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By: Drew Lyon
 Alvin Youngblood Hart |
12 years after the release of Alvin Youngblood Hart's seminal debut, Big Mama's Door, the music racket's grim realities have forced the Memphis, Tennessee-based guitarist-songwriter to reexamine his tolerance for the recording industry.
"I'm pondering my future in the music business," Hart announces from his Memphis home on the eve of his winter tour with his musical brethren, North Mississippi Allstars. "I been just kind of sittin' around, watching the music business change, you know, because with digital albums, the Internet and all that downloading and things, the record business is changing man."
Hart has earned the right to lament the logic of continuing onward in the endless cycle of touring and recording. Big Mama's Door, a potent combination of original and pre-World War II blues numbers, came with an unwelcome catch after garnering a heap of glowing reviews from blues fans on a futile quest for a modern-day link to acoustic deities like Charley Patton and Leadbelly. Hart, to his ire, was forever filed away in the oft-constricting idiom of modern blues. It didn't matter if Territory (Big Mama's successor) strayed far outside the borders of the blues. In the narrow eyes of the music business, Alvin Hart was merely, if incorrectly, classified as a bluesman.
"Unfortunately, people don't want to let you out of that label," Hart says. He speaks from experience. Since his debut in 1996, he has recorded four albums of varying musical styles, but each album saw its release on a different record label. In 2004, Hart earned a Grammy nomination for his fourth album, Down In The Alley, a multi-instrumental solo album of dusty blues covers that recalled the rustic sensibilities of Big Mama's Door. A year later, Hart won a Grammy for his contribution to the Stephen Foster tribute album, Beautiful Dreamer.
Throughout his career, Hart has consistently challenged his listeners, and he prefers it that way. "It's not a conscious thing like, 'Oh they think I'm going this route, so I'm going to do this.' It's just how music moves me," he says.
 Alvin Youngblood Hart |
The momentum behind Hart's latest album, 2005's superlative and sly Motivational Speaker, was halted when his label, Tone Cool, folded. The record was met with justifiably enthusiastic reviews, and the album's muscle and depth - it's a rare breed that can pull off convincing covers of Otis Redding and Johnny Paycheck - indicate it wouldn't be hyperbolic to herald Motivational Speaker as the 21st century's premier rock 'n' roll statement. "I think it's my best record," Hart says. "I wrote some good songs, and we had a good time making it."
Again stuck in the webs of the music business, a stoic Hart regrouped and did what's always come natural to the U.S. Coast Guard veteran; he grabbed his trusty bottleneck slide, gathered his arsenal of vintage guitars, banjos and mandolins, and hit the road. If Tone Cool wasn't going to sell Motivational Speaker, Hart's engaging, haunting live performances would.
"[Motivational Speaker] didn't get the attention it deserved when it came out," Hart says. "I took the reigns and said, 'Well, if the label's not going to do this and that, then I'll do it myself.' So for the next year or so, I went out and played and got some word-of-mouth going. It was a noble effort, but it didn't do too much [and] it exhausted a lot of resources."
"But," Hart sighed, "that's what happens. Meanwhile, I'm still writing some songs and playin' guitar and fixin' amps."
 Alvin Youngblood Hart |
Even if the experience left scars, Hart has managed, on his own terms, to wrestle free of misconceptions and his perpetual state of label instability. He's a highly respected songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and accomplished session guitarist in Americana circles; a true "musician's musician."
Hart's resume has swelled considerably in recent years, as Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, and many others began endorsing his blues authenticity. The self-proclaimed "Cosmic American love child of Howlin' Wolf and Link Wray" backed up Bo Diddley on a 2007 tour, played slide guitar on harp wizard Junior Wells' final studio album, cut an album with Bobby Rush in a marathon 14-hour session, and strangely, also recorded an unreleased duet with actress Christina Ricci that was left on the cutting room floor of the Black Snake Moan movie soundtrack.
"That tune with Ricci wasn't [cut] at the same time," Hart says. "I did my part of the song, and I was back on the road, and she came in a week later and overdubbed some things."
Hart says he still gets excited when he crosses paths with his musical luminaries.
"It still happens all the time," he says. "If you had told me when I was 15 and playing in the garage that someday I was going to meet John Lee Hooker, I would've been like 'What?'"
Last year, Hart and a crew of Mississippi Hill Country musicians, appeared on the Black Snake Moan soundtrack, and he even helped teach Samuel L. Jackson, who plays a blues singer in the movie, a few rudimentary chords on the guitar. Scott Bomar, the film's musical director, initially tapped Hart to record the movie's title track, "but the director's brother-in-law or something got it," Hart inserts. "Nepotism always wins in Hollywood."
