Quick Q and A with Jeremy Lyons
 by Kathy S-B  ·  28 November 2009

Jeremy Lyons has quickly become a popular figure in the greater Boston music scene since he moved back up here after Katrina put a halt to his music on the streets of New Orleans. Jeremy has quickly become a new favorite. The me&thee was thrilled to present him two seasons ago when we needed a quick replacement on the day of the show. He impressed us and the audience and it’s terrific to have him back on our stage.

You can read more about Jeremy on his website, and check out this video of Jeremy playing some mighty fine guitar.

When did you first pick up the guitar? Did you take formal lessons?

I started playing the guitar when I was around 14 or 15. I really wanted to play bass, actually; a friend of mine had a bass guitar and amp and effects and I was seduced by the size of the thing, the thickness of the strings, the tone, the range. . . Anyway, my dad had an old classical guitar in the closet. He had taken lessons for a little while — classical guitar lessons — but according to him his nails kept breaking and he gave it up. I used to take the thing out of the closet now and again and strum train songs on it when I was little. Then when I wanted to play bass, my dad gave me the guitar. At first I was just going to use that till I could get a really bass, but I ended up falling for guitar instead. And although I have enjoyed playing a number of other instruments, guitar is my one true love.

I took piano and recorder lessons for a bit as a kid, and then jazz piano when I was a teenager. I never really practiced much or learned to read music, but my teacher, a very talented woman named Molly MacMillan, hipped me to blues scales, some neat chords and progressions. A little Monk, Miles Davis, some Basin St. Blues, etc. I had started playing guitar around the same time but it was a while before I was able to put the knowledge together from both instruments.

I mostly learned guitar from friends, and from books as well. I was learning whatever my friends who already played would show me - Police, Pink Floyd riffs, Stones, Dylan, the pentatonic scale, all kinds of garage rock. Sabbath, Cream, and that kind of thing. I didn’t even listen to some of the music I was learning, just picked it up from friends. By the time I was 16, some buddies and I put together a band to compete in the high school Battle of the Bands. We were really ragged and all the other bands were very polished, but we were the only group that mostly made up our own songs. And we were weirdoes, so that counted for something. I still believe that heart and commitment are more important to performance than chops.

I began taking formal lessons after I’d been playing for about 5 years already, and had in focus exactly what I wanted to learn. I had become disenchanted with bands, because I couldn’t deal with the personal politics or the volume. I became a folk singer. I had been writing a lot from the get-go, but I gave it up for a while because: a) I had nothing to write about (i.e.: no life experience), and b) I didn’t really understand what a song was. So I went to the basics to learn: folk music and blues, mostly. I became completely enthralled of early, early recordings of old blues, Appalachian music and the like. The scratchier, the better. The static was to me like listening through a time warp to the past. (I was a Doctor Who fan from way back and had a pretty active imagination.) And I have always been interested in where things came from, in how they came about, in digging up history. So from rock n roll and stuff I just headed back (and South), and discovered what I liked. Plus I wanted to be a one-man-act so I taught myself a little finger picking. I had started playing slide guitar early on.

Then one summer that I was back home after my first year in college — I was just 19, so it was about 20 years ago — I got up the nerve to approach Martin Simpson about lessons. I knew him through his stepsons, a couple of metal heads with whom I went to high school. Martin and his then-wife and musical partner Jessica Radcliffe Simpson had moved from England to Ithaca, NY (where I was raised). Martin is a British guitarist who came up in the wake of Fairport and Pentangle, probably heavily influenced by Richard Thompson and John Renbourn, but he also had a great feel for old country blues and slide guitar. In eight weeks of lessons he unlocked a lot of secrets for me — Mississippi John Hurt, Fred McDowell, Robert Johnson, even Clarence Ashley banjo stuff converted for guitar. He seems to know exactly what I was into. He taped all the lessons and I had those tapes till they were destroyed with much of my other possessions in the New Orleans flood of ‘05.

I practiced that stuff for the next few years while I was in college, and after a brief stay in New Mexico I headed to New Orleans where I soon fell in with a bunch of street musicians, many of whom were very talented and knowledgeable guitar players who had as much to teach me as Martin had. I learned especially a great deal from Kenny Holladay, a guitarist who had moved to New Orleans from Cambridge, MA only a few years before, and from a guy named Augie Rodola Junior, from a Cajun named Butch Trivette, and from “Washboard” Lissa Driscoll.

Do you have any interesting anecdotes to tell about your days playing the streets of New Orleans?

Oh, geez. Heck, yeah.

On the streets in New Orleans, there was a lot of competition for band spots. We played on Jackson Square for the first year or more, eventually moving to Royal Street which would be closed off to traffic during the day. Opportunities were on a first come, first served basis, so we would literally have to post a sentinel out on our spot all night sometimes. We had a big band, sometimes as many as 12 or 15 players, so we could take two-hour shifts starting at 3am, 2, sometimes as early as midnight. (This schedule helped prepare me for parenthood.) We could start playing around 11am. We had a bunch of resonator guitars, tub bass or upright bass, harmonicas, washboards, sometimes drums, horns, piano and accordion. The lineup of the band changed throughout the day so everyone who wanted to could get a chance to sing, and we rarely repeated songs. I learned a lot of tunes and picked up a lot of licks in a short period of time. I also got pretty cocky. That hurt in the long run. Prompted me to turn down a lot of opportunities that might have panned out. But whatever, right? I’m still here.

