Blues musician Nat Reese was born in Salem, Virginia, on March 4, 1924. When he was young, his family moved to Wyoming County and then to Princeton in Mercer County. He grew up listening to a variety of music, including jazz, blues, and country. And he learned to play the guitar, piano, organ, bass, and string harp.
Reese worked in local coal mines while going to high school. For two years, he played jazz and blues on Bill Farmer’s Saturday night radio show on WHIS in Bluefield. He also was part of a dance band that played jazz, polkas, and blues throughout the southern coalfields.
Nat Reese was honored with the 1995 Vandalia Award and was inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame in 2009. He died in 2012 at age 88.
“I think sometimes we just look way too past the present and are sort of blinded to…our ability to create beauty in the present.” That was the meditative response from singer/songwriter Cris Jacobs when asked about the meaning of the title to his newest album “Color Where You Are”. Recently Jacob’s life has changed drastically with the birth of his child and now has been focused on creating music in the present instead of waiting for it to happen. This new lifestyle help put the impetus on Jacobs to write this new album–even between changing diapers.
Throughout the album are the influences that have always been a part of Jacobs’s repertoire since his days with his former band, the Bridge: folk, funk, blues, and bluegrass. These styles mix together in a veritable “gumbo” from songs like the grooving “Under the Big Top” to the funky “Rooster Coop”. The lyrical ballad “Painted Roads” is a bluesy meditation that provides us the title of the album in its lyrics.
“Color Where You Are” Album Cover
Take a listen to this interview between Matt Jackfert and Cris Jacobs about this new album as they discuss everything from Jacobs’s influences to his songwriting process to his new lifestyle.
If you’re looking for a chance to catch Cris play live, you can see him perform this weekend at the 4848′ Festival in Snowshoe, WV. Or if you can’t make that, you can always download the podcast of his performance on WVPB’s Mountain Stage!
Singer Mary Smith McClain was born in Huntington on August 27, 1902. She would become a blues legend.
At age 13, she was desperate to escape beatings from her stepmother. So, she disguised herself as a boy, hopped a train, and began performing in the circus. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, she performed in medicine and minstrel shows. In the 1940s, she had diamonds implanted in her front teeth and took the name “Diamond Teeth Mary.” Over the years, McClain shared the stage with such performers as Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Big Mama Thornton, Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, and Bessie Smith, who was her half-sister.
Despite her stage career, McClain didn’t issue her first album until she was 91 years old, recording “If I Can’t Sell It, I’m Gonna Sit Down On It.” She continued to perform at regional blues festivals until her death in 2000 at age 97. At her request, her ashes were sprinkled on the railroad tracks at Heritage Station in Huntington, where she’d hopped her first train. “Diamond Teeth Mary” McClain was inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame in 2011.
“There’s another generation [of blues players] coming up… if the flames are stoked well and kept alive. “
From West Virginia Public Broadcasting and A Change of Tune, this is 30 Days of #WVmusic, the interview series celebrating the folks who make the West Virginia music scene wild and wonderful.
And today’s interview is with a gravelly-bluesy singer-songwriter who has dipped a foot in the musical waters of Nashville and Nitro, West Virginia. This… is Tony Harrah.
I wanted to be a musician since I was little, back when Kroger’s used to sell VHS and albums when you’d walk right through the door in Teays Valley. I went in there and Prince’s Purple Rain stared me right in the face in the mid-‘80s. And that’s when I realized… that’s what I wanted to do.
So at one point in grade school, I crafted this whole rock star outfit complete with guitar with rubber band strings. When all the kids were getting ready at their desks, I went back and got dressed up and came out, and they all laughed at me. But I thought they were laughing with me.
I took piano lessons when I was a kid. By the time I was a teenager, I got a guitar and did angry youth banging out of Nirvana covers [laughing]. I wanted to start my first blues band when I was 19, but I didn’t see at the time how short-sided that was. You really don’t have much to be blue about when you’re 19, not really anything anyone can sink their teeth into. That didn’t really go anywhere.
Credit Marybeth Hannah
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Tony Harrah performing at the Boulevard Tavern in Charleston, WV.
On playing the blues:
My biggest influence is probably Muddy Waters. I found him when I was 16, and I was really taken by that. I got really into James Cotton, and I found out he was the harmonica player on Muddy’s last record. It wasn’t until I really got older that I started seeking out Lightnin’ Hopkins and some of the blues folks that aren’t as popular as the “name your top five” favorites.
I found Tom Waits in my early twenties. At the time, I wasn’t interested in him. I was never a singer, and I never sang. But when I began singing, I was like, “Man, I’ve got a gravelly voice. I think I’ve got soul, I guess.” I figured if Tom Waits has that same range, I could get by with it, so he became a big influence. He has no fear to do anything.
Credit Jon Rickman
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Tony Harrah
Blues music is kind of like country to the effect that I really like that its simple, and it tells a really good story. I wanted to get back into blues and stay there, but the problem with that is I’m not a really good guitar player. When you play blues, you’re either the guitar virtuoso that sings, or you’ve got a backing band, so I do a lot of stuff on slide guitar or resonator. When I play Americana, the guitar playing isn’t much of an issue. But it’s all a version of the blues, whether its country, Americana or whatever.
