Clarke Buehling | ‘Out of His Gourd’ and Leading The SkirtLifters

November 5, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Hello everyone. This is Sound Authors, and I’m Dr. Kent. I’m excited on this show today to feature someone who I found out about through Concerts in Your Home, which is an amazing project and website online. You could organize House Concerts there from all sorts of amazing musicians. At Sound Authors we’ve decided to team up with them in a little small way, and feature a lot of their artists because they’re extraordinary. I have two guests on the show today, one guest who as I said I’m featuring from Concerts in Your Home, and his name is Clarke Buehling. We’re going to talk to him in just a minute. At the end of the show, we’re going to have a brief interview with an author because today we’re going to feature on the “sound” part of Sound Authors. At the end of the show, we’ll talk to an author whose name is Stan Goldberg, the author of ‘Lessons for the Living,’ an incredible book with stories of forgiveness, and gratitude and courage at the end of life. We’re going to talk to him at the very end of the show, but before that, I’m excited to welcome Clarke Buehling, and he’s of course the master of The SkirtLifters and a real expert on the gourd banjo and many other cool things. So welcome to the show Clarke Buehling.

Clarke Buehling: Yes, hello!

Dr. Kent: Well it’s great to chat with you. I love your music, love the concept. Tell me a little about how you got into playing the banjo.

Clarke Buehling: I started the banjo back in the 1960s. That was a time when the folk boom was happening. I was attempting to teach myself guitar and several instruments. I was in high school. A fellow came to our school and played the banjo, and the fiddle and the piano, and that was Hobart Smith, and I’d been thinking about the banjo. But when I saw him play and heard him play close-up, that clinched it for me, and I went out about a week later and bought myself a banjo in downtown Chicago at the folk school.

Dr. Kent: So Hobart Smith came to your school?

Clarke Buehling: Yes.

Dr. Kent: That’s extraordinary!

Clarke Buehling: Do you know Hobart Smith?

Dr. Kent: Oh, absolutely! What an experience as a child. How old were you?

Clarke Buehling: I was in high school.

Dr. Kent: That’s incredible. Did you often get musicians? Was it because of the University of Chicago Folk Festival?

Clarke Buehling: I think so. The director of music at our high school, which was the Lake Forest Academy, had various folk musicians come up. Glen Orlin came up and sang there. George and Gerry Armstrong were good friends of his, and they came up to play for us. So I got a dose of good folk music and direction.

Dr. Kent: What do you recall about Hobart Smith? What did he play? He’s very gifted in many instruments. What did he play that day? Banjo?

Clarke Buehling: Yes, one of the things he did was to demonstrate a tune which was ‘Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss,’ which he demonstrated by playing on the banjo, then playing it on the fiddle, then playing it on the piano, so you could hear the tune done in different instruments.

Dr. Kent: That’s the extraordinary thing about Hobart Smith. He really did think about the tune in a different way. Such a gifted musician. So you heard that and what was your upbringing before that? Had you heard old-time music before?

Clarke Buehling: I’m not sure I did. My upbringing included music lessons, so I had piano lessons. I think I studied piano for five years. At one time, I was taking drums, clarinet and piano all at the same time in elementary school, so I had plenty of music. I didn’t do that for very long, but I did have a sampling that way. It was some years before I actually found a teacher. I missed an opportunity to take music lessons from Fleming Brown, but later on, I was able to find an older man who taught the banjo in Hartford, Connecticut. His name was Frank C. Bradbury. He was a concert five-string banjo player, finger-style, a classic player.

Dr. Kent: That’s one fascinating thing about the banjo: it really was a parlor instrument 120 years ago, right?

Clarke Buehling: Yes, I think there’s some misunderstanding about what makes up parlor music, and the difference between parlor music and concert music or dance music: parlor music was fairly simple, and quiet and played in the parlor. Some of the same music, but in a more robust fashion, would have been played on the stages, Vaudeville and the traveling education program: Chautauqua. That’s where my teacher performed early in his years, back at the time just following the first World War. I also traveled around a bit. I hitchhiked and drove into the south, into Kentucky and Virginia, and did get to meet some of the old-timers that were listed in the Pete Seeger book, which was a good source. That was one of my early books: the Pete Seeger book. Another was a book in notation, transposing notation for banjos, republished from the 19th century. It included minstrel tunes, jigs and reels, some smatterings of classical themes. This book came out in the folk boom. I guess it was Langley and Fischer that put this book out to jump on the folk boom. There wasn’t much in the book that we would call Appalachian. Maybe ‘Granny, When the Dog Bites’ is the closest you’d get to that. But there was minstrel music, and jigs and reels and hornpipes, and I was working on that from the beginning – and finger-style. I also learned the claw hammer.

Dr. Kent: I’d like to start out and play a jig from your album, ‘Out of His Gourd.’ There’s a bunch here. How about ‘Circus Jig.’ Tell us about that one.

Clarke Buehling: ‘Circus Jig’ is from the Briggs book. Tom Briggs was a minstrel. He wore black face, played the banjo, traveled. He was around in the 1850s. He was playing a claw hammer style five-string banjo, fretless. It was tuned low. It was tuned about a fourth lower than a standard banjo today. This is from a book that came out. I found a copy of the book in the public library in Boston, and was able to pull some of these tunes out. Since then, the book has been republished.

Dr. Kent: Neat. Let’s listen to ‘Circus Jig,’ and then we’ll talk to Clarke Buehling about the incredible banjo he’s playing after we listen to it. ‘Circus Jig,’ from the album, ‘Out of His Gourd.’ Here we go.

[Music: 'Circus Jig']

Dr. Kent: Well that’s a wonderful little tune called, ‘Circus Jig,’ from ‘Out of His Gourd.’ Tell me about the banjo that you’re playing on that tune.

Clarke Buehling: May I mention that you can hear some clobbering in the background? I’m doing a foot pattern on a board that I learned down in Kentucky from a fiddler named Louis Lan many years ago, to keep rhythm with my feet. I’ll tell you about the gourd banjo. I worked on the pattern for this after reading about the early banjo. One of my favorite books on that was, ‘The Sinful Tunes and Spirituals’ by Dena Epstein. There was an illustration in the Pete Seeger book of some kind of a gourd instrument. Various things – I think I’d seen the gourd banjo in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. So I thought about it for many years, and decided I was finally going to put something together. I made a few of them, and I sold a few. I never did number them, but I made probably a couple dozen. It’s just a gourd about 8 to 10 inches in diameter. On this banjo, I have like a clear piece of premature calf stretched over the hole. The hole is about 8 inches, and I just nail it down to the sides of the gourd. The whole thing is about the size of a smallish banjo.

Dr. Kent: I know a little bit about the history of the banjo, but for folks that are tuning in that might not even think about the banjo all that often – that didn’t sound like the modern banjo too much – what’s the history of the banjo as you know it?

Clarke Buehling: Well [indecipherable] gut strings on it, gut banjo strings made by La Bella.

Dr. Kent: What kind of gut? Is it calf gut, or pig gut?

Clarke Buehling: They’re sheep intestine. Most of the instrument is biodegradable. I guess all but the tacks, and maybe the fourth string, which is wound.

Dr. Kent: Have you ever left one out in the woods just to test?

