John Fahey - Guitarist

On this day, Feb. 22nd, 2001 John Fahey left this world. But he is hardly forgotten. I’m going to devote the following week on Delta-Slider to John Fahey.
It will be a Benjamin Button sort of week as I start on the anniversary of his death and wrap up the tribute on Feb. 28th, Fahey’s birthday. Don’t expect cake, but gifts will be in order, so stick around!
It’s “Fahey Week” here at Delta-Slider. I hope you enjoy it.


We’ll kick off with a look at his obituary in the New York Times.

John Fahey, 61, Guitarist And an Iconoclast, Is Dead
By JON PARELES
Published: February 25, 2001
John Fahey, a guitarist who carved out a private corner of Americana only to see it become a foundation of new age music, died on Thursday at Salem Hospital in Salem, Ore., after undergoing sextuple heart bypass surgery, said Mitch Greenhill, the president of Folklore Productions and Mr. Fahey's executor. Mr. Fahey was 61 and lived in Salem.
Playing a six-string acoustic guitar, Mr. Fahey used country-blues fingerpicking and hymnlike melodies in stately pieces with classical structures. Wordless and unhurried, his music became a contemplation and an elegy, a stoic invocation of American roots, nameless musicians and ancestral memories. Behind its serene surface, the music was both stubborn and haunted.
''I was creating for myself an imaginary, beautiful world and pretending that I lived there, but I didn't feel beautiful,'' Mr. Fahey said in an interview with The Wire magazine in 1998. ''I was mad but I wasn't aware of it. I was also very sad, afraid and lonely.''
From the beginning, he was an iconoclast and a maverick. He started two independent labels. In 1959 he founded Takoma Records, which released his own albums, blues albums and recordings by other guitarists including Leo Kottke. And in 1995, he and his manager started Revenant Records, dedicated to what it called American Primitive music.
Although he didn't sing or write lyrics, Mr. Fahey was a voluble author of liner notes. His albums were crammed with parodies of academic analysis and tales of a fictitious blues guitarist, Blind Joe Death, and his disciple, John Fahey, who purportedly ''made his first guitar from a baby's coffin.'' He shared a Grammy Award for the liner notes to the 1997 ''Anthology of American Folk Music'' (Smithsonian Folkways).
Mr. Fahey was born in Takoma Park, Md., on Feb. 28, 1939. His father and mother both played piano, and his father also played Irish harp. On Sundays, the family went out to hear bluegrass and country music. Mr. Fahey said that hearing Bill Monroe's version of Jimmie Rodgers's ''Blue Yodel No. 7'' and Blind Willie Johnson's ''Praise God I'm Satisfied'' changed his life.
He started teaching himself guitar when he was 12. He also began collecting and trading old 78-r.p.m. recordings of hillbilly songs, blues, gospel and jazz, going door to door in the rural South to find them. A fellow collector, Joe Bussard Jr., recorded Mr. Fahey on 78-r.p.m. discs for his Fonotone label, under the name Blind Thomas. In 1959 Mr. Fahey recorded his first album and pressed 100 copies, the first Takoma Records album. One side of the LP was credited to ''Blind Joe Death,'' the other to ''John Fahey.''
Mr. Fahey studied philosophy at American University in Washington and then at the University of California in Berkeley, where he played at folk clubs in his first paid engagements. In 1963, he recorded his second album, ''Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes.'' He and his partner in Takoma Records, ED Denson, tracked down two Mississippi bluesmen, Bukka White and Skip James, and recorded them for Takoma, bringing them to new audiences on the folk-revival circuit.
Mr. Fahey entered a graduate program in folklore at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1964, and wrote his master's thesis about the Delta bluesman Charley Patton. After he received his degree, Mr. Fahey turned to music full time.
His compositions expanded, embracing the modalities of raga along with dissonances not found in country or blues; he used unconventional tunings and turned some traditional picking patterns backward. He also experimented with tape collages, often to the annoyance of folk fans. Though hippie listeners may have heard his music as psychedelic, he was a bourbon drinker.
Along with his Takoma releases, Mr. Fahey also made albums for Vanguard and Reprise Records. His pristine 1968 solo album of Christmas songs for Takoma, ''The New Possibility,'' sold 100,000 copies initially and has been perennially reissued. Mr. Fahey spent time at a Hindu monastery in India; a 1973 album of extended solo pieces, ''Fare Forward Voyager'' (Takoma) is dedicated to a guru. Takoma was sold to Chrysalis Records in the mid-1970's, and in the 1980's Mr. Fahey made albums for the Shanachie and Varrick labels. New age performers like the pianist and guitarist George Winston, who made his first album for Takoma, prospered with a more ingratiating solo-guitar style.
Mr. Fahey suffered setbacks in the late 1980's. He divorced his third wife, Melody, and lost his house. He suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome and diabetes. His drinking grew worse. For a time, he lived at the Union Charity Mission in Salem. He often supported himself by scouring flea markets for used classical records to sell to collectors. He sometimes pawned his guitars.
But he was rediscovered in the 1990's. Rhino Records compiled a retrospective, ''Return of the Repressed,'' in 1994, and alternative rockers working on ''post-rock'' instrumental music sought out Mr. Fahey. He sobered up and restarted his career. In 1996 he released ''City of Refuge'' (Tim/Kerr), followed by two albums in 1997 and one each in 1998 and 2000. He continued to experiment, playing electric and lap steel guitars and freely using electronic effects.
Last year, he published a book of loosely autobiographical stories, ''How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life'' (Drag City Press).
''I never considered for a minute that I had talent,'' he wrote in 1994. ''What I did have was divine inspiration and an open subconscious.''

A little over a week after Fahey's death this article ran in the New York Times.

The Spirit Of America In His Guitar


By JACK VIERTEL


Published: March 4, 2001

JOHN FAHEY, the American primitive guitarist who died on Feb. 22, six days short of his 62nd birthday, was so often accused (by those few who acknowledged him at all) of being the accidental father of New Age music that it's easy to dismiss him as a crank who gave birth to an era of fake bliss and bogus musical rapture.

Alternatively, members of the folk-revival community are likely to point to him as a musician who synthesized the delta blues, early country music and other American folk roots with Eastern ragas and sound effects, producing a kind of elaborate acoustic music that ran on a parallel track to the more exotic experiments of the Beatles, the Grateful Dead and Frank Zappa.

While these lofty attributions aren't wrong, they miss the point entirely, for Fahey was a musician almost by accident. He was quick to acknowledge that his technical skills were limited (though his sound was unique) and that his gift had less to do with mastery of the guitar than with what he called ''divine inspiration and an open subconscious.''

Fahey was a sonic painter of the American landscape, whose guitar solos captured the vast spaces, the loneliness, the desolate dreams and the antic dance rhythms of a melting pot in turmoil. It was a hard-edged music that stared down the listener, even when it employed the ragtime progressions of the Memphis jug bands and blackface minstrel troupes. It never blinked. There is no point in comparing it to any other music; it was closer in impact to the writings of Raymond Carver, the paintings of Edward Hopper or the photographs of Walker Evans and O. Winston Link.

Like Link, Fahey was fascinated by railroads, by the restless solitude and wanderlust that their sound and visual imagery implied. Link's famous photograph ''Main Line on Main Street,'' which depicts a locomotive plowing through the main drag of a blue-collar town at midnight, while a man sits alone in a single lighted tenement window, is like a Fahey piece come to life. Even the titles of his songs, -- ''The Portland Cement Factory at Monolith California,'' ''Revelation on the Banks of the Pawtuxent,'' ''The Downfall of the Adelphi Rolling Grist Mill'' -- juxtapose the ironic with the iconic, mixing landscape, vernacular and vision into a uniquely evocative stew.

