Reed Turchi may not be a household name, but for over 10 years the guitarist and songwriter has been quietly leading something of a prolific career. At the core of every project and album he has taken on has been a devotion to the blues. This includes his new live album Tupelo, recorded at The Blue Canoe in the Mississippi town of the album’s namesake. The recording captures Turchi loose and laid back as him and his band embrace tradition while forging new ground. Turchi is sharing the story behind the evening that led to the album along with his own track by track commentary.
Tupelo, Mississippi. Where it began. Elvis, sure, but also for my own lost-in-the-blues trajectory. Flat-circle back a decade or so & find me in the back seat of Kenny Brown’s (longtime guitarist for RL Burnside, now for the Black Keys) van headed to a gig at The Blue Canoe. That night, just to listen. Kenny & his trio rolling through the Hill Country classics and tunes of his own. Crunch of gravel & cicadic cacophony beneath the magnolias haunting the parking lot.
Then last August — the same hot summer, this time my own trio with Tupelo’s own Lee McAlilly on bass & the Tulsa time-keeper Erin Nelson on the throne. The sphere coming closed as we romped through some Burnside & Kimbrough classics (All Night Long, Goin Down South, Jumper on the Line), originals (Ima Bore), and re-interpretations (Alabaster, No Need to Worry, Special Rider). You have to grow roots to grow branches, and this set is a representation of that in nearly perfect form.
The night before we had played in Jackson, where the water crisis that would take over national headlines a few weeks later was just beginning. Two nights earlier we had played in Tuscaloosa. Can you name a weekend more dixie-fried?
Forgive (or embrace) any low-fidelity — what you’re listening to here is a two-track recorder in the back of the room, the wood-walled club serving as echo-chamber & studio all in one.
1 – Alabaster
This is a Wood Brothers song that has become a favorite of mine, for its lyrics and musical simplicity (the elegant solution, every time!) and blank-canvas for interpretation. I’ve always been drawn to their sounds and story-telling, and go figure, it turns out we have a similar lineage — their mother Renate Wood taught at the same creative writing MFA program (MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College) that I grew up within (thanks to my father, Pete Turchi, directing and teaching there from ’93-’08), and that I recently graduated from in poetry.
Additionally, a year or two ago I started recording various projects at the Wood Brother’s studio in Nashville — an analog dream-land overseen and engineered by Brook Sutton, who got his chops in New Orleans. All of which is to say I feel a kinship with this song, this music, and this band and their web of associates and inspirations.
From a guitar perspective, it’s a pleasure to work the intra-solo minor/major transitions a la Duane Allman / BB King over the progression, and from a singer’s perspective it’s fun to inhabit the story and character, particularly thanks to my recent move from Nashville to Brooklyn. Last phone booth in New York City, calling somebody home…
2 – All Night Long
Junior Kimbrough loud and clear. And how cool is it to get to play this song in its geographic home (more or less), just a little bit down the road from the Hill Country Blues homeland? There are many reasons I love playing guitar while Lee McAlilly is on bass, but two that stand out are (1) his melodic sensibilities, thanks to an upbringing in choir-everpresent worlds, and (2) his rhythmic sensibilities, thanks to an upbringing in Tupelo and blues-surroundings. This song (like much in the RL Burnside / JR Kimbrough canon) is “technically” simple, but good lord it can be quite a goose chase trying to get that rhythm and “feel” just right. I know and have played with plenty of highly skilled drummers and bassists who struggle with this — over-playing, or playing too staccato, or clearly getting bored with the repetitiveness and so becoming stale. But Lee always brings just the right combination of groove, forward momentum, and laid back energy. Erin Nelson compliments him perfectly — keeping time, yes, but in a larger sense providing the character of the rhythm section — thick as the humidity outside the club that night.
The way the drums and bass kick in at the beginning of this track is the kind of sound I dream about. You know the party is on, you know the vibe is right, you know there’s nowhere else better to be. And to stand in the middle of that and dance in the upper-register of guitar melody and delay-pedal psychedelia? It makes me a happy man.
3 – Special Rider
Here’s a song with a geographical story. I first knew the Skip James version, but learned this arrangement from my Italian friend and guitarist collaborator Adriano Viterbini, who I’m grateful to have recorded and toured with, and who introduced me to a whole world of music. In this song I borrow one of his tricks (or, tricks he showed me) — weaving a scrap of paper through the strings by the bridge, creating the ultra-percussive “plucky” sound (you can hear it particularly distinctly in the beginning of the guitar solo).
