The Times-Picayune

By Keith Spera Music Writer

Spencer Bohren is not a particularly religious man, but he has a special affinity for gospel groups, both real and imagined.

At The Parish of the House of Blues on Tuesday, Bohren sat in with the Blind Boys of Alabama, adding his trademark acoustic slide guitar to three songs by the famed gospel singers. So impressed was Clarence Fountain, the Boys’ 80-ish leader, that he declared of Bohren and fellow guest guitarist David Lindley, “Those boys played like they’ve been born again.”

When Bohren was recording his much-acclaimed “Carry the Word” two years ago, he communed with a gospel quartet called the Nott Brothers. The Notts grace the CD with rich, warm harmonies, complementing the intimate arrangements of traditional spirituals, songs that Bohren has performed since childhood.

When his mother first listened to “Carry the Word,” she was struck by how much it sounded like Bohren and his brothers harmonizing with their father years ago in church. A Swiss promoter heard it and called to book Bohren and the Nott Brothers for a series of concerts in medieval cathedrals.

Bohren had to decline. And the Nott Brothers won’t be joining him today at 5:10 p.m. on the Lagniappe Stage at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. But in a way, they will: Bohren is the Nott Brothers and the Nott Brothers are Bohren.

A last-minute change of plans during the recording of “Carry the Word” forced him to sing all the parts he had mapped out for a real gospel quartet; he named the fictional group the “Nott Brothers.” Bohren inhabits the soul of this music so completely that most listeners don’t notice the rues. “Carry the Word” was named the best local album of 2000 by The Times-Picayune, and has earned similar kudos elsewhere.

After a 35-year odyssey of many miles and many forms of music, Bohren found his most affecting artistic statement residing almost completely within himself.

“This gospel record has moved people that none of my other records might have gotten to,” Bohren said. “I don’t want to be branded as some born-again zealot—that’s far from the truth. But this music is meaningful to me. It came out so easily. I didn’t have to think a lot about it, its so deep inside of me.”

Crescent City’s siren song

Bohren, 51, was raised in Wyoming. He does not remember learning to sing or play guitar; it was something he, his parents and siblings just did, often in church. At 14, he started playing professionally in 1964 at women’s clubs, church functions, county fairs. The folk music renaissance was in full bloom then; archival recordings of Mississippi Delta bluesmen that found their way to Wyoming fueled Bohren’s early fascination with acoustic blues.

The day he graduated from high school, Bohren set off on three decades of roaming. First came Denver, then the West Coast. He lived on a commune in Oregon, joined a touring Seattle band and bounced back to Colorado, where he met Dr. John at the height of the good doctor’s hoodoo psychedelic period.

“We were hanging around all these people with pirate suits and snake tattoos and glitter and feathers and beads,” Bohren said. “We were hippies, but we’d never seen anything like this.”

Dr. John regaled Bohren with tales of New Orleans and its Mardi Gras Indians and spiritual churches. “I didn’t know anything about this,” Bohren said. “New Orleans was very undercover at that time.”

Intrigued, Bohren and his wife journeyed south. They arrived in New Orleans just before Fat Tuesday. The city “wrapped its tendrils around us, and the next thing you know, we were stuck.”

Gigs were scarce in New Orleans in the mid-’70s, but Bohren landed on eat a place called Spaghetti Eddie’s. He performed with a legendary crew of hard-partying locals, slowly building a following. In 1983 he packed his ever-growing family into an Airstream trailer and hit the road. After seven years of near-constant touring, the family settled in Wyoming.

In 1996, he and his wife made a fateful visit to New Orleans. Sitting in Jackson Square on a brilliant fall afternoon, they had an epiphany: The Big Easy was home. The family packed up once again and landed in Mid-City.

“We were welcomed back with open arms, as if we’d never been gone.” Bohren said. “There’s something real special here. Touring Europe 30-some times, I’ve seen a lot of amazing things, and played with great musicians from a lot of places. All of that experience makes me realize more than ever how truly unique New Orleans is.”

All parts Bohren

For the first 20 years of his career, Bohren didn’t make a record. “I didn’t feel that it was that big a deal,” he said. “You’re at the gig, everything’s cool, you drink some beers and the next thing you know it’s 20 years later.