Clarke Buehling: No, but I could. If I did leave one out, it would be gone in a short time, wouldn’t it? [Laughs] Maybe I can think of other instruments that maybe they should be done that way.

Dr. Kent: Exactly. Was it common to use sheep intestine, or cat gut, or whatever it was on banjos a hundred years ago?

Clarke Buehling: Yes. All the early banjos were made for gut strings, or silk. All the old SS Stewarts, the open-backed banjos, the antique banjos that you find, almost all of those were made for a light string, that’s why so many of them are bent now: you put steel strings on them. The banjo as you know is an African derivative. It’s history goes back somewhere into African history, and there’s a lot of research being done today on this very thing. There’s a group called Black Banjo . . .

Dr. Kent: The Black Banjo Songsters? There’s an album called that.

Clarke Buehling: Well, yes, that’s an album. But there was a Black Banjo gathering a few years back in Boone, North Carolina. I think there’s a website, but I don’t go to it currently, but there’s a website where people converse and exchange information.

Dr. Kent: It’s a really interesting instrument because it’s so racially mixed, at the very beginning, right?

Clarke Buehling: That’s a good point, that the early history of the banjo is also a racial history. The back and forth reflects American problems, and dichotomies, and exchanges and friendship all the way back in exchanging music.

Dr. Kent: The gourd banjo itself, what was the draw for you? You saw it in Pete Seeger’s book.

Clarke Buehling: The draw to me, early on, when I was first learning banjo, I made a little banjo out of a salad bowl with that in mind, that illustration. I didn’t do anything about it for many years, but I had it in the back of my mind. Probably I’d been playing for 20 years before I actually sat down and made one. I was always interested in the history, and the earliest tunes spurred on by hints that I would see here and there bout the African angle, and the origin. To tell the truth, before I bought a banjo or ever had a banjo, I was listening to African drumming. Olatunji was my favorite, and I had some nice field recordings of African drumming, so that was always part of my background.

Dr. Kent: And that was the beginning of the banjo, right? A drum?

Clarke Buehling: I guess, see it’s a resonating chamber, so it’s sort of a drum with a stick on it, isn’t it? The origin of the African banjo probably goes back to India and Egypt. That idea of a sound chamber with a skin over it, it’s present in the Middle East, and in Yugoslavia, and in various places around the world.

Dr. Kent: You were intrigued by this, and you built your first banjo out of a gourd. What exactly is a gourd?

Clarke Buehling: A gourd is a member of the cucurbits family, like a squash, but it has a hard shell, and it’s inedible. The inside is filled with seeds and pith, and when you open one up – have you ever heard the expression, ‘sawing a gourd’? Sawing a gourd is like sawing logs. It makes a huge noise. It sounds like someone snoring. When you saw into a gourd, a large gourd, you find that it’s smelly. If you drink out of a gourd, the water is bitter until it’s been cleaned out quite a bit, leached out. So there you go. It may be an African plant that has floated across the Atlantic and into the New World, into our continent.

Dr. Kent: Where does one find gourds nowadays?

Clarke Buehling: They grow them in California. There was one large place, a woman died who once ran the gourd factory in Stockton. They’ve got them up here in southern Missouri, near me. I’m in Fayetteville, Arkansas. In southern Missouri, they have some people that grow gourds. They have a meeting of the gourd association in Ohio every year. If you go and Google ‘gourd,’ you can probably find quite a bit on it. Crafts people use them. They were used for bowls and utensils for many years, and for boxes for holding things.

Dr. Kent: The name of your album, ‘Out of His Gourd,’ it’s clever because it talks about banjo, but there actually is an expression that we use, isn’t it?

Clarke Buehling: Yes, ‘He’s out of his gourd,’ sure. Who else would put out an album with gourd banjo music?

Dr. Kent: So do people think you are a little bit out of your gourd?

Clarke Buehling: Yes, I think so. Well, they should.

Dr. Kent: Let’s listen to another jig. This is ‘Hard Times Jig.’ Tell us about this one.

Clarke Buehling: I can’t remember which ‘Hard Times Jig’ this is.

Dr. Kent: This is the one on ‘Out of His Gourd.’ How about let’s listen to it first, and then you can tell us about it.

Clarke Buehling: Okay, yes. There are many called that.

Dr. Kent: Here we go.

[Music: 'Hard Times Jig' and 'Old Virginny Jig']

Dr. Kent: That’s an extraordinary tune – I guess a couple of tunes there, right?

Clarke Buehling: Yes, there are two tunes there. I might also mention that I’m playing with a finger pick backward on my index finger, as if it were a fingernail.

Dr. Kent: I was wondering how you did those triplets.

Clarke Buehling: I’ll show you sometime. They’re written into the music. The first tune was ‘Hard Times Jig’ as in Tom Briggs’ book. The triplets on that are done with a hammeron on the second string. It’s a version of the tune; it’s the only version I’ve seen of that tune that seems to be in six-eight, although on the page it’s written in two-four, I believe, which to mean that the accompaniment is going to be in a cross rhythm. So that’s what it seems to me is going on there, which sort of makes sense when you get an overall picture of the other tunes that were published at that time. The second piece I think is out of Phil Rice’s book. It was called, ‘Old Virginny Jig.’ It’s related to two more familiar tunes: one is, ‘Old Molly Hair,’ and the other name is, ‘The Fairy Dance,’ which is Celtic music. So it’s a Celtic tune that seems to have been absorbed into Black culture as ‘Old Molly Hair’ probably, which comes up in Black literature, African-American literature.

Dr. Kent: It’s so intriguing in that you do quite a few gigs, probably half of your gigs, are in Europe, where actually I do know that they have an incredible appreciation for early American music. Part of that is in Ireland. What do folks in Ireland say about a tune like that?

Clarke Buehling: I don’t know that I’ve played that tune in Ireland. The audiences are good there. The European audiences are good. I think they would recognize it as ‘The Fairy Dance,’ and they may – I can only conjecture what their reactions are. I’ve not spoken to the Irish people about that.

Dr. Kent: The Irish tune in the hands of these incredible Black minstrels that were playing, middle of the 1800s, how did that happen?

Clarke Buehling: Well, you understand that most of these people in black face were White, a lot of them were Irish. These books were published in urban areas, where the Irish settled during the potato famine, where there was a great influx of Irish people, and folkways. If you remember Gangs of New York, there is a setting where you would find Irishmen picking up the banjo, among the Blacks in the neighborhood, learning from one another, just as dancing – tap-dancing and step dancing – had an exchange, some of the music styles had an exchange in places like that.

Dr. Kent: This album you put out, ‘Out of His Gourd,’ I’d like to play one more tune from that, and then we’ll go into The SkirtLifters. I’d like to play a tune called, ‘The Arkansas Sheik,’ and there’s a couple questions I’ve got. One is, how did you end up in Arkansas? And another is, tell us about the tune. So how did you end up down there?

