Heritage Music Review, THE TALLBOYS: OLD-TIME MOUNTAIN MUSIC FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM, by Doug Bright, November 2007
"We believe that this is a new type of music that more and more people are gonna play," Mike Seeger predicted in 1960 when he appeared with his New Lost City Ramblers at the Golden Vanity in Boston. "Probably half of you will end up playing it before too long." He wasn't talking about avant-garde jazz or even rock 'n' roll. He was referring instead to Appalachian string-band music as it was first recorded in the 1920's and '30's. However unlikely his prophecy may have sounded at the time, it was fully vindicated by a renaissance of "old-time music" that began in the Sixties, flickered in the mid-Eighties, and is burning brightly again at the dawn of the 21st century. Here in Seattle, old-time music's second renaissance is led by a surprisingly youthful quartet called the Tallboys.
"I grew up in Dallas, Oregon," says bassist John Hurd. "It's a small town in the Willamette Valley. I always remember being interested in playing music: I had toy guitars and horns."
Although he started out on trombone in the fifth grade, it wasn't the music he played in school bands that made the biggest childhood impression. "I listened mainly to stuff like the Beach Boys, Beatles, and Huey Lewis when I was a little kid," he remembers. "I started playing electric bass when I was 14. My ear has been biased towards bass and the rhythm part of music since then."
By the time he finished college in 1998, Hurd's musical knowledge had broadened considerably. "I remember being intrigued by Irish music when I first heard it," he recalls, "and blues, too. I used to listen to a lot of Grateful Dead, and it was through Jerry Garcia that I was first pointed in the Old-time direction. Also the Holy Modal Rounders had a lot to do with it. I came to Seattle because I wanted to be in a city with a great music scene, and I didn't want to leave the Northwest."
Hurd met banjoist Charlie Beck in late 2001 after responding to Beck's newspaper ad for a bass player. A lifelong musician like Hurd, Beck had grown up in Indianapolis and schooled himself on guitar and banjo in a variety of roots-based styles ranging from old-time country to blues to swing. He had arrived fairly recently in Seattle when he placed the ad that introduced him to John Hurd, and together they formed a bluegrass-flavored folk group called the Lowgrounders that relied heavily on Beck's original songs.
Hurd met guitarist Rob Adesso the following February at Tacoma's annual Wintergrass bluegrass festival, and Adesso introduced him to mandolinist Paul McGowen, who had recently come to the Northwest from his native Arkansas and been playing music on the streets of Portland and Seattle. "Charlie, Rob, Paul and I used to get together and play bluegrass," Hurd recalls.
Meanwhile, Iowa-born multi-instrumentalist Joe Fulton had hit the streets of Seattle in January after busking in Iowa City, Austin, and New Orleans. It was during a walk through the farmers' market in Seattle's University District that Rob Adesso and Paul McGowen heard him fiddling Irish and old-time mountain tunes and invited him into their jam circle. "Now we had a full band," John Hurd summarizes. "We played mostly bluegrass for the first few months, but we were starting to get turned on to old-time. I remember we were all really impressed when we heard Foghorn Stringband's first album, and that's when we really started playing old-time."
By spring of 2003 the Tallboys were a performing unit. "We played The Owl and Thistle on St. Patrick's Day," Hurd remembers, "and that probably was the first gig we played with the group of guys that we had. We were tryin' to get gigs, and that was like, "Yeah, we need an album that we can sell, shop around, and use to get booked." We recorded in the fall of that year at my house on my minidisc recorder with a little stereo mike. I got pretty close to being happy with that recording."
Named for one of Charlie Beck's somewhat quirky original songs, HANG IT ON YOUR DOOR was a valiant, solidly played first effort, but it only hinted at the dynamic energy and stylistic focus of future efforts. "I think maybe we had decided that we were gonna be an old-time band," Hurd summarizes, "but we still had a lot of leftover material and hadn't really made that full transition yet."
The band reached its next milestone in the summer of 2004 at the Northwest String Summit, an annual weekend festival and campout for lovers of old-time and bluegrass music. "I think we'd all gone the year before as audience members and thought, Hey, we should play the band contest," Hurd recalls. "We won, and that was a lot of fun. We got to go back the next year and be part of the program, so I think it made us feel more like an official band."
