C.W. Stoneking is an artist for
whom ‘unexpected’ is probably the default setting. How else to
describe such a fine purveyor of American roots music who also
happens to be a towering, youthful-faced white Australian man?
He surprises first-time listeners, throws curveballs at long-time
fans, and everything he does contains at least some background level of
bafflement for all involved.
There are multitudes in Stoneking’s music. It’s probably easiest to
describe him as a ‘blues artist,’ but the term disguises what makes
his music special. There’s so much in there. A 1920s pre-war blues sound
is key, but there’s almost equal helpings of New Orleans jazz, jug
band music, hokum, country and calypso, and he’s lately brought
in elements of jump jive, early rock’n’roll and gospel. His gift
is that he brings them all together without anything sounding out of
place. He finds the strands that connect all of these different styles and
gently braids them together. It’s what he values more than
anything: “It’s getting everything to unify really. The music, the flow
of it, keeping it moving, with no dead spots. Then I guess having the
lyrics and the meaning that flows in that too, you know? Getting it
all to knit together in a way that, if you didn’t speak English maybe,
you’d still be able to feel the melody, or the sounds of the words.
If you did, then the meaning would also flow. That’s sort of what I’m
trying to do, I guess.” When so many on the blues scene are trying
to sound ‘authentic’ – whatever that is – it’s that unity of
sound that allows Stoneking to actually achieve it, and with apparent
ease, too. Back in the day, no-one was ‘just’ a blues musician, or
a jazz or country musician, and so neither is he.
Stoneking’s work can never really be second-guessed; you never know what
you’re going to get. After charming his audiences with acoustic
parlour guitars, National resonators, tenor banjos and a band laden with
brass on his first two albums, he dropped all of that to go electric
with his latest, 2014’s Gon’ Boogaloo, which was all about
his Fender Jazzmaster and doo-wop backing vocals. While acoustic is
still in his plans, it seems like he’s ditched the banjo for good; he’s
been known to go on the occasional but vicious anti-banjo tirade. When I
try to ask him about it, he suffices with “I have to be careful with
what I say. People get angry about that sort of stuff.” Maybe he’s
been advised by his lawyers. Maybe it’s just part of his own epic,
enigmatic legend.
Storytelling is one of his most potent powers. That man knows how to spin
a yarn. He started his musical life in high school, but asked if he
was a blues artist back then, he says: “I wouldn’t have said I was an
artist of anything, except for maybe a bullshit artist!” It
would seem that never really changed. He has the air of an old
vaudeville master, a carnival caller or maybe a market huckster. By
2008, the UK was in the middle of a mini blues boom sparked by
the successes of Seasick Steve, and a good story was all-important. Each artist
had to have their own romantic blues myth for cachet, and Stoneking
had the tallest tales in his backstory, rejecting the
down-home believability of the aforementioned Steve for way-out
parody. His thing was that he had worked for a time as an assistant
to a witch doctor in New Orleans, before getting drunk and finding himself
on a ship bound for the Congo, only to get shipwrecked and land on a
beach in Gabon…it was a saga that got more madcap and rambling
with each retelling. I’m sure I recall hearing some sort of narrative
detour to a dildo farm at one point. These are stories to be taken
with a bucket of salt.
Naturally, his songs are similarly irreverent and fantastical. His albums
are full of tales of talking animals, hoodoo gone wrong and a myriad
of characters in unfortunate situations in locations from jail to the
jungle to heaven itself. It’s probably easy to tell that a common
thread in Stoneking’s music is his humour. If we’re talking about
the authenticity thing, it’s one thing that makes him stand out from
the crowd. It’s surprising how often musicians today forget how funny
a lot of the old-time music really was, blues or otherwise. Almost all of
his work is drenched in that humour, whether it be sly innuendo, ridiculous
sitcom or his particular knack for extended conversations
between fictional friends – the man holds a whole pantheon of
personalities under his stylish fedora and slicked-back hair. Simply
put, he’s just not so bloody earnest all the time, which is a breath of
fresh air to be honest. It also makes the times when he is earnest
particularly touching – an example is his straight-ahead
‘Charlie Bostock’s Blues,’ a heartbreaking ode to one of Stoneking’s
former bandmates and his tragic end.
