Mavericks of Sound

by Ensminger, David

  Does that go back to you being a rock ’n’ roll folksinger, a real rollicking force?

  On the first record, there are a lot of slick arrangements. There are even a couple of cuts that I don’t even play on, I just sing. So when I made Blue Guitar, it was just me and Steven Soles producing, so it’s closer to my own thing and what I was trying to get across.

  It’s much closer to a straight-ahead, Steve Earle–type record.

  Yes, because I wanted what I was doing to be the center of the record, which is something that Steve Earle insists upon, and not about the arrangement of the high-priced session players. But that first record with T-Bone did make an impact, reached a lot of people, especially in the South, so I don’t want to bad rap it too much. It made me a lot of fans and pointed a new way for music to go. And we got a Grammy nomination.

  Only Sings Like Hell seemed to capture your bare-boned live performance, and even then it’s rather subdued compared to your actual shows.

  I’m still hoping to capture that. I love playing live, but when I go in the studio, I really try to nail the songs down in a way that people can listen to them over and over again. Especially with Andrew Williams (Full Service No Waiting, Flying Saucer Blues), we were trying to create a sound that is sympathetic but brings out a lot of the different things from the songs. I’m not the first person who has done this, but I can’t remember who the other person who does it this way is.

  You’ve said that it’s hard to make the records feel alive?

  It’s a different process. You want to make them feel alive, but because you have a small budget, you can go into a studio and flesh them out a bit. I love playing solo. I could name you my ten favorite solo records by people, like Thelonius Monk in San Francisco, though I love his Blue Note stuff; Bob Dylan solo, but I like Highway 61 Revisited, and so on. Robert Johnson didn’t need a band and was great, and Muddy Waters was great solo but was great with his band too.

  Is it difficult to balance images in the songs with the pace or the momentum of the narrative?

  The whole trick with songwriting is to say as much as you can with the least amount. It’s almost like sending telegrams in a weird way. It’s different than poetry, which is going to be scanned over again and again on the page. Poetry moves at a different rate and speed than songs, and songs have to live up to the land of song, the world of song. You can get away with certain things in poetry that you don’t want to do in song, like bog it down. You want to get a whole lot across quickly, and set up your premise quickly, and do it in as detailed a way as you can. There are different recipes for it, so you keep coming up with new recipes. When you have a story, sometimes those are the hardest songs because it’s a lot of work, practically a battle, while pop songs seem to just jump out.

  Back in 1989, Bruce Springsteen said he was listening to you more than any other songwriter.

  He’s a great songwriter. He came out to one of my shows in New Jersey. He was at my sound check and asked me specific things about my first two records. He knew all about them.

  People like Richard Buckner slightly made fun of me for liking his work.

  He should go listen to “Racing in the Streets.” How could a songwriter not know that Bruce is a great songwriter? I don’t understand that. Maybe it’s just his personal taste. Guy Clark played me that song on his guitar in an Athens, Georgia, motel room, and I thought it was his. It’s a great song.

  So, originally the idea of doing the Mississippi John Hurt tribute was a casual remark to Kevin Welch, the head of Vanguard?

  Yeah, we were out getting tacos on Pico Boulevard with another guy from the label. I was thinking about a lot of my favorite records from the past, and we were talking about different Vanguard records, and I said, somebody ought to do a Mississippi John Hurt tribute. And he said, why don’t you do it, and I said okay. And we just went back to doing our thing. But that started the whole thing going. I just started it the next day. I told him, I’m really going to do this.

  Vanguard owns all the rights to Hurt’s 1960s material?

  Well, yeah, they got the catalog rights to a number of the 1960s recordings, the really classic ones. They made really good recordings with him in the 1960s. They’ve got that. Yes, they also have the contacts and information. Man, I never undertook anything like this, putting together a project like this, and it was driving me crazy in a lot of ways because I have always been on the other side. I’ve never been the guy trying to pull together all these musicians.

  How far back does Hurt go in your life?

  I’ve been interested in Hurt since I was a kid, and to do this now just took me to a whole other level.

  Had you recently been listening to Hurt’s records?

  No, I’ve been listening incessantly to Hurt since 1967 and 1968; I’ve always had a place in my life where I was listening to him. I listened to the record Today every day before I went to high school; I mean that was ninth grade, because I dropped out in tenth grade. I was listening very regularly over that period of time. It’s been something that’s really important to me.

  Who came up with the mosaic of musicians on the record?

  The first list was people I had actually sat around in rooms with and played Hurt’s music with, that included Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Bill Morrissey, Victoria Williams, and Geoff Muldaur, who I know loved him, even though I hadn’t picked with him that much. That was the initial group of people that made sense to me. One of the things that I think the record has is the sense that it’s like one of the late-night kind of sessions where people are passing around the guitar. It’s got that feel to it when it finally came together, where people are playing music kind of casually and playing things they love. When I got through this initial list I had, we started contacting people I wasn’t so sure about but was interested having on the record. Then they started contacting me, like Bruce Cockburn called, then sent in this amazing version of “Avalon, My Hometown.” He’s not someone I would have naturally thought of in this context, but I can tell from hearing him do it that he really knows it. And Ben Harper really knows that stuff. Beck’s stuff is probably more faithful in a weird way than anything else on the record to the Hurt style. Hiatt maybe.

