| Thirty-some-odd
years ago, a simple but dazzling LP record album called Home In
Sulphur Springs announced the arrival of Norman Blake as a solo
artist. The bearded and spectacled face that loomed in close-up on the
cover suggested a 19th century poet or painter. But the sound and the
songs, the starchy drawl, and the exquisite guitar technique made it clear
that Blake’s art was music of the most elemental sort, a lusty embrace
of tradition that transcended technological change and the tides of pop
culture.
One of many who fell in love with that album was one Nancy Short of Independence,
MO, then living in Nashville, TN. “I spent a lot of time cross legged
on the floor before I met Norman listening to Home in Sulphur Springs,”
she says. “Because I was just so entranced by everything on it.
I started out as a rocker, so when that came across my ears I thought,
‘Wow, this is a relief.”
Just about a year later, Nancy, a cellist with new found folk music leanings,
was part of an opening act for Norman’s group at the Exit/In in
Nashville. Their meeting that night became the basis for a life-long relationship
in marriage and music that has taken them around the world and garnered
multiple GRAMMY nominations and overwhelming critical acclaim. Together
and in collaboration with others, they’ve forged a sound unlike
anything else in bluegrass or old-time music—an elegant and complex
weave of stringed instruments and honest, open-hearted voices. Norman
and Nancy Blake’s unique chemistry has provided its own kind of
relief for many thousands of music fans seeking timeless integrity in
an increasingly superficial, accelerated world.
Today, Norman and Nancy Blake turn yet another page in their lives and
careers with Back Home In Sulphur Springs, a 14-song
collection that marks a resolution of sorts. The new album from Plectrafone
isn’t necessarily a swan song. They’re not using the R-word
yet. But clearly this well-traveled duo is thinking about the possibilities
of more time to themselves in the picturesque community that gave both
Sulphur Springs albums their titles.
Norman calls the albums “bookends” to a career. “I’m
not saying I won’t record again by any means, but you never know,”
he says. Nancy is more expansive: “We’ve always looked at
the records he and I have made together as chapters in a novel. We never
knew quite how it was going to end up. But this at least creates an off
ramp for quitting the road. Not quitting the music. We’ll be playing
‘til we flop. It’s just that the road’s really kicking
our rear end and we’ve got to find a better way. Cause you can’t
play guitar when you’re dead!”
The irony in the new album’s title is that Norman never stayed away
long from his own home in Sulphur Springs. Sure he’s toured and
traveled, adventured and gallivanted. But he kept coming back to his home
in North Alabama. For almost 30 years, he and Nancy have lived in the
same large farm house just down the country road from where he grew up
and went to grade school. He was born in March of 1938 in nearby Chattanooga
but grew up in Sulphur Springs near the Alabama/Georgia line. The biggest
deal there was the train depot, which has loomed large in many of Norman’s
songs, like “Slow Train Through Georgia” and “Green
Light on the Southern.”
“This was pretty far back down in the country,” he says. “And
the railroad running through there all through my growing up was just
the biggest happening around. The railroad was the biggest thing we had
to relate to. There was a lot of colorful railroad action on the AGS railroad—the
steam and the green and gold locomotives. It was quite a scene. It certainly
stirred the blood.”
Blake left home, quitting school at age 16 to play mandolin in his first
band, The Dixie Drifters, on the KNOX radio barn dance out of Knoxville
then on TV in Rome, GA. He hooked up with banjo player Bob Johnson in
1956, with whom he made some recordings and several guest spots on the
Grand Ole Opry. When Norman was drafted and stationed as a radio operator
in the Panama Canal, he formed a bluegrass band there.
Once home, Norman taught guitar and commuted to Nashville to play sessions.
He found a place in June Carter’s road band. Then an offer to be
in the house band for Johnny Cash’s television show moved Blake
to Nashville in 1969. That’s when his talents really became valued
by country-folk royalty. He played guitar and dobro on Bob Dylan’s
Nashville Skyline album. He toured and recorded with Kris Kristofferson
and then Joan Baez. He teamed up with John Hartford, Tut Taylor and Vassar
Clements to make the progressive and influential Aereo Plain album. About
the same time, he was invited to take part in perhaps the most important
summit of country, folk and bluegrass music of the era, 1973’s Will
The Circle Be Unbroken featuring the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
Norman and Nancy began touring together in 1974 and were married a year
later. Their early recording Live At McCabe’s showcased Norman at
his virtuoso best and Nancy as a sensitive musical collaborator. The album,
issued on CD at last in 1999, took on the stature of a cult classic. With
fiddler James O’Brien, they formed the Rising Fawn String Ensemble,
a finely balanced old-time group whose subtleties and complexities inspired
critics to dub their music “chamber-folk.” In the 1990s, the
Blakes’ recordings spawned a string of consecutive Grammy nominations.
Home In Sulphur Springs doesn’t depart radically from those albums.
Its mix of standards like “Columbus Stockade Blues,” old-time
rarities like “We Parted By The Riverside” and Blake originals
showcase a pair of artists deepening their commitment to a craft and a
tradition. Like its immediate predecessor, The Morning Glory Ramblers,
Back Home was recorded in Colorado Springs, which Nancy describes as the
couples’ home away from home. Like their music, the session was
somewhat spontaneous.
“He tricked me!” said Nancy. “He told me that we were
going to record two or three songs while we were out in the Spring. He
didn’t say anything to me about an album, songs, repertoire. And
I was just like ‘Oh, surprise!’” But that’s the
way the couple makes its music, approaching stages and sessions without
much of a plan. “Sometimes it’s just what you feel like that
day,” He says. “In fact this new one is very much that way.
