WHERE: Yellow Racket Records, 2311 E Main St, Chattanooga, TN
WHEN: Doors at 7PM, music at 8PM
ADMISSION: All ages
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Where does Joseph Allred reside? Musically or geographically, that question has had many answers, none of them wrong. They were born and raised in Tennessee, and currently live in Crawford TN, but if you know them through the records they have made, you’re also acquainted with the extracurricular efforts of a Bostonian graduate student of philosophy and theology. Although Allred is most commonly connected to American primitive guitar, a title they’ve accepted when others have shunned, they are actually a multi-instrumentalist and singer whose records have also tapped into veins of rural mysticism, internationally oriented inquisitiveness and idiosyncratically reinterpreted shoegazing. Their last two LPs were virtual and actual ensemble efforts loaded up with electric instrumentation, but Folk Guitar returns the art of the solo acoustic guitar.
But what kind of folk is Allred talking about here? Not the stuff they might have heard so described on the radio when they were growing up during the last couple decades of the 20th century, nor the actual folk traditions of rural Tennessee. Waltz rhythms present repeatedly, so maybe Allred’s playing for folks who like to dance? The precise, delicate picking on the first tune, “Lord Lucy’s Protector,” sounds like a tribute to John Renbourn. “Hesperis” is named for a flower that blooms in Anatolian regions, but it is likewise filtered through a consciousness of the idiosyncratic directions that the musicians associated with the British folk revival pursued after the boom went bust. The 12-string piece “The Star Against Heaven” uses the tremolo studies once essayed by James Blackshaw, a Briton of a subsequent generation, as a push-off point for more winding explorations. And the unhurried reverie of “Their Silvery Light” feels like a hymn of quiet praise to the vibrations of steel strings, wood and the air that moves around them.
So, maybe Folk Guitar is just a coverall term, an explanation Allred might give to someone who saw them toting their instrument case down the street and asks them what they play. After all, what you call it doesn’t matter as much as what it does for you. Reflective but not overburdened with darkness, purposeful in its perambulations, this music is centering stuff. Put it on and be where you need to be.
- Bill Meyer, Dusted Magazine