Clarke Buehling: How did I end up Arkansas: I came into Arkansas aboard a hippy school bus from the west coast. I jumped on in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. These were people I knew and had run into before. Some I had met at Amsterdam, and some I had met in Berkeley, and they were going through, and they were coming to Arkansas – a band called Corn Bread. They were from Mandeville, Louisiana. So I ended up in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, up in northwest Arkansas in the hills: a nice little town that had been an artist colony, and spa at one time. It was being rebuilt. I’ve come back here several times. I’ve moved out and come back. I’ve been in Denver and Boston, and come back to here. So that’s sort of the Arkansas connection. The song itself, I think it was Riley Puckett recorded it. I just made up the banjo part; there was no other source for that. I just remembered it as I remembered it, and kind of put it together.

Dr. Kent: You said Riley Puckett recorded it?

Clarke Buehling: I believe that’s right.

Dr. Kent: He was with the Skillet Lickers, right? Of course he’s a super favorite of Doc Watson growing up. That makes me think about, were you into the 78s? How did you come across some of this music?

Clarke Buehling: I’ve always been into the 78s, and of course mostly I hear them in reissues, but I have throughout the passage of time collected them, the actual 78s. I’ve referred to the old recordings that started generally in the ’20s, but now I also listen to cylinder recordings, and the earlier banjo recordings which were mostly finger style banjos, the bluegrass.

Dr. Kent: You were touching on it before, but what is classical style banjo? You just touched on that, but was there an actual performance style on stages?

Clarke Buehling: Yes, in the 19th century, that is, the 1800s, there were two banjo styles. When there was one banjo style, it was just banjo, and then there were two banjo styles: there was the stroke style and then there was the guitar style. People started playing like classical guitar. At first they used thumb and three fingers, and then after a while, they just went to thumb and two fingers. And especially as the banjo bridges became narrower and the pitch of the banjo was raised up a little higher, the thumb and two fingers seemed to suffice for most of the players that were playing by the 1870s and ’80s. That’s when finger style started coming in. There were some country styles, rolling styles, but we don’t know much about them. The things that were written down were the pieces that SS Stewart published, and other people published. But every large town, and every state, had somebody teaching guitar, mandolin and banjo, teaching finger style banjo probably, using music and publishing their own. Many places in the middle of nowhere published their own music for all of these instruments.

Dr. Kent: So let’s listen to the ‘Arkansas Sheik,’ – out of the country style?

Clarke Buehling: I’m still playing it stroke style, I believe. I don’t think anything on that album was done in anything other than the old style.

Dr. Kent: Right, and you’re doing it all on gourd banjos, right?

Clarke Buehling: Yes.

Dr. Kent: So let’s listen to the ‘Arkansas Sheik,’ from ‘Out of His Gourd’ by Clarke Buehling. Here we go, let’s listen.

[Music: 'Arkansas Sheik']

Dr. Kent: Great tune, ‘The Arkansas Sheik,’ and of course, there we heard you singing. It’s fantastic, great song.

Clarke Buehling: Thank you very much. The simple term, ‘Sheik’ in the 1920s was a ladies’ man, kind of a Rudy Vallee kind of a person. It’s from an older song; it’s derived from a song that’s pre-Civil War.

Dr. Kent: It’s so much fun. What kind of response do you get from people when you play these old songs?

Clarke Buehling: They like what I play. I get a good response for my programs.

Dr. Kent: I mean, do they say to you, ‘This makes me think of old times?’ Do they say, ‘I had no idea the banjo had such a long history?’ What kinds of things do you get?

Clarke Buehling: Well, both those things. If it’s an older person, sometimes it evokes a past for them, or somebody they heard at one time, or songs they sang when they were young. Yes, when I play the more virtuosic things, people are surprised. Or maybe when I’m playing the gourd banjo, the tone of it is surprising to them, the pleasant tone.

Dr. Kent: With all of the songs we just played, if you played them to someone with no preparation, I think they sound wonderful. But knowing that they’re played on a gourd banjo, it’s pretty extraordinary the tone and the pitches that you’re getting on it, because you are able to be very precise, which is not the easiest thing on a gourd banjo.

Clarke Buehling: Yes, it’s a frontless banjo, is it not? I try to stay in the first position, and I don’t always. I don’t do a lot of up the neck work. It’s just easier not to. Takes a lot of work to keep it up.

Dr. Kent: It’s such an interesting sound, because in a couple of earlier tunes, when you hit a note, because it doesn’t have frets, you have more freedom, and there’s sort of little . . .

Clarke Buehling: Nuances in the notes, isn’t there? It adds color to the notes.

Dr. Kent: Yes. As you play, do you find that the coloring of the notes is fun? Do you enjoy that part of it?

Clarke Buehling: Oh, yes. You notice that I don’t go out of my way to be sliding around. People sometimes ask me, ‘Did they invent the fretless banjo so you could slide?’ I don’t think so. I think the first banjos were fretless [laughs]. But if you were to listen to far south, you would hear some more complicated positions on the banjo.

Dr. Kent: I was about to actually bring up Mike Seeger. He played one of your banjos. Of course, tragically, he passed away this year. Did you have some interactions with Mike Seeger?

Clarke Buehling: Yes, I did. I got to know him. I made three banjos for him. He never wanted me to use a tack head on there. He wanted me to try to thread the heads with rawhide so he could tighten it.

Dr. Kent: What does that mean exactly?

Clarke Buehling: He wanted a system where he could pull the skin tight, but as you can hear on my banjo, it really is not a problem; it’s only a small skin area. So the ones I made were not as well-made in that function as far as stretching the skin. One of the three was a very large gourd. How big would that have been – at least about 15 inches maybe across. He wanted me to use that, and I made him one with that. It was always nice to talk with Mike. He was a very pleasant person, and always had nice things to say: encouragement and interesting things to pull out, anecdotes. He’s going to be missed. We already miss him. I was fortunate to be able to play in a program, about two weeks before he passed away, out at the Birchmere in Virginia. Even then, he was holding up pretty well.

Dr. Kent: It was extraordinary: he played pretty much right up to his death. It was amazing. Tell me a little now about your band: The SkirtLifters. That’s a fun title, and tell me about the group.

Clarke Buehling: The origin of The SkirtLifters was actually in Bloomington, Indiana, and Hawk Hubbard was the fiddler in a dance band there in Bloomington, and he came out to Arkansas. He moved out there to be near some family who had moved there, and found that I was in the area. We had known each other in Berkeley on the west coast. So we got the others started: he wanted to use the same name that he’d used in Indiana, so we formed The SkirtLifters. We had several guitar players, and settled on Bill Mathews. Bill played with us for a long time: Banjo Billy. Eventually, we had a split up in the band, and I played with another fiddler. That would have been Jim Lansford, and Billy was with us for a while there. Eventually, I found another fiddler and another guitar player. I kept the SkirtLifter name. The fiddler now is Tom Verdot, and Thom Howard is the guitar player. They both live in Colombia, Missouri. The band has been based out of Arkansas since about 1987.

Dr. Kent: It’s got a great sound. I want to listen to a track. After that, I’d like to talk about ragtime music. I’ll play a tune that everybody likes and knows, ‘The Entertainer.’ Then we’ll come back and chat about ragtime music. Here we go, from ‘A Ragtime Episode’ by The SkirtLifters.

[Music: 'The Entertainer]

Dr. Kent: That’s a great version of ‘The Entertainer’ by Clarke Buehling and The SkirtLifters from the album, ‘A Ragtime Episode.’ That must be so much fun to play. Obviously, as a banjo player, I wouldn’t even think of touching that tune, but it must be so much fun to play once you’ve got it.

