Robert Cray - Growing up in the Northwest, Robert Cray
listened to the gospel of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, Bobby Bland’s
soul, Jimi Hendrix’s rock guitar and the Beatles pop sounds. He would bring all
of the influences into play throughout his career, but his teenage band was
captivated by Southern Soul and the blues. “In the early days of the band we
were getting back into O.V. Wright and paying attention to my favorite blues
players; Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Albert King and especially Albert Collins,” Cray
says. The Texas-born blues guitarist known as Master of the Telecaster, Albert
Collins, sealed the deal on the Cray Band’s early direction. The musical
highlight of Cray’s senior year was his class voting to bring Collins in to
play a graduation party. The glow of a career in music began when Cray was a
teen, and in 1974 it burst into flames as the Robert Cray Band came together in
Eugene, Oregon. How strong was the fire? “Richard and I didn’t own a vehicle,
and we were staying with his girlfriend in Eugene. We hitched a ride to Salem,
where our drummer Tom Murphy was going to school, to rehearse,” Cray recalls. With
the group’s 1980 debut release, Who’s Been Talkin’, word about the Cray Band
began to spread across the Northwest and down in to California. Playing packed
bars and roadhouses the Cray Band was thrilling. Yes, fans could hear an Albert
Collins guitar riff and a Howlin’ Wolf song but the sound was present. Blues
and soul fans showed up religiously, but those steamy raucous sets also drew
crowds whose tastes in music ranged from rock to funk and jazz. The Cray Band’s
next two releases – Bad Influence and False Accusations – charted, taking the
four-piece’s sound across the airways and abroad. The group was on a roll, but
the players slept on couches. “We were just road rats,” Cray says with a
chuckle. “We’d take a break for two weeks to record, then go back out. We
didn’t have a house, a home, any of those responsibilities.” On one of those
breaks Cray went into the studio with Collins and another great Texas guitarist
and singer, Johnny Clyde Copeland, to record Showdown!, a CD that has become
essential to any 80s electric blues collection. It was the sounds of the blues
and soul that first drew attention from artists in the rock arena. In an
interview Eric Clapton gives his initial response to Robert Cray saying, “As a
blues fan, we’re saved.” The Cray Band’s beginnings did bring the sounds of its
mentors into the mainstream, even taking the music of John Lee Hooker, Etta
James and Albert Collins to a larger, younger audience. But no one knew how
broad the band’s audience would be until the Cray Band opened the ears of rock
radio programmers. With the 1986 release of Strong Persuader the Cray Band’s
tunes were put in heavy rotation on mega rock stations across the nation. The
first hit, “Smoking Gun,” was followed by “I Guess I Showed Her” and “Right
Next Door (Because of Me).” The Cray Band’s next two releases, Don’t Be Afraid
of the Dark and Midnight Stroll, brought more radio listeners to
record stores, increasing sales of the group’s CDs. Following the path of fame
taken by blues-based rockers like Johnny Winter and Stevie Ray Vaughan, Cray
became a sensation, leading his band in concerts at large arena and rock
festival. He was the first African American artist since Jimi Hendrix to rise
to such fame in rock music. Was there a change in the band’s direction or had
the blues arrived again into the mainstream after more than three decades of
being forgotten by radio? “We were doing blues and Rand B from the first,”
Crays says. “That’s just part of what we do. If you’re writing a tune it’s only
natural to grab something from someplace else. You’re gonna put in some soul
changes and some jazz, something you’ve been listening to. With what we do
there’s a whole lot of room to move.” Clapton’s admiration for Cray led to a
writing collaboration on the hit “Old Love,” which featured Cray on guitar. A