The Tallboys got several tracks for their next album, WILD HOG, when they appeared at the annual Portland Old Time Music Gathering in early 2005. They cut the remaining tracks at Big Red Studio just outside Portland with engineer Alan Garren. "He recorded the Foghorn Stringband album that we really liked," John Hurd explains, "so we sought him out. He uses just two condenser mikes: they function basically as a stereo mike."
The simplicity of Garren's recording strategy was certainly in keeping with the band's first effort, but both musically and sonically, this was a far superior product. Not only were the vocals more consistently audible, but the Tallboys played and sang with a degree of confidence and drive that had been lacking before. While banjoist Charlie Beck and mandolinist Paul McGowen reinforced Joe Fulton's melody line on familiar and less-familiar fiddle tunes alike, Rob Adesso laid down a solid guitar foundation while John Hurd ventured tastefully beyond convention with bass patterns reminiscent of the inventive accompaniment style that guitarist Riley Puckett had used with Gid Tanner's Skillet Lickers back in the 1920's. "There's no question that I've been influenced by old-time guitarists' bass runs," he says. "I think there's a lot of early jazz in there, too--walking bass stuff, maybe a little more simplified."
One of the album's most exciting live-performance tracks was the old standard "Granny Will Your Dog Bite", on which guest artist Sara Cory's infectiously rhythmic Appalachian clog dancing can be heard. The show proved particularly momentous because it was through Cory that the Tallboys discovered Charmaine Slaven, the guitarist who was to take their act to the next level after Rob Adesso left the band. "Sara is a friend of Charmaine's," Hurd explains, "and that's where Charmaine learned to clog dance. Charmaine was there as a member of the audience. Our performance was recorded a few hours before we all met her."
The daughter of an Air Force man, Charmaine Slaven was born in Pusan, South Korea and grew up in Stevensville, Montana, a little town near Missoula. "I was born on the base before my father was reassigned back to the States," she elaborates. "My father was from New River, Tennessee and lived there until he joined the Service at the age of sixteen during World War II. He told me stories about hoedowns they had in his rural community when he was growing up. He would always get excited about hearing old-time fiddle music, though he was a big fan of the pop music of his youth."
Thanks to her father, Slaven heard plenty of classic honky-tonk country music during her formative years, including Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, and Loretta Lynn. She also remembers jitterbugging to vintage rock 'n' roll with her sister, watching old video clips to learn the steps. "As a teen I definitely sought out different, edgy music to listen to," she recalls. "I got interested in punk rock culture."
Charmaine Slaven arrived in the Northwest in 1998 at about the age of 18. "I actually came with a group of friends who were in an indy-rock band," she explains. "We all moved to Olympia. I was pursuing visual art at the time. I moved to Seattle in 2000."
For the next few years Slaven worked at a variety of occupations ranging from tattoo artist to veterinary assistant to office manager for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, where she learned the Web design skills that would later prove vitally important to her musical career. Through her friend Sara Cory, an Irish fiddler and step dancer, she discovered Seattle's vibrant Celtic folk scene, and from there it was only a short step to old-time Southern mountain music. "Sara invited me to the 2005 Portland Old Time Gathering around the time my father passed," she explains. "I guess I became more interested learning about his life before I knew him."
"When I went to the Portland Gathering," she continues, "I really fell in love with old-time music. I got to see young punk kids playing old-time, square dancing, and clogging: it was a great experience. It seemed like a missing puzzle piece of my life fell into place. I wanted the scene in Portland to also be happening in Seattle, and I wanted to be a part of it!"
It was at the Portland Gathering that Charmaine Slaven met the Tallboys. Inspired by the experience, she began a serious study of old-time string-band guitar styling, and before long she was performing with banjoist Charlie Beck in a duo called Squirrel Butter. When Rob Adesso left the band later in the year and Paul McGowen moved back home to Arkansas, a serious vacancy was created in the Tallboys' lineup, and Slaven was there to fill it. "I integrated into the band gradually," she recalls. "We had various folks sub on guitar for a while before I took on the role full-time, but it certainly was a "baptism by fire" for a beginning guitarist."