Clarke Buehling: It’s a great tune! It’s one of the first ragtime pieces that I worked on. It was an arrangement that I actually got some help from Frank Bradbury before he passed away. He did some correction on my arrangement that we sent back and forth on a sheet of paper in the mail [laughs].

Dr. Kent: There’s parts to that I’m not familiar with. I guess the C-part in there.

Clarke Buehling: Right, that C-part wasn’t included in The Sting.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s such a beautiful tune. So tell me about this ensemble. You’ve got a string band sound, but it’s not like the Appalachian string bands I’m familiar with.

Clarke Buehling: No, this is more of the urban tradition. A lot of the things we have there are the original publications from the 1890s and the early teens. Also, we have a cello on some of that recording, and there was even a time when The SkirtLifters were five pieces with double mandolins playing. Curly Miller was in it at that time. I’ve been working with Curly Miller with the old 78s recently.

Dr. Kent: The group itself, how do you find your musicians? Are they playing on period instruments?

Clarke Buehling: It’s not easy to find somebody who can read the music and be willing to be in a band to play this. Most of the guitar players I’ve had, which include also John Behling was one, and he’s up in the mid-north, up in South Dakota someplace. They’re all classical players and jazz. Mostly they know jazz and classical guitar. For this, this is like another new area for most people that I’ve had in the band; this has been a new genre for them. There was, at one time, lots of music, in my private collection, a lot of sheet music published for two mandolins, banjo and guitar. This is the format that we’re using. Some of them, I’ve filled in arrangements for parts that were missing, or I’ve done them all from piano scores and written out parts for people to play.

Dr. Kent: What I know about ragtime is that it’s very similar to classical music in form. But tell me, when you first came across ragtime, and obviously this album’s full of it, what is it exactly?

Clarke Buehling: What is ragtime? Ragtime is the popular music that was railed against as being sinful back when it came in. It was sort of the rock n’ roll of its time. It was from the African American community, for one. In the late 1890s, this was the dance. The hot-craze in the dance music, the craze, was the ragtime two-step, and before that, the cake walk.

Dr. Kent: So cake walk – when I grew up, of course, the cake walk was a fun thing – kids did it. What was it originally?

Clarke Buehling: Originally, it goes back to slavery days – way back. It was a long story of one people imitating another, and that sort of going back and forth: we have the slaves doing dances in imitation, in parodies of the White slave owners and their family, and then we find the Whites finding this very amusing, and trying to dance as they are. And they looked really pretty funny themselves. Originally using cast-off clothing that was given to the slaves, and eventually it turned into really the zoot-suit of this period was [indecipherable] type of outfit with the long frock coat, the top hat, and walking cane, the stylized postures of the dance. You could go to Google, or YouTube, and you can put ‘cake walk.’

Dr. Kent: They were parodying in effect each other, and then of course, out of this parody came a style of music. So the White folks would dance to it in parties and that’s why it was risqué?

Clarke Buehling: No, the cake walk wasn’t the risqué dance. I think more the rags. At first, the cake walks, whole villages or schools, would all dress up, and the White students would put on black face and top hats, and the whole school would line up and march around, doing a march, and then walking.

Dr. Kent: That’s the origin of cake walk. Wow! It’s so fascinating. People think of ‘Oh, the banjo!’ If you ask the average guy on the street, they’d probably say it’s a White Appalachian instrument. It has such a rich, mixed history. We’ve got a couple more tunes here to choose from, but we’re running out of time. Let me ask you, what tune should we go out with? We’ve got some more rags, we’ve got ‘Hot Corn,’ we’ve got, ‘Maple Leaf Rag,’ we’ve got ‘Creole Bells’ and ‘Carolina Tar Heel.’ What do you think?

Clarke Buehling: I would probably choose the ‘Hot Corn Jubilee.’

Dr. Kent: All right. Tell us about that one.

Clarke Buehling: The reason I chose that, ‘The Creole bells,’ people will recognize that, that’s a nice song, nice to cake walk. But I particularly like this one because of the voicing of the instruments and the counterpoints. Paul Eno from Philadelphia [indecipherable] the banjo in it.

Dr. Kent: And this again is from the end of the 1800s then also?

Clarke Buehling: Just after 1900, I think, well yes, right around there. I’m not sure of the date of that one.

Dr. Kent: So, ‘Hot Corn Jubilee.’ Are they talking about whiskey? Because I do like hot corn, I mean in terms of actually corn on the cob. But what are they talking about?

Clarke Buehling: I think at that time hot corn – this is before hybrids, and you didn’t have the hybrid corn that we see now. You had to eat the corn when it was young, and it was often sold in the street by vendors. So you would buy your hot corn.

Dr. Kent: You’re kidding! All right. You’ve inspired me, and hopefully many others to look back and dig through the history here, which of course you were inspired to do early on. Hopefully we can keep passing these traditions on.

Clarke Buehling: May I add something about this type of piece: they were often done as the composer’s idea of what an African American band, marching band or a dance band, would sound like. They tried to do the sound of what they heard being done in the more folk terms, but they were being classical in that they were writing it down. When I say ‘classical,’ it means the high point of the banjo, the banjo at its peak at that period, when it was most popular, more popular than today.

Dr. Kent: It’s been a pleasure chatting with Clarke Buehling. Tell us where we can find out more about you, and your music, and banjos, and all that.

Clarke Buehling: Keep your eye open. You can find us at our website which is going to be redone soon. There’s something up all the time at TheSkirtlifters.com. THE SkirtLifters.com – who knows where you’ll go otherwise. Or you could Google me if you could spell my name, then you can find me.

Dr. Kent: It’s Clarke with an ‘e’ at the end and Buehling with a ‘u’ ‘e’ ‘h’ – that should help. It’s been such a pleasure chatting with you. I love this old music. Actually I want to ask you one more question about Concerts in Your Home.

Clarke Buehling: Of course we’ve got to bring them in: Fran Snyder’s Concerts in Your Home website is real fun. It links together musicians with venues, so that if you’re a musician, you can sign up there and put your picture up and a little description of your music, and you can look up venues around the country, and get in contact with one another. For the venues, you can find programs there, people that you might like to have at your home.

Dr. Kent: There’s no greater venue really than having a musician in your home. What a great experience.

Clarke Buehling: I love doing the House Concerts. I love playing acoustically. I love playing in an intimate setting. I recommend House Concerts to anyone. Fran also gives an explanation: how to run a house concern, things that you need to know, a couple hints.

Dr. Kent: People can find out about that on ConcertsInYourHome.com. It’s been such a pleasure to talk to Clarke Buehling. You can go to TheSkirtLifters.com to find out more. We’re going to listen to ‘Hot Corn Jubilee’ from ‘A Ragtime Episode.’ Thank you so much for talking to me.

Clarke Buehling: Thank you!

Dr. Kent: All right, here we go. Let’s listen to ‘Hot Corn Jubilee.’

