Chris Walz, a musician’s musician, a performer, and esteemed educator at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music for roughly the past three decades, brings his considerable talents to fruition in the release of All I Got and Gone (due out March 14th via Chris Walz Music CWM 2501). Influenced by legendary greats such as Doc & Merle Watson and Tony Rice to Elizabeth Cotten, Etta Baker, Dave Van Ronk, and Woody Guthrie, All I Got and Gone pays homage to these and other of Chris’s most pivotal musical influences.
Chris’s passion in discovering the music he now plays came from listening as a boy to the radio – including the “Bluegrass Ramble” on WCNY in upstate New York. Radio being the window into a new musical landscape broadened the young Chris Walz’s desires, passions, and indeed aptitudes, resulting in him becoming the respected and multi-dimensional artist he is today. With the release of All I Got and Gone, Chris brings his well-lauded, Chicago-based talents to the national audience it deserves.
All I Got and Gone is improbably Chris’s first solo guitar album, and today Glide is offering an exclusive early listen. Throughout this eloquent, well-curated collection of tunes, Chris lends his own thoughtful touch and impressive guitar skills to the timeless music. On tracks like “Alabama Bound,” “Blue Ridge Mountain Blues,” “Diamond Joe,” and “Hard Times Come Again No More,” Chris brings a fresh, new life to these songs with his indelible stamp of talent. Incorporating folk, bluegrass, old timey sounds, and Americana, Chris blends warm and earthy vocals with sharp, complex guitar picking. Influenced by Tony Rice’s Church Street Blues, the simplicity of Chris’s guitar and solo recordings gives a fullness and instrumental style so rich, you won’t notice he’s just one performer.
Listen to the album and read our conversation with Chris Walz below…
This collection of songs really works very well together. How did you decide what songs to include?
The tracks on the album are part of a larger number of traditional songs and tunes that I’ve been playing for a long time. When I started thinking about putting the album together, I made a list of songs that I thought would work well in a set. As I continued to play the material on my own, certain groups of two or three songs started to sound, to my ear, that they belonged together. I did want to have a nice representation of the things that I do on the guitar. So there is some bluegrass-style flatpicking and some fingerpicking, as well as my vocals. I wanted the songs to all be old, traditional ones with my own arrangement ideas
What kind of vibe did you want this album to have?
I was going for the same kind of vibe that a listener would feel if they were hearing me play in front of them, or at a performance. One voice and one guitar. Very immediate. The records that I listened to when I was getting into this music were mostly one voice and one guitar. Those were very impactful to me.
How did you come up with the album title, and what does it mean to you?
The album title comes from the repeated refrain in the song “Delia.” As I was putting the record together, I was wondering what to call it, and that line from that song seemed to fit. Also, the expression “all I got, and gone” can be interpreted a couple of different ways. I leave that up to whoever listens to the record.
What was the recording process like for the album? How did it come together and what was it like working on these songs in the studio?
The recording process was very intimate and relaxed. I have an old friend, John Abbey, who runs a recording studio called Kingsize Sound Labs in Chicago. When I approached him about doing this record, we set up some studio time, made a couple of cups of coffee, and started talking about the songs on the record. It was really easy and relaxed. The sessions were basically just John and me. John is a great engineer and gave great feedback during the process. I wanted to have each track be a complete take, in the same way the records I listened to were recorded. I didn’t do any punches or fixes. So some of the tracks, at times, have a slight rough edge to them. Recording digitally was helpful because if a particular take was going well and I hit a bad spot in the middle, I would keep the rhythm and vibe going, pick up where I left off, and finish the take. When John and I would listen back, if we felt that the take was the best one, we would just snip out the mistake in the middle.
Are there any lyrics that you really love in any of these songs? Why do they stand out to you?
As far as the lyrics go, the Internet was like a big reference library for searching out obscure verses to some of these old songs. I tried to make each song have a through-line, a complete story as much as possible. Probably the most interesting piecing together of lyrics came in the song “Diamond Joe.” There is a book by the author, historian, and banjoist Stephen Wade called “The Beautiful Music All Around Us.” In that book, Wade researches a number of songs that were recorded by the Library of Congress. He gets down into the history of the song and the person making the music on the recording. “Diamond Joe” was sung by a man named Charlie Butler, who was an inmate in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. John Lomax went to Parchman to collect songs in the 1930s. He met Charlee Butler and had him sing “Diamond Joe” a couple of times before he recorded him. Each time, he sang the song differently. John Lomax’s wife, Ruby, jotted down the different verses. They appear in Stephen Wade‘s book. When I pieced them together and then worked out the guitar arrangement, the whole thing sounded much more like a love song. I guess the line that really stands out for me is, “My heart is loving, and I just can’t help it. I sure can’t stand it too long.”
What sorts of things inspired you to tell these stories via these songs?
I think everyone likes a good story. Whether it is on the printed page, told in person, or through a song. Old songs tell old stories; times in the past, the kinds of memories our grandparents perhaps had. Hopefully they still resonate today. I think these songs are relatable in a number of ways, whether you look at them as period pieces, or if you pull them forward and relate them to some aspect of your own life today. I like the old songs.
What do you feel are the key themes for the album overall? How are these songs similar to or different from each other? And how do they fit together as a cohesive “whole”?
I don’t know if there is a specific theme to the entire album, other than a collection of old songs, and tunes that hopefully go together. I think the themes that run throughout the album are: love, journey, searching, home, and a chance to hear some old stories. The songs are similar in that they are old songs going well back into the last century, and in some cases the century before. The approach is the same – one voice and one guitar. The hope is that if you listen to the record from beginning to end, the tracks lead logically from one to the other. A couple of songs lead into an instrumental that hopefully makes sense when you hear it. I think the effect I’m going for is that I’m sitting right there playing for you.