call came from Rolling Stone guitarist Keith Richards who asked him to be in
the film he and Steve Jordan were producing about the rock guitarist Chuck
Berry, “Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Concert footage in the film features
Richards, Jordan, Clapton, Julian Lennon, Linda Ronstadt and Etta James. Cray
performs “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” with Berry. Dressed in a baby blue tuxedo
jacket, the young guitarist is the epitome of the tune’s title. Cray also
performed on the Tina Turner TV special “Break Every Rule.” During the 90s the
Cray Band was featured in concert with artists like Clapton, the Stones, John
Lee Hooker, BB King and Bonnie Raitt, who declared that the band leader is “an
original; he’s passionate, he’s a bad ass and puts on one of the best shows
you’ll ever see.” Amidst these accolades, soaring record sales and a packed
touring schedule the Cray Band recorded six CDs in the 90s. Cray produced Shame
+ A Sin, which referenced his blues roots, in 1993. It was followed by two more
self-produced recordings, Some Rainy Morning and Sweet Potato Pie. Recorded in
Memphis and featuring the famed Memphis Horns Sweet Potato Pie was the Cray
Band’s most soulful album to date. The next recording Take Off Your Shoes
delved even deeper into Memphis sounds of the 60s. “That was definitely a soul
record,” Cray says. “I’d already been writing songs, Jim (Pugh, who was
keyboards with the Cray Band from 1989 to 2014) was writing songs, leaning
toward soul. Steve (Jordan, producer) heard them and put the icing on the
cake.” Jordan, who subsequently produced the Cray Band’s In My Soul, Shoulda
Been Home and the first CD in 4 Nights of 40 Years Live, also brought the
personification of Memphis soul to the recording session, Willie Mitchell, to
help with arrangements for the Memphis Horns. Mitchell discovered and first
recorded Al Green along with other Southern Soul singers like Ann Peebles, O.V.
Wright and Syl Johnson for the famed Memphis label Hi Records. When he arrived
at the Cray recording session, he brought not only the Memphis presence but
also a present. “Willie came over – he was wearing a gold jacket – and gave me
this song, ‘Love Gone to Waste,’” Cray says. “Then we put some final touches on
the CD at his studio in Memphis. It was a great opportunity to see Willie in
the studio.” Both on Take Your Shoes Off and 4 Nights of 40 Years Live, “Love
Gone to Waste” showcases Robert Cray’s natural ease with soul ballads. He is
intense but smooth in telling the story of love gone bad. Then in a falsetto
voice he soars through the sadness into the inevitable pain. It is a song that
Cray owns because no other singer has dared try to do it justice. Take Your
Shoes Off won a Grammy in 2000. In the next decade the Cray Band recorded seven
CDs, three of them live, and two – Twenty and This Time – were nominated for
Grammys. The group’s most recent recordings, Nothing But Love and In My Soul
put the band back on the Billboard Charts.
Luther Dickinson - On Blues & Ballads (A
Folksinger’s Songbook) Vol. I & II, Luther Dickinson finds his way forward
by retracing his steps. This ambitious double album collects twenty-one tunes
from throughout his life and career—songs he wrote with his rock & roll
band the North Mississippi Allstars, songs he learned from friends and family,
songs passed down to him by his heroes and mentors, songs that have lived in
the American subconscious for decades now—and pares them down to their
irreducible elements. Voice, guitar, drums. Here and there some blues fife or
Beale Street piano. The performances on the record itself are some of his
most excitable and energetic, with the bounce and rumble of early blues and
rock; the arrangements transcribed in the illustrated songbook (which accompanies
the vinyl edition of the album) reveal the intricate and imaginative rhythms
and melodies that underpin all of Luther’s compositions. “The idea,” he says,
“was to re-record everything very stripped down—very acoustic and honest and
