Kenneth Walton: Old-time sounds of the Deep South making a comeback thanks to Woody Pines

Published on Tuesday 23 March 2010 18:05

IS WOODY Pines a closet time-traveller, or has he perhaps signed some Faustian pact enabling him to stay forever young? Strictly speaking, that question should be phrased "are Woody Pines", for the man and his band share the same name.

Problematical syntax apart, however, the question remains: how does a 30-year-old singer-songwriter living in North Carolina in 2010 manage to sound as if he had projected himself from a historic American Deep South of juke joints, Cajun queens and long dusty highways?

As I noted when I reviewed their current album, Counting Alligators, Pines's nasal holler, squalling harmonica and Nashville resonator guitar, accompanied by fiddle, drums and whumping bass, combines strands of old-time country blues, jug band music and Dixieland to such potent effect that you'd swear they were at least six decades older than they really are, recording for 78rpm shellac rather than CD or iTunes.

It's a sound which they bring to Scotland on Friday as part of their first UK tour. How did they cultivate it, I ask the band's leader – whose Sunday name is Jonathan Woods, but who has long succumbed to the inevitable "Woody".

He says: "It was kind of by default, really. Half of the album was recorded in our living room in Asheville, North Carolina. Most of the tracks were done live, which I think creates a nice energy. We're a live band and we were really shooting for that sound."

The man in the lived-in looking fedora hails originally from New Hampshire, in the extreme north-east of the United States, but an early infatuation with jug band music and ragtime lured him way down south to New Orleans with his friend and co-musician Gill Landry, who is currently with the Old Crow Medicine Show, and who plays on and co-produced the Counting Alligators album. He and Landry toured widely with their band, the Kitchen Syncopators, but New Orleans remained a touchstone and a formative experience.

"It shaped my whole career in a way," says Woody. "I learned all about the jazz musicians and the lifestyle. Basically we'd set up on the street in the French Quarter, and just play. We attacked it like a full-time job for four winters. In summer we'd go back up the west coast and play."

While Woody and his band play some traditional songs, he writes an increasing amount of their material – much of which still manages to sound like period Americana. "Yeah, well I love the sound of the unwritten," he remarks, somewhat cryptically, "or perhaps written by hundreds of people over time.

"The folk process for me is learning a song then forgetting it and re-writing it and singing about what you know.

"Preservationists will learn things note for note and it has to be right. I like changing and twisting it around. I'm a tamperer," he concludes, cheerfully. One suspects Robert Burns might have sympathised.

Woody is speaking to me on the phone while on the Welsh leg of his tour. "We're having a blast. Before we came over, people warned us to be careful, because audiences here would be very attentive but very quiet. Maybe a few theatre-like venues so far have been like that, but most of them have proved that theory completely wrong.

"Last night in Aber… I can't pronounce the name of the town! It was more of a sit-down venue but we still had people up swing dancing. That really feeds back to the band and give us the energy."

He may have trouble pronouncing "Aberystwyth", but there don't seem to be any communication problems music-wise on this side of the Atlantic.

&#149 Woody Pines plays the Tolbooth, Stirling, on Friday then tours various venues across Scotland until 6 April. For details, see www.woodypines.com