Keepin’ On The Acoustic Side
by Matteo Bossi
When we talked to Tinsley Ellis a couple if years ago, he was about to put out his first acoustic record, “Naked Truth”. Life has its own ways, sometimes, and what could have been a one off thing has become his main thing. The title of the new album out now on Alligator, “A Labor Of Love”, speaks for itself. “Yes, it’s all I do now, acoustic blues. That’s my future, my calling! It’s a lot of Mississippi music this time…Clarksdale, Hill Country, Bentonia.”
You’ve really immersed yourself in that tradition, you even went there.
Yes, in Bentonia and Clarksdale. I used to play there a lot forty years ago…and I would be around R.L., Junior, but it’s been inside of me. I’d never really decided that it was my true love. And of course Clarksdale with Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Son House, that’s always been a part of everybody’s music since the Rolling Stones and the first time I heard them do “The Red Rooster”. The new thing to me is Bentonia, I’ve always loved Skip James’music but I had never realized how much it spoke to me. So I went there to play at the Blue Front Café, I got a guitar lesson in the afternoon before the concert by Jimmy “Duck”Holmes. He taught me a lot about that style that was taught to him by Henry Stuckey. But I don’t think he ever recorded, he was just the teacher. Jimmy sat down with me for a couple of hours, he showed me some stuff, schooled me! Then at night we decided to perform outdoors and it looked like it was going to rain, but it didn’t and people came from all over in their pick up trucks and sat there outside drinking beer. His latest album is very good, David Lee Crosby produced it and I think they recorded it right there at the Blue Front. His live show is very hypnotic.
Did he play in different tunings?
I think he was playing in D minor or something close to D minor…he didn’t use a guitar tuner. I must have been in D minor also or Drop D, I don’t remember exactly. I had been playing in D minor when I would do Skip James songs, years ago somebody told me about this tuning. Actually on the last album I recorded one song in D minor, which was “Windowpane”. My favorite song on the album. On the new one half of the record is in D minor tuning. I’m loving it! On “Labor Of Love” I use six different tunings. Playing with Jimmy really changed my whole show, I do these long songs, I’ve always loved that kind of music, but I had not realized it came from Bentonia, I thought it came from band like Canned Heat. I have always loved them. I did a tour with them in Australia one time, Henry Vestine was still alive and of course Fito, the drummer, who I think is the last one. He always get good people to play with him. If I was to play electric again it would be to play with Canned Heat or something like that…I’m looking for something special to play electric but right now I just do in the studio, I don’t do it live.
Did you talk about Skip James with Jimmy?
Well, Jimmy is more interested in talking about Henry Stuckey and Jack Owens than Skip James. When I played in Bentonia I met some local people who knew Skip pretty well. They were children when he would come back and visit, I think he lived in Memphis. He was in a hospital and when they found him inn 1964 and they brought him to Newport Folk Festival. He lived a while longer. The same thing for Son House. They looked all over Mississippi and then they found him in Rochester. That was Dick Waterman. And Dick was the man that got me signed to Alligator Records. He had moved from the Boston area to Oxford, Mississippi. He came to one of The Heartfixers concerts and said that maybe I would be a good fit for Alligator. So he contacted Bruce Iglauer around the same time. And he also was another person that considered me more rock’n’roll than blues and I think he could have helped me with this new acoustic direction I’ve taken. When we went over to his house in 1985 he had an incredible photo collection, Fred McDowell and a teenager Bonnie Raitt, John Hammond and Son House…this was before they were in books, he just had them loose and he was showing me these pictures, we were blown away. I wish I kept better touch with him over the years. I remember he put on a show that I did in the Eighties in the Overton Park in Memphis, a blues and folk festival, Jessie Mae Hemphill played first, he had us played last because I think he was afraid people would leave! All my blues heroes were sitting there watching us.
Did you have more songs than the 13 that ended up on the record?
Yes, and I still write other songs, electric blues and blues rock or folk blues…I probably sent about forty songs to Bruce Iglauer and then we came up with a list of the best, somewhere between twelve and fifteen songs. I think I can make a couple more albums, but one at a time. Bruce and I don’t always agree on the songs, but over time I looked back and I realized he is usually right a lot more that he’s wrong so I value his opinion. He’s been doing it a long time and he also knows how to market and sell the music. I don’t do that, if I did I would not be playing blues in the first place! This is what I love doing. I was really surprised that the first acoustic album did so well. I think it surprised everybody. I thought it would be like a live album or when I did an instrumental album in 2013…but here I am and it completely changed my direction.