No one did more to confuse the actual nature of Fahey's art than Fahey himself, who not only delighted in these elaborately jokey titles but also wrote liner notes to his albums that confounded nearly everyone who managed to plow through them. Here were bizarre mythological tales of his own misadventures, full of inside jokes, classical and low-brow folk music allusions and fake philosophy attributed by footnote to nonexistent sources. The notes were stuffed inside record albums that he produced and issued on his own label. Invariably they turned out to be shaggy-dog stories of the most self-indulgent sort, whose effect was often to convince the listener that Fahey was a prankster, a hopeless eccentric, an oddball footnote to the folk music boom of the 60's, and not a real artist at all.

The truth was more complex. All the hokum was Fahey's most faithful weapon in his lifelong war against self-knowledge. Fully exposed, his vision would have been, and turned out to be, too hard to live with.

Yet it was unmistakable to anyone who ever saw him perform well (though he often performed less than well, especially after consuming quantities of alcohol and Darvon). Fahey in the thrall of his own compositions was both hypnotized and hypnotizing, a man whose longing and loneliness escaped directly through his fingers into the guitar strings that he always changed between sets.

He couldn't outpick Leo Kottke or Doc Watson, but his guitar rang with an authority that was as unequivocal as it was clear in its intention. He played like, and was, a man possessed, insisting that the essential spirit of this boundless, spectacular and unforgiving land could be communicated through six strings if only he could muster and sustain the strength and the clarity of purpose while keeping the lines of his unconscious mind open.

In the late 1960's, as a college junior, I drove Fahey through Massachusetts for a week. He was playing a series of gigs from Williamstown to Wellesley. Well after midnight, somewhere on the Mass Pike, he began to ramble on about his music and the odd and often inappropriate places it had found a home. He told me that there were mental hospitals in Massachusetts where his music was played over loudspeakers as part of the therapeutic regime; psychiatrists had decided it had the power to soothe the more agitated patients.

''I'm always amazed it doesn't drive them to immediate suicide,'' he said, cackling.

I'm convinced now that he knew more than he was saying. Dead at 61, after three marriages, years of battling alcohol, a pitiful career and even a stretch of life in a homeless shelter, he succumbed to sextuple bypass surgery; every conceivable path to his heart had finally shut down. John Fahey joins that elite group of Americans who wouldn't, or couldn't, hoe corn. Like Harry Partch and Charles Ives, he heard an America singing that the rest of us couldn't hear. We can be thankful he left behind a tremendous recorded legacy that gives us a second chance.

Followed by these letters to the editor.
 
JOHN FAHEY; A Profound Artist


Published: March 18, 2001


To the Editor:

Thanks to Jack Viertel for his moving tribute to the great John Fahey [''The Spirit of America in His Guitar,'' March 4], a needed corrective to the uncomprehending remarks that often dogged this poorly understood figure. In particular, readers should know that Fahey can in no way be blamed for the scourge of New Age music -- bland, escapist stuff and the absolute antithesis of everything he embodied. His simple harmonic language paid homage to the blues and hymns that he drew on so powerfully, and we can hardly blame him for the lazy noodling that arrived in his wake.

Fahey had the uncanny ability to channel the spirit of blues styles past, particularly the Delta blues of the 20's, and Mr. Viertel is precisely right in attributing this to his overheated imagination as much as to his guitar technique.

ELLIOTT S. HURWITT

Manhattan

JOHN FAHEY; A Guitar Player


Published: March 18, 2001


To the Editor:

Jack Viertel mentions John Fahey's ''pitiful career.'' In the last 10 years, Fahey came to my place of business every few weeks selling vinyl LP's. My husband and I became friends with him. More times than I can count, he said: ''People are always talking about my career. I don't have a career. Sometimes I play the guitar for money.''

He's dead, and people are still talking about that ''career.''

SUSAN GUNDERSON

Portland, Ore.

All I can say is, when the US is talking about your demise, from coast to coast, in the NYT no less, you were an influential person.  But, I doubt you needed me to tell you that about John Fahey.
 
Ok, that wraps it for today.  I'll be posting stuff all week and I hope you'll come back to see what's up next.  I'll have some live shows to d/l and what I think will be a few surprises.

       

Ragtime Ralph - The Interview

I became aware of Ragtime Ralph via the Fahey Guitar Players Yahoo! Group. It was the summer of 2008 when he posted an offer to send 100 people his CD, "Lost Blues 1929-1934" for free.
Ralph just finished recording for his latest project and will begin mixing this week.
Ralph describes himself as “…a bit of a luddite when it comes to technology...no car/TV/computer/toys...my only fun is my guitar and my metal detector for poking around looking for archaeological relics.”
If you are interested in keeping up with Ralph’s latest recording adventures I recommend you sign up for the Yahoo! Group or check in here at the blog periodically.

If you are new to Ragtime Ralph, click here to see what's available to download.

Tell us about the guitars you play.
My guitar...Dixie X...an early 1930s Regal wood bodied resonator...beautiful fat V-neck and wonderfully warm tinny, banjo-like tone on some songs and a real low down bluesy growl on others. She needs a bit of work, but is in pretty fine shape for a budget guitar from the "golden era"!

On the early Ragtime Ralph recordings I played various guitars: Larrivee 6 & 12 strings/Kona Hawaiian guitar/National metal body guitar (model unknown)/Guild acoustic (model unknown)cheap ukulele/cheap dulcimer...and a hand built one string...with a tin can stuck on the end of it!

Did I read somewhere that you used to play surf music? What other musical journeys have you been on besides American Primitive?
Ahhh...surf music! I've had several musical epiphanies in my tenure on this planet...country blues/John Fahey/surf music/Savage Republic/Stereolab...the surf music came at a time when I was quite fed up with Fahey...he'd accused me of using his name to get known in show biz and I needed an out...my best friend played me "Surf Beat '80" by Jon and the Nightriders and it blew my socks off! From there I played lead guitar in the Garage Surfers/the Unknowns/the Surfdusters/the Fridge Magnets...bass in Beaver Patrol...then bass in Quonset which was a bass/scrap metal percussion duo based on Savage Republic...I also auditioned as bass player for Courtney Love’s band Hole...until I heard that Fahey had died...then I changed my name to Blind Brand X.

I think it’s great that you cultivate two different personalities, Ragtime Ralph and Blind Brand X. Does it give you more freedom to play two different styles of music? Where did the names come from?
Ragtime Ralph was my alter ego before Fahey died and Blind Brand X was after his unfortunate demise...for Ragtime Ralph I just came up with the name one day...it sounded more jazzy than just plain ol' Ralph Johnston...the Blind Brand X came from my distaste for today’s consumer society...just a dig at blind brainwashed consumer spending habits...brand x is better than brand z....that kind of mentality...it also differentiated the way I'd play...then and now...then I used fingerpicks and tried to play fast like Leo Kottke...ignoring the subtlety and space between notes...now I play with pauses...and fewer notes rather than more...I find it quite interesting, reinterpreting Ragtime Ralph songs the way Blind Brand X plays them...it gives them a whole new incarnation...but holding on to the spirit of the original versions.