[Music: 'Hot Corn Jubilee]

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. That’s a great tune called ‘Hot Corn Jubilee.’ Makes us all think of our childhoods and cake walks – but Clarke Buehling gave us a whole new thought process around what that is and what it means. It was great to talk to him earlier on in the show.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Bluegrass, Concerts in Your Home, Folk, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, PODCAST, TRANSCRIPTS

Clarke Buehling | ‘Out of His Gourd’ and Leading The SkirtLifters

November 5, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Clarke Buehling [56:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From his website:

Clarke Buehling has led the group, The SkirtLifters, for over twenty years. An internationally renowned group of performers celebrated for their outstanding skills and showmanship onstage, The SkirtLifters have authentically recreated the music of the 19th century riverboat, stage and parlor, enlivened by period humor, skits, songs and percussive dance. Clarke is unmatched in his mastery of the three-fingered ‘classic’ banjo style of the late 19th century and has applied his equally strong skills in traditional claw hammer and old-time styles as a workshop presenter at leading folk-schools around the country.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Bluegrass, Concerts in Your Home, Folk, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Jacob Moon | Maybe Sunshine

November 1, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is musician, Jacob Moon. So we’re going to listen to a song from him, and get him on the line, and we’ll talk to him about his music. The song is called, ‘Everything’s Gonna Be Alright.’ So let’s listen to that, and when we come back, he’ll be on the line, and we’ll talk to him about his music. Here we go: Jacob Moon, ‘Everything’s Gonna Be Alright.’

[Music]

Dr. Kent: That’s a beautiful song by Jacob Moon called, ‘Everything’s Gonna Be Alright.’ It’s off of one of his older albums. He’s got a new project coming out very soon, and it’s called, ‘Maybe Sunshine.’ Welcome to the show, Jacob.

Jacob Moon: It’s great to be with you.

Dr. Kent: What a beautiful sound. Tell me about your style a little bit. There’s a great clip on your site, of course, where you show how you play a little bit on the roof. You’re a fantastic guitar player, and you’ve got some interesting techniques. Tell me a little about it.

Jacob Moon: I’ve been playing for a bunch of years by myself. When you do that, it kind of forces you to make some choices about how you’re going to have to approach playing solo: are you going to strum the three chords and sing, or are you going to kind of get interested in some other techniques? For me, really the looping pedal has been something that I started working with about 12 years ago. That’s helped me to fill out the sound a little more, and take some of the other roles that maybe people in a band might take, like the drums, and the bass, and the lead guitar, and put those into my sound to try to make it so that people aren’t too disappointed that they’re only coming to a solo concert, but they’re hearing a few other things to keep things interested.

Dr. Kent: Touring by yourself like that, were you nervous at first? Did you always like it? Have you played with bands?

Jacob Moon: I like playing with bands a lot. It’s a lot of fun. Sometimes it’s hard for me to make the same connection that you can when you’re playing solo, because people can really hear the words, and everything kind of becomes about the vocal and the guitar, and you’re not competing with drums or it’s pretty hard to screw up a mix that only has two tracks. It’s a little easier to make connections with the audience, and that’s always been my goal. My ambition is to really have an intimate audience every night. That’s sometimes hard to do when you’ve got a band behind you.

Dr. Kent: So your music is also often times deeply spiritual. Talk about your songwriting. What’s it been like through the years. How have your songs changed?

Jacob Moon: The songs, they’ve come at various times. Like all songwriters, you write some of your best stuff when you’re going through your hardest times. It takes a lot of effort to sit down and write a happy song. I managed to do that on a couple of songs on the new record, so that’s been kind of cool, because there was some really genuine joy that I was writing out of. The trick is to write in such a way that it communicates that without any of the sugary sentiments that might get in the way of it being received. My songwriting process has always just been sit down, start dreaming aloud on the guitar, come up with some melodies, some chord progressions, some guitar riffs, and then let the vocal sort of arrive. It always does. Sometimes it takes a little longer than other times. It’s a strange thing: you start by singing a line that doesn’t make any sense, which I call a ‘dummy lyric,’ and then that’s just basically standing in until you can find out what the song’s really about. Sometimes you end up going with the dummy lyric because it’s the key and the clue to what the whole song is about. If you follow that lead, you discover kind of like a sculptor would, by chipping away at something, you find out that it actually already has a form, and you’re just discovering it.

Dr. Kent: Cool. Now in terms of the gospel music that you do, what’s the difference in audience between say a House Concert, a church audience, a coffee shop audience? What kind of shows do you do?

Jacob Moon: I play all over the place. I play churches, House Concerts, clubs, coffee houses, theaters. I just kind of let the audience tell their friends, and they tell their friends, and it kind of evolves organically from there. It’s very much a grass roots following that I have. Sometimes people hear me on the radio or see me on television, but by and large it’s by touring that I’m able to keep doing what I do. I play and I try to pay the audience a compliment that they can take whatever music I’m going to throw at them, whether it’s a bluesy style, or a jazzy style, or folk or gospel. It’s all coming from the same guy, and so hopefully that’s kind of unifying, and people are able to find something in that mix that they like, and maybe their ears are attuned to something new they didn’t know they liked. I often find people, older folks, who come away and they like the stuff that I would imagine younger people would have liked even more. I’m pretty sure that they don’t have record collections full of youthful music at home, but they liked what they heard that night. They end up going away with the CD, so it’s kind of cool.

Dr. Kent: You’ve got a blog site that I stumbled across when I was doing some research on you. I have two kids that I sponsor with Compassion, and it looks like you went down and visited down there. Tell me about El Salvador.

Jacob Moon: El Salvador was amazing. It’s just a small little country in Central America that has gone through a lot of war and difficulty and economic problems over the years. It’s a developing country. We went down there to really see what Compassion was doing to help the lives of young children and families in some of the poorer areas of that country. They’re doing a lot. There’s over fifty thousand kids enrolled in Compassion programs every day. That’s an incredible thing when you think even of just that number. All of the kids that we met were so fired up and so full of energy and life. The older ones who were graduating from the program, they had this incredible vision for what they wanted to see their country become, and how they were going to be a part of bringing about change in their families, in their churches, in their communities, and ultimately in their nation. That to me is the best defense you could ever make for whether a program is working or not. I was just really blown away by what they did.

Dr. Kent: People can check out more about that online at your blog site, and there’s a link to that off of your main website: JacobMoon.com. There’s also this deal on your site for your newest album, and I’d like to just for a second ask you about House Concerts. We’re partnering up with Concerts in Your Home folks and featuring a lot of musicians that do House Concerts, and you’re one of them. Tell us about House Concerts and what it’s like to do one, and what it’s like to observe one.

Jacob Moon: The new record’s called ‘Maybe Sunshine,’ and it’s just a six-song EP, but I’ve been preselling it online for the last month or so. If people do order it before next Saturday, then they can receive that copy in the mail. They’ll be among the first who receive it. Also, for as many CDs as they order, they’ll be entered into the draw for a free House Concert. I’ll go anywhere in Canada to do that at this point, because I tour all over Canada. It’s always nice to see different parts of this great country, and I love some of the States as well. It’s always a lot of fun. [Indecipherable] a Canadian contest.

Dr. Kent: So you’re on the road all the time. How many dates a year do you do?

Jacob Moon: Basically, I probably play somewhere around 150 a year, so it’s not too bad. Some guys play a lot more than that.

