Sheesham, Lotus & ‘Son,
Sheesham and Lotus & ‘Son celebrate fiddle music and the good-time songs of yesteryear.
“I came up in a family that was parented by hippies,” says Lotus Wight. “My parents met on the hippie trail in Europe in the ’60s. I grew up with an appreciation for folk music from them. I started playing the jaw harp when I was five years old. And I quickly broke a tooth.”
Wight says he was inspired to find out more about the blues thanks to musical comedy classic “The Blues Brothers.”
“I think that movie did a lot for blues music back in that day. I remember as a nine- or 10-year-old watching the scene with John Lee Hooker and saying to myself, whatever that is, that is what I want!”
“So at 11 or 12 I became versed on John Lee Hooker,” says Wight. “It took me a year to figure out where to get that music but then I got a cassette or something given to me for Christmas,” recalls Wight. He soon graduated from jaw harp to guitar and began tracing his way back to the music of The Carolinas, Mississippi Valley, West Virginia, New England and their musical traditions — which have had a profound influence on him as a musician. Wight also studied jazz at Humber College and continued learning to play a number of instruments, including banjo.
“Sheesham Crow also plays banjo and fiddle … saxophone and drums, all kinds of ethnic percussion. ’Son plays lots of different horns and he often plays banjos and African instruments,” explains Wight.
Their instruments include some of their own invention, like the sepia-phonic Monophone, and the Contrabass HarmoniPhoneum. Every one of their old-time tunes has a great narrative behind it — a music history lesson which always gets the audience laughing and foot stompin’ along.
From Jimmy Rodgers and The Carter Family, to the Memphis Jugband and old-time fiddlers like West Virginia’s Edden Hammons, this trio reinvents and reinterprets the music with musical panache and countless antidotes.
“It stems for our need for attention,” says Wight. “We both grew up as nerdy kids. So we definitely have some concerns with needing attention in our lives,” he adds. “Any opportunity we have to put on a spectacle we do so,” notes Wight, adding the band likes to put their own sonic and visual stamp on a each show trying to do things a little differently from one performance to the next.
Like Jake and Elwood, Sheesham and Lotus & ’Son are on a mission — reviving old-time music while slowly introducing audiences to some of their originals like “F and D Rag” and “Swimming Blues” and “1929” — tunes so authentic they sound like turn-of the-century field recordings.
Wight says he and Crow play a million different kinds of music and had been doing that for years before they started their own band.
“Sheesham is an amazing percussionist. He was playing percussion in Cuban bands,” he says.
“The reason that we got so re-entrenched in Southern music was actually because he and I were in a rhythm section in Flapjack, a Canadian band that played fiddle music. That band became very busy in the southern United States playing for dances. We just got on a circuit for playing square dances. So from being in that band we made a lot of friends down in the South and spent a lot of time there. We already had a large interest in that music so we immersed ourselves into it. We stayed down there for about eight years playing tunes, playing dances and hanging out,” says Wight, adding that he and Crow loved combing through the archives and different labels to find music.
In 2012, Sheesham and Lotus & ‘Son recorded the critically-acclaimed “1929: The New Kings of Old Time” nominated for “Best Traditional Album” at the Canadian Folk Music Awards. “The High Stepping Music of Sheesham and Lotus and ’Son” came out in 2014.
Wight and Crow grew up listening to collections of phonograph recordings so it was the thrill of a lifetime in 2015 when the duo was invited to be part of the Lathe Revival Project through the Newcastle University in England.
They spent a week recording songs on a 1938 Presto 78 rpm recording lathe disc-cutter, the same machine that the Lomax family used to record their famous recordings of folk music around the world. The 26-song CD is called “78RPM.”
“We believe in mono and off the floor!” proclaims Wight. “
The band is now working on putting a new album “in the can” for their upcoming European tour.
Wight says it has been a challenge to come up with original material. “We are all so in awe of the old stuff,” he notes. “There is so much of it but we actually have really made it our business to try and start doing original tunes. I have to say it just takes time and perseverance,” he adds. “But we have now arrived at that place.”