Charlie Parr

Many people play roots music, but few modern musicians live those roots like
Minnesota's Charlie Parr. Recording since the earliest days of the 21st century, Parr's
heartfelt and plaintive original folk blues and traditional spirituals don't strive for
authenticity: They are authentic.
It's the music of a self-taught guitarist and banjo player who grew up without a TV but
with his dad's recordings of America's musical founding fathers, including Charley Patton
and Lightnin' Hopkins, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. With his long scraggly hair, father-
time beard, thrift-store workingman's flannel and jeans, and emphatic, throaty voice, Parr
looks and sounds like he would have fit right into Harry Smith's "Anthology of American
Folk Music."

Parr uses three instruments, not including his own stomping foot. He got an 1890 banjo
the first time he heard Dock Boggs. "I don't do claw hammer, I don't do Scruggs-style,
it's just a version of me trying to play like Dock Boggs, I guess," Parr says.
He has two Nationals, a 12-string and a Resonator, which became an obsession when
Parr saw a picture of Son House playing it. "The first time I got my paws on one, I went
into debt to buy it," he says. "Nationals are fun because they are as much mechanical as
instrumental, you can take them apart and put them back together again." On an
overseas tour, the neck of the Resonator broke in baggage: he played the guitar by
shimming the neck inside the body with popsicle sticks. "It solidifies your relationship
with the instrument so much: It's as much part of you as anything else."

Most of his recordings, including Roustabout (2008), Jubilee (2007), Rooster (2005),
King Earl (2004), 1922 (2002) and Criminals and Sinners (2001) eschew typical studio
settings. He has recorded in warehouses, garages, basements and storefronts, usually
on vintage equipment, which gives his work the historic feel of field recordings. It's not
because he wants to sound like he was discovered 75 years ago by Alan Lomax; it's
because most modern recording studios make the reticent and self-effacing Parr feel
uncomfortable. He often works with engineer and mastering master Tom Herbers of
Third Ear Studios in Minneapolis to give his recordings true fidelity no matter what the
format, from mp3 to 180 gram vinyl to whatever is in between. Yet his music sounds so
timeless that you half wonder if there's not a scratchy Paramount 78 of Charlie Parr
singing and strumming somewhere.
His inspiration is drawn from the alternately fertile and frozen soil of Minnesota. Parr
grew up in the Hormel company city of Austin, Minnesota (population 25,000) where
most of the world's favorite tinned meat, Spam, is still manufactured. And he hasn't
moved far, drawing sustenance from the surprisingly large, thriving and mutually
supportive music scene of Duluth: Parr's 2011 album of traditional songs, Keep Your
Hands on the Plow features locals including Charlie's wife, Emily Parr; old-timey
banjo/fiddle band Four Mile Portage; and Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker of the
renowned alternative rock band Low.



The combination of industrial meat factory where both of his parents worked proud union
jobs, set in a largely rural environment, had a broad impact on Parr. "Every morning
you'd hear the [factory] whistles blow, when I was a kid they had the stockyards andanimals there, so you were surrounded by this atmosphere," Parr says. "My mom and
dad would come home from work, their smocks would be covered by paprika and gore."
But out the back door were soybean fields, as far as they eye could see. "As a kid I
thought it was kind of boring, but now I go and visit my mom and I think it's the most
beautiful landscape there is."
What leisure time was available was spent at an uncle's farm a few miles away in
Hollandale, where Charlie would pick the potatoes and other crops that would feed their
families. Charlie's father and uncle would buy whole cows from a local cattle farm. The
family rarely ate Spam.
Parr shows the same resourcefulness on the road, averaging 3 or 4 shows a week, year
round. To stay in traveling shape, he eats home-prepared meals such as spicy lentil
curry, black bean chili and mix vegetables that cook on the manifold of his van while he
drives. "It's a good heat source and it's handy—25 miles on the manifold will cook about
anything you want."

