Long before JP Harris came down off the mountain in rural New England and settled into Nashville; before he toured the country playing stripped down, country music free of pretentiousness; he was playing traditional Old-Time music on a homemade banjo at fiddle conventions with likeminded musicians. And we’re not talking square dance numbers or “Oh Suzanna,” but obscure arcane pagan themes and 17th century Scottish ballads.
So, seeing an opportunity during the recent global pandemic that effectively shut down every touring musician’s schedule, Harris headed up to the West Virginia home of another likeminded musician and longtime friend, Chance McCoy (formerly with Old Crow Medicine Show) and got down to recording 10 of those tracks – but not before they had to complete rewire McCoy’s former sharecropper’s shack turned recording studio.
Looking to draw a distinction between his country records and this album, Harris opted to put this one out under the moniker JP Harris’ Dreadful Wind & Rain. Harris was kind enough to get on the phone recently and talk through the motivation for putting out this record, homemade banjos, pandemic carpentry and finally playing live again.
This album is definitely different than things you’ve done in the past. Is this project something you’ve been wanting to do for a while now?
Yeah. If you want to get all geek speak about it, it’s adjacent to the music that I’m more known for. All country music came from a melding of African American Blues and traditional music, Appalachian traditional fiddle music. I sort of view this as the precursor to the music I normally make. But I’ve been playing this stuff for years, long before I ever thought I was going to have a country music career and move to Nashville down from the mountains and have this whole other lifestyle. I was a carpenter and a logger, and I lived up in rural New England for about 12 years way up in the back country. And the only music I ever had anything to do with was this old-time traditional Appalachian music. I started playing banjo at 19 years old and through complete cosmic happenstance or predetermined fate or whatever it is at the time the only professional banjo builder within about 400 miles of where I lived happened to live 2 miles down the road from me way out in the country; this great friend of mine, Will Fielding.
And is that how you got your first banjo?
Well, I got into banjo and being the stubborn little kid that I was at the time I thought, well, I’m not going to buy a banjo, I’m going to make it damn it. The carpentry crew I was working with had seen me sneaking off to my car at lunch breaks and playing this junkie banjo I got my hands on and one of the guys was like, “do you know Will Fielding?” I’d never even heard of the guy; I was new to music. Long story short, I ended up apprenticing with him for a couple of years and had my own shop for a while building these very specific oddball sort of fretless banjos and spent as much time as I could, weekends taking time off from jobs, traveling down South going up and down the entire Appalachian range obsessively playing old time string band music and it really is what segued into what my career is now. After a couple of years of touring I was booking all of my tours through the connections I made from this scene. It was just a community-oriented, really supportive scene of musicians. I met a lot of people that it turned out were full-time musicians, but I just knew from this old-time world. It just turned out that as I transitioned into this new career, all the weekends that these old-time festivals were happening I had to go with my band and play gigs elsewhere. It’s just sort of the twain shan’t meet type of situation where I had to pick one or the other and I drove headlong into my country music career. So, for years now I’ve sort of wanted to reconnect with that old community. Some of my best friends who have moved on to Nashville I know from that old world, but I hadn’t been back to these fiddlers’ conventions. I haven’t played regularly with other folks. I just kind of wanted to do something to just sort of show musically where I came from.
Having this whole year where there really was no music industry, there was no touring, it just naturally felt right to head up to the mountains to and make this kind of record.
So, it’s fair to say the pandemic gave you the time you needed to finally make this record?
Yeah, me and my buddy Chance (McCoy, formerly of Old Crow Medicine Show) were talking about making this record for a couple of years really and we had put dates on the calendar around April of last year for me to go to West Virginia to his studio and work on this album and I had tour dates that were to start in May, so I had this little window to scoot up there and get it done and figure out the rest of the details after it was recorded and then pandemic hit and everything got canned. I was fortunate enough to stay real busy doing restoration carpentry, that I’ve been doing for 20 something years. We sort of put the brakes on the album for a little bit to figure out when we could get around to doing it. Right about the point when I felt like I was getting to my breaking point, the world is kind of getting to be one big dumpster fire right now, the situation on the entire globe is getting pretty heated and disastrous and just sort of lined up so I made a hole in my calendar realizing I had to get out of town. I needed to get away from the city and get away from all these people to get back up into the mountains where I spent so much of my life. I just went up to Chance’s with an open-ended two or three weeks and it just kind of fell into place that way.
2020 seems to be the perfect year for passion projects.
Yeah, it really was. Several of my friends just happened to sort of record or release records in a similar vein, going back to music they grew up with. Some of them put out an album of fiddle tunes, Sturgill Simpson made his bluegrass record, so it’s kind of interesting to see that a lot of us independent of each other communicating, said “you know I got time to do this now.” I just sort of want to get this nailed down before everything explodes.
From what I heard, Chance sorta had to patch up the studio before you could get to work in it. Was that story right?
