Here comes a whole lotta trouble with some FIERCE guitar sounds:
Tag: blues
“When you’re a kid, your parents are like, ‘You want to do WHAT?'” Alvin Youngblood Hart says of going musical. “My parents said, ‘You need something to fall back on.'” Hart took their advice, sort of. He has two jobs: playing rock-and-roll with a band and playing solo, acoustic roots music.
“I’ve got the solo thing to fall back on for now. There’s playing rock shows, and there’s the day job. It kind of works out like that. I like playing it all.”
Hart also plays in the South Memphis String Band, and he was part of a recent session for John Kilzer’s upcoming album. The personnel on that session amounted to a pantheon of Memphis greats, including three guitarists: Hart, Luther Dickinson, and Steve Selvidge.
“Having me, Luther, and Steve on the same session could sound like a disaster, but we’re all old enough at this point in time — particularly me — to exercise some restraint. And I think me and Steve have a new career as harmony singers.”
Hart is looking forward to his Hi-Tone show this weekend.
“Memphis is pretty important to all of us. It’ll be a good Memphis rock show.”
— Joe Boone
Alvin Youngblood Hart’s Muscle Theory with Jimbo Mathus and the Tri-State Coalition, Saturday, November 2nd, at the Hi-Tone
Valerie June played the Tonight Show last night. She starts after the last hash mark in the video timeline. 37:42. You can see it if you watch a million commercials. Seriously, a million. You will watch 2 minutes 30 seconds of commercials; Xfinity seconds, not real seconds. It’s worth the wait. Compared to her David Letterman appearance, she seems more at home with her band and more comfortable in her role. She seems to be justifying all the recent publicity. All the best from Memphis.
Beale Street mainstay and contender for TV’s The Voice Patrick Dodd is back in Memphis and recording tracks for a new EP of thematic songs at Ardent Studios. The dreadlocked blues guitar phenom is looking to explore a smaller form than the traditional album as an outlet for his trio and his meal ticket: his voice.
With his new burst of TV-derived notoriety, Dodd could easily have upped the ante with a full album and a larger-format band. But he seems confident and content to move in the opposite direction. Asked why he isn’t going for bigger things, Dodd looks at his career with a sense of humor born of relentless gigging on Beale and throughout the region.
“Everybody wants to get paid,” he joked, going on to mimic the lines he must have heard a million times. “It’ll be good exposure. I know you’re only 40.”
- Joe Boone
- Patrick Dodd relaxes after nailing his overdubs.
But in all seriousness, his band is in a better place than before his run on the popular NBC primetime singing contest in which he sang a convincing “Walking in Memphis” before his elimination.
“It absolutely helped,” said Landon Moore, Dodd’s bassist who with drummer Harry Peel rounds out the trio. “But I’m glad to be doing what we were doing before he left.”
What the trio does is provide a solid blues-rock foundation for Dodd’s gutsy, powerful voice. Dodd was recording a few overdubs and made quick work of them; his Paul Rogers-like voice needing very little fuss from engineer Jeff Powell.
Powell, longtime Ardent veteran, is a major proponent of the shorter-form approach and sees more clients opting to focus on fewer songs with more preparation beforehand. The trio was in the studio for one long day cutting two Dodd originals: “End of the Line” and “I’m Gone.”
“The one-day thing works if the band is ready to go. We’ll mix this tonight,” Powell said.
The songs mark a major development in Dodd’s songwriting and arranging since his last full-length recording, Future Blues. The new material has a wider breadth due to rolling chord changes that add harmonic richness to the recordings. Dodd hopes to a series of five-song concept recordings that are thematically woven together with lyrics and artwork. “I’m Gone” will serve as a single for the first new collection, which, at this pace, could be ready to go in as little as six weeks.
www.patrickdoddtrio.bandcamp.com
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Charlie Musselwhite
As a teenager in Memphis in the 1950s, Charlie Musselwhite made money by laying cement, digging ditches, and bootlegging moonshine. All the while, he dreamed of making it big as a blues-harp player. Sometimes referred to as “Memphis Charlie,” Musselwhite became one of the few non-black blues musicians to emerge in the ’60s. Musselwhite has released more than 20 albums and is currently on tour promoting his newest, Delta Hardware. He is honored with a brass note on Beale Street’s Walk of Fame.