To many, Parr is considered a regional artist, which is another way of saying he doesn't
like to travel far from his family's Depression era roots. "From Cleveland to Seattle and
down to San Francisco and back is my area," he says, though the focus is
unquestionably Minnesota and the Northern Plains. Yet he's built a big enough audience
in both Ireland and Australia to tour both regularly. He's had especially good fortune
Down Under, where his "1922 Blues" was used as the counterintuitive music behind a
Vodafone mobile commercial and became a viral and radio success. Three of his songs
added atmospheric resonance to the 2010 Australian western "Red Hill." On his last
tour, his fourth of that continent, he was a guest DJ for three hours on a Melbourne roots
music radio station, on which he played songs from his own mix CD. "The newest thing
on it was some Bukka White recordings from the 1940s," Parr says with some
incredulity. "People were calling all morning to say how much they like the music."

Quiet, thoughtful and humble, Parr has made two albums of spirituals, and a few
traditional songs of the hard life and the hereafter are always in his live sets. Such music
isn't necessarily rooted in the Methodist church in which he grew up: "It was more like,
let's get the service over quick so we can get downstairs and drink coffee and have pie!"
But faith, though undefined, underlines all of Charlie's music, both in the listening, the
covering, the writing and performing.
"When you listen to Charley Patton playing something like 'Prayer of Death,' way over
and above it just being a 'Charley Patton' song, or a 'spiritual' song, it's one of the most
beautiful and haunting pieces of music you'll ever hear in your life. You can't quite put
your thumb on it, you just want to do something like that so much...I don't think I ever
have, but it's a weird, visceral thing. Any time I get a song like that right, I get kind of that
weird feeling, you know?"

—Wayne Robins, April 2012
Wayne Robins has been writing about music since the 1960s, and lives in New York.

Anita MacDonald & Ben Miller

Combining the fiery edge of the Scottish Border pipes with the rich sounds of the Cape Breton fiddle, Ben Miller and Anita MacDonald join together, merging traditional influences from Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island, as well as the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. This fresh and talented duo pairs driving dance-tunes with expressive Gaelic airs and songs, bringing their listeners a powerful combination of passion and grace.

...
Ben
Ben is an American-born player of Scottish bagpipes, currently living in Cape Breton, NS.
His interest in traditional music stems from his exposure to the pipes at a young age, in his hometown of Queensbury, New York, as well as his family’s strong connections to its Scottish and Irish roots, through both his American mother and Canadian father. He began studying the Highland Bagpipes around age eight, but by twelve he began to shift his focus to the bellows-blown Scottish smallpipes and Border pipes. Ben is also an academic, holding an undergraduate degree in Music, as well as a Master's degree in Scottish Ethnology, from the University of Edinburgh's School of Scottish Studies. His repertoire and style draw mainly on the Gaelic traditions of Western Scotland and the Canadian Maritimes, blended with a healthy dash of Irish tunes for good measure.

Anita
Anita is an accomplished musician, dancer, and Gaelic singer from Little Narrows, Cape Breton.
She began stepdancing in the family kitchen at the tender age of four, and picked up the fiddle a few short years later, at age eight. Anita has been wowing audiences with her impeccable timing and neatly choreographed steps ever since. Anita’s fiddle playing has a distinctive sound, influenced by the deep roots of her musical family and her teachers throughout the years. Her energetic style has put her in demand as a performer and teacher, across Cape Breton and beyond. She has been a featured artist in the Celtic Colours International Festival, and has toured throughout New England with Cape Breton folk trio, The Goin’s On. Anita is also the recipient of the Frank “Big Sampie” Sampson Award, nominated by the Festival Volunteer Drive’ers Association. Following this award, Anita released her debut album, “Stepping Stone,” during the 2011 Celtic Colours International Festival.



This new and exciting duo emerged after a chance meeting at the Celtic Colours Festival in 2013. Anita then joined Ben for his latest recording project, an EP titled “On Home Ground”, which was released only a few months later, in January 2014. In August 2015, Ben and Anita launched their full length debut album, titled “A Day at the Lake”. They are currently touring across North America, the United Kingdom, and further afield to promote this fresh, new release.