Dr. Kent: It’s plenty, though. People can check out your profile on JacobMoon.com, and again, I want to put in another plug for Concerts in Your Home, a great little organization where you can find out a whole bunch about some known musicians and some less known. That’s where I first saw your subdivision’s YouTube video.

Jacob Moon: Sorry – you’re breaking up a little bit. I was having trouble hearing you there. I’m on a cell phone.

Dr. Kent: It’s been such a pleasure talking to you. Jacob Moon’s new album, if you go and preorder it from his website: JacobMoon.com, it’s called ‘Maybe Sunshine,’ maybe you can win a free House Concert in Canada. If you are in Canada and listening to the show, that’s awesome. If you’re not in Canada, maybe you should rent a place in Canada just for that House Concert.

Jacob Moon: Absolutely. That would be great. If people want to hear a preview of the new record, they can go to the site, and I’ve got a little mini-podcast up there right now, and it plays some clips from the new songs.

Dr. Kent: Cool, and actually we’ve successfully uploaded a track from the new record, called, ‘Sara.’ Do you want to give us a little [indecipherable] about it?

Jacob Moon: Fantastic. That would be great!

Dr. Kent: Tell us about it.

Jacob Moon: That song there is called ‘Sara.’ It’s all about the sponsored child that my wife and I met when we were in El Salvador. An incredible eight year old girl, full of life, beautiful and funny. We spent the whole day with her at a children’s interactive center in El Salvador and just had a blast. We came into that experience kind of with heavy hearts. Some personal stuff had been going on for us, and we just really needed what she brought, which was joy. She didn’t know what she was doing, but she was lifting our burdens. For that, I thought it was really a good tribute to pay to her to write her that song.

Dr. Kent: It’s such a beautiful relationship that you can have through these sponsorships. It’s extraordinary. I really like Compassion and how they do it. Some of the happiest days are when I get letters from my sponsored kids.

Jacob Moon: Yes, I know. Truthfully, their happiest days are when they get letters from us, and pictures. They keep them in a box under their bed, wrapped up like a Christmas present, and they get really emotional when they think about those letters and what they mean to them. It occurred to me that for some of them, it’s their first contact with unconditional love. I heard the one guy say, ‘Yes, these people on the other end of the world, they don’t even know me, but they love me.’ That meant so much to him, and the light kind of turned on for me, and I thought, wow! There’s something about this relationship that is really redemptive and really beautiful for these kids and for us. I just encourage those who are already sponsoring kids, write them, send them pictures, because it actually makes a huge, huge difference: more than we know.

Dr. Kent: It’s been such an honor to chat with Jacob Moon. ‘Maybe Sunshine’ is the new record, and we’re going to listen to a track from it called, ‘Sara.’ Thank you so much for talking to me today.

Jacob Moon: Thank you so much for calling me, man, and all the best with your program.

Dr. Kent: We’ll talk again sometime.

Jacob Moon: I would love that.

Dr. Kent: Alright, JacobMoon.com. You can go and check out his album, and like I said earlier, and like he mentioned, you can preorder ‘Maybe Sunshine,’ and be entered to win a House Concert in Canada if you’re so inclined. You’ve got to do that before Halloween, October 31st. Let’s listen to a track from that new record, ‘Maybe Sunshine,’ by Jacob Moon, and it’s called, ‘Sara.’ Here we go.

[Music]

Dr. Kent: And that was the first part of a song by Jacob Moon. It got cut off a little bit there, but such a gorgeous song. You can go and listen to the entire track at JacobMoon.com. Earlier on in the show we listened to ‘Everything’s Gonna Be Alright’ from his earlier album. Of course, there’s also some great YouTube footage that he’s done, where he shows some of his incredible guitar techniques where he layers guitar sounds, one over the other, with a great looping pedal. Well it’s been an honor on the show today to welcome the award-winning author of ‘Skinny Bitch.’ She’s a New York Times bestseller, and of course, the book has done extremely well, selling millions of copies. As she said, Posh Spice has even posed with a copy of it. Of course, it’s a huge hit around the world. Before that we talked with Dr. D.A. Henderson who’s the author of ‘Smallpox: Death of a Disease.’ Fascinating, especially in a time when we’ve been talking so much about H1N1 virus and about vaccines. They’re so important, vaccines. Vaccinate your children. It’s just so important. Before that at the beginning of the show we talked to Glenn Bachman, who wrote, ‘The Green Business Guide.’ He gave us a great insight into how to be green and what being green really means. I really hope green businesses are going to be a profitable model for the new century. At the end of the show, again, we just listened to Jacob Moon and a couple of his songs. I’d like to go out with one more song by Jacob Moon. It’s called, ‘The Great Beyond.’ This is, again, from one of his earlier albums. Check out his website at JacobMoon.com. On the flip side, I’ll be gone. So have a wonderful week, pick up a great book, pick up Jacob Moon’s wonderful CD. He’s got that great special deal online. You might even win a House Concert with him. We’ll see him the next time. Visit me online at SoundAuthors.com. Thank you so much to Jamie and to Amber, the producers on this show, and I’ll see you the next time.

[Music]

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Bluegrass, Concerts in Your Home, Folk, Gospel, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, PODCAST, Pop, TRANSCRIPTS

Jacob Moon | Maybe Sunshine

November 1, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Jacob Moon [28:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From His MySpace Page:

When audiences first hear Jacob Moon in concert, often their first question is “Why isn’t this guy famous??” To see and hear this Hamilton-based singer-songwriter in action is to be filled with wonder, and more questions, like “How does he make the guitar sound like an entire orchestra?” and “Where do I get my hands on these songs?” To answer the question of what Moon has been up to for the past few years, he’s been very busy recording CDs for the Signpost label (Steve Bell’s imprint), and touring all over Canada and into the United States. He has played hundreds of theatres and churches in his quest to reach new audiences with his songs and stagecraft. He has taken the grassroots approach to marketing and promotions, like his friend and mentor Steve Bell, and it has rewarded him with a following that is passionate and loyal. His CDs have been played on radio stations across the country, and have sold over 25,000 copies. His passionate vocals and inspired lyrics are given flight by his total command of the guitar, which at times sounds like an entire orchestra, owing to his use of the JamMan, a live looping device that allows him to more fully realize his onstage ambitions as a solo artist. The opportunity to hear and experience a Jacob Moon show is not to be missed. His newest album, ‘Maybe Sunshine,’ can be pre-ordered at his website: www.JacobMoon.com

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Bluegrass, Concerts in Your Home, Folk, Gospel, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, PODCAST, Pop

Chris Smither | Time Stands Still

October 27, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is the incredible musician, Chris Smither. He’s been in the music industry for about four decades now, and has an incredible brand of music. He taps his own feet as the percussion to his music, and often tours with just him and his acoustic guitar, and his tapping shoes. Incredible singer: Chris Smither. I’m going to listen to a song from Chris Smither called, ‘Don’t Call Me Stranger,’ and right after we’re going to be talking to him about his newest album. Here we go, ‘Don’t Call Me Stranger,’ by Chris Smither.

[Music]

Dr. Kent: That’s an amazing tune called, ‘Don’t Call Me Stranger,’ by Chris Smither from his latest album – and what an album it is – called ‘Time Stands Still.’ It’s his eleventh studio album. Welcome to the show, Chris Smither.

