Memphis, TN – Nineteen individuals and organizations will be honored with The Blues Foundation’s 2010 Keeping the Blues Alive (KBA) Award during a recognition brunch at the Downtown Doubletree Hotel Saturday, January 23rd, 2010, in Memphis, Tennessee. The KBA ceremony begins at 10:00 A.M. and will be held in conjunction with the 26th International Blues Challenge (IBC) weekend of events that will feature the semifinals and finals of the world’s largest gathering of blues bands, as well as seminars, showcases, and receptions for blues societies, fans, and professionals.

The Keeping the Blues Alive Awards recognize the significant contributions to blues music made by the people behind the scenes. Each is selected on the basis of merit by a panel of blues professionals. KBA Chairman Art Tipaldi notes with respect to this year’s recipients: “We are very pleased to bestow this recognition on people and organizations who have promoted blues music for many, many years. Increasingly, this is an international effort, and this year’s recipients reflect the worldwide impact of blues music.”
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Some people are surprised that he would get nervous performing at all. Spencer Bohren has toured from Japan to Europe to all over the United States. But his hometown is where he gets the most pre-concert jitters.

It’s actually comical for people in Casper who take pride in saying that the successful musician was born and raised here.

For more of this story by clicking here.

BIG TIMBER ROOTS ‘n’ BLUES
Guitar Workshop

Big Timber, Montana – October 10 & 11, 2009

Attention guitar players!! Now is the time to sign up for Spencer Bohren’s autumn acoustic guitar workshop to be held in Big Timber, Montana, amid the scenic grandeur of Sweet Grass County where the Yellowstone River meets the Boulder River in the shadow of the mysterious Crazy Mountains before flowing into Yellowstone National Park. There’s no prettier place to make friends with other players and singers while learning how to get the most from your acoustic guitar.

We will spend two full days playing blues, country, folk, gospel and original songs, and in the process we will cover finger picking, flat picking, open tunings, musical philosophy, singing and song writing. The students influence the direction of the workshop, and breakfast and lunch are provided.

Big Timber is an intact western town where you almost expect to run into Bat Masterson and Doc Holliday playing cards in the saloon of the historic Grand Hotel or witness a cattle stampede on the edge of town. The air is pure, the citizens are friendly, and you will have a great time playing music with no distractions. Guaranteed!

Early Birds get a deal if they sign up before August 10. For additional details please call Marie Thibeault at 406.932.6771, or email her at marie@mtintouch.net.

• Spencer teams up with Bill Kirchen, formerly of Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen. July, 2008.
• Spencer’s exhibits Petits Mysteres at the Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper, WY. February, 2008
• Casper Star Tribune – Read about Spencer’s daring collaboration with opera singer, Karen Clift. April, 2007
• Check out Spencer and the Blind Boys of Alabama on American Routes with Nick Spitzer. June 20, 2001.
• Listen to A Prairie Home Companion with Ralph Stanley and Spencer Bohren. February 17, 2001.
• Hear Spencer with his mom and brother on A Prairie Home Companion in Laramie, Wyoming on May 19, 2001.
• Listen to A Prairie Home Companion Live from the Saenger Theater in New Orleans, Louisiana. February 16, 2002. [ APHC bio for this show ]

spencer bohren - the long black line

“Every New Orleanian knows about the long black line, the dirty bathtub ring left by receding floodwaters. Folk/blues troubadour Spencer Bohren threads that indelible image through a post-Katrina landscape laced with the menace and moan of a slow-crawl, doomsday acoustic slide guitar. His unflinching narration resonates with the authority of an Old Testament prophet. “The Long Black Line” could serve as the soundtrack to a Katrina documentary, but video footage would be redundant – Bohren’s song paints an all-too-vivid picture.”

Also performed are an array of topical songs that give the listener the feeling of reading the news of the day.

- Keith Spera for the Times Picayune.

Cafe Lena review

By David Greenberger

Spencer Bohren Cafe Lena, Saratoga Springs, Sept. 20

Mixing, gospel, folk and blues, Spencer Bohren has a similar sensibility to Geoff Muldaur. Equally affecting as a singer and guitarist, his vocals are resonant and believable. Last Saturday’s show at Caffe Lena found him alternating between electric slide guitar, an acoustic Gibson and a banjo. Adept at each, his playing and singing were intermingled in the best possible ways.

Performing since the sixties and now based in New Orleans, the Wyoming native spent the better part of the eighties touring the country in an Airstream trailer with his wife and children, towed by their ‘55 Chevy Bel Air. Not surprisingly, Bohren’s got a troubadour’s eye for detail, taking notice of the towns he passed through and the people he continues to meet. His two sets mixed originals with worthy covers. The former included his “Night Is Fallin’,” which sounds like the classic it deserves to become. The latter ranged from Woody Guthrie’s “Deportees” to Fred Neil’s “Blues on the Ceiling,” a couple by Hank Williams (”Long Gone Lonesome Blues” and “I’m So Lonesome I could Cry”) and the Rolling Stones’ “No Expectations.”

Bohren’s first set ended with one of numerous stories he told with a hypnotic ease. This one recounted a road trip he’d made which took him past the infamous Parchman Farm prison. This led into an acapella blues he learned from a tape a friend at the Smithsonian supplied him with, and which he was listening to when he happened upon the facility. It was a searing number originally recorded by Alan Lomax at Parchman decades earlier. With his eyes closed and his voice moving from a whisper to a wail, Bohren captured his own personal connection to the song as well as the dignity in the performance that inspired him.

In fact, Bohren’s storytelling had a life of its own. While most stories prefaced specific songs, one did not and it reveled in a life of its own. This tale of a woman named Dawn Petty from Bird City, Nebraska had the masterful strokes and unforced confidence of a natural storyteller. Free of the hyperbole of a raconteur and nuanced with the subtlety of music, Dawn Petty came to life and wanders around in *my* memory now.

METRO SANTA CRUZ    January 29 – February 5, 2003

Spencer Bohren

Call me a godless heathen and a musical philistine to boot, but I just assumed nobody could make me want to sit through old-timey standards like “Amazing Grace” or – sweet Jesus! – “Gospel Plow” ever again.  But, friends, Spencer Bohren has changed all that, and I’m here to testify that his Carry the Word is no mere history lesson.  With an ear for uncanny arrangements and an otherworldly acoustic and slide guitar style, Bohren has injected this roots music with the same rawness that turned the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack into a shocker of a success.  The topper is a bone-chilling, pitch-black version of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “One Kind Favor” (a.k.a. “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”) that drives the song through Springsteen’s Nebraska on its way to the haunted graveyard of Howlin’Wolf.   Henfling’s $8-$10; 8 p.m. (Steve Palpoli)

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.

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