Tempering the sharp edge of the pipes and fiddle, Ben and Anita are joined by friends from the Maritimes and beyond. They perform regularly as a three or four-piece band, blending in subtle and sympathetic rhythm guitar, the lush, ethereal sounds of the Scottish harp, or the driving groove of Cape Breton-style piano accompaniment, to create a full and well rounded sound.

Wynn Walent - San Diego

via Last.fm http://ift.tt/1Oe993f

William Elliott Whitmore - Radium Death

William Elliott Whitmore is well-known for his raw, poetic, rural folk albums. On all of them, his rough-hewn growl of a voice is skeletally accompanied by only his banjo or acoustic guitar. Whitmore's always played in punk clubs, and he's claimed bands from the Jesus Lizard and Bad Brains to the Minutemen as influences on his own music. It's been somewhat difficult to hear that influence until now. Radium Death still contains Whitmore's hard folk roots. A third of these songs find him solo, spitting out his love for the land and his rage at those who would destroy it and his way of life. The rest range from rock & roll and folk-rock to country songs that find him backed by a varying assortment of musicians who played live in the studio. Recorded over two years, Whitmore drove two hours from his Lee County farm to Iowa City to work with producer Luke Tweedy. They cut various versions of tunes and decided on the arrangements as they went. Whitmore's strengths as a songwriter have always been in very simple, direct melodies and in lyrics that cut through the veneer and get to the soul of things. The larger -- but by no means excessive -- arrangements underscore their poignancy. And, while always strong, his delivery just roars here at times. Check the blistering, clattering opener "Healing to Do," which pairs the heat of a punk band with the blues moan in Them's "Gloria." "A Thousand Deaths," played solo on a slightly out of tune electric guitar, is a garage folk song worthy of Phil Ochs. "Don't Strike Me Down" is a blistering, full-band country boogie with a pumping, upright piano balancing the distorted guitar and drum attack with a full "ooh-ooh" female backing chorus to add some sweetness to the sweat. "Can't Go Back" is a country waltz complete with pedal steel and a walking bassline. The solo work isn't gone, however -- the ragged tenderness in "Civilizations" and the agony in "Have Mercy" find Whitmore importing his lived-in, time-worn wisdom with only his banjo and guitar, respectively. "Ain't Gone Yet" closes the set as a humanist, honky tonk gospel-waltz. A backing chorus, electric piano, and shuffling drums amid the acoustic and electric guitars bear witness to Whitmore's paean to his presence in the moment as a man on earth, and his belief he will return to it, not Jesus. Radium Death finds Whitmore at his songwriting and singing best. That said, his successful indulgence in rock & roll's various forms makes one wish he had just put the entire album on stun.

 

Sam Bush

Grammy Award winning multi-instrumentalist Sam Bush doesn't seem old enough to be a musical legend. And he's not. But he is.

Alternately known as the King of Telluride and the King of Newgrass, Bush has been honored by the Americana Music Association and the International Bluegrass Music Association.

"It's overwhelming and humbling," Bush says of his lifetime achievement award from the AMA. "It goes along with the title cut of my new album, Circles Around Me, which basically says, how in the hell did we get this far? In my brain I'm still 17, but I look in the mirror and I'm 57."

But honors are not what drive him. "I didn't get into music to win awards," he says. "I'm just now starting to get somewhere. I love to play and the older I get the more I love it. And I love new things."

Among those new things are the growing group of mandolin players that identify Bush as their musical role model in much the same way he idolized Bill Monroe and Jethro Burns.

"If I've been cited as an influence, then I'm really flattered because I still have my influences that I look up to," Bush says. "I'm glad that I'm in there somewhere."

He's being humble, of course. Bush has helped to expand the horizons of bluegrass music, fusing it with jazz, rock, blues, funk and other styles. He's the co-founder of the genre-bending New Grass Revival and an in-demand musician who has played with everyone from Emmylou Harris and Bela Fleck to Charlie Haden, Lyle Lovett and Garth Brooks.

And though Bush is best known for jaw-dropping skills on the mandolin, he is also a three time national junior fiddle champion and Grammy award winning vocalist.