“It’s hard for me to believe, because now I make records all the time. I can’t imagine that I deprived myself of that kind of pleasure for that long.”

He now has more than a dozen albums to his credit, including several Japan- and Europe-only releases. The seeds for “Carry the Word” were sown with its predecessor, the acoustic guitar and harmonica meditation “Dirt Roads.” Bohren bookended with a pair of old spirituals. Encouraged by positive response to them, he decided to make an entire album of such material.

He entered a friend’s Jackson, Miss., recording studio in April 1999. A Mississippi gospel quartet, the Williams Brothers, was scheduled to come in on the last day of the session and add harmonies. The band’s leader called that morning with bad news: He and the others were laid up with the flu. With no time to find a replacement, Bohren laid down the gospel himself.

He would sing one part, roll back the tape, add another, then do it again, building the “quartet” one take at a time. He rendered the soul-swoop falsettos, the bass parts, all the gospel harmonies that resonate so deeply throughout the album. And he invented the “Nott Brothers” name.

“It was so different than the plan. In the end, I think it’s much better. It went very quickly, because I knew exactly what I wanted. There was no teaching any lyrics; I just went in and sang it.”

The powerful simplicity of “Dirt Roads” and “Carry the Word” made Bohren rethink his methods.

“I realized that maybe all these records that I was making along the lines of John Hiatt or Steve Earle weren’t really what I had to offer,” he said. “These last two records are these simple, rootsy records and they really struck a chord with people.

An artist’s life

As good as they are, they likely will never sell big numbers. Lean times last year forced Bohren to accept his first-ever day job; it didn’t last. Then in February he appeared on “A Prairie Home Companion,” the syndicated radio variety show with Garrison Keillor as host, and played for 4 million listeners. He’ll return to the show May 19, and hopes the exposure will give his career another boots.

Such are the ups and downs of the life of a musician, the life he’s chosen, the life that chose him.

“At this point, I feel real good about my life and myself and my music,” he said. “I realize that the music is just a reflection of whatever life I’ve got going. Maybe that’s why these records are so calm.

“It’s a great gift to be an artist. My daughter once said, ‘It’s maybe not a good living, but it’s a great life.’ It’s true. We’ve made a life that would be impossible to pay for. It’s been quite a journey.”

LAST DECADE IN PARIS
Chapter Three

By Mike Zwerin

The Mississippi Delta was shining
Like a National guitar
– Paul Simon

When I first met Spencer Bohren, the Paul Simon line above was not yet a cliche. And it had taken Bohren a while to come to terms with the idea that journalists are more interested in his lifestyle than his music. I think I was the first journalist to put that on the table with him.

He was an excellent guitarist, sang with conviction, had a warm low-keyed stage presence and ‚ along with John Hammond Jr. ‚ was one of the few white solo blues singers who made a living at it. He would drive a total of a thousand miles to get to four or five one- nighters a week and when he started to raise a family he realized that he’d either have to start bringing them along or lose them. His wife, Marilyn, was a midwife in Louisiana, delivering babies for circus people. The circus people recommended the mobile-home life. Bohren saw that what these people lacked in space and privacy was made up in rich relationships.

The Bohrens first hit the road as a family when their oldest son, Django (named after the Gypsy guitarist) turned six. There were four children, the youngest was seven months. They were all born at home and the older ones were home-schooled. They started with an old Chevrolet towing a bottom-of-the-line trailer. Bohren learned how to repair the engine “with a flashlight in my teeth. I’m a hell of a mechanic on a small-block Chevy engine. I learned in the School of Hard Knocks ‚ or rather valve knocks. I dug us out of some major holes.”

But before I met him, the blues business had begun to look up. He had recently bought what he described as a “maxed-out silver Airstream chrome- home deluxe,” 35 feet long with three axles, a hardwood interior and cedar closets (”it’s a real dish”). And then there was also a new Ford van that was “made to tow, it’s a killer vehicle.”

The fact that the loan officer was a blues fan is the only explanation Bohren could think of for approving a $31,000 loan to someone with $91 in the bank and without “what most people consider a job.” He called it a “dream life, that endless American highway åOn the Road’ thing. We’re not really political, we just know a lot of people who don’t fit the envelope exactly. I think we’re only taking advantage of the freedom America offers.”