What about how you learned to play this style, did you have a mentor? Did you learn by ear?
I started playing this style of music when in 1969 I saw John Fahey on the PBS show Guitar, Guitar...I was so knocked out by what I'd heard that I immediately tracked down several Fahey albums (Yellow Princess/Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death) and started teaching myself by ear. I had the good fortune to have an older brother who owned a guitar shop...I worked part time there and learned some tunings from some books and magazines he was selling. I took one lesson at another shop from a guy who taught me a Mance Lipscomb song "Texas Rag"...and that song will be on my next CD! The only other lesson I took was from John Fahey himself! He and his wife Melody stayed with me for a night...John was playing at the Vancouver Folk Festival the next day...I was having difficulty with a chord in one of his songs...he straightened me out and the song "Ragtime Piece In G ( aka Television Rag) appeared on Ragtime Ralph Volume 4.

Can you tell us a little about how you were almost a part of the Takoma catalog? What happened there and how did you feel about that then and now?
Fahey had contacted me after I'd sent him copies of the first three Ragtime Ralph EP’s...he seemed to like my stuff and over dinner one night when he'd come up to Vancouver to play at the Soft Rock Cafe where I opened for him he suggested to me that he might be interested in releasing the album (Volume 4) I'd completed. Then out of the blue I started getting weird phone calls from John...he said I was using his name to get "known in show business", and one time a very drunk Fahey phoned me at 3 AM babbling about some sort of nonsense or another...by then I was starting to get an inkling that John might be a little troubled...so I released the album myself and never really thought too much about the Takoma thing...I've always been very wary of people making all kinds of promises...it seems to happen to me fairly often...someone has a big idea...more often than not it turns out to be mostly smoke and mirrors...especially when I hear it coming from some drunk in a club somewhere...that's one big reason I like doing things the way I do...I'm not beholden to anyone. It was nice though that John recorded my arrangement of "Away In A Manger" on his Varrick Xmas album...I'm so proud when I show folks the record with my name right on the label...that's the biggest kick I got out from my tenuous relationship with Fahey. I never felt any resentment towards him 'cause he gave me so much in the form of music. John never liked to take any credit for how his music affected people like me...but I bring his name up whenever possible and try to turn folks on to his wonderful music!

Why do you give away your music?
I have to quote my favorite "rock band" Savage Republic for this one..."I can't seem to see the things you see" from their song "Film Noir"...I am in turmoil with the capitalist system...I have so much while the rest of the world starves...I need very little, so I figure I might as well take a bit of burden off the system and at least offer what I do to the world for the world to enjoy without the world being mired in the red tape that seems to entrap all of us in our daily lives...I need no reward for what I do...I don't seek fame or glory...I just know that my music might inspire others to do the same...and the music they might produce will possibly go on to inspire others!

Can you tell me how you came up with the Empty Square Records name?
Empty Square comes from me misunderstanding Charlie Patton’s lyrics on "Mississippi Bo Weavil Blues"...I always thought he was singing "Eat all your blossoms and leave you an empty square"...but blues scholars have determined the lyrics are "Sucks all the blossoms and he leave your hedges square"...to me it doesn't really matter...as mistakes lead to new and exciting discoveries...a lot of my songs are based on mistakes made when playing songs I already think I know...a slip of the finger and...voila!...a new sound/chord/melody...I often look forward to mistakes to shake me out of the doldrums that encircle me while playing the same song over and over again...like finding the gold nugget in the slag heap! The tattoo I have on my left arm was based on a photo of Charlie Patton...and I added the "Empty Square" in banners surrounding a suit wearing, guitar playing skeleton! What some of us will do for attention!

Are you planning a road trip/tour anytime?
I'm actually planning on traveling the USA on my holidays...renting a car and visiting the gravesites of Fahey/Patton/Hutchison/Hurt/White...and stopping in on Joe Bussard and Glenn Jones...and I hope to maybe pass through some of the towns of folks on my mailing list and maybe...pickin' a tune or two. I'm hoping this will all take place starting in May this year! I will elaborate further later!

What is your latest project?
My latest project is "Wreck of the Ol' 78"...I'm doing 13 of my favorite old blues and country songs and we are going to engineer the whole thing to sound like a batch of dusty old 78s! I really love the sound of old records and I explain my fascination in the CDs notes!

How are you doing your current recordings? Are you using a studio or is it a home set-up?
We're doing the recordings in Oliver Conways Aero Studios...Oliver is the soundman at the Vancouver blues club The Yale, as well as being the guitarist for several local blues/rhythm and blues bands. It's a small room in the basement of a music equipment supply company and he has a nice digital setup and knows how to get around it quite nicely. We use 4 mics: one near the resonator, one at the headstock and 2 room mics about 4 feet away and about 5 feet in the air. We usually do one or two takes of each song as I seem to know the stuff pretty well before entering the studio...I don't care if the takes are perfect, just as long as the flubs aren't obvious!

Any chance you are going to be on the upcoming Imaginational Anthem Vol. 4?
I'd sent Tompkins Square Records several of my releases, but I never heard back from them...I don't crave exposure...I'm having lots of fun doing what I'm doing...in the past I was turned down by Kicking Mule Records, Windham Hill Records and eventually Takoma Records but I knew I could never commit to being signed to a label because I work lots and am extremely, how would you say shy, to play in public...a hurdle I've not yet been able to conquer.

If a label offered to sign you would you do it?
I don't know if I'd want to be signed to a label...they probably couldn't justify spending money on someone who probably wouldn't tour to support an album...my approach of playing, recording and sending out free music satisfies my needs...to play...to document...and to communicate with others...apart from these things I have no goals...I just like to send the music out...like that Police song "Message In a Bottle"...set the music adrift and see where it ends up...even if nothing happens with the music in the outside world, I'm still happy and satisfied with what I do. Not being signed to Takoma never phased me a bit...I just kept and keep on releasing my own stuff...Fahey HATED the business end of Takoma and I don't want Empty Square to become a business. Fahey also disliked playing in public but felt trapped because it was his job, not a hobby like music is for me, although it's a hobby that pretty well dominates my non worklife. Oh well, I'll just dawdle along and enjoy this marvelous gift bestowed upon me...it makes me happy and seems to make other people happy too....I can't ask for much more than that!

Mississippi John Hurt - Guitar Tabs

Could there be anything better than sitting on a rocker picking some Hurt tunes? 
This is a little pdf book someone put together with the basics of Hurt's songs, most have the lyrics as well. 
I make no claim to accuracy and these are probably no different than all the other tabs out there, except they are all in one place! 
I printed it out and bound it loose leaf so I can learn them all someday.
Download MJH tabs!

Delta-Slider’s Tops of the Decade

Hey, you aren’t a real blog if you don’t do a Top Ten list, Best of the Decade or some other sort of list that says, “I know something you don’t…”

Well I don’t know shit, but here it goes anyway…

in no particular order:

Bob Brozman is usually all over the place, and that's fine, but I generally like his blues work the best. And this one is a beauty! You can get a run-down of each song on Blues Reflex at his website. I love to read where the song is from, what the artist was trying to do or how they got an idea. This isn't your usual blues playing and Brozman smacking, tapping and beating on the guitar is a bonus! Get it!

Yair Yona is up next, going in a completely different direction.  See my short review of this one here, posted just recently. 

Glenn Jones' three releases have all been great and after much waffling I pretty much picked this one at random.  They are all very good efforts.  But I do have one criticism of Glenn, dude, post your touring schedule somewhere, I just missed you recently and I'm very sad.

Ah, Sean Smith.  This was one of the first modern American Primitive releases that I stumbled across.  Though his second effort is arguably more intricate and his composition abilities made a huge leap, this one is a favorite of mine, perhaps just because of how blown away the first time I heard it.  You can find him HERE

Jack Rose was a monster when it came to releasing stuff and I decided that one of the rules I was going to have for this list was only one effort per artist would be listed. When I got to Rose, that rule made things difficult. But I decided to go with Kensington Blues.  It's got a little of everything, slide, 12 string, 6 string, raga and rag influences and a Fahey cover.  Be sure to check out VHF Records, Thrill Jockey and Three Lobed Records for releases.