Chris Smither: Thank you. How are you?

Dr. Kent: I’m great. I saw you many years ago for the first time in Middlebury, Vermont, at the little coffee house there.

Chris Smither: Was it snowing?

Dr. Kent: I think it was, yes.

Chris Smither: It always snows when I play up there. I play up there every year, and it snows every time I’m up there.

Dr. Kent: It’s amazing to see, I believe that year it was just you and your feet.

Chris Smither: That’s normally the way I play: 99 percent of the time, that’s just exactly how you’ll hear me.

Dr. Kent: This last record of yours, ‘Times Stands Still,’ was produced by David Goodrich, who played with Peter Mulvey for a very long time. I know you and Peter are good friends. I just chatted with him a couple of weeks ago.

Chris Smither: Yes, and in fact that’s how I met Goodie, and then once I spent some time with him, I asked him to help me on a record, and this has been about the third album that we’ve produced together.

Dr. Kent: There’s an amazing sound on this thing. This feels to me like it’s so fresh and new. The sound of that song, it’s nasty, it’s gritty, it’s down on the earth. Tell me about the sound of this album.

Chris Smither: Well, it’s deceptively simple. It’s virtually live. There’s very, very few overdubs on the record, and we could do that because it is so simple. It’s basically just a trio working on the record. The idea for that came from a festival that I played about a year before we started work on the record. It was a festival in Holland. They wanted me to play, but they didn’t want any solo action. I basically always work solo. I said, ‘Well, that’s too bad.’ They said, ‘Can’t you get a band together?’ I said, ‘Maybe I can bring a trio,’ and they said, ‘Well that’ll do.’ So I brought a trio, and we had a wonderful time, I mean it really was a wonderful time. Everybody loved it, including us. They gave me a recording of our set that had been done off the board. I didn’t listen to it for a few weeks, but when I finally did, I said, ‘Well gosh, no wonder everybody liked it!’ I sent it to Dave, and I said, ‘Listen to this. This is the way we should do the next record.’ He listened to it, and he said, ‘Yeah, let’s give it a shot.’ And that’s what happened.

Dr. Kent: Yes, and it still has that feel of solo. It’s still got your feet, and it’s still got the simplicity of the one sound. Maybe David Goodrich kind of has that because he’s done this sort of duo with Peter Mulvey for so many years. Maybe he’s great at making you sound like a soloist.

Chris Smither: He is. He knows what to do to make the sound bigger, but to not at the same time step on what I’m doing. It’s a rare skill. I feel like I’ve been looking all my life for a producer that knew how to do that, and I finally found one.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about your style. You’re a fantastic guitar player, and you’ve got this voice that you’ve been carrying around your whole life. Tell me about how your style has changed.

Chris Smither: It’s just a gradual accumulation of characteristics. I started off listening to Blues guys, [indecipherable] Mississippi John Hurt, guitar players like that, Skip James. Probably that accounts for at least half, if not two thirds of my style. It was a combination of trying to imitate what they were doing and not really succeeding, but at the same time coming up with something that’s valid in it’s own right, and just learning a little bit at a time, trying to figure things out. I’m a self-schooled musician. I always think of myself as not really knowing a whole lot about music, at least not in any formal sense. Gradually, it’s gotten to the point where, if you work at something long enough and keep to yourself, and keep yourself isolated enough, then you’ll start to be recognizable. Whether that will be good or not is something else again, but at least you won’t sound like anybody else. The voice just comes from, as you put it, I’ve been carrying it around my whole life, so it sounds fairly lived in. It’s been a long time.

Dr. Kent: From love songs to political songs, I remember one of the first songs that I really loved, I was exposed to first from Peter Mulvey, and I traced it back to you of course, and that is ‘Every Mother’s Son.’ I especially love that song; it’s just such a unique perspective. Where do songs come from for you?

Chris Smither: Sometimes they come from the newspapers, and that one did. It was a pretty terrible story about some father who’d just killed his son. He was trying to make him be quiet, and he wound up killing him, and didn’t really understand why he’d done it. To me, that was the most poignant part of the story. He just seemed like such an ordinary person. You could hear him talking on TV, because I saw a story about him on television, and it was one of these banal things; if it hadn’t resolved in the death of a young child, it wouldn’t have amounted to anything. It was just so unimportant somehow. To me, that laid the foundation of the song: this could happen to every mother’s son. It could happen to you, it could happen to me. We don’t like to think it could. It just seems like that’s the nature of the thing. That was my perspective on that one. A lot of songs just come right out of the newspaper, and just things that I read. I’ll say, there’s a theme there, there’s an idea there. Something that would support some sort of commentary.

Dr. Kent: That actually reminds me. I’ve heard Tom Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan, they do that: they mine the newspapers. There’s a hint in that last track we listened to, ‘Don’t Call Me Stranger’ – I heard a tiny bit of Tom Waits in there; maybe I’m wrong.

Chris Smither: It could be. I sort of think it’s coincidental, but at the same time, I’m a fan of Tom Waits, and I’ve known him since his first record, and it wouldn’t be a surprise to me if we came up with the same sound or the same take on a certain kind of thing, because he’s certainly rooted in the same kind of ground as I am. I think there’s a very similar sensibility going on there.

Dr. Kent: There’s real dirt in the music, and at the same time, there’s real melody. That’s what I see. I guess Dylan has kind of come around to that too. Incredible sense of the dirt. Does some of that come free – it seems to me that you were talking about Skip James, and some of those 78s, and on this album there’s a song by Frank Hutchison. Do you love those old 78s, that scratchy sound?

Chris Smither: I’m not so much a fan of the scratchy sound that’s produced by the technology, but in terms of the spiritual dirt, I love that. Dylan in a sense has never gotten away from that. He went through one little day when he tried to sing a little prettier than his natural voice, but it just didn’t work. He’s just let it take its own course. I’m always thinking to myself that people say, ‘Well he’s a terrible singer.’ And I say, ‘Well, no, he’s not a terrible singer. He’s not a pretty singer by any means, but he’s an extremely effective singer.’ He gets it across, you know? That’s what we’re really talking about in terms of what I try to do, and Tom Waits, and Bob Dylan, or anybody else that we’re talking about. It’s the people who are trying to get something across. They’re not trying to just sort of paint a living room a pretty color. They’re trying to tell you something, and if it’s effective, it’s effective, and they’ve accomplished what their aim is.

Dr. Kent: So what do you think about some of the younger musicians, who I believe really did benefit from your playing a whole bunch in their own style, like Peter Mulvey? Do you often get tributes from those folks that say, ‘Your style meant so much to me’?

Chris Smither: I get it all the time, in a sense. I get it in performances. I spend a lot of time talking to people at performances. A lot of players come up and they tell me not only that the guitar playing has done a lot for them, but the writing and the whole concept of how to approach writing a song. It means a great deal to me. I think I’m a little embarrassed by it. At times, I don’t really know how to take it as gracefully as I probably should. At the same time, it’s really something to sit and realize that I’m at an age now that all my heroes were when I started talking to them. I mean, I actually hung out with Skip James. I met [indecipherable]. I talked to all those people when I was just a boy. I think of myself as a boy: I was in my very early 20s. To me, they were these monumental figures. To me, they were as old as the planet it seemed. I was in awe of them. Now I find myself in that same position, and I begin to appreciate how they felt at the time. It’s a different perspective on things. But, you know, I love it. When I was 60 years old, all the younger musicians in Cambridge threw a birthday party for me. They didn’t let me play at all. They all got up on stage and played Chris Smither songs, and it was one of the most exhilarating evenings of my life.

