Live Music Alert: Charlie Parr with My Two Toms, Concert in the Garden series, the ND Museum of Art sculpture garden, UND campus, Grand Forks, ND, 6 pm, $5 in advance, $7 at the door or $25 for season tickets that will get you into all five shows. Kids 12 and under get in free. To purchase season tickets, call (701) 777-4195

“One man, one guitar, one foot in the grave”—that’s the sentiment on Charlie Parr’s website. And in a sense it describes this Duluth singer/songwriter. Except he plays more than a guitar, though usually that’s what fans see him with. And I’d hardly say he’s got one foot in the grave—no more than the rest of us. But it is this wry look at life that makes Charlie Parr the complex musician he is. 

Parr grew up in a family that appreciated music and turned to it for comfort and nourishment. “My dad was heavy into old folk music and blues and the old country music. We had a big giant Magnavox record player. It played all the time,” Parr says. “There was a little black and white TV that was in the kitchen. He would turn on the news while we were eating. He’d turn it off again, because he’d get all upset. I was a little kid during ’72, ’75 and Vietnam. I remember him just railing about that. Then, he’d go in and put on a record.”

Young Charlie saw that music could be a balm and a way to mark joy. Most of that music was ancient, even then. “The newest thing that I heard was Johnny Cash and Johnny Horton,” Parr recalls. “Music went all the way back to Woodie Guthrie and Leadbelly and Mancee Lipscomb, The Harry Smith Anthology and all those great Smithsonian Folkways LPs that they used to put out in big cardboard sleeves. I got to hear all of that stuff.”

They were old records, telling stories about people long dead in circumstance that Charlie Parr would never know.  Yet, he knew about small towns and hardworking people. He grew up in Austin MN, a small meatpacking town where Hormel was based. “My folks worked there. My dad came up from farming in Iowa and Kansas and Illinois. They were tenant farmers so they did land rentals. He was all over the place during the Depression. He took off and rode freight trains. He was trying to get down to Texas to get work and ended up on the road for a long time. He got into the Piedmont [Virginia and NC] a few times in his travels. I think that’s where he picked up listening to some of that stuff.” 

With all of that music saturating his house, it was no big leap for Parr to pick up guitar at a young age. He was eight and taught him self how to pick, through trial and error. “I was trying to learn to play the banjo and never quite got there,” he says. “I play banjo in the parlor style. It took me 20 years to figure out how to do that.”

With the guitar came learning a lot of old music, but soon Parr was writing a song or two of his own. He began performing in Minneapolis in 1988, doing the club and coffeehouse circuit. He learned a lot from Minnesota roots artists Dave Ray and Spider John Koerner, who brought black blues to a white audience. Parr’s own work had that old-timey feel as if Woodie or Uncle Dave Macon were still walking among us.  

Though his folks were union workers, Parr wasn’t attracted to political songs. “I’m really attracted to laments,” he says. “So all of the laboring songs I know are laments.  I love the songs that came out of the mining operations all over the country, the disaster songs….I love listening to Joe Hill, but I’ve never really consciously decided that I was going to play some of this stuff in my set….I’ve done labor picnics where the only upbeat song I sang was John Henry. Everything else was laments, songs about mining disasters and farm accidents.”

Though Parr still collects old tunes from vintage recordings to introduce into his sets, he still writes a lot. Much of it isn’t introspective angst. It’s often a quirky look at the world. “When you look outside of yourself, the songs are not only more relevant but they’re generally more meaningful,” he says. “I don’t like self indulgent songs about the girl that got away. It’s far more interesting when people sing about a specific event or point in time. There’s a human reaction to an event, rather than thinking about my personal reaction to a personal problem that no one else really has access to.”  

Take “Riding Mower Blues,” for example. This humorous song really chronicles an event that happened in Minnesota. “There’s a fellow in West Duluth who got so many DUIs that they permanently revoked his driver’s license. So, he set out for the bar on his lawnmower.  He got drunk at the bar, and then he drove home on his lawnmower,” Parr recalls. “He had the mower deck on. He was mowing the boulevard as he drove home. The police pulled him over. There’s not too much more that they can do to him any more. He had no license and had no access to a license. They put him in jail and took away his lawnmower. I don’t know what his yard looks like nowadays….I guess you get desperate.”