  So it kinda amazed me, man, all the different people that were into him. The theme of the thing, to me, became that there’s three or four generations of people that have been turned on to Hurt. Starting with Doc Boggs, who mentioned in the interviews he did in the late fifties with Mike Seeger, which is before the stuff came out on Vanguard—“If I played guitar, I would have played like John Hurt.” This is a guy who recorded in 1928, you know. And then go on to the generation of guys like Geoff Muldaur and Taj Mahal, then go on to the next generation like Hiatt, then finally Beck and Ben Harper. There’s been several generations moved by him; it just continues to move down. The whole idea of the record is to show that, and put the music forward in a real positive way, and maybe turn the whole wheel one more time on the deal and bring a bunch of people into it again.

  What makes Hurt different than other classic blues people like Bessie Smith, Lightnin’ Hopkins, or even Muddy Waters?

  Well, one thing about John Hurt is that he wasn’t just a blues player, he’s what they call a songster. That means he not only plays blues, but he’s also playing gospel music, fiddle music, which I guess you could typify as country music, breakdowns, popular tunes of the day, a lot of different things. And for one thing, his song sense separates him out from a lot of blues. A lot of blues isn’t song-oriented, it’s verse-oriented, it’s improv verses, pulled out of a huge pool of verses, an ocean of verses that they keep pulling up in different forms, it’s sorta passed on. Some of the people, including Johnson and Hurt, were very song conscious.

  So there’s a whole different kind of structure to their songs?

  I think so. With John Hurt, the pieces are very set; they’re extremely well put together. Mance Lipscomb is another guy. He’s from Houston and is the local version of that i
n your area and another really important singer that you could do an incredible tribute to. There are a couple different things about Hurt, though. A lot of the Mississippi guys really whacked their guitars, sort of a whacking, hollering kind of thing, you know. Like Taj says, Hurt plays more like a chorale player, he’s got a sweet lyrical sound. And it’s very subtle rhythmically; it’s got this really insistent groove to it that he gets with his thumb and he picks against it with his fingers. It’s very pure melodically, too, in a way where every note counts. It’s got an early jazz element to it too in certain ways. In a way, he was a minstrel, a lot of it was pre-blues, but then he takes it past that and grows up through the blues, so as you get to the later records the whole thing has gotten stronger. Like a lot of people, he stopped making records in 1928, when the Depression hit, just like Dock Boggs’ career stopped in 1928 along with a lot of other hillbilly and blues singers. Everybody kind of hit the wall in 1928. The whole business went under. Basically because people with less income didn’t have any money at all . . .

  For entertainment.

  People went home, or hit the road, but they didn’t have records. It was the end of the recording career for John Hurt, but his musical career was just taking off in terms of developing his music, which it sounds like he had been developing for years and years, learning a huge repertoire and playing locally, creating a subtle style, you know.

  Do you think he would have been as important if all we had were his 1920s recordings?

  I don’t know what important means.

  Or stand out?

  If you’re like a blues collector, he would have been extremely important, or if you were into guitar playing, he was extremely important for his 1920s contributions. I never heard that stuff myself until the 1980s when I got the Harry Smith box set. That stuff is fantastic music and is very strong, but all the 1920s blues records are fantastic. I don’t think there are any bad ones; I think some are more out there than others, and there are many different types, but it was just an incredible period of time for music, and it was very close to the source. John Hurt was like a virtuoso at the time and stood out at that point for the incredible guitar work. Yes, he was already in a whole other world and was already influential at that point.

  But when he came back, music had changed, and he had changed a bit with it too. The recordings are changed, the tempos kind of relaxed. And there are other things happening with the Vanguard records that are very beautiful, pure, and strong. It’s an amazing contribution to his work; he didn’t simply go back and re-record all his earlier stuff. He came up with incredible new things like “Pay Day,” things he hadn’t recorded during his earlier career. Like “Casey Jones.” There’s enough material out there for a whole other tribute record. He’s a really important artist. There’s a whole world of fantastic John Hurt contributors that we didn’t get on there. But we did show the different generations of people that are into it, which explains, I hope, why a lot of people from the earlier generation aren’t on it. Man, I would have loved to ask Dave Van Ronk to be on it.

  Besides Beck and Cockburn, were there any other performances that surprised you?

  I knew Lucinda would do a great job, but I didn’t realize how much she would make it sound like one of her songs. That blew my mind. I knew Victoria would do something very interesting, but I didn’t know she would do something as interesting as she did, which is one of my favorite cuts on the album. Because in a way, it’s the most removed from John Hurt’s style, and in another way it’s the truest to the sensibility of the original music. So, I love her cut, and it’s got a great sense of humor to it. The Taj thing, with the Hawaiian feel, is an interesting twist, and the Gillian Welch track, well, I just really wanted her to do that track near the end of the record because it’s one of my favorite Hurt songs. I could really hear her doing it, even though she had never done it before. She did and did a killer job on it.

  From scratch.