folky—to accompany the songbook.” As the subtitle suggests, this is only the
beginning of what promises to be a multi-volume undertaking. It started,
as so many good things do, with Mavis Staples. The two have been friends and
occasional musical partners for twenty years: She has sung with his
rock-and-roll band the North Mississippi Allstars, and he accompanied her on
the soundtrack to Take Me to the River, the 2014 documentary about soul
music in the South. When Mavis mentioned that she wanted to record the Allstars
tune “Hear the Hills,” Luther knew he had to make it happen. On the day of the
session, however, Mavis changed her mind and asked to record another song,
“Ain’t No Grave,” from the Allstars’ 2011 album Keys to the
Kingdom. It’s a song that means the world to Luther. He wrote it shortly
after the death of his father, the producer/singer/songwriter/all-around badass
Jim Dickinson. Most people know him as a session musician who played on
hits by the Stones and Dylan or as a producer who helmed seminal albums by Big
Star and the Replacements. He taught Luther everything he knows: how to play
guitar, how to lead a band, how to keep a songwriter’s notebook. For
Mavis, “Ain’t No Grave” is the kind of song her own father—the great Pops
Staples—might have taught her and her sisters back in the 1950s and ‘60s, when
the Staple Singers were the biggest name in gospel. Arranged, performed, and
recorded on the fly, their version of the tune is haunting. The tempo is slow
but determined, as though midway through a long, arduous journey. Sharde Thomas
taps out a sympathetic rhythm on her drums while Luther lays down a wiry blues
riff and sings about living up to his father’s example: “When the day comes,
death comes back my way,” they sing together, “I would hope to be as brave as
he was on Judgment Day." Mavis sings behind him, her voice trailing
his, her presence a reassuring hand on Luther’s shoulder. Fatigue colors their
voices, evoking the inescapable gravity of death: We are all pulled toward the
grave, but it’s what we do along the way that matters. At the heart of the song
is a kernel of hard-won hope, as though simply making music is consolation
enough. That memorable session sent Luther down the road toward Blues
& Ballads, which he describes as a community project: “This is the most
casual record I ever made. I’d record one or two songs at a time, very
effortlessly and unstrategically. Then I started recording songs with different
groups of friends, wherever I happened to be.” Fortunately, he happened to be
in some of the best and most historic rooms in the world, including Sun Studio
and Willie Mitchell’s Royal Studios in Memphis. Equally fortunately, he has
some incredibly talented friends: Jason Isbell, J.J. Grey, Alvin Youngblood
Hart, Jimbo Mathus, Lillie Mae Rasche, and Charles Hodges, a keyboard player of
the legendary Hi Records rhythm section that backed Al Green. In addition
to these cameos, Blues & Ballads emphasizes first and foremost
Luther’s chemistry with his solo band, Amy LaVere on bass and Sharde Thomas on
drums, fife, even accordion. Sharde in particular plays a prominent roll on
these songs, not just providing a steady backbeat but singing backup and lead.
It’s her voice that introduces the album on opener “Hurry Up Sunrise,” which is
fitting since the song was written by her grandfather, the renowned blues fife
legend Otha Turner. Their voices blend gracefully on the verses, lending the
tune a spry bounce and a wide-eyed tone. Luther is so moved by the
performance—recorded in one take—that he punctuates it with an excited, “I love
you, girl!” He’s been singing the song for most of his life, first
learning it on Otha’s front porch. “Back in the day when I was a teenager, I
would sit on his porch with our friends, all guys in the hill country blues
scene, and we would all play guitar. We’d try to get Otha fired up enough that
he would start singing. If he started singing, we knew were getting somewhere.”
