Although I have never spent any considerable length of time in the South, Mike Farris all but assures me that the stories are true: The first question people often ask is “Which church do you attend?” and the second is “Which team do you root for?”
“My son was really little when we moved from the South to New York,” Farris says. “He spent his formative years there, so when we came back to Tennessee he was so tripped out over everyone being so taken with the University of Tennessee Volunteers, and when the Tennessee Titans came to town he was like, ‘What in the world?’ because up in the Northeast it’s not that big a deal. But down South? Oh my God, it’s all about your Alabama Crimson Tide fans, and then it’s NASCAR…and they eat, breathe, sleep, and die of loyalty to a jersey, you know? A lot of that—your salvation and who you root for—sometimes goes hand-in-hand. So it’s a different world down here, but it’s my home!”
It is that love Farris has for his home—and not just that part of the country, but its plethora of sounds and musical styles as well—which laid the foundation for the former Screaming Cheetah Willies frontman’s decision to record his latest album, The Night the Cumberland Came Alive. Proceeds from the album are going to charity efforts to aid the victims of the recent floods in Nashville, but this was not the original intention.
“We were scheduled to do a charity record for the W. O. Smith Foundation, a school here in Nashville which provides musical education and musical instruments to underprivileged kids, and then the floods hit, so it was obvious we had to focus our energy on doing what we could for our community-at-large. It’s one of the worst natural disasters America has ever known and so we just jumped right into it, head-first.”
Working with the Nashville community has been an eye-opening experience for Farris, something which further galvanizes his belief that choosing to record for the benefit of flood victims was the right choice.
“When you get close to something like this and you start working hand-in-hand with a group of people, it becomes very personal,” Farris says in a sober tone. “So, we’re going out and doing as many shows as we can now and keeping up and getting updates on what’s happening (in Nashville) just to raise awareness and let people know that, man, there are people here who, now, six months down the road, it’s just as bad or worse for these people in most cases as it was just after the floods.”
The people have been a consistent source of surprise for Farris, who says that many of them have not reacted to their dire situations the way he would expect most people to react.
“We’ve been recording videos of interviews with the victims and it’s been amazing because there’ve been two common threads tying all the stories together. Every time we’d interview somebody, they would always go on about how they were really struggling with accepting other people’s generosity. That was kind of shocking to me. It’s easy for us to reach out and help people, it seems, but it’s difficult for us to accept it in return. So whether it’s pride, or people aren’t used to it and it makes ‘em uncomfortable, whatever the reason is, it’s way more difficult.”
And the other common element?
“You had this horrific event taking place, turning these people’s lives upside-down, destroying homes that they’ve raised their families in, you know, all their memories gone…” There is awe in Farris’s voice as his sentence is left dangling for a few moments. “Photos and everything. And yet they see it as a positive thing, a beautiful thing. Because of the people’s generosity and how the victims managed to get through it, miraculous things would happen just in time. It’s been amazing to hear these stories.”
Farris and the rest of the band have done more than just listen to the stories, however; they have allowed these tales to sink into their souls, to reinforce the fact that these people are important. All of this has given them the energy and fire they needed to make this record.
“Just being a part of the relief efforts,” he begins, “when you jump into it you say, ‘Well, we’re gonna make this record,’ and then along comes this tragedy, and you get real involved on a personal level and it becomes life-changing and enriching along the way. And the music serves as a catalyst to kind of get that thing going and then all these other things happen as a result.”
In some ways this entire experience—recording The Night the Cumberland Came Alive, choosing to support flood victims and actually going out among the city’s population and lending a hand wherever it’s been needed—has been a reflection of the changes Farris has made in his life since his days with the Willies.
“Hopefully, at some point, people…” Farris pauses for several seconds, something he does many times in this interview. He seems to constantly be in search of just the right words and phrases to express himself. “For me anyway, I came to the realization that I was selfish. I was acting selfishly the way I was living at that time, so I think for a lot of people, if you can just have that realization like, ‘You know what? Most of the things I do are really self-centered, and I would be much happier if I would not be this way,’ I think it would be a benefit to the rest of the world. It sounds like a simple thing, but like with me—I was a drug addict, and it’s a sad, horrible thing, and there’s many reasons why people end up like that—but it’s still very selfish and self-centered.”
Farris admits that he did not realize this was a problem for him at that time.
“No, not when I was in the middle of it. It was later that I realized who I was being. And just looking back on it I realized…I guess I just stepped away from it long enough to realize what kind of person it makes you. But in the midst of it…I don’t know, I guess I did, I really did understand in a way, but sometimes you can’t seem to get it together long enough to stop, you know?”
* * * * *
The Night the Cumberland Came Alive is a stirring mixture of blues, soul, Gospel, country and old spirituals. Each of the album’s six tracks contains its own unique story or influence to set it apart from all the others; and yet, they are unified in their thematic construction and cohesion, as well as their message of finding hope and redemption amid struggles and tragedy. When speaking about the new record, Farris’s voice has a serious, focused tone to it that matches the importance he placed on writing this album.