How does Stoneking make that world so relevant to his own life? How does
Australia impact on his sound? It’s not something he’s really
pondered too heavily, but his answer is a musing that takes him off on a
ramble about the nature of aesthetics. “When I first was driving
around in the south of America, it was the first time I realised
the Australian lens that I was maybe hearing stuff through. You know
when you’re daydreaming, you hear music and you sort of feel like
there’s a landscape emanating from the person’s voice or the sound of
the music? Hearing Charlie Patton or Son House sing back in the old
days, I realised that the landscape of that internal world
wasn’t really the world that those dudes were actually in. It wasn’t
cut-down jungle and floodplains and green, which is what it made me
think of. It was more like where I grew up: desert, an Australian sort of
arid. Which I’d never thought about, and I was like ‘huh, it might be
different.’” Maybe his music doesn’t sound Australian, but
those experiences as an Australian in Deep South America
have informed the sound: that never-quite-real landscape he heard in
the voices of blues masters certainly does emanate from his own.
And his voice is probably the most recognisable thing about Stoneking. The
accent isn’t quite his own (although he owes that proficiency to his
American parentage), but when he speaks, it is in that same soft, slow
drawl that caresses his music. With another musician, it could all
come across as somewhat tacky and distasteful, but not with Stoneking.
He is so deeply immersed in the world that his music conjures that it’s
hard to imagine him any other way, somewhat like a Lord Buckley of
the blues.
That unique voice of his also has a habit of cropping up in strange
places. Really, who else would be better to provide the voice of a
gentlemanly vegetable fellow, as Stoneking did alongside Elijah Wood in
the charming cartoon short, Tome of the Unknown, in 2013? He could
most recently be heard on notorious blueshead Jack White’s
album Boarding House Reach earlier this year. Such things are
unexpected even for Stoneking himself: his blues skills were not
needed here; his contribution is a somewhat opaque spoken-word poem,
written by White. “It was all kind of mysterious. I had to wear
black and be at this plain-looking building on a certain floor at a
certain time. They’d taken all the light bulbs out and put all black
lights in. He had this sheet of paper with these words written on it,
and I just read it. I didn’t really understand the content of it, it’s
just…me talking something I don’t fully understand, or even partially
understand. But he was into it, so that was his thing. He sent me the
record just before it came out and I was like ‘Oh my god…’ Millions
of people are going to hear this and it’s going to be a track that everyone
goes ‘what the hell is this? Hit the skip button!’ Who cares, though?”
After such an odd experience, would he ever want to collaborate with other
artists in his own work? His answer is immediate, and unsurprisingly
surprising: “Kanye West. Yeah, I’d like to make a record with him. He’s
about the only one.” That was an answer that hung in the air a
bit. Does he care to elaborate on that? “I just like how he
puts stuff together, his rhythmic piecing of sounds. I would like my
flavour but using his ideas a bit, you know?” He definitely
sounds sincere, but there is that bucket of salt from earlier…
Who really knows what is next in store for C.W. Stoneking? He does, maybe,
although I wouldn’t bank on it. There was a six-year gap between his
second and third albums. It’s already been four years since then, and he
says the ideas for the next one are just about starting to emerge
from the ether. Band or solo? Electric or acoustic? Old-time blues or some
other star in that constellation…or Stoneking x Kanye? No idea. All that
can really be certain is that it won’t be what you’re expecting.
Info available at thepubstation.com
Pub Station Taproom (2502 First Avenue North, Billings, MT 59101)
General Admission/All Ages
7PM Doors/8PM Show
Free/No Cover Charge