"At first she just clog-danced with the band," John Hurd remembers. "Then she stepped in on guitar, and that's where we are today. I've always done most of the booking for the band, though lately Charmaine has been doing a lot, too. She's a real go-getter and has added a lot of energy in terms of all kinds of stuff--not just the music, but promotion and getting the message out. Until she joined the band, we were all more low-key, just focused on playin' the music, but she's good at getting people's attention and communicating."
The Tallboys' third CD, YEAH BUDDY, was recorded at the same 2005 Portland session that had yielded its predecessor, with Paul McGowen on mandolin and Rob Adesso still playing guitar. In addition to unusual versions of fiddle standards like "Cumberland Gap" and "Mississippi Sawyer" and a remake of Charlie Beck's opus of offbeat old-timery "Ida Mae", this one deviated from convention by slowing down the tempo with a plaintively harmonized reading of the old mountain murder ballad "Henry Lee".
The praise it drew the following year from prestigious national magazines like OLD TIME HERALD and BLUEGRASS UNLIMITED made it clear that a more ambitious promotional effort was now required. "When I got involved with the Tallboys, they had a rudimentary website," Charmaine Slaven remembers, "but we quickly decided that more of a Web presence was needed. It's been a huge tool for our band and has helped immensely with exposure, CD sales, and getting offers for gigs."
Impressively constructed and thorough as it is, the Tallboys' site, www.thetallboys.com, is only part of an ambitious and innovative online marketing strategy. "I also started a website for the local old-time community at www.oldtimeseattle.com to help promote other artists, teachers, dances, etc.," Slaven elaborates. "John started a website at www.songslide.com for independent musicians to sell their music to customers who pick the price they want to pay for MP3's. The band Radiohead has been getting a lot of press for releasing their latest CD only on MP3 and allowing their fans to pick the price. Songslide has been around for about a year giving independent musicians the same ability."
The Tallboys gained still more visibility with the October 2006 launch of a regularly held square dance at Seattle's Tractor Tavern. "We're hoping that these fired-up, exciting dances will boost interest in square dancing in Seattle, as we'd like to match the Portland Old Time community in their enthusiasm for dancing," Slaven announced on the band's website. The monthly event, which included a pre-dance jam session and potluck supper, was only supposed to last through the winter, but it proved so successful that the Tractor opted to keep it going indefinitely.
The band followed up last spring at Conor Byrne Pub in the same Ballard neighborhood with a weekly Tuesday-night jam session called the Old Time Social. "This event is music-focused, but not just for musicians!" Slaven proclaimed on the website. "It's our hope that dancers, listeners, curiosity-seekers, and anyone with an interest in old time music and culture come check out this event."
The Tallboys' latest CD, RUBBER DOLLY, was officially released at the end of August with a multi-act show at the Tractor. Its title track, also known as "Rubber Doll Rag", is a heartily delivered tune attributed to the Georgia Yellow Hammers, a popular string band of the 1920's. An even more famous act from the period, Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers, is credited with two numbers on this album: the wonderfully Irish-flavored "Paddy Won't You Drink Some Cider" and the rousing "Rockingham Cindy". "God Don't Like It", which may well be the most rollicking temperance anthem ever recorded, comes from a relatively unlikely source, bluesman Blind Willie McTell. "Debuque's Hornpipe", on the other hand, comes from Dwight Lamb, an old-time fiddler whom Joe Fulton had known in Iowa. "We started out playing heavily from old recordings and old bands like the Skillet Lickers," John Hurd explains. "Then lately, as we met more musicians, we started to learn directly from people."
Even operating with four instruments on this album instead of five, the Tallboys have a sound that's full-bodied and infectiously hearty, graced by Charmaine Slaven's crisp, assertive guitar chords. When she adds an irresistibly rhythmic clogging track to "Train On The Island" and "Pike's Peak", the temperature goes up a few degrees more. The band's twangy vocal harmony, usually delivered by Joe Fulton and Charlie Beck, has never sounded better.
The new Tallboys release is available in cyberspace at www.thetallboys.com and locally, along with its predecessor, at Dusty Strings Music and Sonic Boom Records. There will also be plenty of copies on hand at live appearances like the weekly Tuesday-night Old Time Social at Conor Byrne Pub and the square dances on November 12th and 26th at the Tractor. The band will also appear there on November 17 as a part of Snowbash, a benefit show for the Northwest Avalanche Foundation. "We definitely sell the most CD's at our live performances," says Hurd.