I've
always thought of Bo Ramsey as the Bob Dylan of Iowa. And not just
because of their hats - late additions, both.
No, it's the way both can write a song whose images and music stay with you after only one listen, cover a song and make it their own, and deliver a hybrid American music that has their particular sound stamped all over it. When I first heard the start of Ramsey's just-released CD Stranger Blues, I thought I'd mistakenly put on Dylan's new release Modern Times instead. And Dylan's "From a Buick 6" (blues from Highway 61 Revisited) fit right in to Ramsey's live set the other week in Des Moines.
Of course, there are major differences between the American music icon and the Iowa roots-rocker. Dylan's a genius poet. Bo's a guitar wizard, keeping an arsenal of axes in different tunings so that he gets the tone just right for whatever sound he's after - Americana or rockabilly or blues.
Bo played guitar on Lucinda Williams' Grammy-winning Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, and he's toured with her, including appearances on The Late Show and The Tonight Show. That 1998 collaboration led to Bo producing Lucinda's later albums and cemented his role as a record producer of note (also adding guitar and vocals) for folks such as Greg Brown, Pieta Brown, Iris DeMent, and Kevin Gordon.
Ramsey will perform with his band Stranger Blues at River Roots Live on Friday, September 22 (9:30 p.m. on the bandshell stage), one of only five dates in support of the Stranger Blues CD. Drummer Steve Hayes has been on all of Ramsey's albums, including the acclaimed Down to Bastrop (the 1991 disc that prompted Lucinda to look Bo up) and In the Weeds (1997), all the way back to the Mother Blues Band days of the early 1970s. Another old friend with whom Bo's developed a musical chemistry is Rick Cicalo on bass. Rounding out the band are Bo's son Benson Ramsey on guitar and Nate Basinger on Hammond B3 organ.
"I have a great appreciation for Bob Dylan," Bo brought up in a recent interview. "He doesn't talk a whole lot. Instead, he's trying to connect to the audience through his music. I like to try and let the music speak."
I had asked Bo what performers had influenced him. The first name that came up was blues legend Muddy Waters, whose stage persona had a big impact: "He was totally himself with no show business involved - I was struck by that and I carried that with me down the line." Muddy's and Howlin' Wolf's performances moved Bo with "their honest delivery of the songs."
Bo continued about the blues: "It's been a music that's stayed with me my entire career, and it's been a constant source of inspiration." This comment surprised me at first; Ramsey does not have a reputation as a blues artist, and his previous recordings and outings with his bands over the past 25 years have presented mostly his own material. Stranger Blues is a departure, but also a coming home to blues roots.
An album of songs by some of his favorite blues artists - the list includes Elmore James, Little Walter Jacobs, Jessie Mae Hemphill, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Howlin' Wolf, and Sonny Boy Williamson - Stranger Blues is Bo's way of "paying tribute to that music that's driven me through my career," he said. He made this record as a labor of love; the hardest part was picking the material from so many great songs.
"I wanted to be righteous to the artist and at the same time put myself into it," he said. "I tried to find songs I could connect with. If you can feel that it creates a way in for your heart and soul to enter, that allows room to express yourself within the song. I serve the song."
Don't be fooled by the Stranger Blues title. What we get from Bo Ramsey is Bo Ramsey: alt-blues, alt-country, eastern-Iowa singer/songwriter roots music. Stranger Blues may be an album of blues covers, but it feels as though Bo Ramsey wrote each song; his style is that unmistakable. That means Bo's protean way of singing - the comparison to Dylan holds - and guitar runs with lots of space and reverb built in.
The eclecticism of the Stranger Blues CD gives a good preview of what Bo's set will sound like. The title song, the album's opener, presents Elmore James in a spooky-sounding, really lonely minor key, and it takes form as a 12-bar blues only after analysis. "Hate to See You Go" has a deep Delta riff and downbeat, with modal chording reminiscent of the kind of mesmerizing north Mississippi blues put forth by R.L. Burnside. The next song continues in this vein, and you probably won't believe the new meaning Bo gives the old standard "Sittin' on Top of the World" - the pace is slow, with an echo-y Delta guitar dripping sarcasm as Bo moans, "Now she's gone but I don't worry."
In the same key and the same mode but much more up-tempo is "Jump Baby Jump" - meant to put any dancer in a trance with its percussion and guitars; Bo's voice here sounds like an old shaman from the north-Mississippi woods. Another dance tune, "Crazy Mixed Up World," is done as more of a slow drag. There's real Muddy-sounding slide on his "Little Geneva," and "You Got Me Dizzy" has Bo singing just like Jimmy Reed, with the band in jump-blues gear. We're back in a deep, scary place, one-chord-keening guitar and Delta groove, with "No Place to Go." Sonnyboy's "Unseeing Eye," as Bo treats it, sounds like a bluesier "Leopardskin Pillbox Hat" (Dylan again) with a great slide-guitar solo.
Joe Price, Pieta Brown, and Greg Brown all contribute guitar work, but the CD features Ramsey playing a variety of guitars including 12-string acoustic and National Reso-phonic. "I think in terms of color," he said. "The picture the song paints, or the images - I can inject colors into the picture with the guitar."
If we can't have the master of images in song, Bob Dylan, at River Roots Live, then Bo Ramsey is the embodiment of what the festival's name implies. Born in 1951 in Burlington, Iowa, next to the Big River and blues Highway 61, Bo Ramsey personifies river-roots music.
To listen to the River Cities' Reader interview with Bo Ramsey, visit (http://www.qcspan.com).