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Re-creating the Blues
Scott Barretta felt skeptical when he was cold-called May 1st to share ideas for a film project. The former editor of esteemed Swedish blues magazine Jefferson and Oxford, Mississippi’s Living Blues had grown accustomed to such queries. “Having worked in blues, I’m used to getting milked for information by people making documentary films,” Barretta says. The drill is quite simple. “They’ll say they’d like to work with me, I tell them everything I know, and they never call me back.”
G. Marq Roswell, who contacted Barretta, proved to be more than a purist on a shoestring budget. Roswell has over 50 credits as music supervisor in motion pictures including Wild at Heart, The Commitments, and Baadasssss!.
Two-time Oscar winner Denzel Washington hired Roswell to re-create African-American blues, jazz, and gospel from the mid-1930s — without the crack and hiss of the surviving sounds of those days on 78 rpm records — as the aural backdrop for The Great Debaters, the story of a small black college in Texas taking the national debate championship in 1935 against rather long odds. Washington directed, produced, and starred in the film, and his fingerprints are all over the soundtrack, for which Barretta facilitated recording sessions and wrote liner notes.
The soundtrack bridges different genres and generations of black music practitioners to make old music in original combinations that include Memphis musicians Alvin “Youngblood” Hart, Teenie and Leroy Hodges, and Billy Rivers and the Angelic Voices of Faith choir.
Hart bristles at the thought of himself as a revivalist. “As far as being the preservation society — that’s not me,” he says. Nevertheless, Hart and the African-American string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops immediately came to mind when Roswell asked Barretta to recommend musicians for a juke-joint scene.
“Alvin’s simply the best person alive playing that style of acoustic blues,” Barretta says. “I’d just seen the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and it became clear to me that if you hooked them up with Alvin, it’d be great, so I suggested that to Roswell. He liked the mp3s I sent and asked where we should record. I said, ‘Why don’t we do it in Memphis?'”
“It” required three two-day recording sessions at Ardent studio. Atlantic Records released the soundtrack, with 13 songs made in Memphis, on December 11th.
The youngest of the featured artists, the 30-and-under Carolina Chocolate Drops, play the oldest style. They represent a black string-band tradition that “has always been there, it’s just hidden,” explains Dom Flemons, a 25-year-old multi-instrumentalist who joins Rhiannon Giddons and Justin Robinson to round out the Chocolate Drops’ lineup. “We might be the first black string band in a major motion picture,” Flemons adds.
“Working with the Carolina Chocolate Drops was fun because they’re years younger than me,” Hart explains. “Looking back when I was their age, I was wondering if there was anybody else into this stuff. This was something I’ve been waiting for.”
Washington wanted a modern-day Bessie Smith, the prototype blues queen who died following a wreck on a Mississippi highway in 1937. He found her in Sharon Jones, the soul singer from Brooklyn who, along with her Dap-Kings, has released the year’s soul revival hit album 100 Days, 100 Nights. Despite her historical leanings as an artist, Jones says she wasn’t fully aware of the Memphis music legacy until she arrived at Ardent studio to cut tracks for The Great Debaters.
“I was standing there where Booker T. & the MG’s had recorded, playing with Alvin and Teenie [Hodges],” Jones explains. “I wasn’t familiar with Memphis’ reputation when I got there, but being there was an education.” Hart, the guitarist whom Taj Mahal once described as possessing “thunder in his hands,” knew to expect the unexpected at the Ardent sessions.
“The funny thing about recording in Memphis is that you never know who’s going to show up,” Hart says. “I’d worked with the Hodges brothers maybe 10 years ago. They showed up. Then somehow we started working with Billy Rivers and the Angelic Voices of Faith choir. I’m glad that the soundtrack work was done here and the producers of the film kept coming back and getting more local people involved.”
It’s a treat to hear Teenie Hodges, whose name is synonymous with the plush sound of the 1970s, pluck his acoustic on the foot-stomping Piedmont blues duet “Step It Up and Go” with Hart. “Teenie’s certainly not known as an acoustic blues player, but that’s what he did, and when he and Alvin played together, it was seamless,” Barretta says.