"In the acoustic world, I've been pretty lucky to play with almost every one of my heroes. I've gotten to play with Bill Monroe, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, I've been to the mountain," says Bush with a smile.

But his greatest contribution may be his impact on the future. "I'm secure with what I can do and I know what I can't do," he says. "You just have to stand there and applaud the great young talent.

"Chris Thile, Wayne Benson, Shawn Lane, Matt Flinner, Ronnie McCoury, Mike Marshall—they play in ways that I can't play," he says of today's younger generation of mandolin players. "I'm hoping to be around for is the next generation that comes along after that group. That's going to be something. The music keeps evolving.

Circles Around Me, Bush's seventh solo album and sixth with Sugar Hill, is an aurally inspiring mix of bluegrass favorites and complementary new songs. "I don't know why, but it felt right at this moment in my life to go back and revisit some things that I've loved all my life, which is bluegrass and, unapologetically, newgrass," says Bush. "After all these years of experimenting —and there's experimentation on this record too —I've come full circle."

Produced by Bush, the 14-song set includes appearances by Del McCoury, Edgar Meyer, Jerry Douglas and New Grass Revival co-founder Courtney Johnson (posthumously). The album also employs the phenomenal talent of Bush's band: Scott Vestal, Stephen Mougin, Todd Parks and Chris Brown.

"I get to play every show with my favorite musicians and I feel real fortunate," Bush says of his band. "I love playing with them. I feel like this group is limitless and they proved it again on this record."

The title cut, which Bush co-wrote with Jeff Black, "is about being thankful that you're still here, that you're still alive walking around," Bush explains. "Why are we the ones still here when we've had fallen comrades and loved ones?"

"The Ballad of Stringbean and Estelle," which Bush co-wrote with Guy Clark and Verlon Thompson, is the haunting real-life story of the 1973 murder of Grand Ole Opry star David "Stringbean" Akeman and his wife.

Bush and Courtney Johnson, who died in 1996, were reunited thanks to New Grass Revival producer Garth Fundis, who found a previously unreleased recording with Bush and Johnson's fiddle and banjo pairing on "Apple Blossom" from 1976. "It's pretty special and means a lot to me."

Meanwhile, "Souvenir Bottles" and "Whisper My Name" are fine updates of songs Bush first recorded in his New Grass Revival days. "I guess I'm proud that I can still sing it in the key that we first cut it in," Bush says of "Whisper," which was on New Grass Revival's 1972 debut album.

Del McCoury, whom Bush first met in 1970, guests on two Bill Monroe songs, "Roll On Buddy, Roll On" and "Midnight On The Stormy Deep." "Del always encouraged me to sing," Bush says. "So I wanted to do these songs with him. 'Roll On' is one of the few songs Del ever recorded with Bill."

Songs such as "Diamond Joe" and "You Left Me Alone" have roots in Bush's youth. The latter was on an album by the Country Gentlemen that Bush bought in the '60s. "It's a great 6/8 fast waltz tune and I am almost quoting John Duffey's mandolin playing note for note," he says. "It's a great tune and I've never heard anyone else do it."

The Bush-penned "Old North Woods" is a "Bill Monroe-sounding waltz," according to Bush, that features Meyer, his wife, Cornelia Heard of the Blair String Quartet, and their 16-year-old son, George, in his recording debut.

"With Emmy I learned more about singing and more about letting music breathe and I hope this CD is part of that thought," Bush says of Emmylou Harris, his former boss in the Nash Ramblers. "Through her I realized you don't have to whack people over the head with intensity on every song."

There's plenty more of course and Bush fans new and old will find lots to love.

"It's crazy to think about," Bush says of his influence on today's crop of mandolin players. "I'm proud to be part of a natural progression in music. And I hope to still be playing 30 years from now."

That said, it's not surprising that Bush still has goals. "I want to grow as a songwriter, as a song collaborator," he says. "There are still a lot of things I haven't discovered about playing mandolin. I want to be able to be secure in the styles that I know how to play well, but I also want to explore other styles that I haven't learned yet.

"I want to improve as a singer," he adds. "I have to work harder on singing than I do on playing."

