crystalright.blogg.se

Nonetheless, fellow founders Ketch Secor and Critter Fuqua, and maybe to an extent the later edition, Gill Landry, have always been the outfit’s most out-front members. Old Crow has always done very well to make sure they portray themselves as just a gaggle of guys with no real frontman or formalized positions in the band. One of the founding members of Old Crow Medicine Show who left the formidable throwback outfit back in 2011, Willie Watson has re-emerged with a new album and a very, very old approach to country and folk music. The key here is that one guy, and that one guy only is the one and only Willie Watson.

I’m sorry, but that’s just not enough to hold the listener’s ear for an entire album. So yeah, this isn’t Billy Bragg or Charlie Parr. Not to mention that this is an album entirely consisting of covers and traditionals. You can’t take one guy, and one guy only, no overdubs or band, just acoustic instruments and a cued mic and call it good. He counters a masterful bravado with the tragic fragility of one who has been wounded.On paper, nothing about this album should work. Louis bluesman Charley Jordan’s sing-song “Keep It Clean.” Like the music, Willie can be murderous, bawdy or lustful, sometimes in the course of a single song, with a sly sense of humor that cuts to the quick. The album spans ten songs from the American folk songbook ranging from standards like “Midnight Special,” “Mexican Cowboy” and Richard “Rabbit” Brown’s “James Alley Blues” to the more obscure, like Memphis Slim’s 12-bar blues, “Mother Earth,” Gus Cannon and the Jug Stompers’ “Bring it With You When You Come,” Land Norris’ double-entendre kids chant, “Kitty Puss” and St. 1, was produced by David Rawlings at Woodland Sound Studios, the studio he co-owns with associate producer Gillian Welch in Nashville, TN, over the course of a pair of two-day sessions, for their own Acony Records label. A few years down that road, Watson’s work with Old Crow is already a large part of the reason that banjo and guitar driven music is heard everywhere in the air these days.

He discovered like-minded souls in Old Crow Medicine Show, the band he helped create. He began to unearth Folkways albums, including the label’s groundbreaking 1952 Harry Smith compilation, Anthology of American Folk Music, which helped kick-start the ‘60s folk revival lovingly captured in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. With a voice that could quaver in the operatic style of his favorite, Roy Orbison, Willie went on to discover North Carolina Appalachian fiddle and banjo players Tommy Jarrell and Fred Cockerham, who played songs like “Cripple Creek,” “Sugar Hill” and “John Brown’s Dream” on a compilation cassette of “round peak style” music.

“ As soon as I heard that record,” he recalls, “ I was hooked.” Combined with having heard plenty of local string bands-featuring old-time banjo and fiddle-Willie experienced an epiphany. Born in Watkins Glen, N.Y.-best-known for its race track and the rock festival of the same name which took place there, featuring the Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead and The Band-Willie Watson grew up listening to his father’s basement record collection, including Bob Dylan and Neil Young, before stumbling on a Leadbelly album at the age of 12.