It’s very unscripted. Of course I’ve done that way on shows
a lot of times. A great deal of the time, you just play a number in front
of people, and that dictates what you play next. And if you have a big
backlog of stuff to draw on, that helps of course.”
That “backlog” is actually one of the enviable repertoires
in American music, a vast catalog of songs from the famous to the obscure
that lets the Blakes pick tunes the way painters pick colors. Here, new
Blake songs like the title track and “Seaboard Airline Rag”
sit comfortably next to folk heirlooms like “Katy Cline” and
“He’s Coming To Us Dead,” a wrenching little song about
a father collecting the body of his soldier son. Whether that song was
motivated by current events or not, Nancy’s unusual and beguiling
version of “The Star Spangled Banner” certainly was. Inspired
by a speech in the heat of the 2004 presidential campaign, she left the
couples’ camper home and crossed over to the old warehouse recording
studio and laid down this arrangement on mandolin. “It’s refreshing
to hear a slightly different version that isn’t blown out the top,”
she says. “That’s what we need – a little quieter, gentler
thoughtful approach with a lot more imagination to our culture right now.
And that’s what I was trying to say.”
As they have for decades, the Blakes continue to show us that old songs
and old musical values have a great deal to tell us and teach us about
our contemporary lives. Technology is changing music more radically than
it has since the radio and phonograph mixed up America’s regional
musics into a vast creative smelting forge. But in Norman and Nancy’s
hands, the rawest ingredients of voices, stringed instruments and sturdy
songs demonstrate that purity is still possible and truth is still the
brightest, strongest metal of all. Some artists of Norman’s generation
have breathed life into their careers by collaborating with jam bands
and other young musicians. But Norman has chosen to look inward instead.
“It’s the music that I want to make,” he says. “I
don’t have those kind of career aspirations. I enjoy playing music
with Nancy. When we can do something good, like the last record, that’s
an accomplishment to me.” And Nancy is content with carrying the
music back home to the porch and the living room, where, symbolically
and literally, it was born. “Everything from here on out after this
one is epilogue,” she says.
NORMAN and/or NANCY BLAKE SOUND RECORDINGS
Date
2005 BACK HOME IN SULPHUR SPRINGS (Plectrafone Records / Dualtone 1211)
2004 MORNING GLORY RAMBLERS (Plectrafone Records / Dualtone 1160)
2002 OLD TIES (Rounder 1166)
2001 FLOWER FROM THE FIELDS OF ALABAMA (Shanachie 6053)
2001 MEETING ON SOUTHERN SOIL (Red House 153)
1999 FAR AWAY, DOWN ON A GEORGIA FARM (Shanachie 6045)
1999 NORMAN BLAKE & RICH O’BRIEN “BE READY BOYS”
(Western Jubilee Recording Co. 1182)
1998 CHATTANOOGA SUGAR BABE (Shanachie 6027)
1996 THE HOBO’S LAST RIDE (Shanachie 6020)
1994 WHILE PASSING ALONG THIS WAY (Shanachie 6012)
1992 JUST GIMME SOMETHIN’ I’M USED TO (Shanachie 6001)
1992 FIELDS OF NOVEMBER / OLD & NEW (compilation) (Flying Fish 70004)
1990 BLAKE / RICE II (Rounder 0266)
1988 BLIND DOG (Rounder 0254)
1988 NATASHA’S WALTZ (compilation) (Rounder 11530)
1987 TAKOMA PLUS ONE (compilation) (Takoma 72826)
1987 SLOW TRAIN THROUGH GEORGIA (compilation) (Rounder 11526)
1987 BLAKE / RICE (Rounder 0233)
1986 NORMAN AND NANCY COMPACT DISC (Rounder 11505)
1986 GRAND JUNCTION (Nancy Blake) (Rounder 0231)
1985 LIGHTHOUSE ON THE SHORE (Rounder 0211)
1984 NASHVILLE BLUES (Rounder 0188)
1982 ORIGINAL UNDERGROUND MUSIC FROM THE MYSTERIOUS SOUTH (Rounder 0166)
1981 FULL MOON ON THE FARM (Rounder 0144)
1979 THE RISING FAWN STRING ENSEMBLE (Rounder 0122)
1978 DIRECTIONS (Takoma 1064)
1977 BLACKBERRY BLOSSOM (Flying Fish 047) (Rounder re-release 2000)
1976 LIVE AT McCABE’S (Takoma 1052)
1976 WHISKEY BEFORE BREAKFAST (Rounder 0063)
1975 NORMAN BLAKE & RED RECTOR (County 755))
1975 HDS SESSIONS (Flying Fish 701)
1975 OLD AND NEW (Flying Fish 010)
1974 THE FIELDS OF NOVEMBER (Flying Fish 004)
1972 HOME IN SULPHUR SPRINGS (Rounder 0012)
SOUNDTRACK RECORDINGS
2003 COLD MOUNTAIN (DMZ / Columbia 86843)
2000 O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? (Mercury 088170)
VIDEO RECORDINGS
NORMAN BLAKE - GUITAR TECHNIQUES Video Two (Instructional) (Homespun)
NORMAN & NANCY BLAKE - THE VIDEO COLLECTION 1980-1995 (Vestapol 13059)
LEGENDS OF FLATPICKING (Compilation) (Vestapol 13005)
MY DEAR OLD SOUTHERN HOME (Shanachie 208)
THE MANDOLIN OF NORMAN BLAKE (instructional) (Homespun)
NORMAN BLAKE GUITAR TECHNIQUES (instructional) (Homespun)
PLANET RIDER (Central Sun Video)
NORMAN BLAKE & THE RISING FAWN STRING ENSEMBLE (Ramblin’)
BOOKS
1998 NORMAN BLAKE ANTHOLOGY (Mel Bay Publications)
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