"As long as I'm alive I hope I have the ability to play," says Bush, a two time cancer treatment survivor. When the ability to play is taken away, it's humbling. It teaches you a lesson: don't take it for granted."

Here's to the next 30 years.

Songs From The Road Band

     Songs From The Road Band formed in 2004 when Charles Humphrey III pulled its members together to record songs he'd written while traveling the roads with the Steep Canyon Rangers.  The guys began their musical friendships in Chapel Hill, NC where Charles Humphrey, Andy Thorn, Jon Stickley, Mark Schimick and Bobby Britt often jammed together.  Their first album was simply "Songs From The Road."  The sophomore album Songs From The Road Band "As The Crow Flies" was released in 2009.  The band members are all fully engaged in their respective bands but have been playing and recording together, whenever schedules permit, for over 10 years.

Andy Thorn is the man on the High Five!  He resides in Colorado and is a full time member of LEFTOVER SALMON.

http://leftoversalmon.com/site/

Sam Wharton is a dynamic guitar player.  Originally  from Alabama he developed his picking chops in the music halls of Telluride, CO.   He currently makes his home in the mountains of Western North Carolina.  He sings lead and harmony vocals on all 3 Songs From The Road Band albums.

Mark Schimick is one half of the Josh Daniels & Mark Schimick Project.  He's sings and picks with heart and soul!

http://joshdanielmusic.com/the-josh-daniel-mark-schimick-project/

Bobby Britt is the tastiest, fieriest young fiddle player in bluegrass music.  He's currently a student at Berklee School of Music in Boston.  He is the full time fiddle player in the band TOWN MOUNTAIN.

http://www.townmountain.net/

Charles R Humphrey III's full time band is Steep Canyon Rangers.  He is a bass player and a songwriter.  He makes his home in Asheville, NC.  He is executive producer of "Traveling Show" and has written or co-written all songs in the SFTRB discography.  "CH3" is also an ultra runner and ran his first 100 mile race in 2014.

http://www.steepcanyon.com/


Andrew Marlin engineered, co produced, played, and sang on "Traveling Show."  His full time band is Mandolin Orange.  Andrew is an accomplished songwriter.  Mandolin Orange also features Emily Frantz who contributed harmony vocals on one track off of the latest album.


http://www.mandolinorange.com/

Jon Stickley is a modern day acoustic pioneer on the guitar.  He offers up a warm baritone on several songs on "Traveling Show."  He leads his own group The Jon Stickley Trio.

Charles Humphrey III plays bass with bluegrass music’s Grammy-winning Steep Canyon Rangers. The native Tar Heel is a prolific songwriter as well, and his compositions are often performed by a talented collection of friends on CDs he produces at those rare times when the musicians are not on tour.

“Traveling Show” is Songs from the Road Band’s third album on Humphrey’s Lucks Dumpy Toad Records. It features 14 tracks written by Humphrey and co-writers, including Jonathan Byrd, Shawn Camp and Calico Moon’s Mark Bumgarner. The songs are performed by 11 of Humphrey’s friends, and mixed and mastered at Chapel Hill’s Rubber Room Studio.

“Traveling Show” opens with the title track, a reflection on life on the road that will resonate with any hard-traveling musician. It’s performed by Mandolin Orange wunderkind Andrew Marlin, who co-produced the album; Marlin also sings lead on “Silk and Lace” and “Rake Out the Nails” (a duet with his M.O. partner, Emily Frantz).

Guitarist Sam Wharton sings joyously of “jumping the broom” in the tongue-in-cheek “Hillbilly Wedding Day.” Town Mountain’s Phil Barker imparts a wistful feel to the Grateful Dead-inspired “By the Banks” and pain and sorrow to the fatal tragedy of “Thompson Flood.” “Just Let Go,” sung by Leftover Salmon’s Andy Thorn, is presented as a newgrassy tour de force.

Additional contributions are provided by Town Mountain’s Robert Greer and fiddler Bobby Britt, along with other young and talented pickers and singers. Together, they make “Traveling Show” a showcase of young musicians carrying the bluegrass tradition forward to a bright, creative, compelling future.