Interview with Andrew Calhoun | Sound Authors Radio

December 1, 2008

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Dr. Kent: Welcome to the show Andrew Calhoun who is on the line.

Andrew Calhoun: Yes, it is I.

Dr. Kent: Well that’s a beautiful song; Jaybird and Sparrow from the album Bound To Go by Waterbug Records. Now this is interesting. This is a bunch of spirituals and shout songs. I love these old records that you got some of these from. Tell us about where you found these songs.

Andrew Calhoun: A lot of them are in old books that are out of print. Jaybird and Sparrow was in a collection by Thomas Kelley who was a chemistry professor at the University in Nashville and he did a collection of these. His parents had been born slaves. He was born in 1870 so he was able to collect a lot of music from the European white collectors who were unable to get to and especially a song like that, that has some sort of the social attitudes about fairness of labor practice. His book was called Negro Folk Rhymes and it came out in 1922 and there’s a number of good books. There’s also some early recordings from people like Don Lomax but actually more songs in this project were from old books so I just go through and find some words you like.

Dr. Kent: What inspired you to do this collection of 35 spirituals and folk songs? After doing several albums of your own music and things like that?

Andrew Calhoun: I’ve always liked the spirituals and this project is really in memory of my mother and was attributed by her passing. My whole family gathered and it was sort of spontaneous but we ended up singing for several hours and one of the songs we sang was All Gods Children Got Shoes. Kind of when I get to heaven I’m going to put on my shoes and walk all over God’s Heaven. Those were songs she’d sung to us as kids and the song really struck me at that moment.

Because my mother hadn’t been able to walk for more than a year and I wanted to find out more about the people who gave us such a great song to help you through an experience like that. So after a few months of collecting spirituals I saw a connection to African religion and I started reading up on that and what I found was a lot. A lot survived the trip and kind of descents of ancestor connections and so forth that came from African religion.

Dr. Kent: You do also tend to your albums have kind of schematic, thematic elements. For example, Telfur’s Cows is a ballad of Scotland and Shadow of a Wing. You tie it together on your website with a description of your spirituality and things like that. How do you go about sitting down saying okay I need to do this album?

Andrew Calhoun: That’s a good question. I find that when I’m doing a creative project that things happen and I kind of let them change under my hand and maybe my original conception will shift and change a little bit. This project changed when I found Kelley’s collection of songs because I just didn’t even know they existed, some of those African American folk songs. But they were written out of our history so I’m trying to revive some of those.

Sometimes I don’t know, you have one idea and then it kind of changes according to the material you’re working with. The Scottish Ballads were a long time love of mine and I just translated them so Americans could follow the story better. I translated them to American dialogue so they’re easier to follow.

Dr. Kent: You’ve been doing this for a few decades, this folk singing. How have things changed for you?

Andrew Calhoun: They haven’t changed that much you know. The more the technology changes the more its still a struggle for me to make music. With all the downloads now or whatever it is, the price of gas, the cost of touring, so pretty much if you’re going to be a folk singer, if you work real hard you can get by but that’s about it. As far as it changing, when I was young there was more of an urban sort of folk singing that was connected to maybe anti-war politics and that urban edge to it.

So there would be clubs in the city where you’d play and it was kind of a community around that and its kind of changed to where I play a lot of house concerts in living rooms and there’s the concert series at the Unitarian Church but the club scene isn’t what it was and that may be true in other forms of music as people don’t go out to hear live music much but house concerts are wonderful. They’re real simple to put on and always very rewarding.

Dr. Kent: You have a quote from Dave Carter on your website and he’s I believe you’re talking about Dave Carter from Tracy Grammer and Dave Carter?

Andrew Calhoun: Correct, yes.

Dr. Kent: We lost him a couple of years ago and it seems like he said there’s no better songwriter alive than you. Did you have a relationship with him?

Andrew Calhoun: We were really good friends. I moved from Chicago out to Portland Oregon in 1999 and I played my first gig in Portland with Dave and Tracy who were writers around there and he helped introduce me to Portland and sent me a lot of songwriting students. He was certainly the best songwriter I ever met and very encouraging to me. Yeah, he passed away in July 2002 leaving four Dave and Tracy albums behind. I was very fortunate to get to know him; I never met anybody like him.

Dr. Kent: I saw him and Tracy Grammer about a year before he died and they were incredible, they had great energy together. Folk singing is so much about the live concert and talking about your songs and engaging the audience. Is that why you’re onstage?

