For country blues guitarist Todd Albright, there was no studio trickery involved on his upcoming album, “Blues for Dexter Linwood.”
Albright and first-time producer Charlie Parr aimed to capture the authenticity of the guitar and vocals.
“We used one single microphone, and it was recorded in mono. There was no real mixing done after the recording. It is what it is. We didn’t spend any real time on it. I don’t particularly enjoy being in the studio. It probably is evident to my lack of a catalog,” Albright said with a laugh. “The object of the game was just to make it as simple as it could. The record was recorded in maybe an hour and a half.
“We just sat there, and I played the songs and if I got through the take, that was the one that we took. That’s the one we kept. We didn’t fuss with it. I love records that have mistakes on them. I love evidence of there’s something real happening, especially in an age where everything is so heavily manipulated. I think the object was to make something as un-manipulated as possible, just the simplest setup we could do and just play the songs as if I would at a show. You don’t get second chances at a show.”
“Blues for Dexter Linwood” is Albright’s first album since 2017, when his “Detroit Twelve String: Blues & Rags” came out on Jack White’s Third Man Records. Full of his interpretations of classics from Blind Willie McTell, Lead Belly and more, the album releases on April 17 on his own Misfortune Records label.
Two days later, he’ll headline a show in Pittsburgh at Acoustic Music Works on the South Side, with Arthur Terembula and local Jagtime Millionaire also on the bill.
In a recent phone call from Detroit, Albright spoke with TribLive about the album, fingerstyle guitar and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.
You mentioned it was recorded in mono, so what are the benefits of doing that?
First of all, stereo recording was a scam that was foisted on people when they invented this stuff just to get you to buy more records. That was the only reason they did it, and there are some folks out there that really like the stereo sound, but the records I listen to are all recorded in mono. Things from the ‘20s and ‘30s. There was no stereo. I just want to hear the music coming out of both speakers. I don’t need things to pan around and play tricks with your head. I find it to be a more honest way of doing things.
I read that the initial sessions didn’t start out that way in mono. Can you hear the differences between the early takes and then the final product?
It wasn’t even that. Charlie and I attempted to record this record maybe three times at different places under different circumstances with different people playing on the record, and our goals were not being met. We weren’t getting out of it what we wanted, and we kept stripping it down and stripping it down and stripping it down to finally this is what it is now. It was much more, I don’t want to use the word convoluted, but maybe that fits. When you start out doing anything, you always try to really complicate things. (laughs) And then you finally realize that the simplest way is always going to be the best way.
If you’re in the studio, you have all these bells and whistles available to you, but then maybe you find out that those bells and whistles aren’t necessarily needed.
Yeah, at a certain point we figured out we were not making “Sgt. Pepper.”
How did you settle on the album title then?
Well, that was pretty easy. There’s a history of, especially in the jazz world, the post bebop, hard bop world, of naming things, naming places in records. There was “Blues for This,” “Blues for That,” “Blues for.” There’s a famous record (by the Jason Bodlovich Quintet). It was “Blues for Dexter,” which was meant for Dexter Gordon, the great tenor player. There’s a long history of people assigning that title to records and paying homage to somebody or something or some place. And in this case, Dexter Winwood isn’t a person. It’s the neighborhood I live in here in Detroit. So I’m paying homage to my own spot in the world here.
With the songs that are on the album, how do you track down those songs? How do you decide what you’re going to use for the album?
Everything that’s on the record are things that I had been playing regularly in live shows and just decided all of these need to be recorded now and we’ve played them enough. Typically, I play a little game with myself where I’ll think of a song that I’m really enjoying or hadn’t thought about in a long time. And then I’ll sit there with the guitar and I’ll try to figure out the song without having listened to it, just to see how close I can get, because these are all traditional songs or those that are real close to being in the public domain anyway. Whatever I happen to be playing at the time, that’s what ends up on the record. They’re good, and they’re broke in and you know what you’re doing.
If you’ve been playing them for all this time, then that’s how you can do a record in an hour and a half.
Yeah, exactly. You’re used to doing it once a night for however long you’re on the road and then you end up in the studio and you just do it. There’s no fussing.
How do you think the 12-string guitar helps to shape these songs? Do you think they would sound a lot different with a traditional guitar?