Parr released his first full-length CD, Criminals & Sinners, in 2001, though he had a appeared on a couple of compilation recordings around then. More albums followed:  1922 (2002), King Earl (2004), Rooster (2005), Backslider (2006), Julibee (2007), and Roustabout (2008).  

Members of Trampled By Turtles lent their chops to many of these recordings. Frontman Dave Simonette  add background vocals and guitar on Roustabout and Jubilee.  The whole band appeared on Backslider. Dave Carrol played on banjo in Rooster, and Ryan Young handled fiddle on Roustabout. 

All of these recordings were done low-budget in living rooms, garages, barroom basements, and empty storefronts. This often created an authentic roots feel. But Parr’s new album When the Devils Goes Blind is a departure from that formula. “This is my very first ever studio recording,” he says. “I had a ton of help with it. Bo Ramsey from Iowa produced it. Matt Zimmerman, the guy who runs studio, was there helping me out. It just turned out to be a really good experience. I was really nervous about wasting all that money, but it turned out to be a great time. I really enjoyed it. I think the sound quality is quite a bit higher than anything else I’ve done that has been recorded in garages and basements. People have been reacting to that.”

Taking it’s name from an old fiddle tune called “We’ll All Go to Heaven when the Devil Goes Blind,” the album is full of originals and vintage tunes. “Turpentine Farm,” for example, is not the heart-rending original “Turpentine” that JJ Grey wrote about the turpentine camps in Florida. “It’s not a real political piece as it was for him,” Parr says. “This is a traditional tune. The earliest recording of it is from the early 30s by a fellow that went by the name of Catjuice Charley…It’s been covered a lot, but it’s been covered in a real hillbilly kind of way. Doing songs that way with a funny accent is a bit cheesy. I love the song. I’ve been playing it live so I thought I’d take a stab at it on the record.”

 Still Parr’s rootsy sound comes through on the slicker studio recording. “I don’t want to get away from sounding like what I’m supposed to sound like. It’s got to be me. Otherwise, it’ll be fake,” he says.

Charlie Parr has toured all over the country, appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, and even had been overseas. “Once or twice a year, I end up in the UK or Ireland,” Parr says. “I’ve got two releases on an English record label and one on an Irish record label. A lot the music fans over there apparently seem to know more about America folk music than most American folks do.” Parr has also recorded a song for an American folk anthology on a French label.

While he was touring in Bristol, he met My Two Toms, a guitar and banjo duo, that he really connected with. “My Two Toms carries the traditions of the most memorable music; the complexity found deep within the drone of the Appalachian Mountains, the spiraling melodies of Northumberland pipe tunes, a simple song that stands well the test of time and is remembered not in a crazy-making way but as an old friend,” he says of Tom Stubbs and Tom Cops.

“In 2007, they came over here, and we did shows down through Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, and back up through Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota,” Parr says. “I’m looking forward to having them back again. I toured with them in England, too, but to a lesser extent, mostly around Bristol where they’re from. They’re really good guys and their music is just fascinating. It’s instrumental music, but it really engages you. …They’re really fun to see live, too. They’re personable guys with a quirky sense of humor.”

Parr played the Concert in the Garden series at the ND Museum of Art last year and loved it. “I had such a good time there. I thought it was a fantastic place,” he says. And that will be the launching pad for a US tour with My Two Toms. “I’m looking forward to having My Two Toms play there, too.”

 Charlie Parr is always a treat to hear live. Check out his set at the Concert in the Garden series at the ND Museum of Art Tuesday, August 3, at 6 pm.

DISCOGRAPHY 

When The Devil Goes Blind (2010)

Roustabout (2008)

Jubilee (2007)

Backslider (2006)

Rooster (2005)

King Earl (2004)

1922 (2002) Re-released by popular demand.

 Criminals & Sinners (2001) (sold out)

Misplaced Pets (sold out)

Keep Recordings (sold out)

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Issues, July 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.