Recording Old-School Music the Old-School Way

The way I see it, if you’re traveling across the U.S. to record in the country’s oldest juke joint with the greatest living practitioner of an esoteric regional tradition, there’s no doing things halfway. I don’t want to preach a kind of analog dogma, but after years of listening to recordings of Jack Owens, Junior Kimbrough, and Fred McDowell on labels like Wolf, Fat Possum, and Arhoolie, I wanted to make every effort to produce my own sessions in the footsteps of David Evans, Bruce Watson, and Alan Lomax, which included using a portable analog setup to capture traditional music in the space where it is authentically made.

So, I brought a Tascam 22-4 reel-to-reel tape machine, several tube preamps, a mixer, and five microphones to produce two albums in two days with 77-year-old Jimmy “Duck” Holmes at the Blue Front Cafe in Bentonia, Mississippi. They are, essentially, modern field recordings done in the old style, produced in the country’s longest-running blues club—hallowed ground where legends like Skip James, Sonny Boy Williamson II, and Howlin’ Wolf all played back in the day. And the feeling of the room, the location itself, is part of not only the sound, but also the atmosphere we caught on tape.

Our approach to recording was simple. Essentially, we followed Jimmy’s ethos of no rehearsals or discussions. (“That’s how the old man does it,” he said.) This was doable because I have been a student of Duck’s for years. When playing with Jimmy, you have to follow each and every note, because he doesn’t adhere to the 12-bar form. It’s truly old school. Fortunately, we also had Grant Smith on calabash, who is a world class musician and an exceptional listener, for our rhythmic anchor.