Yeah, I got up there and I was probably about a couple hours away from Chance’s outside of Charleston, West Virginia and I knew that I was going to lose phone service once I got up in the mountains and I was at a truck stop so I called Chance and asked do you need anything from town while I’m here? Groceries, oil for your chainsaw, whatever city amenities I can pick up from the nearest “big city”? He was like, “oh man I’m gonna shoot you some specs for some wire if you can go by Lowe’s. I need like four 75-foot pieces of service wire.” I’m like for what, did your power go out? “I’ll explain when you get here.” The entire studio which at this point was just a little two room sharecropper shack built in the 20s – it had been his studio for years – he had found out that the whole studio was being powered on like a single household wire buried about four inches in the dirt. And he had figured it out right when I was about to come over and he was getting all the gear in there and he noticed everything was starting to get really hot. He fired up one piece of equipment and all of the lights went out. That’s when he figured out that he was running on a very sketchy power supply. We spent about three days digging a ditch through shale and hammer drilling through the foundation of the house and running a whole new underground electric service. We spent about three or four days completely rewiring the studio before we could make the record.
That’s not exactly how someone like Justin Bieber sets out recording a new record.
No, it’s not at all but it’s pretty typical of how Chance and I work together. I’m sure everybody pictured some sort of beautiful from the ground up world class studio from the guy who used to be in Old Crow. Meanwhile, we’re out there with pickaxes. It was pretty hilarious. We did a lot of screwing around in the creek and not actually doing work in the studio. It wasn’t until, the last four days I was up there, that Chance was like “you know we probably ought to start working on this record.” This was after we had taken lawn chairs from his house down to the creek and we’re sitting there just drinking beers cooling our feet for about two hours.
So, it was just you and Chance performing on the record?
Yeah, he produced it, engineered it, played all the fiddle on it, and did backing vocals. He and I had been playing for years and he just has an uncanny understanding of not just traditional music, but all forms of music in general. He plays and is accomplished in so many different styles of music that people don’t know him for, and it gives him a really great sensibility to be able to put something a little different without going too far out of the traditional realm. I knew that there was nobody else that was going to be able to make this record with me.
There are 10 songs on this album and most of these songs are pretty obscure to the average music listener. Was it tough deciding which songs you wanted to tackle?
Well, it was a little bit. A couple of years before I actually made this record, I just had a little notepad and again from being so removed from the old-time scene, I sort of had to get back into the mindset of that scene. A tune would pop into my head, and I’d have to pick up the banjo and try and remember the melody and the lyrics and they sort of came like bolt of lightning to me and I kept a running tally in that notebook. And, funny enough, almost all of them turned out to be pretty obscure to the those not super well-versed in the old-time music. I know that there are some standards that people might recognize, or at least recognize the modern iteration of those songs, but I didn’t want to just make a record that was what people thought it would be. “Hey, here’s a bunch of recognizable square dance fiddle and banjo tunes.” That’s not really what I wanted to do.
In so many ways it’s so poised to be interpreted as cliched when a country artist “goes back to their roots.” It’s a great thing that a lot of country artists have done over the years and there’s sort of a longstanding tradition of it. Merle Haggard made a Texas Playboys album and through all these eras it’s a thing that country artists have done. But I wanted it to be incredibly far off from center field. Because I didn’t want it interpreted that way and also in my opinion, to not just pass on and preserve tradition, but to keep some of those more obscure things alive. The song “Old Bangum,” is from the old British Isles and the earliest known iteration of it is from the early 17th century, I mean it’s an old, old, old tune that has sort of been bastardized into current English from the Anglo English that brought it over here. There literally is a lineage of hundreds of years on some of these songs and as the subject matter became more and more odd to modern society those tunes sort of fell out of favor because they weren’t up to date. But I think there’s something really important about preserving all of them. That was kind of part of my motivation and grabbing a lot of these really fringe songs and put him on the record.
Do you anticipate being able to play these songs live as the world starts to open up, mixing them into your set? Or have you and Chance talked about playing shows where you specifically take on these songs?
Well, it’s funny because I think there’s going to be a little bit of confusion for a lot of folks. Wait a minute, is JP Harris changing his sound? I purposely titled this as a side project with a very long and strange name for the act, JP Harris’ Dreadful Wind & Rain. It’s sort of almost like a quasi-alter ego and I wanted to delineate from “JP Harrison is loud ass electric honky tonk band” versus “JP Harris’ Dreadful Wind & Rain.” Just to sort of let people know I was doing two completely different things. It’s not really anything I intend to do full time, but I’ve always really wanted to perform this music.
There’s a pretty decent section of my fan base that’s always asked about this sort of mysterious banjo old-time background of mine that I have very rarely performed live to a crowd. I just thought it would be sort of fun to have something a little different to do to break up what I do normally. I’m pretty sure at some point Chance and I will play some shows. I’ve also got some other fiddle players who are old, old friends of mine that have accompanied me in the past. Not this year but starting sometime in the spring of next year there will definitely be some JP Harris’ Dreadful Wind & Rain tour dates popping up. I’ll be out playing it a little bit. It’ll be a different kind of show it will be a different kind of venue, but it’ll be a nice stripped-down way for me to re-enter the music community.
Photo credit: Greg Homolka