Barretta explains that Washington wanted to begin and conclude the film with musical prayers. Memphis got Jones in the mood.
“I go to church, and I know what it’s like when the Holy Ghost comes through. People get to shouting,” Jones says. “During the recording, I could literally feel it. Some kind of something came over me in that studio while I was singing ‘My Soul Is a Witness.’ It was like I was in church, and I got happy.”
Jones’ happiness has yet to wear off. “I know I’m not dreaming,” she says. “I know it’s for real, and I know it’s done. This is something I’ll tell stories about for a long time.”
The project left the performers with a sense of unique accomplishment, as Hart explains: “If you’d have told me when I was a 15-year-old wannabe guitar player in the garage that I was going to be working with Denzel Washington, I would have said, ‘What?'”
The Great Debaters opens at movie theaters on Christmas day.
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Handy Heritage Awards
Heritage Tours, Inc. will honor the recipients of the 11th annual W.C. Handy Heritage Awards Sunday, November 18th, at 6 p.m. at the Gibson Lounge. This year’s gala celebrates the 134th birthday of the “Father of the Blues” and the 50th anniversary of Memphis soul.
Honorees cover a wide range of local musicians, including street-corner blues guitarist Fred Sanders, gospel singer Deborah Manning-Thomas, Stax soulman Eddie Floyd, doo-wop harmonizers The Astors, former Stax sideman and erstwhile Bo-Key Ronnie Williams, and worldwide blues belter Koko Taylor.
All have confirmed their attendance and, with the exception of the Astors, will perform.
The Handy Heritage Awards recognize lesser-known musicians. “Memphis has been able to maintain the “Home of the Blues” title thanks to them,” Elaine Turner, executive director of Heritage Tours, says. “They were playing on Beale Street when it was down. Fred Sanders has taken Memphis blues all over the world, and he’s playing in the park on Beale Street today. These are people who’ve basically been overlooked. We don’t just search for people with big names.”
Additionally, B.B. King‘s longtime executive assistant Polly Walker will receive the Music Business Award. “She’s been a behind-the-scenes person,” Turner says. “With the hectic schedule [King] has, somebody had to be the business person, and she has been for many years.”
The late jazz bandleader and Memphis high school teacher Jimmie Lunceford will receive a posthumous honor in recognition of the 60th anniversary of his death.
Tickets cost $30, and proceeds benefit the W.C. Handy Memphis Home and Museum, which Heritage Tours manages at 352 Beale Street. — Preston Lauterbach
For the Benefit of Mr. LFM
Christopher Reyes, founder and proprietor of LiveFromMemphis.com, has been one of the most tireless and prolific supporters of local music (and film) in recent years, providing a great online resource for artists and fans alike while better-funded organizations such as the Music Commission have come up dry on the same front.
Recently, Reyes has found himself waylaid by back surgery and the medical bills that come with such a procedure. With his labor of love Live From Memphis already a shoestring operation, Reyes could use a little help, and this weekend offers a chance for the arts community he’s served so well to come to his aid.
Mark Akin of The Subteens has organized a benefit concert for Reyes and Live From Memphis Saturday, November 17th, at the Hi-Tone Café. The always high-energy Subteens will headline the show, with Giant Bear, The Harmony Brothers, The Perfect Fits, and Billie Worley & the Candy Company rounding out the bill. Akin says there will also be an art show and live auction. Doors open at 8 p.m., with music set to start at 9 p.m. The cover is $7, with all proceeds going to help Reyes as well as Live From Memphis.
Additionally, those wishing to help with operating costs of Live From Memphis can donate directly at LiveFromMemphis.com/donate. — Chris Herrington
Waylo Back at the House of Hi
It isn’t quite the Memphis relaunch of Stax Records, but Willie Mitchell, godfather of Memphis soul, has announced the resurrection of his Waylo Records label. Mitchell originally founded Waylo in 1982 after the sun set on Hi Records with the onset of disco. He produced and released Waylo records from soul stalwarts Otis Clay and Ann Peebles before mothballing the venture in the late 1980s.