That porch was where he met Sharde, back when she was just 9 years old but
already something of a fife prodigy. As a teenager, she started playing with
the Allstars. “I look at him as an older brother,” she says. “When we’re
onstage together, magic seems to happen. I know Otha’s smiling down on me and
Luther’s father’s smiling down on him." Blues & Ballads has
a retrospective flavor, but it’s not a greatest hits. Rather, it’s a means of
translating these songs to a new moment, of letting them breathe and take new
shapes. In that regard, it’s fitting that the vinyl edition includes that
songbook. “I love all sorts,” says Luther, an avid collector of “hymnals,
children’s songs, country music, whatever. And I’ve always wanted to have my
own.” When he was growing up in rural Mississippi, these songbooks formed the
bedrock of his musical education. “My grandmother was the church pianist, and I
remember looking at the hymnals and trying to figure out the music. I would
read the words and listen to the people singing along. Growing up pre-internet,
I would go to the library and memorize every music book in the Hernando Public
Library.” Around this same time, Luther learned to keep copious notebooks
full of stray thoughts, fragments of lyrics, doodles and drawings, anything
that came to his mind. It’s an approach his father insisted was essential not
just to the songwriter, but to anyone who creates any kind of art. Luther
continues the practice today, archiving his old notebooks—all emblazoned with
stickers and filled with his chicken scratch penmanship—the same way he
collects songbooks. “My whole life my dad really helped teach me how to
craft songs. I’d bring in these rough songs and we’d demo them up and record
them. He would always go through them and make sure the syllable count added up
and the rhymes were traditional. He taught me the importance of getting the
most out of every word, making every word as strong as it could be. Now that
he’s gone, I still work on songs using what he taught me. We’re still working
together, because he taught me how to do it. The collaboration lives
on." Every song on Blues & Ballads was born in those
songbooks and notebooks, a fact that lends the double album the feel of a
memoir. This is the sound of a vital artist taking stock of his life in music
and acknowledging his debt to his heroes: his grandmother, his father, Otha
Turner, Mavis Staples, and so many others. “When you put all these songs
together, they tell my story and my family’s story.”
Sonny Landreth - Sonny Landreth’s new album, Bound By The Blues, to be released June 8th on Provogue, marks a return to the slide guitarist’s musical roots. It presents a bold, big-sounding collection of recordings that climb to stratospheric heights of jazz informed improvisation, swagger like the best of classic rock, and inevitably remain deeply attached to the elemental emotional and compositional structures that are at the historic core of the blues.
With Landreth’s mountainous guitar tones and nuanced singing leading the way on its ten songs, Bound By the Blues is a powerful tribute to the durability and flexibility of the genre, and to his own creative vision. It’s also a radical departure from his previous two albums, 2012’s classical/jazz fusion outing Elemental Journey and 2008’s guest-star-studded From the Reach.
“Ever since The Road We’re On [his Grammy-nominated 2003 release], fans have been asking me, ‘When are you going to do another blues album?’ Landreth explains. “After expanding my songs for Elemental Journey into an orchestral form, I thought I’d get back to the simple but powerful blues form. I’d been playing a lot of these songs on the road with my band, and we’ve been taking them into some surprising places musically. So going into the studio to record them with just our trio seemed like the next step.” Bound By the Blues, the guitarist’s twelfth album, pivots on the song “Where They Will.” Its gloriously chiming cascades of six-string, and the refrain “Let the blues take me where they will,” serve as a musical blueprint for the album. “The blues has been a big part of my journey for the past 40-plus years,” Landreth attests. “Some of the numbers on this album are among the first I learned. I wrote ‘Where They Will’ about my relationship to blues – letting the music lead me to new sounds and improvisational passages, and introduce me to things I haven’t played before.”
The Landreth-penned title track offers brilliantly keening guitar solos while paying tribute to the universality of the experiences – love, death, birth, transcendence – chronicled in the blues’ vast catalog. “Bound By the Blues” also name-checks Muddy Waters, Jimi Hendrix, Buffy Sainte-Marie and some of Landreth’s other musical heroes along the way. He offers, “Singing about the unifying power of the blues and paying tribute to the great artists who’ve helped shape the music in that song means a lot to me.” So does paying homage to his hero and fellow slide slinger Johnny Winter, who died last year, with the instrumental “Firebird Blues.” Winter was an important influence. The two men became friends and often shared bills in recent years, and Landreth made a guest appearance on Winter’s 2011 return-to-form Roots. Landreth reflects, “The news of Johnny’s death came just as we were about to make this album and it hit me really hard. I decided to record a slow instrumental as a tribute by keeping it raw and in the moment like Johnny’s playing always was.” To that end, he used his vintage Gibson Firebird guitar, a model long associated with Winter. Drummer Brian Brignac played on cardboard boxes to give the track a funky, primitive feel, while bassist David Ranson played a ukulele bass with nylon strings for a more flexible kind of thunder.