I came across Andrew Stranglen either on the Fahey board or MySpace...or maybe it was CD Baby...I don't recall, but I'm glad I did.  This little gem is about as far as I go when it comes to experimental music.  I know, I know, maybe I need to try harder.  But nonetheless this one works for me.  Love it!

Ok, Cam Deas.  Here's a guy I found clicking around on MySpace again.  He gets the comparisons to James Blackshaw, and he does play 12 string, but Deas is much rawer, something I like.  This release WAS available here but he has since re-released it so you'll have to go to his site to get it.  Go HERE to read the review.

Careening back into the realm of blues: Felonius Smith is a local here in Colorado and I have the good fortune to see a lot of good live music from these guys. Get the CD Hoolay Moolay.  This is blues with an old-timey and fun feel to it.  But don't let that fool you, there's some great chops on this one.  Felonius studied with Bob Brozman before moving to Colorado.

John Hammond has really come though on this one. This is strictly solo guitar and harmonica along with some stomping and grunting. Hammond is an amazing act to catch live and this is almost as good.

Pat O’Connell was featured here on Delta-Slider back in June of 2009 when I wrote a review of his forth-coming release of On the Sunny Side of Ashland, also available at Amazon.

Mike Fekete was featured here in August of 2009 as a prelude to a successful tour. Mike is planning on re-releasing some of his earlier work this year. You can get his CD Yellow and Red on Amazon or CDbaby.

Mike Fekete and Pat O’Connell have something in common, besides being great guitarists. They, along with Aaron Sheppard are expected to be on the next release of Tompkins Square’s Imaginational Anthem Vol. 4. Yeah, freakin’ awesome, eh? In addition, Sheppard is going to be on volume two of Berkeley Guitar. Volume one of Berkeley Guitar gets an honorable mention in the Delta-Slider list.

Nick Schillace’s first solo CD, Box Canyon was fantastic, but he upped the ante with the second: Landscape and People.  You can also get his stuff at CD Baby

Next we have C. Joynes’ Anglo-Naïve and Contemporary Parlour Guitar Vol. 1.  The title is a bit much but the music is much simpler. I love the feel of the recording. I think this is a home recording and it has a great feel to it. The songs are simple and beautiful. Joynes has a real talent for playing songs in an unhurried way. It’s a real hard thing to do, most people try to play everything as fast as possible. Whenever I try to play slow it just sounds boring…and slow.  This is out of print so d/l it at the link above.  Don't miss this one.  Also, Joynes has been busy as of late and you can get a couple more releases on Amazon or at the label, Bo'Weavil Recordings.

Next is Ragtime Ralph’s Vol. 4 release, click on the lick to d/l it!!
Ragtime Ralph and his nom de plume Blind Brand X have been VERY popular downloads here on Delta-Slider. All of his stuff is here on Delta-Slider and it's all free.  And it's all good.  Just give him a listen, you’ll understand!

Mark Lemhouse plays the blues, damnit!  This release, Big Lonesome Radio is amazing.  No, I don’t have a free download for ya. Here’s the deal, this came out in 2002 and since then Lemhouse has been spiraling into insanity, an insanity catalyzed by banjo playing. It’s said that he wanders aimlessly around the Northwest. And when he isn’t plunking his Banjo, he’s cuddled up to it asleep…dreaming of plunking it. Nonetheless, he does stop by Yellow Dog Records once in a while to pick up a royalty check.  Won’t you buy a copy of Big Lonesome Radio?

Pat Donohue's latest is Freeway Man.  This is one of the best Donohue has put out in years. His choice of music is unique and he arranges them nicely as well. He’s got a thumb and an attack that is just so solid.

This was really off the top of my head hard and took a lot of time!   I was going to do an honorable mentions section but I think I will just save that for a later post skip it.

I’m sure I forgot some great music. What do you think I should have included?

What do you think of what I DID include?

How is it possible that I didn’t include a single Radiohead release?

Rahim Alhaj & Ottmar Liebert - Under the Rose

Ever since I heard Paco de Lucía play the oud on Almoraima I've been facinated with it's sound and it's place in modern flamenco music.

Ottmar Liebert (on guitar) and Rahim Alhaj on the oud have released an excellent effort. Also included are Jon Gagan (bass, keyboard), who also produced the CD, and Barrett Martin (percussion).

Free downloads of the music are available at Liebert's site, HERE.

I'm not sure why I like the oud so much but I've noticed that like a blues guitar, it cries and sings with so much feeling when the strings are bent.

Hope you enjoy it and be sure to visit the site, lots more info there.

Yair Yona - Remember

Yair Yona has released a nice little gem into the American Primitive world and he titled it Remember. I'm not quite sure how I came across this release and it has been out there for a while but if you aren't aware of it, read on!

Ah, forget the reading...listen!

This CD is not strictly solo guitar but is very focused on the acoustic guitar. There is a mix of solo and multi-instrumentals. The production is excellent.
Yona gives this music away! Free. has hit the big time but the digital d/l is still quite reasonable. $5.00!! for Mp3, flac, just go to http://yairyona.bandcamp.com/ to get it. Now, you may think there is a catch, you've got to give up your email. Well I downloaded this months ago and as promised, I've received one or less email per month. And all of them quite useful, I might add, some links to YouTube videos and even some unreleased takes from Remember.

To learn more about Yona you can read some of his thoughts here.

And there is an excellent blog out there called Work & Worry with an interview of Yona, you can find that HERE

Yona of course has a MySpace

And a nice blog called Small Town Romance

And finally, if you would like to buy the CD you can do so by following the links below. I did and in addition to the fine music Yona has added one of my favorite facets of a solo guitar release: he listed every tuning and took the time to write some thoughts on each piece.

AnovaMusic is Yona's label that I believe he runs himself.

Strange Attractors Audio House
CD Baby 
 

Blueswax E-zine interview with Otis Taylor

Decoding Otis Taylor
By Stacy Jeffress
This story originally appeared in BluesWax and is reposted here with permission.

"Some people are Blues interpreters. I'm more like a composer."

Otis Taylor
Photo by Stacy Moore

Otis Taylor is not one to spoon-feed music to his listeners. You have to work at it; your appreciation for his roots-based, jazz-infused, African call-and-response brand of trance Blues is going to come only after some investment of sweat-based equity on your part. He is not about to hand you some twelve-bar, foot-tapping Blues and call it good. And you are largely on your own in deciphering what the minimalist lyrics of his songs mean, but you can be certain that he has a message to deliver.

It follows, then, that Taylor is surely not going to make it easy on an interviewer who admits to being new to, and perhaps a bit wary of, his music, although he did display much good humor, often at his own expense, during our conversation. This is a man who takes great pride in his artistry and cultural contributions but can laugh when his wife Carol teases him for writing what she calls his "huge amount of unfinished songs." Taylor acknowledges that he can be cryptic and that his music is "an acquired taste" defying categorization in the Blues world.

Taylor discussed his latest release, Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs, as well as his music's appearance on the soundtrack of the recently-released feature film Public Enemies.

Stacy Jeffress for BluesWax: It's a privilege to talk to you. I have to tell you I'm new to your music. I've been listening to the CDs and wanting to learn about your music. Your music is different than what I'm used to. I'm looking forward to getting a chance to ask you about it.

