From Eilen Jewell
How singer Eilen Jewell is helping make Americana great again.
You’d have thought living among the craggy mountains, dusty back-roads and wild horizons of Idaho would put you in the heart of true-blue American country music.
But singer Eilen Jewell, who hails from the state capital, Boise, has been forced to find a more receptive audience overseas.
The north-western state, once synonymous with the music of the Wild West (singing cowboy Roy Rogers starred in a 1940s movie called Idaho), now taps its boot to the sound of slick Nashville country pop.
“The US really is strange,” says Jewell. “We don’t fully care about our roots and musical history, so I often go to places like Europe and New Zealand to be best received. We really seem to have our heads up our asses.”
Over her seven-album career, the 39-year-old has seen Americana music – incorporating elements of country, folk, bluegrass and blues – slowly regain traction, to the point where it now has a Grammy Awards category. However, she still finds it “tricky” to navigate a genre that resonates more in the niche markets of city-dwelling hipsters and college radio than in the very backblocks from which it emerged.
“It’s a bit of a no man’s land out here in Idaho because everything’s more spread out and there’s more isolation.
That means there’s more commercial mainstream music, because the only broadcasters that can reach everyone are the major commercial radio stations,” she says.
“The people who might really empathise with those who survived the Dust Bowl will never hear this music. Instead, they just hear commercial country music, and that to me is nothing to do with the country music of the Dust Bowl and the Okies that were forced to leave.”
Jewell’s latest album, Down Hearted Blues – which she’s touring to New Zealand next month – is made up of precisely the sort of obscure, niche folk and country-blues covers that evoke early 20th-century America.
She readily admits although she built up a stack of vintage Howlin’ Wolf and Memphis Minnie vinyl after discovering blues as a 15-year-old in Idaho, the majority of this album’s tracks (including Betty James’s I’m A Little Mixed Up, Willie Dixon’s You Know My Love and Charles Sheffield’s It’s Your Voodoo Working) came from her nine years living in Boston in the north-east of the US.
The source of these “songs that were bashing me over the head to be recorded” was often the radio station where her bandmate and husband Jason Beek and friend John Funke spun their “dusty, old scratchy 45s” and it seemed only a matter of time until she was able to condense them into an album of favourites.
Although she’s risking the ire of blues purists and those who think a white woman from Idaho singing Bessie Smith’s Down Hearted Blues smacks of cultural appropriation, the album succeeds in conveying universal truths as well as offering the occasional surprise package.
Its highlight closes the album and dates back to the late 1920s with Moonshine Kate’s Poor Girl’s Story, which subverts the typical Jimmie Rodgers railroad-travelling tale by having a ramblin’ girl singing about leaving a string of suitors stranded by the tracks.
It’s a song that lives at the intersection between folk, country and blues and speaks to the history and heart of trueblue American society. And, via Jewell, it’s a song that has found an appreciative worldwide audience.
The album succeeds in conveying universal truths as well as offering the occasional surprise package.
DOWN HEARTED BLUES, Eilen Jewell (Southbound)
Eilen Jewell and her band will perform at The Tuning Fork, Auckland, on June 2.