Bound By the Blues opens with a brisk version of “Walking Blues,” a Delta chestnut associated with Robert Johnson and Son House that’s among the first blues tunes the Louisiana-based slide man recalls learning. Inspired by the Paul Butterfield interpretation, the arrangement’s pace and singing guitar solo takes the song’s broken-hearted lyrics to a surprisingly joyful place. And his take on Johnson’s “Dust My Broom” (made famous by Elmore James) is played as a dance floor stomp, with a beat Landreth’s late mentor, the zydeco king Clifton Chenier, used to call a “double shuffle.” The performance is a showcase for the sheer heat of Landreth’s touring and recording trio as well as his own right-hand technique, with sharp-toned picking and muting adding previously unheard nuances to the oft-recorded number.
“Key To the Highway” was first recorded by pianist Charlie Segar for the Vocalion label in 1940. But Landreth’s interpretation reframes the song in much the way that great jazz improvisers like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane reinvented pop tunes. Landreth reconstructs the familiar melody into a series of telegraph-like dots and dashes, with the low-end growl of his Stratocaster humming like an overblown saxophone and his use of delay creating sheets of reverberating sound.
“As a kid, my first instrument was trumpet. Miles Davis and John Coltrane were two of my jazz heroes,” Landreth relates. ”That’s where a lot of my perspective on improvising and phrasing comes from, and my belief that when you’re playing ‘in the zone’ there’s no real limitation of where you can go creatively.” This is, of course, if you’ve got Landreth’s staggering command of his instrument.
The lean Mississippi native, who grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana, had already been playing horn for three years when he got his hands on his first six-string and fell deeply in love. Slide guitar spoke to Landreth immediately. He recalls, “When I realized that my slide heroes had mastered a vocal quality on the guitar, I wanted to do the same thing. At the start, the sounds I made were rough on everybody – my family, and especially my poor dog and cat – but eventually I was able to develop my own instrumental voice and began to apply that to any style I wanted to play.” At age 17 Landreth attended three very different shows in his home state that would have a great impact on him. “Amazingly, in the span of about a year, I met and heard B.B. King in New Iberia, Jimi Hendrix in Baton Rouge and Clifton Chenier in Lafayette. Needless to say, all that had a profound effect on me. To this day, I still think about those experiences.” Many years later, he became a member of Chenier’s Red Hot Louisiana Band. With steamy roadhouse sets that often ran for hours without a break and stretched songs out for their maximum impact on the dance floor, he was put to the test. Landreth quickly developed the ability to change keys, rhythms and even musical styles in a flash.
While still with Clifton, he recorded a solo album in 1981 called Blues Attack. Four years later his influential “Congo Square,” named for the slave auction block in old New Orleans, appeared on Down In Louisiana. Although that album fanned the flames of his reputation as an emerging force in roots music, Landreth kept a parallel career going as a celebrated sideman and session player. Over the years he performed and recorded with many great artists, including songwriter John Hiatt and British blues innovator John Mayall, and toured as a member of Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band. He also collaborated with Eric Clapton and has performed at all of Clapton’s prestigious Crossroads Guitar Festivals since 2004. Along the way Landreth has continued to develop his vision and his musical voice, growing increasingly original and diverse, expanding from blues, zydeco, folk, country and jazz into increasingly category-blurring musical excursions like Bound By the Blues.
His plans for the remainder of 2015 include heavy international touring with his razor-sharp trio as well as duet concerts with fellow slide virtuoso Cindy Cashdollar. (Landreth and Cashdollar both guested on Arlen Roth’s recent Slide Guitar Summit album.) “Developing a style and an approach that is your own musically is not something to be taken for granted,” Landreth says. “I’m at a point in life where I want to make the most of every moment I can and that changes your perspective, your priorities and how you relate to everyone else. And at the end of the day, I think that’s the essence of what I wanted to express with Bound By The Blues.”
