New Orleans

Volume 35, Number 1 | October 2000

Spencer Bohren grew up in a big Baptist family in Casper, Wyo., a town more noted for straight-arrow politicians like Dick Cheney than for folk singers stricken with wanderlust. He sang in the choir of the church where his father was a deacon: he sang those time-tested religious favorites like "Amazing Grace," "River Jordan" and "Beulah Land," among others.

Bohren's Latest CD, Carry the Word pays homage to the spiritual imagination of his youth. This work, it is charitable and accurate to say, is a far piece from the blues-laced folk songs that the guitarist and songwriter has performed in countless locations and on a string of CDs for some three decades now. A few religious songs dot some of the earlier works, but a full array of religious songs is something new for this troubadour. As an 18-year-old in exile in Denver, Bohren cut his teeth on music of the Kingston Trio and soon Bob Dylan, during early chapters of his odyssey.

"Gospel-singing families learn to sing harmony and speak English at the same time," he says with a chuckle. "I like to call myself a recovering Baptist. But as time passed, I realized how fond I was of those songs."

Carry the Word has a lush serenity in the unhurried vocals and a river-flowing resonance in the guitar chords. It's a deep, mellow sound with echoes of the spiritual energy in pews of swaying black churchgoers, yet undergirded by a more deliberate pacing from the way white choirs sing old hymns.

"The black gospel stuff is deeper and more obviously heartfelt," Bohren says. "From gospel to blues to jazz, it's always the better stuff to me. In my [religious] tradition the music is very straight. I took my cue from the old-timey Virginia and Carolina musicians, that high lonesome sound."

So the echoes of bluesman "Blind Willie" McTell and country pioneer A.P. Carter are as calculated as the inspiration of music.

"I'm not on any sort of crusade," says Bohren with unaffected candor. "It's all interrelated, like a gumbo."

Bohren who recently turned 50, has lived an intriguing life, with a good many contradictions along the way.

It's fair to call him a family man. He and his wife, Marilyn, have been together 30 years; they have four kids, ranging in age rom 23 to 9.

But music-making is a hard life because of the heavy travel necessary to advance a career and to sell the recordings. Lots of relationships go bust along the way.

Bohren visited New Orleans in the late '70s and plunged into the club circuit. "New Orleans strummed a big chord for us," he says. The town became his base as a traveling folk-blues musician. Marilyn delivered babies as a midwife. They liked the town's bohemian ways. Thy also go restless. And so in 1983, they packed up the children and started driving. They didn't stop for seven years. Until 1990 they lived, literally, on the road. The 1955 Chevy Bel Air (which has 755,000 miles and has been through several generations of engines) crisscrossed American toting an Air Stream trailer in which they bathed, slept and home-schooled the kids, the youngest of whom was born in those years.

"Marilyn booked the gigs from phone booths," says Bohren with the wistful air of a man recalling his salad years on, say, an island off a barrier reef.

Bohren's operation seems to have been a fusion of "The Waltons" and Jack Kerouac's On the Road.Beatniks with family values - onward!

They tapped into a network of clubs, campuses and coffeehouses that catered to folk music. "Marilyn would get the kids up in the morning for a little regional adventure: Visiting a fort or the library, or going to see where Buddy Holly's airplane went down. Then by noon we'd be leaving again. We kept the trailer and car together and that was how it worked."

It was not all one-night gigs. At times they spent stretches in neighborhoods where they made friends, parked the trailer in carports or side yards and stayed a while. In Florida they became friends with a marine biologist who in another incarnation had been a bartender at Tipitina's. The kids spent time on his boat.

Reminiscing about the towns and cities they visited during those seven years, Bohren calls it, "a great education for my children. They learned more about American than most kids. And the read. A lot."

Bohren released six CDs during that long haul; he developed a following in many places that provides a network for appearances with each new CD.

The family stopped the odyssey when the oldest son, Django (named for the famous gypsy musician Django Reinehardt) turned 13 and decided he wanted to go to a real school.

All of the children have done well as students, Bohren says. Two of his sons are grown; one daughter is a student at Benjamin Franklin and NOCCA, another son is in junior high.

"When we stopped, I let the kids and Marilyn make up their minds on where we'd live," he says. Life had moved at Dad's pace for so many years; he felt he owed them that latitude. They chose Fort Collins, Colo., because the family of subdudes musician John Magnie who had been their neighbors in New Orleans, had settled in Fort Collins. Marilyn began working as a manager for the subdudes.

In 1992 they moved to Casper, Wyo., where Bohren hadn't lived in many years. It allowed him to renew bonds with family members and spend time with his father in his final years.

"I had the opportunity to buy a house," he says. He was also coping with an occupational hazard from his nomadic travels as a solo musician—"I needed to get clean and sober. We lived in Casper for five years."

In 1997 they sold the house and bought one in New Orleans. Moving back seemed like a second homecoming.

"Musicians are rootless by nature, and I'm happy to be back," says Bohren, who has touring plans underway for Europe and points afar in the United States in the coming months.

Carry the Word with its hymnal pacings and warm lyrics of down home faith is a substantial contribution to Spencer Bohren's repertoire. Returning to his Baptist roots seems to have been a purifying experience, a midlife plank building on older blocks of memory and music.

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