In a way this is a different kind of acoustic record.
When I made “Naked Truth” two years ago, actually I recorded it three years ago, I had not done hundreds of acoustic concerts. I was barely ready to make that album in terms of qualified. Now after doing all of these concerts acoustically I feel like I’m so much better at playing and writing these songs and having different influences than just old Muddy Waters, Son House or Skip James. This album goes in a lot of directions withing the Mississippi blues.
Tinsley Ellis photo Jackie Dorsey
Yes, I can hear even a guy like Fred McDowell in some of these songs.
Thank you, very much. And another thing in this album that I had never done before is singing spirituals, God’s songs…a lot of blues guys like McDowell or Son House they would always be singing church music. I’ve never done that before, I’m not a religious person at all, I’m open minded, if there’s something up I want it to like me! But that’s the kind of music I was raised on, even before rock’n’roll, before The Beatles, when my parents would drag us to church. In the South there’s a lot of spirituals. That was in me but I had never experimented with things like that, I usually sing about love…I have a couple of different themes on this album.
But you also have a song like “Hoodoo Woman”.
Right, which is really hill country…I love what R.L. Burnside did with traditional blues, he kind of made a party out of it, danceable. I used to go see him play in colleges, here in the south-east, in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia…and there would be three hundreds students there. And it was in th Eighties when Stevie Ray Vaughan came out. Then RL came out and I think the students liked him because the music had that groove, that beat…I wanted to make sure I had some of that, it’s a big part of my live show. During my shows I talk and I tell stories about the old blues guys but every once in a while I play a festival where the people don’t want to hear any story they just want to boogie. So I put a microphone by my foot and I really stomp it and I try to do what R.L. did, to keep it danceable. And it’s kinda cool to see a bunch of people in front of you dancing, and it’s just me. It’ a challenge sometimes.
And R.L. was discovered by your friend George Mitchell back in 1967.
Yes, George produced the first Heartfixers album also, in 1981. You know RL was not rediscovered like others, he was outright discovered by George. I think Otha Turner told him about RL, he said to him he could flat out play some blues. So George went there with a tape recorder and recorded an album that later came out on Arhoolie and then Fat Possum, they used to call them field recordings, like Lomax did. Even Robert Johnson was recorded with one microphone in the right place. Which is kind of like I recorded “Naked Truth”, while on this one I have some overdubs and there were more mikes. George has been very supportive, very encouraging to me in this musical direction. We’ve kept in touch for 45 years. And it makes me happy. I remember when we first me in 1981, The Heartfixers were rehearsing in an empty store in Atlanta. He heard the music and he sat outside and he waited until we took a break then he knocked on the door, came in and said he wanted to record us. We didn’t know who he was, but he said he used to be Mike Bloomfield’s roommate in Chicago, he knew Big Joe Williams and Charlie Musselwhite, he called him Memphis Charlie. He dropped the right names. He got us our first record deal. We recorded the first album in seven hours. He did the stuff they probably did back in the day, at the end of the session he gave each of us a couple hundreds dollars…we thought we were somebody. That was my beginning. I got the feeling he liked us but he considered our music more rock’n’roll, and it was compared to what he had recorded, R.L. Burnside, Willie Guy Rainey, Hezekiah & The Houserockers, Otha Turner and stuff like that. We would do songs that people could dance, New Orleans music like “Barefootin’”, “Tossin’ and Turnin’” or “Trick Bag”.
Or even Allman Brothers stuff?
Oh I love them, that’s the sweet spot for me, blues meets psychedelic rock’n’roll…they blended it just right. I loved Cream and The Yardbirds too, but I think The Allman Brothers just hit the right place with blues and Gregg what a great singer! Every now and then I would do one of their songs, if I have to play a long night, but now I do a lot more original songs. The good thing about playing acoustic is that I can change direction, I don’t have to check with anybody. If I want to do a Bob Dylan song or a Leo Kottke song I just do it. I love John Fahey, Kottke or Bert Jansch, or even someone like John Martyn. I think Jimmy Page was very influenced by those players.
