(Editor's note: The August 20 show has been cancelled.)
"Little" Annie Raines, 38, is from the Boston area, so she didn't learn how to play harmonica at the knee of anyone in the cotton fields.
"I started playing the harmonica when I was 17 just for something to do," she said in a recent phone interview. "I was looking for a book on juggling - called Juggling for the Complete Klutz - and the bookstore was out of it. But they had Harmonica for the Musically Hopeless, so I got that instead. And that's how I got started playing harmonica."
Annie and her longtime partner - and now husband of one year - Paul Rishell (guitar, vocals) will bring their deep country blues to the Redstone Room at the River Music Experience on Monday, August 20 at 8 p.m. The show is sponsored by the Mississippi Valley Blues Society. This is the final show on Rishell and Raines' current tour that has taken them eight thousand miles across and around the nation from their home base on the East Coast.
The Boston Globe says that "Raines is the perfect foil for Rishell. Both are sincere lovers of the older masters, and though they have chops to spare, they keep their playing straight and simple, going to the heart of the material." Pulse! notes the duo's rapport "and a wide embrace of styles, from Delta heartache to Chicago drive, that make for world-class blues."
Paul and Annie have released three albums as a duo: I Want You to Know (1996), Moving to the Country - which won the Blues Music Award for Acoustic Album of the year in 2000 - and Goin' Home (2004).
Sing Out! comments that audiences worldwide "have been won over by the team's imaginative adaptations and sympathetic re-workings of oft-neglected titles from the songbooks of masters such as Bo Carter, Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Lemon Jefferson and one-man band Jesse Fuller as well as the more modern likes of Magic Sam, J.B. Lenoir, Django Reinhardt and Lightnin' Slim."
Annie said that first harmonica book steered her in the direction of the blues, but three tapes of Muddy Waters given to her by a classmate started her on her journey. "It took me three years to return those tapes," she said. "It absolutely blew my mind! I just started feeling a way I'd never felt before. I'd never really felt good listening to music. I was just amazed at the... pure joy" that she heard in the Muddy Waters band. And she listened to Muddy's harp players: Little Walter, Big Walter, James Cotton, Jerry Portnoy.
She went to Antioch College but dropped out in her first year to pursue music back in Boston. Within a few months she had started playing in a blues jam "and meeting all these incredible people - great harmonica players around Boston, the Cambridge music scene."
One night, when she was still so young she had to sneak into clubs, Annie went to hear harmonica player Artie Fox, who was playing in Paul Rishell's band at the time, and Fox invited her to sit in. That "was pretty uneventful as sitting-in events go. No musical sparks were flying or anything like that. But I did like Paul's singing and choice of songs. No one else was doing harmonica-friendly stuff who had a guitar band. And Paul was pulling out Sonnyboy Williamson songs!"
Paul's manager (his first wife Leslie, who died of cancer in 1996) was at that gig and heard them; she recognized some kind of connection because she encouraged Paul and Annie to play together as a duo. Paul was skeptical, especially since he'd been considering a solo career. But, Annie said, Leslie pointed out to Paul, "'You're so into the musical history and the scholarly stuff, you tend to forget about the entertainment. You play well but you don't care if anybody knows it or not. But Annie cares - she'll make it accessible to people.' And it just took a couple years to work it out. It wasn't 'til I got a gig somewhere and called him up. We had a chemistry right away, a great rapport."
During those years between meeting Paul and connecting with him, Annie traveled to Chicago, where she met and played with Pinetop Perkins, Louis Myers, and James Cotton (who has dubbed Annie "James Cotton Junior").
Also at that time, according to Wikipedia, "Annie taught harmonica and began developing her own style within the blues tradition. Fast becoming one of the most sought-after harmonica players in New England, she had earned a reputation for playing with energy, soulfulness and taste, but she was ready to take her musical education to a deeper level."
That was when she and Paul began working together, in 1993, and when Annie's true education in the blues began.
"When I started playing with Paul," she said, "I didn't know anything about country blues. My concept of acoustic blues was Cephas & Wiggins to Jimmy Reed. I had no idea what a deep well there was. Like a lot of people I thought that the farther back you go the more primitive the music was. But I had no idea what the music really sounded like. Playing with Paul I had a rhythmic epiphany.
"I started to understand there was much more going on with the rhythm than I'd realized - more going on with the beat than Muddy Waters and Little Walter even. So that opened up my ears to the Chicago stuff in a new way because all the Chicago blues players had listened to the country blues when they were growing up. And so they had these polyrhythms in their ears even if they simplified them.
"I started understanding there were more beats than one going on. It wasn't just a shuffle. That improved my playing greatly; it deepened my concept of older and more contemporary blues."
Dirty Linen magazine says Rishell and Raines "have perfected the sort of intuitive musical connection that turns a collaboration into a band, filling in the spaces between each other's notes with just the right improvisations and flairs. They perform both as a duo and with a full electric band, and aside from their own club tours across the country, they've backed up musicians ranging from John Sebastian to Susan Tedeschi. They're proof that the country blues is music that transcends time and space."
Annie and Paul have also had a friendship with Sebastian that goes back almost 15 years, playing in his J-Band doing jug band music until the recent death of washboard player Fritz Richmond, Sebastian's mentor. Now they occasionally play as a trio.
"Because of John," Annie said, "I began listening to jug band music. ...That was a whole other side of the music I hadn't even explored. Party music bands. Good time music. Most of it wasn't what you would technically call blues. They played popular tunes, but they used homemade instruments and it was a communal approach."
Recently, Sebastian joined Rishell and Raines and other guests for a concert in Woodstock, New York, that was filmed by a director fanatical about jug band music. "It was a gig that turned into an everything-we-do night," said Annie. "It started out as a duo and then a trio and then we added Bruce Katz on keyboards.... It was a crazy night. The purpose was to have footage of John playing for the movie. I don't know if they used the footage or not, but we get to use it for a DVD once the movie is done [in about a month]."
Right now, besides the DVD project, she and Paul are "sorta gestating another album," Annie said. "I myself have always preferred playing live because you get something back - there's an audience there.
"This music really exists because of audiences as much as the musicians themselves. It's basically gospel music for people who like to drink. It's interactive music. Somebody's preaching, somebody's testifying, somebody's shouting out. There's not supposed to be a big barrier between the musicians and the audience. It's all supposed to be part of the conversation."
Paul Rishell and Annie Raines will perform at the Redstone Room in downtown Davenport at 8 p.m. on Monday, August 20. For more information, visit (http://www.redstoneroom.com).