Otis Taylor: Different than what you're used to. What are you used to?

BW: I guess Blues music that's more, maybe superficial. You can learn a lot from your music; it's like you're teaching us about events and history that we didn't know about, such as the Ludlow Massacre ["Your Children Sleep Good Tonight" from 2005 release Below the Fold].

OT: That's a different album.

BW: What elements are present in trance Blues that might not be in other types of Blues music?

OT: Trance music is like voodoo music, the congas. That's trance music. Something with no chord changes. Howlin' Wolf did a lot of trance music, R.L. Burnside.

BW: On the new CD, I was looking at the musicians that appear, and a lot of them have a jazz background. Could you talk a little about how you select the musicians who appear with you?

OT: I saw [pianist] Jason Moran once in Germany, but I didn't pick up on him. Then I saw him in West Virginia playing at a concert - I said, "Whoa, I could do something with that," and I did. I just felt it, you know? Like when you talk about the Ludlow Massacre, you've heard that song ["Your Children Sleep Good Tonight"]?

BW: Yes.

OT: I had Rayna [Gellert] from [Rounder Records folk group] Uncle Earl play with me. I had a vision for it. I just see people I know. "Hey, I could do something with that, you know?" That's a very unique sound; you don't hear that cello-fiddle combination too much.

BW: And the cornet with Ron Miles was a very interesting element. How did you hook up with Ron?

OT: I met him at a music showcase a long time ago, and I asked him to sit in, and I just kept him in the back of my head, so he's slowly played on more albums and more albums. He said he really wanted to play with Jason, and I said, "Okay, I'll work on it."

BW: Tarus Matean [on bass]?

OT: Tarus and Nasheet Waits [drums] are in Jason's band called The Bandwagon, so I brought out his whole band. Sometimes we had two bass players in one song.

BW: It was interesting that you had Gary Moore on guitar on several tunes. I was reading up on him.

OT: I met him about four years ago in Brighton; he played on Definition of a Circle, too. I had opened for him at Santa Monica at the end of the night. I did a lot of touring with Gary.

BW: I've had the privilege of meeting Cassie [Taylor's daughter who sings and plays bass with her father's band]. She is absolutely delightful, an amazing poised young woman. You obviously did some great work parenting her, you and Mrs. Taylor. I enjoy her when she's hosting the International Blues Challenge.

OT: Yes, she does. That's what I was told.

BW: I enjoy the song about my daddy works for the Pullman Company ["Working for the Pullman Company" on Below the Fold]. It said in the liner notes she sang that when she was little. Did you work for the railroad when she was young?

OT: My father did. I used to do a lot of traveling to Santa Fe in the antique business. So she sat under the piano, and she made up that one little line, then I made up the chorus. At that time I wasn't even playing music anymore, I was retired from music, but I kept that song in my head because it was such a good song ["My daddy's gone to Santa Fe/My momma's taking care of me/He's working for the Pullman Company."]

BW: It's a lovely song, and she has such a nice singing voice. Was she always musically inclined like her dad?

OT: I think so, yeah. I'm not that musically inclined, but she's way better than I am.

BW: You have a lot of devoted fans who would beg to differ with that statement. I was asking [BluesWax Editor Don Wilcock] what it was about your sound that attracted him so much, and he said that you push the boundaries of what music sounds like. Do you think that's an accurate description?

OT: Oh yeah. Artists are supposed to push the envelope, you know. I'm a Blues artist, not a Blues musician. Does that make sense?

BW: Tell me how you distinguish the two.

OT: Some people are Blues interpreters; they interpret the Blues and play like other people. Some people are like composers. I'm more like a composer. Doesn't that make sense?

BW: It does, obviously your compositions are very strong. You have so much to say to your audience. During the years that you were not performing regularly, how did you express that creativity? Were there other outlets?

OT: I think buying antiques and sort of looking for what's going to be ahead of the curve is an art form. I was always buying crazy stuff. It's not the same, but it still is an art form.

BW: What kind of crazy stuff?

OT: Art deco, black photos, bicycles, televisions, art nouveau, paintings, whatever.

BW: You were buying guitars from George Gruhn in the 70s. How did you get hooked into him?

OT: Somebody told me about him. I used to go to Utah, and I used to go to Tennessee to buy guitars.

BW: Were you continuing your musical performance at home?

OT: I basically stopped except for playing my piano, my banjo sometimes. I only played in public once for nineteen years.

BW: What spurred you to go back to the music full time?

OT: I did a benefit for somebody. I had a friend who had a bicycle team; he was the sponsor. He was bankrupt, so I helped him out at his new coffeehouse. He had clothing stores and lost them all, so he opened up a coffeehouse, and we played for him.

BW: How long ago was that?

OT: 1995.

BW: I saw you perform at the Blues Music Awards. I absolutely loved it. I hadn't seen Anne Harris before on violin, so much energy.

OT: She's a great show, she's very visual. They said we'd be on the big stage, but we were on the side of the big stage. I brought more people because I thought we were going to be on the big stage. She jumps three feet in the air. She does really outrageous things. She needs about five feet by five feet of space, or at least ten by ten feet. She can really break loose.

"I'm a Blues artist, not a Blues musician.Does that make sense?"

BW: Your songs have a lot of depth, and they're not just "my baby done left me" kind of songs. They're very thought provoking.

OT: That's just because people are that smart. They just want to sell records, and I don't care. I make the kind of music that's not really commercial. I just don't care. I'm sure other people can write like that; they just may not be comfortable because they won't sell records. It isn't that they can't do it; they just choose not to do it.

BW: If you're not in it for the commercial reasons, what does it mean to you when you're nominated for the Handy and the Blues Music Awards?

OT: It's a little touchy there; they told me they don't have a category for me. It's really tough. My albums don't get it. I've just lately been nominated for banjo, not for my albums.

BW: White African won as Best New Artist Debut [in 2002].

OT: That was a long time ago.

BW: How do you characterize the difference between that time and now?

OT: That time and now, I think I got two nominations for Truth is Not Fiction [2004] which won Downbeat Blues Album of the Year, Downbeat critics, you know Downbeat magazine? Then I won Downbeat Blues Album of The Year the next year for Double V. Then I was off for a few years. Then I won for Definition of a Circle [2007], and then I won for the banjo album, Recapturing the Banjo [2008]. So in the last 10 years, I've won four Downbeat Blues Album of The Year Awards, but I can't get my albums nominated for the Blues [Music Awards] because they don't feel comfortable with what I'm doing. They tend to categorize me.

BW: But then you won this year.

OT: Only for banjo, see. I was nominated last year for banjo and the year before that for banjo, but not for my albums.

BW: Who's the constituency for the Downbeat awards?

OT: The critics.

BW: So that's the difference between critical and commercial success, I guess.

OT: Unfortunately, not commercial. I'm not a crybaby, I'm just saying there's a disconnect. Jay [Sieleman of the Blues Foundation] told me he has no category for me, he's very honest about it. What can you do? It doesn't stop me. I just don't have a category. I'm a man without a country.

BW: But you're a man whose music is on a major movie soundtrack [Public Enemies].

OT: Yeah, Michael Mann's a big fan, he gets it.

BW: Had your music been used before on soundtracks?

OT: Yes. There was a movie called The Shooter with Mark Wahlberg, sharpshooter Danny Glover. There was a movie called The Badge with Billy Bob Thornton. I scored a documentary called Purvis of Overtown [about contemporary Miami urban painter Purvis Young, 2006]. They put my music on American Idol, Crossing Jordan.

BW: I didn't realize you had that wide of exposure.