I view a 12-string and a six-string as two different animals all together. There are certain things that you can do on a 12-string that sound incredibly good, but then when you try to do it on a six-string, it just sounds kind of silly, doesn’t work. And vice versa. There’s things you can do on a six-string that you just could never do on a 12-string because sonically it’s just not meant to do that. I have to be kind of cautious about the material I’m doing. I have to figure out, is this even going to work because the majority of the country blues was written on a six-string guitar. There were very few 12-string guitar players. There was Barbecue Bob and Blind Willie McTell and George Carter and a handful of guys, most of which actually came out of Atlanta, Georgia, for some unknown reason. The rest of it was all mainly six-string guitar. Trying to figure out whether it’s going to translate well to a 12-string is part of the challenge and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, You don’t know until you try it or you have to really adapt the arrangement quite a bit or change it quite a bit to make it work out well on a 12-string guitar.
You also play fingerstyle. Did, or do you, ever use a pick at all?
I’ve never used a pick in my life. I never figured out how to hold on to one. (laughs)
If you’ve only played one way, then I guess it wouldn’t be as hard to do it this way then.
The music I was attracted to initially when I started playing guitar was always some kind of fingerstyle guitar, and I didn’t care what it was or who was doing it. If it was a finger-picked piece, then I wanted to listen and I wanted to know it. There was something intriguing about having a bass line next to a melody line. So you’re playing two different things at one time. You’re holding down the bass and then you’re also playing the melody and how you put those things together and arrange those things was interesting to me. I would listen to, anything, you name it, Jim Croce – anything that was finger-picked, I would listen to. And then of course you discover that all of the country blues is dominated by fingerstyle guitar because that’s what was done. Starting in the 1880s, when the guitar became popular with ladies during that fad of the parlor guitar. The guitar was primarily a ladies’ instrument in the 1800s, and it was popular for women to sit after dinner, and they made these very small guitars and they had not exactly sheet music — but something akin to it — and these guitars were all tuned to an open chord. So you really didn’t have to do a whole lot to make a song. You could bar all the way across all the strings and suddenly you’re in G and suddenly you’re in D, and you could make all your major chords just with one finger. A lot of the songs like “Spanish Fandango” and in the Crimean War, there was the Battle of Sebastopol and songs like that came out of that tradition and also ended up being the names of these guitar tunings. “Spanish Fandango” was an open G tuning, and that became known as Spanish tuning after “Spanish Fandango.” And the Battle of “Sebastopol,” that song was recorded in open D and it became known as Vestapol tuning after that song. You got Mississippi John Hurt doing his version of “Spanish Fandango” that he probably heard when he was a kid, and all these things kind of melt into what we have today.
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With the music that you’re playing, it sounds like you’re learning a lot of history of the music as well as the songs.
Yeah, it’s such a rich history. This is Black American music, and by the time it got recorded in the ‘20s, this music was hopelessly old-fashioned. This stuff comes from way back, to begin with the earliest recorded country blues from the mid-’20s. That stuff comes out of the minstrel shows, and a lot of the songs that were done in minstrel shows ended up being some of the first recorded country blues songs. There was a guy, Irving Jones, who was a very famous Black — what they were referred to back then were — coon shouters or coon writers or coon. He was very famous in that he wrote a lot of songs that were done in these programs. These were traveling shows. It was essentially Black vaudeville and most of the time, they were performed under tents and they went from town to town and they were hugely popular. It was the most popular entertainment form in America during the 1880s and 1890s were these shows. There were Black troupes. There were white troupes, but the majority of them were Black for sure. There was blackface involved in a lot of them, and it was just a very common thing. Irving Jones wrote some songs. He wrote a song called “Ragtime Millionaire,” and he wrote a song “My Money Never Runs Out,” and that ended up recorded in ‘26 or ‘27 maybe by a guy named Gus Cannon, Banjo Joe. So these songs that were written for that period of that time were so popular in the Black community that they ended up becoming the foundation of what we call the country blues.
You started your own label so what are your goals for that?
I got some things coming. We’re in the middle of this campaign, obviously, for my record, and the very next thing that’s going to come up is a live recording of Paul Geremia from the venue called the Down Home from 1984. Paul just passed away (in March), and he was working on this album before he had the stroke that ended his career 12 years ago. I finally was able to get the rights to the music. And now, Misfortune Records is going to put that out, hopefully in the fall.