“When Hi Records was sold, there were four people involved,” Boo Mitchell, Willie’s son and business manager, explains. “My dad was the only one who was like, ‘Guys, we’re making a mistake.’ So he bought the studio and started Waylo.”
What the Waylo announcement lacks in hoopla, at least compared to the Stax fanfare, it compensates with substance. Mitchell will focus on local talent, beginning with the label’s first release, Mashaa‘s Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere. Mashaa (real name: Erma Shaw) is a Mitchell protégée who moves to the forefront after singing back-up on numerous songs at Mitchell’s South Memphis Royal Studios.
“He was trying to shop [Mashaa] out to a major label to pick up,” Michell says. “He got tired of shopping it around and decided to release it himself. Select-O-Hits is distributing it. We’ll press CDs and do digital.”
Michell describes the sound as traditional rhythm-and-blues. “The lineup is basically the whole crew that he normally uses, with live instruments. It sounds like a graduated version of the Memphis sound of the ’70s,” he says.
Coming next are reissues of Clay, Peebles, and Lynn White records from Waylo’s first run.
These days, if you ask Boo Mitchell what he’s doing, day or night, he’ll tell you the same thing: “Cuttin’ records.” — PL
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Holly in Memphis
An avowed fan of blues practitioners such as Memphis Minnie, Ike Turner, and Sleepy John Estes, British singer Holly Golightly is happy to discuss her affinity for the minted-in-Memphis style as she tools eastward on Interstate 8, traveling from San Diego to Tucson on a tour that will land her in the Bluff City this week.
“English people are realists, not escapists. We like the dirt, the imperfections, and the spirit of getting up and getting on with it,” says the performer, who will play the Hi-Tone Café on Friday, October 19th. “I’ll take Memphis Minnie every time, because I like her grit.”
Golightly — yes, it’s her given name — acknowledges her grandfather, a Welsh miner who sang in a close harmony choir, her parents, who she says had “fairly eclectic tastes in music,” and the punk scene of the early 1980s for instilling her love of blues, rockabilly, and other American roots genres.
Born and raised in Medway, a seaboard town that sits between the Thames river delta and the English Channel (“Living in Medway is like living in a wind tunnel,” Golightly notes), the singer began playing music with local cult hero Billy Childish. She then formed an all-girl group called the Headcoatees, a spin-off of Childish’s band the Headcoats.
“I went backward,” Golightly explains. “My taste developed from going to see punk bands who did covers of obscure R&B songs. I didn’t go out looking for this musical style. It found me.”
Content to play small club dates and release albums on an array of indie labels (she has recorded 13 full-lengths for labels such as Damaged Goods and Sympathy for the Record Industry in as many years), Golightly has been branded a “musician’s musician,” an artist who’s lauded by the likes of filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and the White Stripes and perennially lands on critics’ best-of list. But she hasn’t translated that critical acclaim into platinum record sales.
Golightly, however, couldn’t care less.
“To begin with, I don’t know anything about contemporary music,” Golightly says, insisting that her vocal contribution to the White Stripes’ “It’s True That We Love One Another” is “fairly inconsequential, in the scheme of things.”
“Whether people reading my name in their credits equates them coming to shows or buying my records, I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve been involved in reasonably high-profile collaborations before working with the White Stripes. I’m playing the same places I’ve always played, and I’m making the same records I’ve always made.”
Those records, cut at London’s famed Toe Rag Studio, run the gamut from Nancy Sinatra-style rave-ups to better than Amy Winehouse blues-powered ballads.
On albums ranging from 1995’s Good Things to You Can’t Buy a Gun When You’re Crying, which was released last April, Golightly offers up a large number of originals along with dozens of well-picked covers, such as Ike Turner’s “Your Love Is Mine,” Wreckless Eric’s “Comedy Time,” and Bobby Womack’s “It’s All Over Now.”
“I was the first person to record at Toe Rag. I was the guinea pig,” says Golightly, describing producer Liam Watson as a good friend.
“Historically, it’s very easy to work with someone you’ve known that long. We’ve got very similar reference points, and we both have a clear idea of what we want things to sound like.
“We’ve known each other since ’84, I think. He’s always been interested in getting this old gear, and now he’s got an empire of amazing stuff,” she says of Watson’s copious collection of analog recording equipment, which has been utilized by British soul singer James Hunter, rock group the Kills, and pop outfit Supergrass over the last decade.