Are you friends Luther and Cody Dickinson and their late father Jim? They really grew up with that music since they were kids.
I was friends with Jim Dickinson, he almost produced my album when I left Alligator the first time to go with Capricorn. It was between him, Dave Edmunds and David Z, who had produced Jonny Lang’s album which was very big at that time. So we chose David Z. But I really wish I could made an album with Jim, because him and his sons they really understand that music. It’s in their genes! I learned that music mainly by listening to the records, but they leared it from a community. And North Mississippi Allstars they’re probably the modern version of what Canned Heat was in the Sixties. There was a lot of reverence and awareness for roots music back then, it’s not so much that way now. But when young people play blues, like Eddie 9V for instance, they would go to see him. It’s a different time, things change but with record companies like Easy Eye Sound he’s our hope for Atlanta’s music. He just gets better and better, I know him since he was in high school. You know, he produced my version on “Death Letter Blues” on the previous record.
Tinsley Ellis photo Kim Reed
I remember that.
It was something between an album and a demo, it was mainly covers and maybe four original songs. Then Bruce said, – there’s too many cover songs, that have been done before, like “Sitting On Top Of The Word” or “Death Letter Blues” – he was kind of against it at first. So when I did the “Naked Truth” album I wrote some more songs and I did again “Death Letter Blues”, but we all agreed that the demo version was better than the studio version, so we put in on the album. It was nice of Eddie to let me use it, but I would like to work with him again now that I’ve got more experience doing it. I wasn’t quite ready then but it was a turning point for me, because Eddie was so encouraging to me, he was very animated, walking around the room and charging me up…I’d like to do it again before he becomes such a big rock star.
Another very good artist from Georgia is Jontavious Willis.
He’s the best! Have you heard him play electric? I’ve seen a video of him sitting him with someone from Chicago, it might have been Lurrie Bell, and the stuff he was playing…I didn’t know he could play like that. The sound and the tone of the guitar! He’s sort of like the savior of the blues, he has a great future ahead. There’s a lot of young people, like Jerron Paxton or also from Georgia Sean McDonald, from Augusta. I met him when he was playing with John Nemeth. When I discover people like them on videos or something when I like them I would immediately write them, because now I’m an old man! I tell them how much I like it and then I write to Bruce Iglauer and tell him about these people. Bruce is harder to impress, when I told him about RL Burnside he said well I saw Fred McDowell play and If I talk about somebody he goes, well I saw Son House play! But he loves all those we’re talking about, Eddie, Jontavious, Sean or Young ‘Rell. Things are looking up, they show a lot of respect for the music. They’re young enough to spike it into pop culture, because pop culture is driven by two things: youth and image. Which means I’m screwed! Elvis had them, Stevie Ray Vaughan too, and I think Eddie 9V does. But I’m happy about it, there was a time in my twenties where I was the Eddie 9v of Atlanta.
Back to the album, you play even mandolin on some of these songs.
Well, like I said “Naked Truth” was just me with a couple of microphones playing live, for this album I added some instruments in, piano, percussion, but keeping the sound stripped down. The first song I put mandolin on is “Hoodoo Woman” and I went over to my mom’s house and my brother’s mandolin was there. He lives in Japan and leaves his mandolin at her house. So I got it, tuned it up and I wanted to double the lick in that song. It sounded pretty good so I decided to put it on another song, “Too Broke To Worry”. Then I thought wouldn’t it be cool to have a song with just mandolin? So I did “Sad Sad Song” which is just mandolin and hand clapping, no guitar. So I can play three songs on mandolin and they’re all on this album! I went out and bought my own mandolin and I’m gonna bring it around in my concerts. A lot of bands had put mandolin on their songs, Rod Stewart, Led Zeppelin’s Going To California…I think kind of like an harmonica it puts a smile on people’s face. I have listened to Yank Rachell or Big Jack Johnson playing it and bluegrass music from the Georgia hills has mandolin too but I don’t know what I’m doing…I’m a musician and if you give a clarinet I’d probably figure something out of it…
You could also add an harmonica in the future.
I had some harmonica songs that I sent to Bruce and I’ve played harmonica on two or three songs over the years. But I can’t do the Little Walter thing, I just do the Jimmy Reed thing, that I like very much. I’m not as good as Bob Dylan, I need to work on it, I like it when Bob plays it, it’s emotional.
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