OT: Hollywood's been very very good to me.

BW: What's important for folks to know about the new release, Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs?

OT: I don't know. What's important is what they can possibly discover. You want to keep everything a surprise, don't you? Maybe for them to hear sounds they've never heard before if they're not familiar with me. It's hard to say what's important. What's important is that I do this interview. That's almost like a legal comment, "Your Honor, what is important? He's dead, is it important that he had a heart attack or is it important that this woman stabbed him fifteen times? He's dead, Your Honor, he's still dead." What's important is what's important to the person who listens to it.

BW: I enjoy the summaries of the songs that you include.

OT: I do that because I never could understand people singing songs. My wife says I write in a very cryptic way.

BW: I'd agree with your wife.

OT: She says I write this huge amount of unfinished songs. I don't agree with that part, but that's what she thinks. I write conceptually. I just try to get the point across. The words don't matter as much as the point.

BW: I'm grateful for the synopses. That helps me understand what the point is.

OT: It's like a decoder ring.

BW: Exactly! I just said that to my boss today, this synopsis is like a decoder ring for an Otis song.

OT: They'll find my records, and they won't have [the synopsis], and they'll have to get Egyptian cryptology people to figure out what I'm saying.

BW: Honestly like on "Sunday Morning" which I love listening to because Cassie's singing is so great, but I was like, okay, what the hell is that song about? And then I read [the synopsis], and I said, "Oh, okay. I hear her singing about the cat on the bed."

OT: "And I kindly said move aside, move aside/Sunday morning will return." I thought that was an easy one, actually.

BW: Well, see, I am challenged in my Otis decoding.

OT: It takes awhile. I wrote that song in 1972. I thought that was one of my easier songs. I mean like "Mama's Got a Friend" and we tell people she's our sister, that's a little cryptic. You have to know what's going on.

BW: That's based on a true story on your mom?

OT: Yup.

BW: Is your mother still alive?

OT: No. I wouldn't have written it while she was still alive. I'm not that spaced. I just gotta wait for everybody to die so then I can write songs. I write those so my kids won't have any skeletons in their closet where they can be blackmailed.

BW: Get it all out in the open.

OT: Yeah, it's better for them.

BW: On "Lost My Guitar," it says the man is mourning not so much for the guitar as for the child. Is the guitar the metaphor for the child?

OT: Yes.

BW: That's one a heartbreaker.

OT: It's a true story.

BW: Who was Emma K. Walsh?

OT: That was Joe Walsh's daughter. There's a fountain - they gave money to the park to name a fountain in North Boulder, a plaque with her name on it. I knew Stephanie; I was friends with his ex-wife. It's a love song, love for his guitar, love for his daughter. It's about separation, too. You get divorced, your life changes, the sort of things maybe you missed, the relationship with this child. He goes and sits by the grassy bank maybe he will remember. I guess it is a little cryptic.

BW: When your wife says it's cryptic, I'd have to go with that.

OT: I like cryptic. But you get the point that somebody's really mourning something, right?

BW: There's no doubt that he's mourning.

OT: When you think about it more, it must not be a guitar 'cause it's too mournful for a guitar. I'm not trying to get deep here 'cause my wife says I'm not very deep.

BW: You have all these serious, serious songs, and then I saw on YouTube a clip of you at the Chicago Blues Festival last year.

OT: I don't put on a sad show, I just write sad albums. There's a difference. People who see me live - I'm not there to depress anybody.

BW: Where you're playing the harp walking through the crowd that is a joyous thing.

OT: But people don't understand. Ask somebody who sees my concerts, do you think those two songs were sad that I did [at the BMAs]? I don't do sad onstage.

BW: The first time I saw you was at the Acoustic Blues Fest in Kansas City a couple of years ago. You were solo. I didn't understand anything at all at that point. I had friends who had seen you, and they just raved about you. And honestly, I didn't get it. What I recall about that, it was that it was rather serious. And then at the BMAs it was anything but, it was just a celebration. It was so much fun. And then that hambone thing at Chicago Blues Fest, that was so much fun, too.

OT: Well you'll see the hambone thing at Monterey. I don't know. You have to find someone who's seen my show with the bands. It's not like that. I'm not trying to make anybody depressed. What can I say? You'll have to go on YouTube and see more of my sets. Get a better perspective. I don't want anybody depressed. I remember getting depressed going to see Midnight Cowboy.

BW: That's the movie to do it to you.

OT: I was depressed for a week.

BW: Ratso Rizzo.

OT: I was him. When I'm backstage at big fancy shows and the rider, all the food, and fancy Swiss chocolates I get. I put that in my bag, I take it home, that's my food. If I could figure out how to put shrimp in my pocket, I would. I can't get over being a poor kid. I was right with him. I would have done that for sure. Put that raw shrimp in his pocket. That was me. When we go backstage, the band knows I have to go through the back room and decide what I'm gonna take, and they can have what's left. I might go back and put two pounds of chocolate after we've toured Europe. Europeans love to give me chocolate. Drives the kids crazy, it's like trick or treating.

BW: There's some of the songs that I connect with better than others, and I'm sure it's my failing more than anything.

OT: Then that's what you should write about it. There's always something to write about. There's always a story inside of a story.

Stacey Jeffress for BluesWax: I asked one of my friends about what he found appealing about your music. It was that you didn't just say, "My baby done left me"; there is content there.

Otis Taylor: You have to understand the culture of America. In the 1930s you couldn't say anything but "My baby done left me" or you'd get lynched. You have to get it in perspective. I can say things that people couldn't say in the '30s. I can sing about a little black boy and a little white girl having a little romance. You couldn't sing that in the 30s, you'd be lynched. Once when we went to Memphis at the Folk Alliance and I played "St. Martha Blues," I was a little nervous playing that song down south.

BW: How were you received?

OT: I was received okay, but I was definitely nervous about it. My first time down south and here I am singing about a lynching. What can I say? I think there are two reasons that I can sing about things that other people couldn't. I sing about things that are not commercial but are interesting. I like interesting stories. I just like a story to be interesting. Did you get an album called Truth is Not Fiction?

BW: Yeah, I've got that.

OT: Listen to "House of the Crosses." I think it's one of the best songs I ever wrote. It visually puts you right there in Russia. I think it's one of the best songs I ever wrote storytelling wise. Some people think "My Soul's in Louisiana" is the best all-around song I ever wrote or maybe "Just Live your Life" [from Respect the Dead]. I really like "House of Crosses" as a visual journey. I don't tell people what to think of my songs, I don't judge anybody. I'm not being political; social political, but not political. I don't tell what anybody what to think.

BW: Is that what politics is? Telling people what to think?

OT: I'm not like Joan Baez or Bob Dylan.

BW: But see that's who I think of is Bob Dylan, the groundbreaker, the one who tells us the news we don't want to hear so much.

OT: I'm the opposite of Bob Dylan - I have no words. I'm the opposite of Bob Dylan or Ani DiFranco. I use very few words to explain myself. Bob Dylan tends to preach more about freedom and do this and do that. I don't do that. I don't want to tell people what to think. I'm not a perfect human being. I'm like an audio newspaper. I sort of give you the news.

BW: Exactly, you give us the news like on Below the Fold.

OT: That's what Below the Fold is about. It's a newspaper expression.

"I don't know much about the Blues,
but I'm good at being black."

BW: In "House of the Crosses," I thought maybe it was my imagination that there was more told in the synopsis in the liner notes than in there was in the body of the song.