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I'm pondering my future in the music business. I been just kind of sittin' around, watching the music business change, you know, because with digital albums, the Internet and all that downloading and things, the record business is changing man. -Alvin Youngblood Hart |
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In spring 2007, Hart was invited to record pre-World War II era blues and string band music for the soundtrack to the Denzel Washington directed, Memphis-based drama The Great Debaters. Hart led a roster including soul singer Sharon Jones and the Carolina Chocolate Drops, recording the soundtrack in Memphis' famed Ardent Studios. Hart, who was briefly featured in Martin Scorsese's 2003 PBS blues series, even makes his silver screen debut as "Juke Joint Musician No.1" in the film's opening scene.
 Alvin Youngblood Hart |
"It turned into a summer job," he says. "[On the soundtrack] we pretty much ran the gamut of what was going on musically at that time. It was cool, you know, like I said, when you're 15 playing in the garage, you don't think 'Man, I'm going to play some music in a Hollywood movie someday.'"
Though he doesn't resemble a man liable to find himself seduced by the sinful scent of Hollywood, Hart says he found soundtrack work intriguing and cost-effective. "It's a fun challenge. I really like being in the studio, and especially," he emphasizes, "on someone else's dime."
A day after this interview, Hart, along with the Allstars, unofficially opened their tour with a performance at the inauguration party for Haley Barbour, the Republican Governor of Mississippi. Hart will testify a gig is a gig, and even politicians get a rock 'n' roll jones on occasion.
"I played a gig in Utah a couple years back," Hart recalls, "and the governor happened to be there and really dug it. And I did a gig in Jackson [Mississippi] last summer at the governor's mansion and I played as loud as I could!"
In concert, Hart seamlessly bounces, much to the displeasure of blues purists hollering for another tired rendition of "Sweet Home Chicago," with scant warning from his inventive originals to covers of Doug Sahm, Tom Petty or Tampa Red. And if you don't like it, well, sorry pal, that's your problem, not Hart's. The Stevie Ray Vaughan clone is on some other stage.
Hart's musical eclecticism stems from his childhood, which found him moving from his family's roots in the Mississippi Hill Country to the Oakland Bay Area, Chicago and Ohio.
After being introduced to the blues via his father and his grandmother - Hart's real-life "big mama" - he cultivated an indiscriminate love for American music, and a healthy disregard for genres. Hank Williams, Thin Lizzy, Sonny Rollins and Sleepy John Estes all share equal esteem in Hart's musical hierarchy.
 Alvin Youngblood Hart by Larry Hulst |
"I spent my early years in the Bay Area in the late '60s, early '70s," says the 44 year-old Hart. "I was too young to go to any of them Fillmore shows, but I saw the posters and the bills on some of the posters, you know, Miles Davis and Cream on the same bill. To me, it's all music."
When asked about his thoughts on the year-round blues festival circuit, which Hart has reluctantly frequented for more than a decade, he responds with a weary indifference.
"I try to avoid [the blues festivals]," he says. "A lot of people that go to these blues festivals, they don't dig the solo stuff at all. They surely don't like my band, so the booking agencies, they'd book my band on some really kind of strict, humpty-dumpty stages. It's unfortunate, but that's the way it is."
Hart's history with booking agents and the festival circuit has been a quarrelsome union at best.
"My band can't get booked on a lot of these circuits," he said. "I've had agents tell me they've tried to book me at festivals like Bonnaroo, and they were like, 'No go.' I just try not to think about it. Whatever form I'm playing, I just try to do my best."
His coast-to-coast tour with the Allstars pairs Hart together with familiar comrades on the battlefield. Memphis rock 'n' roll stalwart Jim Dickinson, the father of the Allstars' Luther and Cody Dickinson, produced Hart's 1999 album, Start With The Soul, and later played keyboards on Motivational Speaker.
During the Start With The Soul sessions at the eldest Dickinson's Zebra Ranch Studio in summer '99, Hart was asked to play guitar on "Drop Down Mama" for the Allstars' Shake Hands With Shorty album. An avid champion of Hart's artistry, NMA guitarist and lead singer Luther Dickinson once warmly introduced his "homeboy" Alvin onstage as "an original Allstar."
"It's gonna be a cool tour," says Hart. "I'm gonna do my solo acoustic thing first and then we'll see what happens. I love playing with those guys, always have."
After the Allstars' tour, Hart went across the Atlantic, where he collaborated in Europe with his friend Otis Taylor on what he terms "a banjo project." [Editor's note: Taylor's Recapturing The Banjo was released February 5, 2008. Look for a discussion of the project with Taylor in the coming months here on JamBase].
As for Hart's proposed retirement from the recording industry, he readily acknowledges the difficulty in jumping off the train at this stage of his journey.
"Ah man, I'm too far gone now."
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