  Yeah, I felt like I heard it in my head before they even did it. And they just nailed it, I thought. The amazing thing for me about this record is that you don’t have much control, really, as you put together a thing like this, like what the tempos are all going to be and how the whole thing is going to fit together. The trick was sequencing it so it worked like a record. It was amazing to me that I could sequence it and that it rolls through like a program like it does. It really makes sense. I know that somebody was watching over it. I just didn’t know. The first cut we got to hear was the Smither cut. Chris came in with that. I didn’t know before if I could even do a record like this, or what was going to happen; I didn’t know if it would be interesting or fresh enough that people would be interested. I didn’t know. When I heard Smither, I knew, man, that was the standard right there. That’s why the record starts with his cut, because it’s totally true to John Hurt; it has got a really strong groove, and so much energy and freshness to it that it stands right up. That to me is what the record is about, taking this old thing and making something really fresh out of it.

  Why did you perform with Dave Alvin, instead of by yourself?

  I just thought it would be interesting and a different twist. I just thought it would be an interesting combination, and it was. And I wanted to work on something with Dave. I’ve loved Dave’s music since I met him back in 1979. We’ve been friends for a long time but never really recorded together. I thought it would be fun; I had no idea what would happen with collaboration like that. But we had sat around and played all the stuff like that. I was like, let’s give it a shot. I thought it would be a different thing—a different format for both of us to be on a record like this. I also thought it made that song work. It sorta sounds like a Dave song, then the harmony singing sounds like one of my things, then it’s my band which played on Full Service . . . and Flying Saucer Blues.

  Were these some of the songs you used to play during after-gig parties with the Plimsouls?

  Totally. On this record I’ll tell you what was on my repertoire: “Pay Day,” “The Angels Laid Him Way,” “Candyman,” “Monday Morning Blues,” “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor,” “My Creole Belle,” all those songs. Victoria used to sing “Satisfied.” But when I met Bill Morrissey, I sat around in a hotel room in Virginia, and we just started playing guitar. I started playing a John Hurt song, and he said, hey, I know some of those, so we sat there all night playing Hurt songs. He said to me one time, you know the thing about John Hurt’s songs is that they are as good as any writer today. The songs are amazing, very together.

  Do you think we’ll see any new collections of Hurt’s work?

  We might. You know the complete Vanguard sessions are out. They remastered it from the records, and it sounds a lot better. I had big complaints when I signed to Vanguard. I got the CD at one point and was like, “What the fuck is this? “What did you guys do to it?” The original vinyl today is so amazing sounding. That guy still works for Vanguard who recorded and mastered those. The same guy from the 1960s. He just hadn’t gotten used to the digital format in the early 1990s, but now he’s got it, and they sound really good. Yeah, I think you’ll see some more things. I feel that John Hurt’s in the air. Even before this record, I opened Mojo, a mag from England, and the box set is everybody’s favorite record of the year. And there was some English pop band that was touring the states, and the mag asked, “What were you listening to last year?” and they said, we’ve been listening to this guy Mississippi John Hurt. It was our soundtrack for driving around the United States. They were just some pop band from England. A lot of people have picked up on it.

  For me as a teenager, and for Beck, and for a lot of people, and Morrissey as well, I know that they got into it at a really young age, and it was really something that opened up to me when I was thirteen and fourteen. And if you’re the kind of person who’s going in that direction, it’s an amazing doorway into American music. American music is African American music, you know the thing that makes America special is the African American t
hing. The people, the art, the whole sense and spirit that comes from black Americans is an amazing door that opens into American music. Hurt has really got it together, and it is very inviting, and you can just go in there, and there’s a whole world in there. That’s his gift. Another part of Hurt’s gift was that he was just a cool guy. That’s what everyone says who knew him. A lot of those blues guys were hard-asses, for a lot of good reasons. Skip James was kind of an egomaniac, but apparently John Hurt was just a really great, lovely cat who was really cool to hang out with. That’s what Muldaur and Taj tell me. That gets across this thing of love for him, that he was a guy you just loved. Really full of life, a fantastic cat.

  This record, in part, crystallizes that too?

  I feel that it does. I feel that coming through it. That’s part of it too. You hear it in his music. I think you hear what people are in their music. You can’t really hide. Your music is about your life. If you want to work on your music, you gotta work on your life, the way you look at everything and the way your spirit is.

  How did T. Bone Burnett get you involved with playing on the Johnny Cash bio Walk the Line soundtrack?

  I don’t know, man, he just called me up out of the blue. I didn’t even know that T. Bone even had my number.

  But why did he pick you out of the blue?

  Every few years, I do something with him, but I just hadn’t talked to him for a while. He called up and wanted harmonica. He wanted some harmonica part on this Johnny Cash song, “It Ain’t Me Babe.” So, they are cutting it for this movie, and they thought they’d have me come down and do that. It’s funny because it’s not really a Dylan-style harmonica. It really is this other kind of style, and it is like what I do, so he knows what he’s doing. So, he got me down there, and while I was down there at Capitol Studios, there was Reese Witherspoon. . . . God, who else was there? This actor Joaquin Phoenix was singing, then there was me. . . .