Then Golightly’s mind turns back to the road.
“We just passed an ostrich farm, which was an amazing thing,” she says. “You know, I had trouble with my work visa, and we had to cancel the first three shows of the tour. It was a real shame, but now that my visa has come through, I’ve got three years’ grace. A lot of other British bands have been refused, but I kicked up a fuss about it and got an immigration lawyer involved.
“I guess I pose an international threat,” she notes with a hearty laugh. “I’m on the most wanted [list] for not being a good guitar player!”
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Two Weeks Notice
Most modern electric blues these days sounds like it comes from Chicago, but apparently Crash Kole & the Bluesouls come by it honestly. A Chicago native, Kole leads his Memphis band through a set of accomplished, stomping, growling, City of Big Shoulders blues on Two Weeks Notice.
The album doesn’t exactly break new ground or put novel twists on a time-tested (or some might say time-worn) formula, but the result is certainly as convincing as any of the army of similar bands you can hear on Beale Street every year at the Blues Foundation’s International Blues Challenge.
Outside of some slide guitar on “Blues Ain’t No Trouble” and a little bit of Elvis echo trailing some of his phrasing, Kole is not a terribly distinctive singer/guitarist, but as long as they keep the tempos up, he and his band produce the kind of workmanlike blues groove that can keep a club hoppin’. The slow ones — such as “Tupelo” and the aforementioned “Blues Ain’t No Trouble” — don’t quite sink in as deeply as they need to. — CH
Grade: B
Crash Kole & the Bluesouls play a CD release party for Two Weeks Notice on Thursday, August 23rd, at Pearl’s Oyster House (299 S. Main Street). Showtime is 7:30 p.m.
I’ve written about Memphis musician Charlie Wood many times in many different contexts, but it wasn’t until I typed a song title, “I Just Want You Cause I Want You” (from his latest album), into my notes that I thought of what now seems an obvious comparison: Lyle Lovett.
That song is reminiscent of Lovett, as is Wood generally: He’s a little bit like Lovett behind an organ, Wood’s music is rooted in blues rather than country, and the generosity-to-wit ratio of his songwriting is a little more weighted toward the generosity side of the equation. But, like Lovett, Wood specializes in clever, jazz-tinged songs whose musicality is spread across most of the American roots-music spectrum.
Charlie Wood and the New Memphis Underground is Wood showcasing his new not-so-large band. The frontman writes and sings the songs while manning keyboards, bass, and drums. But he’s joined in this setup by Joe Restivo on guitar, Billy Gibson on harmonica, Kirk Smothers on sax, Marc Franklin on trumpet, and Tamara Jones on backing vocals.
Back when Wood was playing Beale six or seven nights a week, he’d go a few years between albums. Now that he’s scaled back his local live gigs, he’s become downright prolific. I suppose this is bad news for Beale regulars but good news for record fans. But the formation of the New Memphis Underground seems predicated on a return to the stage, since this album could have easily been labeled as a Wood solo record with credited backup in the fine print.
New Memphis Underground opens with five straight originals before Wood & Co. start mixing in covers. “Let It Rip” is a rollicking opener where Wood puts a vocal-jazz spin on rave-up rockabilly while playing the barrelhouse blues. “Brand New Feelin'” is a fine contemporary blues without cliché. And the swinging keyboard-and-sax showoff tune, “Too Much Is Not Enough,” is the album’s strongest groove. I found myself involuntarily typing my notes to the beat.
From there, the album mixes originals and sharp covers. The originals include the club musician’s anthem “Don’t Let the Money Get Funny” and the bitter sociopolitical lament “You Don’t Really Wanna Know.” Among the covers are the Percy Mayfield blues ballad “Please Send Someone To Love,” the Ray Charles slow-burner “Drown in My Own Tears,” and a heated rendition of the Booker T. & the MGs instrumental “Boot-Leg.”
Charlie Wood and the New Memphis Underground isn’t Wood’s best record, but it’s mighty fine. As a calling card for a live-band show, it totally convinces.
— Chris Herrington
Grade: A-