I was reading a book called Why It Hurts So Good about the history of the blues. The blues was once very popular in the South, predominantly black music. But it’s flip-flopped, and they were showing the statistics: now it’s like 90% white and 89% over the age of 50. So there is some concern that there’s a dying out of it, but when I was at the Memphis International Showcase this past year, you wouldn’t believe how many young kids were there. Some of it was, “Oh, that’s cool,” and some of it was, “Wow. This is really good,” and some of it blew us away.
Credit Jon Rickman
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Tony Harrah
On moving down to Nashville for some time before returning to West Virginia:
We were playing a lot in Huntington in the mid-2000’s. We did well there, but around the time American Minor had moved from West Virginia, it gave me the idea that if you want to do something, you’ve got to leave here. So in 2004, we thought about it and packed up and moved down there. We got a house and all lived in the house together. We played some down there. You think it’s the land of milk and money, but there’s a lot of people down there looking for the same opportunities as you are. It taught me a lot about the music industry, and it taught me I didn’t know anything about it when I moved there.
It’s not always bad being a big fish in a small pond. I realized that you need a reason to move there, and at the time social media hadn’t arrived and being able to record on your own wasn’t affordable. By the time I left, I thought, “I don’t need to be here.” Networking as a young artist, you think your music will stand for itself. Having a great record will fail without the right publicity. Getting to know the right people is where you get your ins-and-outs.
Music featured in this #WVmusic chat:
Tony Harrah and the Putnam Prohibition- “Port of Call”
Tony Harrah and the Putnam Prohibition- “Hard Times”
Tony Harrah and the Putnam Prohibition- “Simple Times”
Support for 30 Days of #WVmusic is provided by Kin Ship Goods, proud supporter of DIY music and the arts. Locally shipped worldwide at kinshipgoods.com.
In April 2015, they released their first full-length Snowflake Mandala. Less than a year later, they earned an entry into the 2016 International Blues Challenge with their second release U Can’t Bother Me. And now, Huntington rockers The Shadowshaker Band are back with a bigger band and a bluer sound.
We sat down with The Shadowshaker Band’s Eve Marcum-Atkinson and Michael Lyzenga in the #wvpublic studios to talk about the band’s new record Heart on the Line and their blues-y beginnings.
The Shadowshaker Band regularly performs at Ritter Park in Huntington, West Virginia.
On playing blues music:
Michael: People say it’s so easy, it’s just three chords and some attitude, but it’s so much more than that. It comes from the heart. Country music does in a way, if you write the right music. But the blues…
Eve: …will rip out your heart and make you happy you did.
On Eve’s musical beginnings:
Eve: I was all rock. Although I really liked one of the albums U2 did when they went more blues, and I liked that style. It wasn’t until the ‘90s that I really started appreciating that style with Nina Simone and Billie Holiday and those chanteuse-style singers. I was hiding under a rock for a very long time, and I did not sing in front of people… at all.
Michael: She’s got it good both ways though. She can not only sing The Shadowshaker Band music (the folk and blues and rock and Americana), but she’s also in a band called Under Surveillance where she can flat out rock. So she has the best of both worlds: she can come to my studio and record a little love ballad and go to their studio…
Eve: …and scream it out.
Credit The Shadowshaker Band
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The Shadowshaker Band’s Eve Marcum-Atkinson designed the band’s cover art.
On writing The Shadowshaker Band’s music:
Michael: You can ask me where the lyrics come from, but I have no idea. I could not tell you how I can wake up in the morning, pick up my guitar, strum a chord, and write and record the song by the end of the day. I don’t know how it works, and I don’t know where they come from.
Music featured in this #WVmusic chat:
The Shadowshaker Band- “Heart on the Line”
The Shadowshaker Band- “Collide”
The Shadowshaker Band- “Shadows”
The Shadowshaker Band- “Mr. Weather Man” (Live in the #WVPublic Studios)
At the 16th annual Blues Fest in Wheeling this weekend it rained hard and shined hot, and at Wheeling’s Heritage Area Port the weekend blues musicians rocked on through it all. About 2,400 paying blues fans came from far and wide and dealt with both deluges of rain and sweltering sun.
The festival’s producer Bruce Wheeler says dedicated fans flock to Wheeling every year for several reasons:
“It’s a combination of the talent that’s on the stage, the volunteer crew that puts it together so well, and the setting of the Heritage Port in Wheeling, West Virginia.
“To sit here and look at the historic suspension bridge, listening to blues music right on the bank of the Ohio River that has it’s connections down to the delta where the blue started,” Wheeler said, “I think there’s some magic here.”
Fans and musicians came from Ohio, Georgia, Florida, California, Canada – and there were also local die-hards like West Virginia’s poet laureate, and Wheeling resident Marc Harshman. This is his 15th BluesFest:
“It’s such a shot in the arm – this high energy blues music. It ends the summer with just the right note for me. I feel like I’ve been revived after being here for three days listening to old time country acoustic blues, to high-powered electric rhythm and blues. I love it. And the best names in the business it’s really an incredible lineup year and year.”
Credit Glynis Board / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
On Sunday when the rain really came hard, the Blues festival moved here into a nearby restaurant, River City Ale Works, and carried on.