OT: Oh, no, I thought the song was right on. "I went down to the house of the crosses/I saw my momma fall on her knees/Well she told me this man's your father/He killed two people and he raped me." Later he was a guard at the House of Crosses watching over his father because he thought he was so evil. He just wanted to be a prison guard to make sure he never got loose, just to watch over him. That's some twisted shit. There's a place called the House of Crosses in St. Petersburg. It's a high-security prison. They don't let people visit; they have to yell up with little megaphones. I thought that was an interesting story just about the prison, and then I came up with the story the next day.

BW: And then on the same CD was the "Kitchen Towel" song, another heart-breaking song.

OT: A ghost story. I like those. But they weren't true, I just made those up. Sort of like Edgar Allen Poe.

BW: They sound like they could be true.

OT: Well, the thing that happened to the people happened to the people. Where they lost their farms and gave up and killed themselves. Did you listen to Pentatonic Wars yet?

BW: Yes.

OT: So, you just like the pretty songs.

BW: I have to say I am drawn to Cassie's voice. On "Mama's Best Friend" I think she's scatting a little bit. She's really developed as a singer, or maybe she could always do that and I just didn't know it.

OT: I kind of featured on this album and let her sing more than one song. Usually I let her sing one song, never three.

BW: I think she's a winner, and it's wonderful that she's part of your group. Is it true you made her learn bass and play with your band, or she was going to lose her allowance?

OT: Kind of, basically. She used to cry. I used to make her practice fifteen minutes, and she would cry. But I knew that she was really good. I knew that she had it. One day she picked up a bass and she asked my old bass player Kenny Passarelli, "How do you do that for "Hey Joe?" [he sings bass line]. She learned that in fifteen minutes. That's when I decided she was going to play bass. It's funny. People go, "Is that really true that you made your daughter play bass?" Like people are just amazed that I did that, how cruel! How many people had to take piano lessons? Is that just twisted or what? Are people sick? I have a way of being the bad guy. "Otis, you write some depressing songs." What about "Teen Angel," that was a big hit, or "Ode to Billie Joe."

BW: Or "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die."

OT: Yeah, how about that? But I get blamed for all that; I'm the one who put the depression in the Blues or something. I'm the one who's like, "Guilty, Your Honor." You're doing five to ten for making the Blues depressing. All the depressing Appalachian songs: "Pretty Polly." "Little Sadie." So, can you figure this out, Your Honor? Cause I can't. So I made my daughter play bass guitar. Oh, man!

BW: You took her around the world, that's terrible.

OT: How many people had to take violin and piano lessons? Go figure. See how I get kind of a bad rap?

BW: When she tells the story it's done with humor and affection. "Well, my dad made me play in his band." And the rest of us would love to be in her shoes.

OT: She had to make money to help pay for college. She always forgets to tell you that her mom and dad sent her to college.

BW: It's mentioned in the article that she went off to Chicago to go to college and study theatre.

OT: She leaves out the parts where they spent a lot of hard-working money, and then she drops out. Nobody gets that part of the story. Well, I tell you, I'm an acquired taste. You have to listen to the music more and more. Like opera. Once you get it, you get it. I'm still waiting for Porter to get it. He's still working on it.

BW: Porter? Who's that?

OT: Historian [Bob] Porter. [He was just inducted into] the Blues Hall of Fame. He does all those radio programs, but who knows, maybe one day he'll get it. I don't know how to tell you how to review the album. I just took different genres and brought them together. Because Blues is the base of all American music, of jazz, of rock 'n' roll. I believe Blues is an attitude. My music is very roots oriented and, since Blues is an attitude, there's always call and response in my music which is part of the African experience.

BW: That's like the segment of the PBS series, Martin Scorsese's The Blues, that Corey Harris was in and he goes to West Africa, and what's the word, "griot"?

OT: Yeah, "griot," it's part of the griot tradition, storytelling. That's their history books, that's how they keep their history through music and stories,

BW: I read other books since them that disputed that there's a West African tradition that came over and took the form of the Blues. But that's something that you subscribe to, that it's a descendant?

OT: Well, think about it, blacks weren't allowed to read, right? So, how was anything passed down if people weren't allowed to read?

BW: The verbal history.

OT: Yeah, so somebody's full of shit, no offense. I'm blunt about that. Duh, come on, man, are you joking? In the tradition of the whites not letting them read. Call it what you want, but they had to keep on passing everything down verbally. It was pretty tough for the first hundred years.

BW: B.B. King has been quoted as saying that the Blues started at Dockery [Plantation] in Mississippi.

OT: I don't exactly know where it started. I'm not a historian. You know what I say to people? I don't know much about the Blues, but I'm good at being black. You can quote me on that. I'm serious. I was born on the south side of Chicago. Came to Denver when I was four. My parents came from the Deep South.

BW: Where in the south were your parents from?

OT: My mother was from Lake Providence, Louisiana. My father's from Memphis.

BW: How'd they end up in Chicago?

OT: 'Cause everybody was going that way like the Irish leaving Ireland. The great migration up north. You might get shot, but you probably wouldn't get lynched.

BW: And then your uncle was murdered?

OT: My uncle was sort of a gangster; he was shot in Chicago. He was shot before I was born. My mother was sixteen when her brother was shot.

BW: Goodness.

OT: It's no big deal.

BW: It's kind of a big deal.

OT: A lot of people get shot in Chicago. He carried a gun. It's like you see in the Mafia movies, the guy always kills somebody. My uncle's probably the one that killed. A lot of people didn't make it. They ran the streets. A lot of people didn't make it. There was a certain lifestyle that he lived, and you've got to live by it. Some people say that he maybe killed people, we don't know. You know those family rumors that spread around. He got killed in a crap game. He was a really handsome guy. They always said I looked like him, my eyes were like his. His name was Andrew Bell. All my relatives go, "You got eyes like Andrew Bell." He had light eyes. Am I helping you at all with all these boring stories?

BW: I don't think they're boring at all. I like your stories. Do you have brothers and sisters?

OT: I don't talk about my family too much. Just my uncle 'cause I write about it. Take a couple of listens to the album. Have a glass of orange juice, and let it seep in. Did you listen to the banjo album [2008 release Recapturing the Banjo]?

BW: Yeah, I really like that one, and I enjoy the variety of artists that are on here. Your original songs are so different than the norm and then you pick some songs to cover like "Hey Joe." Do you just pick the songs you want to cover? Is there any rhyme or reason?

OT: I had an album called Blue-Eyed Monster that I won't re-release. So whenever I play live I play "Hey Joe," and people go, "I wish you had 'Hey Joe' on one of your records," so I put it on the banjo record. I thought it would be a trippy thing to do. It's like a sorbet, sort of breaks up the banjo-ness of the album. It sort of catches you off guard. I was playing lead guitar on that one, too, which was fun. I don't get to do that much. The other people picked some covers, like "Liza Jane." Everyone brought a song to the table.

BW: I like "Ran So Hard the Sun Went Down."

OT: I wrote that one. It's very traditional, not the way we did it, but it's a traditional sound, then I just layered it to make it crazy.

BW: So much on the most recent one feels like jazz no doubt since there are so many jazz-based musicians on there. Do you encounter any criticism for using so many jazz musicians?

OT: I encounter criticism for what I do all the time. That's why I can't get a category. But you have to listen to it and see how it interplays with the Blues-based roots part of it. It's the attitude of the jazz. Some jazz guys won't tell you it's jazz. They'll say it's not really jazz. Ask some jazz guys, "Is that jazzy?" No, 'cause it's trance. It's trance music. There's a lot of interplay going on.

BW: Jazz guys can get pretty territorial.

