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(return
to part 2)
How did you come to meet
these legendary musicians?
A lot of it was a result of my [1991] album
Arkansas Traveler. There was a lot of self-consciousness,
an agenda, behind that album. We understand bluegrass fiddle
and old-time music to be the purest expression of the white man's
high lonesome voice, but that's a bastardization and a gender-driven
revision of the actual history. Country music is pretty DIY,
and I think Gatemouth [Brown] is the original embodiment of it.
His dad taught him. The point is, this music is not racially
pure in any sense of the word. Bluegrass isn't pure, and neither
is blues. Like everything about American music, they're miscegenated
from the beginning. The key? The minstrel tradition. So, given
that agenda, I didn't want to make a bluegrass album that just
played into [the accepted thought].
What was Gatemouth like?
Working with him was as much of a mutual admiration
society as Gatemouth would ever admit to. He was a cantankerous
old fuck, but he had such magnetism. At Sun Studios, they had
a picture of him from when he was in his early 20s, and he was
so good-lookin'. He's a ladykiller. If he's like that
now, can you imagine what he must have been like in his 20s?
Your record deal came about
as a result of the fact that you were essentially field-recorded.
Did that give you extra insight into the experience of early
blues artists?
I'll explain it this way. Recently we were
at this bar in New Orleans with crawfish boiling and a band playing
outside. Kermit Ruffins was running the gig, and this trumpet
player came up and sat in and did "What a Wonderful World,"
and it was done so sincerely that it hit me what a loving continuation
of a tradition this is. He befriended us and introduced us to
his vast array of friends and family, and we became very well-connected
within the brass-band scene. In New Orleans, I've had occasions
where I was sitting in the heart of living jazz and wondering
why no one was showing up to document it. I'm talking about sitting
on the stoop and a stereo is blasting music, and maybe last week
someone got shot, and I'm taking all this in with my mind's camera.
And then I juxtapose that with my experience of being
field-recorded, and the roles switch. I suddenly realized that
I was also a specimen under a glass. I mean, I
was the quaint, rustic, primitive hillbilly being captured by
this British folklorist onto a Sony Walkman. Granted, that doesn't
mean I can know what it was like to be Leadbelly in a prison
full of men who had plenty of blues to tell, trying to draw the
attention of Alan Lomax to say, "Hey, steal from me."
(continue
to part 4)
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