Amy Speace - Amy Speace is a folk singer, timeless and classic, and a bit
out of her own era. “She has one of the richest and loveliest voices in the
genre and her songs are luxuriously smart,” writes Craig Havighurst (host of
Nashville’s “Music City Roots). “She’s profoundly personal yet also a bit
mythic.” Since her discovery in 2006 by folk-pop icon Judy Collins,
Speace has been heralded as one of the leading voices of the new generation of
American folk singers. Her latest release, “That Kind Of Girl”,
received rave reviews by Billboard
Magazine, The
New York Times and NPR.
Recorded live in 3 days with her longtime collaborator/producer Neilson
Hubbard, with a small combo featuring Will Kimbrough (Emmylou
Harris) and Carl Broemel (My Morning Jacket), Girl is
spare, direct and brutally honest and is her most personal collection of songs
yet. Born in Baltimore, Amy Speace studied classical acting in New York City
after graduating from Amherst College and then spent a few years with The
National Shakespeare Company and other Off-Off Broadway classical rep
companies, doing guerrilla Shakespeare in Lower East Side parking lots, working
backstage on Broadway, writing poetry in cafes and feeling increasingly like
success as a theater artist was just out of reach. In that season of doubt, she
bought a cheap guitar at a pawn shop in the East Village and began putting her
poetry to music and in short time was appearing at local folk clubs The
Sidewalk Cafe, The Bitter End and The Living Room. Judy Collins’ manager caught
a set of Amy’s at the 2005 SXSW conference and brought her demo back to
Collins, who had just started her own imprint, Wildflower Records and
immediately signed Amy. Her Wildflower Records debut “Songs For Bright
Street,” was released to rave reviews in 2006 and featured E-Street band
fiddler Soozie Tyrell and a duet with The Jayhawks Gary Louris. That year
she was nominated as Best New Artist by the International Folk
Alliance. In 2009 she released “The Killer In Me,” recorded in North
Carolina with Mitch Easter (REM, the db’s), which had NPR comparing her to a
young Lucinda Williams. That record's bonus track, an acoustic version of
her song "Weight of the World" was recorded later that year by Judy
Collins herself, who named it “one of the best political folk songs I’ve ever
heard.” WFUV, NYC's premier AAA radio station, awarded "Weight of
the World" the #4 Folk Song of the Decade. Seeking new
inspiration, in late 2009, Speace moved to Nashville, changing management
and labels, and began collaborating with producer/songwriter Neilson Hubbard on
a collection of songs that would become the cinematic “Land Like A
Bird,” released in 2011 on Thirty Tigers. In 2013, she received the best
reviews of her career with the epic "How To Sleep In A Stormy Boat,” a
string-laden song cycle inspired by Shakespeare, winning 4 stars from Mojo
Magazine and a feature on NPR’s “All Things Considered”. Rock critic
Dave Marsh, long a fan, who contributed the album's liner notes, wrote
"Amy Speace’s songs hang together like a short story collection, united by
a common vantage point and common predicaments…it’s a gift to hear a heart so
modest even when it’s wide open." An accidental side project was born
in East Nashville in 2015, when Applewood Road was formed. The trio of
Speace, Amber Rubarth and Emily Barker met in 2015 at a coffeeshop in
East Nashville and, after writing one song together, were signed to a deal with
the London-based Gearbox Records. Their eponymous debut was recorded in 4 days
around one microphone at Nashville's analog studio Welcome To 1979 and was
released in the UK in February 2016 to astonishing 4 and 5 star
reviews. The Sunday London Times called the album “a flawless set that has
to be the most haunting release of the past year” and The Telegraph wrote
“There’s a Moorish magic to the harmonies of this country-folk trio that
recalls the vintage appeal of the Everlys and the Andrews.” Applewood
Road appeared that summer at Glastonbury Festival, The Cambridge Folk Festival
and on the Andrew Marr Show.