Dr. Kent: You still persist in doing very intimate gigs. You go from living room to living room, and that’s part of the real beauty and charm of the stuff that you do. Why did you make that choice early on, to play the coffee houses and the smaller gigs?

Chris Smither: Basically, I play what I can. It’s not so much a conscious choice as the size of the audience that the music will support. There are markets in the United States where I can play for an audience for about 500, and that’s about as big as any of my shows get. I would say that the majority of my shows now run about 200 people, and there’s probably maybe 15 to 20 percent that are between 75 and 100 people. I will say that the ones that are between 75 and 100 are easily the ones that I enjoy the most, because there’s an intimacy to it that is something that I really look for. I’m almost on a search for it. My whole objective for performing, and I don’t care how big the audience is, my objective is to make everybody feel like I’m sitting in their lap, whispering in their ear [laughs]. I don’t want them to think of me as some performer a long ways off up on the stage; I want to be right in their face. Of course with a small audience, that’s much more easily accomplished.

Dr. Kent: I think a lot of folks that are stuck with the large audiences would completely agree with you. It’s wonderful for the audience, wonderful for you, and it’s great that you’ve been doing it for so long. Tell me a little bit about the song we just heard, ‘Don’t Call Me Stranger.’

Chris Smither: I just realized that it had been a long time since I’d written a ‘bad boy’ song, and I set out to do one. It’s a pretty straightforward seduction piece. The thing that I like about it is it’s long on [indecipherable] but very short on details. It never gets really specific about what’s going to happen, but at the same time, there’s a sort of erotic undercurrent to it, and it’s full of promise, and I really like that. It’s got a pretty damn good line in every verse. It’s hard to argue with a song like that, if you can pull one off: it’s got a good line in every verse, then you sort of go home happy.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about your feet. How did you train your feet as a young man, and how have your feet treated you through the years? Do you go home and have sore feet from being percussive all night?

Chris Smither: It’s not really the feet that get sore; it’s the muscles in the legs that make them go up and down. That’s the hard part. I have never trained my feet at all. It’s something that I cannot help doing. I literally cannot not do it. If somebody held my feet down, it would be extremely difficult for me to play the guitar.

Dr. Kent: And your feet have been guest stars on at least Peter Mulvey’s albums. They have a life of their own now.

Chris Smither: Yes, they do. Drummers actually like my feet. If I’m playing with a drummer, they like them because my feet show them where I feel the pocket, so it’s easier for them to see where I feel it.

Dr. Kent: You’ve got a drummer that plays with you in this trio. What does he do? You’re nailing down the downbeats, and what’s he doing?

Chris Smither: He accentuates, he plays off of what I do. There are some songs on this record where he’s playing musically; he’s not really holding down time at all. He’s just adding little percussive forces to things. I absolutely love it. He doesn’t draw attention to himself, but at the same time, if he wasn’t there, you’d notice it, believe me. You would really notice it. It would be a very different sound, much more stark. He’s got a wonderful way of understanding what it is that I’m trying to do, and emphasizing it without stepping on what I’m doing. He does with the drums exactly what Goodie does on the guitar, which is to kind of amplify the intent without actually duplicating anything.

Dr. Kent: I know you’re in Charlotte right now, and you’re going on to Georgia and Louisiana and all this. Are you doing any dates with the trio?

Chris Smither: I am. That won’t happen for a few weeks. I’ve got to do a West Coast tour, and then a Midwest tour: Chicago and Michigan, places like that. Then when I come back, I’m going to work with the trio up and down the East Coast, I think the Birchmere and Joe’s Pub in New York. There’s a good double-handful of dates that we’re going to do together. I’m looking forward to that.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s such a great, fresh new sound. It’s been an honor talking to you. Tell me a little about ‘Surprise, Surprise.’

Chris Smither: [Laughs] This really is a newspaper song. This is a topical song. I started that song back in the depth of the latest financial debacle, and I was reading the newspaper, and just a verse started coming to me, and I forget which verse it was, but it was all about what a drag it is to think that you’re rich and suddenly find out that you’re poor, through absolutely no action on your own part. By the time I’d gotten up from the breakfast table, I was off into my private little work studio, and I was working away at it. It took me about two or three days to finish, but that’s the story on that.

Dr. Kent: That’s what we need right now. I mean, ‘Surprise, surprise – you are poor. You don’t have health insurance.’

Chris Smither: Whatever it is.

Dr. Kent: Yes. How do audiences respond to that?

Chris Smither: They love it! They scream with laughter. They’re basically laughing at themselves, you know? I have yet to play that song for an audience that didn’t respond extremely favorably.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s been such an honor. I’ve been talking to Chris Smither. His new album is called ‘Time Stands Still.’ What a sound it’s got, and it’s been a real honor chatting with you.

Chris Smither: Thank you very much.

Dr. Kent: So here’s the song from ‘Time Stands Still,’ called, ‘Surprise, Surprise.’ Let’s listen to it on the way out.

[Music]

Dr. Kent: That’s a great tune called, ‘Surprise, Surprise,’ from Chris Smither, on an amazing album he just put out called, ‘Time Stands Still.’ It’s his eleventh studio album. He’s of course influenced people up and down inside the Folk world, and Blues world. It’s been such an honor chatting with him. On the show today, wow, what a fun show it’s been. At the beginning, I talked to Thomas Childers. He’s an award-winning professor of history. His book was called, ‘Soldier from the War Returning.’ What a fascinating look at the greatest generation’s troubled homecoming from World War II. They really weren’t as far away from the Vietnam vets and Iraq war vets that we know so well with their PTSD and all of that. And then it was an honor to speak to Ronald Kessler. He’s written eighteen books in the nonfiction category, usually really uncovering secret after secret. This last one is a book called, ‘In the President’s Secret Service,’ and it goes behind the scenes with agents in the line of fire and the presidents they protect. Great, great, great insights into Barack Obama’s Secret Service, and George Bush and his daughters, and Dick Cheney, and all sorts of fun, fun things in there. Then talking with Peter Brown, of course, floated my childhood boat, and we talked about his new book, called, ‘The Curious Garden.’ Today, on the day when ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ is coming out in theaters. I’m headed out there tonight to watch that movie. I’m still a child at heart. As I told Peter during the show, his book is ‘three plus,’ because I’m certainly part of his audience. His book is called, ‘The Curious Garden.’ Check out his website; he’s got some really fun stuff for your kids, and for you as well. Then of course speaking to Chris Smither was really my pleasure. His last album, recorded in only three days, was called, ‘Time Stands Still.’ He’s been on the road for more than 30 years, and he’ll come to your town soon. Go check him out. His feet keep tapping and incredible rhythms come out of his guitar. We’ll talk to you the next time. Pick up a great book, and I hope you all have a wonderful week.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Bluegrass, Folk, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, PODCAST, TRANSCRIPTS