Andrew Calhoun: I love performing and its funny, people ask you about your albums but to me it’s always about the next show and its what can happen in a room with people. Sometimes you just see people relax and let go their tensions and see their faces open up and shine. It’s just the greatest reward and every audience is different. I read Chuck Barry’s book and he said at the end of it, “Audiences are different than they were in the 50s. Every audience is different, it’s different every night and that’s why it’s so much fun.” The audiences as much of the show as the person onstage.

Dr. Kent: Folk audiences are one of the last remaining audiences that you can really interact with.

Andrew Calhoun: Well yes, especially in a small setting. A house concert you don’t even use a PA and people can talk back to you. I saw an English singer recently named Pete Morgan and the audience just kept answering back and forth, it was really like a living room show and people talked back. I like that interaction, its one of the great things about spirituals. They’re designed for dissertation. By the end of the first verse you know the response line and people can jump right in.

Dr. Kent: That’s an interesting thing. A lot of us have grown up with a lot of spirituals. For example you’ve got a song on there well, I won’t go there, but a lot of us grew up with a lot of these spirituals and you’re doing different versions of them that are from some older books or a different recording. Michael Haul The Boat Ashore, things like that. How much fun is it for you to see people’s reactions and say oh, I’ve never heard that version?

Andrew Calhoun: That song in particular got radio play because people are sort of familiar with the other one. Yeah it’s nice. The folk songs in sort of their natural sphere they’re always changing and there’s many versions of them. I mean that’s why they’re folk songs but they’re passed along the way jokes are now, you never hear quite the same version. So its very improvisational, a live kind of a form and when you hear different versions of a song, you get a sense of that. I never knew the story of Michael Rode the Boat Ashore, its kind of a folksy hymn along with Kumbayah, which is another song people don’t understand.

Both came from the Sea Islands. Kumbayah means come by here my Lord, it’s a prayer and people say its not enough to get together and sing Kumbayah, they’re kind of putting down some people; it’s their prayer. Well it’s like saying it’s not enough to say The Lords Prayer, sometimes that’s all you can do. Sometimes that’s exactly what you need to do. Michael Haul the Boat Ashore was rowing song from the Sea Islands and directed to the Archangel Michael. They would sing it when the tide was against them so it was kind of a work song and a religious song. I didn’t know any of this stuff when I started researching it. Light bulbs kept going on and I said what is with this song; then I knew.

There’s so much history around it. When I did the Scottish ballads it was kind of just about the songs for me but this project really drew me into it. I’m just finishing a book on the civil war and understand the African American story in America and also in my genre of folk music which has become largely a white genre and I’m trying to understand the reasons for that. I’ve kind of gotten some clues but it’s nice to be on this project and have an integrated group that’s working together and it’s been really, really fun.

Dr. Kent: I know the song No More Cane on the Brazes; I know that song from my own work and I’m fascinated by that one because the cane workers down in Texas, what they said the average life span of those guys was something like six years once they started working in the cane fields.

Andrew Calhoun: Yeah, people know that song but the story of that song; people need to know the convict leasing that went on after slavery really, I mean they kept slavery going in the prison system and to some degree they’ve kept on running the prison system for profit and that’s something that I didn’t want this project not to address. I wanted to talk about the fact that these problems are not in the past. They are still with us and also the way for people to endure slavery overcame them with this kind of spiritual sensibility.

It’s really a remarkable thing and I think of them as teachers. People don’t like to look back at slavery and it’s shameful and shame on both sides but the goal of the story is the grace with which those people endured their experience. They were just amazing individuals. I also wanted to get more of a sense of the individuals behind the songs on this record because people know a few spirituals but it almost has become a generic sense of Negro spiritual instead of well some artistry; it wasn’t people made this up you know. So I’m trying to connect the story to the song and that song No More Cane on the Brazes is a heck of a song. I mean it’s like a movie or a book; it captures a lot of what people went through on those work farms.

Dr. Kent: It’s been a real honor speaking with Andrew Calhoun about his music and his latest album Bound to Go. Thank you so much for being on the show. I’m going to play a little bit of Roll Jordan Roll off that album before we run out of time.

Andrew Calhoun: Great, thank you very much.

[Music]

Dr. Kent: That was a little bit of Roll Jordan Roll by Andrew Calhoun, a beautiful tune. It was an honor speaking with him and all the guests on the show today and we’ll see you next week.

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