Tinariwen and Bombino are the other artists I have to mention here as guiding lights — in musical style and also in mentality. The pulsing, driving, dance groove. Sounds like Hill Country Blues, right? That would be the “thesis statement” of this set, if it were delivered in lecture form — playing music emerging from opposite sides of the world that drive at the same core pulsebeat.
4 – No Need to Worry (It’s Alright)
At this point in the set we turn the corner into tighter, uptempo funk, via a song by one of my favorite bands (that you all should know!), Greyhounds. Based in Austin, Andrew Trube and Anthony Farrell have been friends, collaborators, and colleagues for a decade or so at this point, and this tune of theirs is a favorite of mine to “shake things up” with amid longer, looser songs. Someone let’s out “WHOOO!” at the 3:45 which pretty perfectly mirrors how I feel when we get cruising in this tune.
5 – Ima Bore
Staying in the dry and funky mode this song is an original of mine that originally appeared on “Speaking in Shadows” in 2016 and has evolved ever since. In this recording Lee introduces a major motif in the bassline that opens entirely new possibilities — before he came up with that this lived squarely in pentatonic-zone. I think it’s thanks to that and Erin’s breakbeat approach that we explored new territory this night, both the percussive chord-strumming (2:24) and slide-guitar moments (3:47) in the solos being first-time experiments.
The persona of this song is a fun one to perform — the joke “boring” de-tuning solo at the end, the Street People-esque (Bobby Charles) attitude, the rhythm. It always makes me smile. Recently, playing here in the big city of NYC, I caught a well-dressed woman looking at me very disapprovingly when I sang “don’t want to get a job / too slow to steal or rob,” and that made me smile, too. We’re all finding our own way in the world — some paths parallel, some perpendicular.
6 & 7 – Jumper on the Line & Going Down South
I have to write about these songs together because they, combined, are at the very center of my musical education and why the moment of this performance stands out to me. Of course these are not only both RL Burnside songs, but songs that Kenny Brown (Burnside’s longtime sideman) played on and continues to perform. I spent a lot of time with Kenny over the course of a few years, and though I don’t think he’d ever say he “taught me” guitar, I am very aware of having learned much of what I know from him — musically, culturally, and spiritually.
I think these are the very first two songs I ever learned on guitar, driving around Mississippi desperately “searching for the blues” in one way or another (and in one way or another I found it, or it found me) — so to get come back to Tupelo and perform these tunes in the land where they were born is a special treat. In a way it lets me breathe easy, having completed a certain type of circle: This was the music I re-shaped my life in order to explore and learn, and so to now find myself at the center of it (and by center I just mean performing it on its own turf for one night) feels like an accomplishment. Not anything grand, or fame-based, or trophy-based, or financially-based (lord knows), or that I wish to be praised for or lay claim to, but something I can chuckle about to myself.
8 – Bonus Track: Field Recording – Found Harp & Voices
My musical career began not playing music but recording it, with Devil Down Records (RIP, 2008-2014ish), driving around Mississippi falling in love with a music I only kind of understood. And what I wanted to do then, as now, is not necessarily “write perfect songs” or climb up the radio charts, but to celebrate a range of distinct voices. And I think the inspiration for that came much earlier in life, and was greatly emphasized by my studies with Bill Ferris (the legendary folklorist/recordist) at UNC Chapel Hill. I remember as a kid listening to the Lomax album “Blues in the Mississippi Night” and always being attracted to the way the conversations and voices merged in and around the songs — inseparable. The creative art not isolated from the life.
The first album I ever produced, Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “Come and Found You Gone” (edited archival recordings made by Bill Ferris in 1967) taught me the importance of that — the way the round-about, digressive story being told in the background is as equally vital as the guy sipping whiskey and playing guitar. Call it polyvocality, maybe, or the polyrhythm of being a human on earth.
So, this collage is made from a series of voice-memo recordings I made the weekend of this tour: Standing around in a parking lot in Jackson, talking up the midnight receptionist at another cheap tour-hotel, and improvising on a harp at 3am in Tupelo. I’ll let you listen closely to the rest, these voices stand on their own.
Ultimately I believe in music that emerges from a particular time and place, and that celebrates its humanity, rather than hides it.
I’m extraordinarily grateful to everyone I have had the opportunity to create music with, and hearing Lee and Erin and I come together on this night feels particularly powerful. “The mojo was in the air,” or “the ghosts were around,” whatever you want to call it. At the very least, the cicadas were singing, and we, like them, were finding our rhythms.
Enjoy. If some ghosts come haunting, let them in. Sometime tomorrow we’ll go get biscuits. Lee knows a spot.