“I already had a bunch of songs lined up to cut,” Farris says. “And then I thought, ‘Well, we’ve gotta have a song that’s gonna encompass what we’ve gone through here these last few days.’ I’d been really taken with this song by Curley Weaver called “You Was Born to Die,” and I was just so taken with the chorus that I took it and applied it to some new lyrics, a new idea that I had about a story of my recollection of what happened when the floods hit.”
And Farris did not stop there. Not only was he very intentional about the songs he picked for this album, but also the artists who were going to perform with him…even if it meant being a little historically inaccurate.
“I’d been wanting to do a sort of stripped-down, jug band kind of record,” Farris says with a hint of childlike glee in his voice, “so when I put the band together for this album, I knew I needed to get some guys in there with some cache, who I knew could help me sell some records for this charity. So I got Sam Bush, Byron House, Kenny Vaughan, Ketch Secor and all those guys, Gill Landry, and I knew I was gonna have to sacrifice some of the historical accuracy by having all these incredible musicians. You know jug bands were guys who couldn’t cut it professionally, per se…street corner guys and all that; but there’s this beautiful, primal, raw thing about that style of music, so that’s what I really wanted to do and that’s what led to this. And I don’t know what particular style you would call this album…it’s…maybe because it’s so laid-back at times it could be like a country blues kind of thing but it’s definitely not jug band anymore.”
So, much like the inspiration for the recording of this record, it seems that the recording process itself took a life of its own as time went on.
“It did, yeah,” Farris laughs. “And I love that. I love going into a project and having my ides as to how things will go, but never really being committed to that. I just know going in that it’s good to be ready for an album to take on a life of its own, and I enjoy that.”
And just like any other interview, this one began to take on a life of its own when he let slip that not only is the band promoting Cumberland, but they are already about to begin work on the next record. In fact, Farris told me the band planned to begin recording later on that very same day.
“Going into a new record, I’m always real nervous. Things always seem like they’re not quite ready, or I’m not quite ready, or I’m going over and over and over it, not sleeping nights on end going ‘Do I have the right songs?’ or ‘Is this song good enough?’ So that’s what’s happening today and what’s been happening for the past few days. So hopefully we’ll have the right songs that’ll go in and we’ll get it right during the first two sessions.”
And despite his desire to be open-minded about where his music is going, he has some ideas about how the next album might sound.
“I think it’s gonna have a little bit of that flavor that was on Salvation in Lights (released in 2007). But it definitely seems like it’s progressing right now into more of the soul world, like the old-style soul. It’s venturing into the Jackie Wilson kind of world, that kind of stuff. But it’s still gonna have a little bit of that New Orleans touch to it.”
* * * * *
“I’ll never forget,” Farris says, his focus back on the flood victims again, “there was this guy telling this story about how they’d escaped their home and they had gone to his mother’s house. This guy was retirement age. So they had gotten to his mother’s house outside of town and all they could do was wait and watch TV and hope that there would be something on TV showing their house. The second day, there’d been a helicopter flying over the neighborhood and they recognized their home. They saw all these other ones where the water had gone all the way up to the roofline, so they were pretty heartbroken. The day before they had left their house, they’d moved everything up to the top floor, all the things that were precious to them. So they’re watching the news and they see all these houses almost completely submerged, but when they finally got back to their home they were so ecstatic that they only had 15 feet of water in their house instead of being completely submerged.”
Farris is not the only one who is surprised to hear about people being happy to deal with fifteen feet of water in their home. But this only further proves how resilient these people really are, and the capacity they have to not let circumstances bring them down.
“You know, it could have been worse,” Farris says in a matter-of-fact sort of way. “It didn’t get to the irreplacables, you know? So they were ecstatic and they had hope and they had things to look forward to and things to hold on to.”
When Farris sees these people and everything they have had to endure, it reminds him that people are always in need of some kind of help, and he is proud to be able to do his part to aid people through the music he makes.
“Music is a mighty powerful thing. Music really does have the power to heal. And it’s also sometimes like a good cuss word, you know? Sometimes nothing’s gonna make you feel better than yelling out a good cuss word,” Farris says, laughing harder now than at any other point in the interview. “And sometimes you need a song like that. Music really is our souls just reaching out and wanting to express themselves through us. It’s such a life within itself and it’s so beautiful, and it’s up to us what we want to do with it. And that’s another really beautiful thing about life itself, is that we get to choose. I’ve chosen to do this music that makes me happy, that hopefully lifts other people up and that’s the kind of music that I really love. That’s one of those questions—What does music mean to me?—you can take for granted and just not think about, you know? But it’s a simple, profound thing to ask.”
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