delves deeply into the extreme trauma she experienced in her youth spent in Montreal both as a mechanism for personal relief, but also in the hopes that it might reach people with similar experiences.

“The writing process was having to delve deeply into the most painful parts of my past and childhood and history,” she says. “I experienced severe childhood abuse, sexual, physical, mental, and psychological. In many ways, I think the psychological is the toughest part to unpack and defang. I don’t know that I am ever going to be entirely free of that and the process of dealing with that. What was very beautiful about this to me is that I didn’t have to go on that fearsome journey alone. My partner J.T. [Nero] was with me every step of the way. He co-wrote many of the songs on this record with me. He scraped me up off the floor when I was in the depths of it.” Read more.

Tray Wellington

Banjo player Tray Wellington was everywhere to be found during the 2021 IBMA World of Bluegrass — performing, hosting the Momentum Awards luncheon, and playing a main stage set at the Red Hat Amphitheater. This is remarkable because if you had looked for Wellington at IBMA just a few short years ago, you might not have run into him except on the youth stage or in the halls, jamming.

Catapulted by his prior work with the talented young band Cane Mill Road, his studies at East Tennessee State University’s bluegrass program, and a stable of accomplished and connected mentors and peers, Wellington went from a newbie to a seasoned veteran faster than a global pandemic could subside — and during it. Efforts for better and more accurate representation in bluegrass have contributed to his momentum (no pun intended), but above all, his talent and his envelope-pushing approach to the five-string banjo are the root causes of his mounting and well-deserved notoriety. Read more.

Yasmin Williams

 

Guitarists spend lifetimes — often gleefully, sometimes manically, or at times frustratingly — finessing techniques, especially with their picking hand. Entire careers can be made or broken by the idiosyncrasies of one picker’s striking and sounding strings. Fingerstyle guitarist and composer Yasmin Williams has mastered myriad forms of right-hand styles, each complicated enough for multiple lifetimes’ worth of study. But she doesn’t merely alternate techniques between pieces; to a transcendentally perplexing degree she effortlessly alternates her entire picking hand approach mid-song.

On her 2021 release, Urban Driftwood, a collection of thoughtful, dynamic, and engaging instrumentals written for fingerstyle guitar and harp guitar, Williams makes many of these technique-swaps while the compositions charge forward, each one earning tailor-made right-hand approaches. As a result, the songs don’t feel encumbered when Williams, mid-melody, goes from right hand fingerstyle to bowing her strings with a cello bow, or plunking out notes on a kalimba taped to her guitar’s face, now positioned laying across her lap. She utilizes hand percussion and tap shoes to fill out arrangements, interposing Afro-descended instruments from around the world into her compositions, and she picks up, puts down, and readjusts her stable of musical tools in real time — as a foley sound effect artist, prop master, or choreographer might. Read more.

Yola

Speaking to Yola over Zoom is way more fun than a video call has any right to be. From the time she dials in from the UK, she’s ready to chat. Good thing, because there’s a lot to talk about. About a week earlier, she picked up two Grammy nominations in the American Roots Music category of Best American Roots Song (“Diamond Studded Shoes”) and Best Americana Album (Stand For Myself), and she’s clearly still exhilarated by it.

“It’s very hard for it to even land because it feels really super surreal,” she says. “I don’t know how else to describe it. I’m endlessly grateful to the work that everyone puts in to get me to this point, and honestly, the faith that people have to let me lead at all. I wasn’t always in positions like that, ones that would let me lead.”

She’s speaking of a different kind of leadership style than, say, former British Prime Minister Theresa May, whose sparkly footwear worn during a speech about childhood poverty led to the idea of writing “Diamond Studded Shoes.” Although it does have a feel-good groove, you can’t miss its message of inequality. “And that’s why we gots to fight,” she sings. Read more.

Photo Credit: Norman Seff (Ray Charles); Alysse Gafkjen (Robert Finley); Courtesy of Reggie Harris (Reggie Harris); Justin Hardiman (Christone “Kingfish” Ingram); Sandlin Gaither (Amythyst Kiah); Jeremy Cowart (Keb’ Mo’); Merrick Ales (Buffalo Nichols); Mathieu Bitton (Chris Pierce); Laura E. Partain (Allison Russell); Mountain Home Music Company (Tray Wellington); Kim Atkins Photography (Yasmin Williams); Joseph Ross Smith (Yola)

Inspired by Black Culture Overseas, Buffalo Nichols Makes His Blues Debut

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As the first solo blues artist signed to Fat Possum Records in 20 years, Buffalo Nichols faces high expectations. But on his self-titled debut, the musician (whose given name is Carl Nichols) more than meets them, stitching Black history and musical traditions with current events and experiences to craft the sonic equivalent of a quilt. And the story it tells is an important one.

Nichols was born in Houston and raised in Milwaukee, but when he got the urge to roam and the money to do it, he took off, immersing himself in creative scenes across Europe and West Africa. Although he’s been based in Austin since the fall of 2020, Nichols channels the Delta, North Mississippi and Chicago through his nimble fingers or resonator slide while wrapping his warm voice around words that cut to the core of oppression, and the many forms of heartbreak it causes. While the poetic lyrics in songs such as the sad, beautiful “These Things” might be open to interpretation, there’s no mistaking the point of “Another Man,” adapted from the chain-gang lament, “Another Man Done Gone”:

When my grandpa was young
He had to hold his tongue
‘Cause they’d hang you from a bridge downtown
Now they call it ‘stand your ground’
Another man is dead.…

No need to hide behind a white hood
When a badge works just as good
Another man is dead…

It’s a protest song for today — clearly connecting the dots that for Black people in America, as the song says, “it might as well be 1910, killing women and killing men.”