It was the old Huck Finn vision of freedom in America, free of school, free of prison workplaces. He ran into some resentment and jealousy, but also a great deal of respect and generosity. A shrimp fisherman in Florida who was touched by his music gave him a mint condition 1928 National guitar. He told Bohren this incredible wartime story about his friend Shorty, who said, just before he died: “Arthur, take this guitar and give it to…” Another time, Bohren was buying a Toyota part from a funky biker who was running what appeared to be a fencing operation in New Orleans when he saw this black 1958 National that looked like a compressed Buick leaning against a wall. The biker said to take it home.

“I guess it’s my good looks,” Bohren said, laughing. He was born and grew up in Wyoming and you get a touch of the prairie when he laughs. They traveled by the old blue highways, driving slowly, stopping often, the kids were always looking out the windows, interested, thinking, asking questions. It took Django four years to learn his multiplication tables but he learned them.

The family was thrown together, they’d become friends. And returning over and over to the same towns, the family accumulated a lot of outside friends, although they only saw them a few at a time. Kind of a horizontal crowd. “My life is horizontal,” Bohren said. “I may not be famous but I’m working everywhere, I’ve got all the local gigs in America, I’m a local everywhere.”

Six weeks a year he worked in Europe, mostly Scandinavia, and then he left the family behind. Early in 1989, he recorded an album with Totta Naslund, a Swedish blues singer, and so that tour was longer than usual. He refused to do it until the record company agreed to pick up the tab to bring over the family. The music has to fit family life rather than the other way around.

On a later tour, while Bohren was working in Paris, Django was sitting in the Airstream, which was parked in his grandfather’s driveway in New York state reading “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Django read four or five books a week. They had no television. If there happened to be one somewhere, Django would turn it off in order to read. “I guess a kid growing up in America without television is rather unusual,” Bohren said, understating up a storm.

He grew up in a church-oriented family. His father was a deacon. He sang gospel songs with the choir. From there it was a short step to the folk movement in the å60s. Moving to New Orleans, he discovered the vast difference between white and black gospel. It was another short step to Robert Johnson.

He lived in Denver, Hollywood, New Orleans: “I had bands, played with bands, endless bands, bands, bands. Then I went out solo, started to build my own circuit. It got better every day. I wasn’t famous but I was popular in blues circles. I used the genuine Delta, Georgia ‚ whatever you want to call it ‚ blues as a jumping-off point. I love the feeling of early blues. It’s so informative, almost like reading a newspaper.”

About once every two years he worked Medicine Bow, Wyoming, close to where he grew up: “It’s a crossroads for two highways nobody ever travels on anymore, 90 miles from the nearest town. Windblown, open range, no fences, mid-Wyoming. My mother stands next to me and points to elderly people saying things like, åThat’s Mrs. Mills, she was your kindergarten teacher.’ I draw tons of people. They tell me what a charming little boy I was. They forget all about the time I was åa nasty drug addict’ and they just about threw me out of town.”

He produced two of his own albums and then sold them to small record companies that barely get them distributed, let alone paid royalties. His wife, who had a business degree, was his manager. Gigs were usually self-promoted. They had a regionalized mailing list and sent out periodic postcards to keep in touch between appearances. The kept a telephone answering machine in a friend’s house and rented a mail service (a packet once every 10 days or so) two blocks from Fats Domino’s mansion in Arabi, Louisiana.

One day they got a letter from Ojaste and Christian Di Natale, an English teacher and a physiotherapist who had started a label called Loft Records in their spare time, of which there was plenty, in Vichy, France. The partners had stumbled on one of Bohren’s records and wrote to the address on the jacket. Bohren became a Loft artist. He said he thought it was “pretty hip to have a record company in Vichy.”

So after Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet, Jerry Lewis and Samuel Fuller…Ladies and gentlemen, Spencer Bohren. The French are always pleased to discover American talent from under American noses. Business had been better than good, media play out of sight, when he opened at the Platinum Bar of the Meridien Hotel in Montparnasse for a week. “They seem to think I’m some kind of star over here,” he said. “I’m beginning to believe it myself.”

Mike Zwerin has been jazz and rock critic for the International Herald Tribune for the last twenty years. He was also the European correspondent for The Village Voice. Mike Zwerin is the author of several books on jazz and the jazz editor of Culturekiosque.com.