I got to know some of the homeless people pretty well while I was on the street. Some of the senior members of our band — the Big Mess Blues Band, it was called — were pretty . . . edgy characters. So the homeless were really only a small step from us, in terms of our social standing. Some of them were pretty interesting people. There was one guy with a swollen vodka nose like W.C. Fields, long, blonde hair, and beard. He was from Mississippi. He was called Cornbread and he would go on soliloquies that were just fascinating. He and most of the others were in and out of Central Lockup. They would go in for a month and come out clean and shaved and sober, and by the end of the day would be on a bender. Cornbread died in jail a few years ago. There was also a guy named Cherokee, who got killed after getting stabbed up on the levee. Lots of folks who were at the end of their lifespan but when you talked to them you learned that they had each had very interesting and difficult lives.

There are lots of other good stories; the time the whole band were this close to getting flown out to Tahiti for Christmas (but we blew the negotiations); the time my friend Bobby and I were hired for a TV commercial and he spent all his rent money because he was convinced he was going make it rich off residuals but the spot got cancelled; the times I was held up at gunpoint and had fortunately left my guitar or all my money somewhere else. The time Augie turned an entire Thanksgiving dinner onto the floor. Playing on Jackson Square on Christmas day in 35-degree weather. I’ll be sure to tell some of these stories at the Me & Thee, as many of my songs are about those days.

You studied ethnomusicology in college. Your general thesis is that the various ethnic and popular musical styles in America are all pretty similar. Is it possible to say what “American genre” is at each end of the spectrum or have nearly all music genres moved centrally to share common elements? How did you come to discover what you call “deltabilly” music?

“Deltabilly” is a term I came up with to describe what I do; particularly what my band does, in a shorthand type of way. It started out as “Deltabilly Swing,” which was the name of my first record, in 1998. Deltabilly=Delta Blues+Rockabilly+Hillbilly.

My band (“The Deltabilly Boys” in New Orleans and “Bright Moments” here in New England) plays a mix of Delta Blues, Harlem Swing, New Orleans R&B, Rockabilly, Classic Country, Surf, Western Swing, and so on. Basically, it’s classic American party music. Nowadays I guess people call what I do “Americana,” which I think is pretty comical. “Americana” generally refers to white “roots music.” I mean — you don’t hear that term applied to black musicians, even when the material is virtually identical. That’s the point I was trying to get across with “deltabilly:” the differences that separate American musical genres are far less significant than the similarities

Early recordings of white and black rural music were often indistinguishable, but record companies marketed them along racial lines. Later on, “Blues” or “R&B” were code words used by the record industry to mean “Black,” and “Rock & Roll,” though invented by whites and blacks simultaneously, quickly came to mean “white R&B.”

All American styles have been cross-pollinated multiple times. Country artists use blues forms and vice versa. Early blues artists would play tunes with Jazz changes. Jazz artists improvise over revamped show tunes. Western Swing mixed elements of hillbilly, blues and jazz. Cajun musicians in the 40s and fifties basically played Western Swing sung in French. Zydeco started as Creole-French Blues played on the accordion with homemade percussion. And the term “pop” merely refers to a wide market base, not to any qualities of music itself. At the present time, when American music has influenced music all over the world and those “world” elements have leaked back into music here, isn’t time we opened our ears and stopped trying define our tastes and influences simply along lines that are drawn by publicists and nit-picking critics?

Are you still doing your Deltasilly shows for children? What’s your favorite thing about playing for children?

Oh, yes, music for children has become a large, and very rewarding part of my career. I play shows at two locations of the Stellabella’s toy stores in Cambridge, every other week at a pre-school, and I’ve started doing monthly shows at the Fox Branch Library in Arlington. And this year I was Music Specialist at the Park School Summer Camp (“Summer @ Park”) in Brookline.

I love playing for kids for a number of reasons. The hours are better for someone like myself, who is a parent and no longer a night owl. (Actually, playing on the street was great because we’d be playing for all ages, not just for those who were old enough to drink or sufficiently free of responsibility to spend a lot of time and money in bars late at night.) I also find that children are better audiences in general; they are more likely to listen and pay attention than adults in a nightclub. (The parents are another story.) And it’s really neat to be an early influence on children in this subtle way. I believe that live music is suffering in this country in general, and that there are fewer venues that are family-friendly. A lot of children’s entertainers focus on singing original songs with a lesson or some “politically correct” message, which is fine, but I enjoy introducing kids to music that in some cases is hundreds of years old. There’s nothing wrong with singing songs simply because they’re fun and good songs, even if they don’t teach you to tie your shoes, or to love your neighbor. Music is a positive thing, and the rootsy-er, the better, as far as I’m concerned!