BGS: Do you remember when you discovered blues music?

Nichols: I guess I discovered it as a genre when I was 12 or 13, through my mom’s music collection. She had the stuff that everybody had in the ’90s: Robert Cray, Strong Persuader, and that Jonny Lang album (Lie to Me); stuff like that. For the most part, I skipped the blues-rock thing. That was never of much interest to me; I went from contemporary blues straight to country blues and folk blues.

So how did you get from Milwaukee to West Africa and Europe?

Airplane.

Thanks for the smart-ass Greenland answer.

(Both laugh.) I didn’t travel much as a kid or into my teens. When I finally had the money and independence to do it, I decided to go as far as I could. That’s where I ended up.

And how did your travels help you find this path you sought to connect the Black experience, as expressed in early blues, to Black lives today?

I just saw a respect for Black art and Black culture that didn’t exist, and still doesn’t exist, here. And it is upsetting, but I just felt like, if there’s something that can be done about it, even if it’s futile, it’s still worth trying. I saw so many people in Europe making a living off of (music), and in Africa, really living and dying for it. So I felt like I could contribute in my own way.

The lyrics in “Another Man” are particularly chilling, and quite effective, I think. Listeners tend to assume lyrics are autobiographical even when they’re not, but the lines “Police pulled a gun on me. I was only 17” sure sound like they come from actual experience, especially in a place like Milwaukee. Is that a fair assumption?

Yeah. That is fair. “Another Man” is an older song that came from a time when I mostly wrote autobiographically, when I was deeply immersed in — or at least trying to be immersed in — the folk and Americana world. Ironically, the reason why I felt like leaving that and going to the blues is because I got really tired of this sort of outsider perspective, like trying to explain my humanity to a bunch of white people. That’s what Americana was, and still is, to me. So I stopped talking about myself so much, because I felt like my experience should be valid enough without the trauma. They really love that stuff in Americana. In the blues, it’s not much better, but now I make more of an effort to write stories and not always write about myself.

I’m sorry that you felt invalidated in those genres. Country and Americana … a lot of these genres are trying to be more inclusive, but sometimes it feels like they’re forcing it. Where’s the balance, and how do we find it?

As far as I can tell, so much work has been done to keep it this sort of white-boys club, that any effort for inclusivity is naturally going to be forced. Until there’s this real structural change, the same people who made it what it is are just going to be cherry-picking which voices they allow to break through every once in a while. It doesn’t feel natural; it feels … like it’s all been sort of orchestrated from behind the scenes.

I guess if it feels forced now, maybe one day it won’t. Going back to the music, there’s a really elemental sound to these songs. A lot of them are just your vocals and resonator. When I saw you live, I noticed a lot of effects being added that aren’t on the album. What’s the decision behind that?

I had a more ambitious idea of what I wanted to sound like, and I didn’t get to do it on the record, so I try really hard to be more creative live.

I think it’s a great album, but I can understand if it doesn’t express your artistic desires, why that might be frustrating.

That certainly ties into my gripes with Americana. Everything is like, “Oh, this is great progress.” But at the end of the day, the people who orchestrated it are the same people who kept us out of it.

When it comes to authenticity in blues, do you believe race makes a difference?

I think it does. I mean, I’ve been hearing that word a lot, authenticity, and I don’t even know what it means anymore. Obviously, it’s complicated, but … there’s so much about the blues that I don’t even understand, being born in 1991 and being raised in the Midwest. And it takes me a lot of conscious effort to — you know, part of it is this real ancestral connection that I feel, and part of it is stuff that I have to learn like everybody else. But I really think that white people are so far from the actual music and the culture of it that I just don’t understand; I mean, it’s great music, but white people can do whatever they want and be anything they want. I don’t know why you would want to be a depressed Black person. (Both laugh.)

A blues scholar I really respect told me that one reason it seemed like Black people gravitated away from the blues is because it was the music of a depressed culture, a time of oppression, and hip-hop is music of aspiration.

I think that’s a myth. Hip-hop and the blues both cover the entire — I mean, I jokingly say it’s depressing, but both cover every aspect of Black existence, the joy and the darkness. There are a lot of theories on why Black people moved away from the blues. But I think a pretty good example is somebody like Elvis, where the music industry found a way to make the music without the people, and when people don’t see themselves in it, they look for something else. I think that’s really what it is. You can even see it in real time. When things get commodified, regardless of race, the people who create the culture feel like, “OK, now we have to move on because it’s not ours anymore.”

Well, how do you respond to that? Is there any way that makes sense?

I really don’t know. Some of my peers are a little further ahead of me, but Kingfish (Christone Ingram), Adia Victoria and Jontavious Willis, everybody’s doing their part. But we’re also scrambling around, figuring out how do we, in this limited time on this earth that we have, carry on this tradition that these people dedicated their lives to and went through hell to preserve, this little piece of culture that we are able to make a living off of. I think the best thing we can do is just keep creating, because each one of us is going to inspire one or two or three artists to take on that burden and turn it into something that we’re all proud of.

Every time somebody says the blues is dead, there are always people who seem to be picking it up. Maybe it goes in and out of popularity, but it doesn’t feel like it’s going away; at least, I think people who want to find it are still always going to find it.

It does kind of go in and out of fashion — and people make a bigger deal out of it than they should, because this music predates the music industry. It doesn’t have to be profitable; it doesn’t always have to be in vogue. It is a genre, and there is an industry surrounding it, but it also is a cultural art form. It doesn’t need anybody’s attention to be valid.

Photo Credit: Merrick Ales