Copyright © 1996 – 2001 Culturekiosque Publications Ltd. All Rights Reserved

If you missed Spencer’s Prairie Home Companion debut, you can still hear the show at the PHC archives.

Click here to check it out.

TOP 20 CD’s of 2000

New Orleans Times-Picayune

Spencer Bohren traveled many miles before coming home. Just as he had toured the country for years in an Airstream trailer and lived out West before returning to New Orleans, a city that had seduced the Wyoming native once before, he had released several albums of acoustic blues and folk before rediscovering his musical roots in gospel.

“Carry the Word” is a quietly moving synthesis of traditional gospel and noble blues, a timeless recording of delicate beauty that is simultaneously old and new. The bare-bones arrangements – most consist only of Bohren’s voice and slide guitar, with occasional embellishment by JAB Wilson’s harmonica, the Nott Brothers gospel quartet and singer Teresa Albury – lend additional poignancy to the inherent convictions of the material. On “I Am a Pilgrim,” Bohren’s voice is set against the deep intonations of the Nott Brothers and the long, resonating quivers of guitar strings. “Samson and Delilah” brims with subtle menace and foreboding. The last lingering note of the haunting “One Kind Favor” trails off, taking listeners away with it. Bohren testifies on “I’ve Been Delivered,” settles in for a gorgeous “Amazing Grace,” then lays “Beulah Land” down in the pocket. He is completely at ease – and at home – on this special album.

The Boston Blues News

Spencer Bohren’s spiritual side of acoustic blues is always a breath of fresh air.

Following his critically acclaimed Dirt Roads release, Bohren here records 11 primarily gospel based tunes. Backed by the dulcet voices of the Nott Brothers Quartet, Bohren opens the CD with “I Am a Pilgrim.” The sweeping musical vista of “Bound for Glory,” a.k.a. “This Train,” rides the rails on Bohren’s pure and simple vocal techniques and his spotless finger picking. His reference to “no Jim Crow riders” shows how spirituals like these were the rallying point of the Civil Rights movement. I haven’t heard “Samson and Delilah” since the days of Peter, Paul and Mary. Bohren’s version finds its power in the restraint he uses in his delivery. When Bohren adds Lemon Jefferson’s darkly colored “One Kind Favor,” he shows how close blues and gospel have always been. With his dark as a river bottom slide and vocal approach, Bohren takes Jefferson into a somber realm not often heard. “Gospel Plow” and “River Jordan” are as simple a pleasure as stars in the night air. The hand clappin’ and slide guitar on “I’ve Been Delivered” centers the spirit in the pews of every cotton field church. He ends the service with a moving cover of “Amazing Grace.” Often this comes with popular culture clutter.

Bohren’s stripped down instrumental approach instead relies on the essence of his evocative slide to transport listeners into their spiritual meditations. “Beulah Land,” with its offer of salvation “way beyond the blue,” closes these musical sermons. Bohren has always been one of those who travels the roads of the spirit close to the taproot of American music.

For that dedication, I am always thrilled to hear his music.

New Orleans Magazine by Jason Berry

 

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.

Blues Review

by Bill Wasserzieher

Carry the Word is a collection of 11 songs of old-time devotion, played at hymnal pace with slide guitar for accompaniment. The songs range from “Bound for Glory” to “I Am a Pilgrim” and are immensely comforting, which is just what I need from time to time.

I have listened repeatedly to Bohren’s album and continue to find deep satisfaction. Perhaps it’s some residual memory surfacing from the days when my ancestors attended country churches in southern Ohio and Missouri before industrialization brought them to the secular promised land of California. I suspect they sang such songs as “Samson and Delilah” and “I Am a Pilgrim,” but for me – a product of my age and time – the first is just and old Victor Mature movie and the latter a Byrds tune from when they went country on Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

Bohren, however, reminds that religion, despite its punishing morality, also provides bedrock sustenance during periods of trouble. His voice is calming, his slide guitar is as sparsely understated as that of Kelly Joe Phelps and his choice of material is as universal as one could expect within such a context. I don’t see myself spending Sundays at church or watching cable preachers vent bigotry and hypocrisy in the name of religion, but I will continue to find faith in Bohren’s Carry the Word. We can all use some comfort for the soul.