OT: They sure can. So, it's really just Otis music. I like the way that I went into it. I didn't go into it immediately. Then, I came back out of it, too.

BW: Do you have a sense of who your fan base is, your demographics and who you attract?

OT: I don't know. I have all kinds of people walk up to me and say, "I'm really a fan of yours," and I didn't even know they existed. I'd like my fan base to be younger. Since the movie, here's a little story for you. "Ten Million Slaves" [from Recapturing the Banjo] on i-Tunes was selling four hits a week. When the trailer [for Public Enemies] came out, it went up to nine hundred, so I know there's some new people. It's averaging about five hundred a month on i-Tunes hits, so there's a lot of new people who know who I am. If they were Blues fans they would have already had my records. So these are all new people.

BW: That's got to be good news.

OT: It is good news. I can't tell you who my fan base is.

BW: What sort of festivals do you get invited to, folk, roots, Blues?

OT: Only a couple Blues a year and jazz festivals in Europe 'cause they have Blues night, roots festivals. I don't do too many Blues festivals. It's really funny - I won [the 2004] Living Blues Entertainer of the Year Reader's poll with Etta James. I won that one year, and that year I only did two Blues festivals. So I'm kind of a rebel. I think I played at King Biscuit. The first time I went to King Biscuit I think I had twenty people in the audience, the second time I went I had fifty, the third time I think I had maybe eighty, the fourth time I went I had six hundred people on acoustic stage. It's been a hard journey for me. I don't know what will happen next. I must have new fans, because they're buying my songs.

BW: Cassie, as a younger woman, is this a natural fit for her?

OT: She's probably gonna break loose and do her own thing. That's up to her.

BW: You must have done something right for her to take the leadership position she has at the Blues Foundation.

OT: She did that all by herself. I had nothing to do with that.

BW: And initiating the Youth Jam this year at IBC. She learned how to be proactive from somebody.

OT: I'm proactive but maybe in a more negative way. I'm outspoken. She's a little sweeter than I am.

BW: One thing I find appealing is the pictures of your childhood that you include in a lot of your CDs, you as a baby or a toddler.

OT: I was forced to do that. When you open the inside [of Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs], you see that picture of me? That's what I wanted the cover to be, but they thought it was too scary. So I gave a baby picture, figured they're not going to complain about that.

BW: I've seen pictures of you in other ones, like you on a bearskin rug.

OT: That was a joke. The person who did the cover for that wanted me to do a nude photo. I said, "You're out of your mind." I said, "Okay, I'll give you a nude." My wife hated that I did that. But I said, "Okay, we'll go with a nude."

BW: I thought maybe you were showing us your softer side.

OT: I just did it as a joke, something interesting, I didn't take it very seriously. It was just decoration. Take a listen to the records, and let it seep in. It takes a little time. It doesn't soak in for people on the first listen. If you listen to all the instruments, you can hear them all clearly all at the same time which you can't hear in a lot of music

BW: You're so versatile in all the different instruments that you play on these recordings.

OT: The other guys are way better musicians than I am. I make sure everybody's better than me, or they can't play with me. I'm the producer, so they've got to be better, not emotionally, but technically better than I try to get the emotion out of them. But like Ron Miles is a genius. Jason is the next Herbie Hancock.
BUY Otis Taylor from EMUSIC
Stacy Jeffress is a contributing writer to BluesWax. She can be reached at blueswax@visnat.com.
BluesWax is an electronic publication from Visionation.Copyright © 2000-2009 Visionation, Ltd. All rights reserved.

Cam Deas European Winter Tour

Hey you people across the water!

Cam Deas is on tour

Take note!

Take time!

And go see this guy!

I'm running this a bit late, so sorry, he's on the road, NOW!!
I took this info from his newsletter, you should sign up too!
Tour Dates with Jack Allett (formerly Spoono):
Jan 13th - Oslo; Sound of Mu
Jan 14th - Gothenburg; Cafe Ana
Jan 15th - Copenhagen; Lygten Station
Jan 16th - Hamburg; TBC
Jan 17th - Prague; The Brick Bar
Jan 18th - Vienna; Celeste (Vienna Institute of Improvised Music)
Jan 19th - Stuttgart; FFUS
Jan 20th - Mainz; Walpodenakademie
Jan 21st - Krefeld; Unrock @ Kulturrampe (With Good For Cows)
Jan 22nd - Den Haag: The SCSI Cell (With Basshaters)
Jan 23rd - Tilburg; Vatican Analog
Jan 24th - Louvain La Neuve; Ferme De Biereau
Jan 25th - Gent; Villa Drashhoek
Jan 27th - Rennes; La Bascule
Jan 28th - Cherbourg; Studio Chaudelande

Ok, Cam has also restocked his supply of My Guitar is Alive and It's Singing CDr and you should buy it, I did and it kicks ass. Yeah, really. Go to his MySpace and listen to The Waters of Kval0ya, fantastic tune.
I had it here for d/l but you really ought to support him so go check out his MySpace page for all the details. Lot's of other cool stuff to buy too, including that ridiculously popular black stuff with grooves.
Why are you still here? Go.

Jack Rose has died

This is very sad news. I will try to update this post as new info is released. I think he will be missed tremendously in the musical world. And of course the people in his life will miss Jack Rose the man, and they will miss him the most.

Though I haven't found an official 'news' article, it appears that Jack Rose has indeed died at the very young age of 38, today, Dec. 5th, 2009.

There are some credible sources verifying that it is true:

Three Lobed Records is reporting that it is true.

Glenn Jones on Yahoo! FaheyGuitarPlayers has this to say:
All too true, unfortunately. Jack Rose died Saturday morning. I only got the news a couple hours ago from Regina Greene — our booking person -- just can’t wrap my mind around it. I haven't been able to reach his wife Laurie, she must be inundated with phone calls, so there’s still a lot I don’t know.

Laurie talked to Regina and told her that Jack died suddenly of a heart attack (sometime Saturday morning or Friday night, I’m not sure) -- that it was fast, there was no pain. I don’t know if he died in his sleep, if they were at a hospital, in an ambulance or what.

Not that the details matter much. Words are so poor. That’s a huge hole in so many lives -- it’s too unreal. Not only a fantastic musician, but a great, great friend, big-hearted, funny, outrageous. We just had several shows together in Belgium two weeks ago, and were scheduled to play in Denver together next Friday. We just bought our plane tickets.

Touring with Jack was a blast — always. Can’t believe it won’t ever happen again.

He’d just finished an album for Thrill Jockey, which would have upped his ante in terms of exposure. (We have a duet on the album, “Moon is in the Gutter.”) There’s also a DVD, filmed in the studio, which is just about ready for release. We each do hour long solo sets and a couple duets, and there’s a very entertaining interview conducted by Byron Coley as well. Jack was in top form for the sessions, and plays beautifully.

An indescribable loss.

Glenn//.

I first saw this news on Work & Worry, but it is posted in many places, most seem to be referring to Arthur.com as the source.

Here is what I have found so far in no particular order:
http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/12/05/remembering-jack-rose/
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/phillygossip/Philadelphia_guitarist_extraordinaire_Jack_Rose_has_died.html
http://pitchfork.com/news/37302-rip-jack-rose/
http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/12/05/remembering-jack-rose/
http://cahlsjukejoint.blogspot.com/2009/12/jack-rose-dies.html
http://othersideoflife.wordpress.com/2009/12/06/jack-rose-r-i-p/


And some info sites for Rose:
http://www.thrilljockey.com/artists/index.html?id=12380
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Rose_(guitarist)

There are a couple posts HERE on my blog with some of Jack's music.