Oates’ Arkansas honors influences
Long before he was making blueeyed soul hits and becoming a ubiquitous presence on ’80s pop radio with Daryl Hall, John Oates was a young folkie in Philadelphia, learning guitar and absorbing the raw, acoustic blues of the Mississippi Delta.
Now the 69-year-old Oates has made an album, Arkansas, informed entirely by those early influences and his affection for pre-rock ’n’ roll blues and ragtime. Nashville, Tenn., label Thirty Tigers will release the record Friday.
“This album is a culmination of everything I’ve done up to this point,” says Oates in December from Colorado, where he is spending the holidays with his family. “It emphasizes the music that made me want to be a musician as a young kid, the music that I played before I met Daryl, the influences that really informed who I am as a guitar player, especially.”
Among those sonic guiding lights was Mississippi John Hurt, who recorded influential sides of gentle, folk blues for the OKeh label in the ’20s before returning to farming and then being rediscovered in 1963.
Oates got to meet and hang out with the bluesman when Hurt came through Philadelphia on tour.
“Philadelphia in the ’60s was a hotbed of folk music,” Oates says. Acts like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Robert “Pete” Williams, Son House, Hurt and others were often in town to play gigs. While there, many of them would stay with musician Jerry Ricks, Oates’ guitar instructor, which gave the wide-eyed fan a chance to rub shoulders with his heroes.
“I got to see them and watch them firsthand,” says Oates who, along with Hall, is a member of both the Rock and Roll and Songwriters halls of fame.
Hurt’s spirit hovers close on Arkansas, which is Oates’ sixth solo release. The record, which features
Oates’ versions of Hurt classics “My Creole Belle,” “Spike Driver Blues,” “Stack O Lee,” along with a slightly rewritten “Pallet on Your Floor,” was originally intended to be a tribute to the bluesman, who died in 1966 at age 74.
“I began to record a bunch of Mississippi John Hurt songs in the traditional way — guitar and vocal, no accompaniment,” says Oates, who recently bought Hurt’s old Guild F-30 guitar from Ricks. “But then I sat back and wondered, what’s the point of this? It’s already been done better than I’ll ever do it.”
What he decided to do instead was assemble a band of friends and seasoned Nashville pickers he has dubbed The Good Road Band — Sam Bush, mandolin; Russ Pahl, pedal steel; Guthrie Trapp, electric guitar; Steve Mackey, bass; Nathaniel Smith, cello; and Josh Day, drums and percussion — and tackle not only Hurt tracks but other pre-rock ’n’ roll songs and an original or two.
“One of the things I learned early on about John is that he is able to take a song and reimagine it,” says David Starr, the Arkansas-born musician who befriended Oates in Colorado. “He can make it his own. And the instrumentation on the new album is what blew me away.
He’s using a cellist, he’s got Sam Bush on mandolin. It’s thinking outside the box of what you’d normally put in there. It’s not the usual stuff at all.”
Recorded in Nashville, where Oates has lived since the early 2000s, the result is an earthy, big-hearted, Americana menagerie of cotton fields, the Mississippi River, pallets down on the floor and barroom brawls.
“It was really just dumb luck,” Oates says. “As soon as we recorded the first song [“Stack O Lee”], we just continued to record and record with every song sounding better and better.”
The organic, spontaneous feel of the recording was intentional.
“The sessions had this magical quality,” he says. “There are no overdubs on this record, what you hear is what happened. The players are all complementing each other.”
The solos weren’t even planned, he adds, each player just jumped in when it felt right.
“We didn’t discuss any of that. We just went into the studio and played,” he says, still sounding amazed at what he and the band were able to capture.
Starr, whose recent EP, The Head and Heart, was produced by Oates, can attest to the singer’s studio acumen.
“He takes it very, very seriously,” Starr says from his home in Cedaredge, Colo. “I sent him rough demos and by the time we got to the studio he had tweaked them in a way that made all the songs better and more listenable. His sensibilities about what people hear and what people listen to are pretty phenomenal.”
Arkansas opens with “Anytime,” written by Herbert “Happy” Lawson in 1921 and recorded by Emmet Miller in 1924. Oates says his first exposure to the song was the version by country crooner Eddy Arnold.
“I played [Nashville’s] Ryman Auditorium a few weeks ago and I played that song,” he begins, “and I thought that this is really coming full circle. I guarantee you, when Eddy Arnold had a massive hit with it, he stood in that exact spot and played that song.”
Oates and The Good Road Band also amble through a slow waltz on Jimmie Rodgers’ “Miss the Mississippi and You” from 1932, and work up a jaunty take on ragtime guitar king Blind Blake’s “That’ll Never Happen No More.”
“Dig Back Deep,” a country rocker and Oates original, is yet another nod to Hurt’s influence.
“I needed a song that summarizes what I’m doing,” he remembers. “I’m digging back into the influences that affected me as a young musician.”
With that in mind, he adapted lyrics from Hurt’s
“Sliding Delta” to the tune.
“To me, it was a summary of the album,” he says.
The title cut, with its accordion accents, Bush’s mandolin and evocations of rustic bliss, is an Oates original with its genesis in a trip he made to perform in the Mississippi County town of Wilson.
“I was really taken with the cotton fields, the expansiveness of the land,” he says of his visit. “It occurred to me that, when it comes to rural American blues and roots music, Arkansas is kind of a last stop before that music became urban, before it hit St. Louis and Chicago and even Memphis. It seemed to sum up the feel of the album and I wrote the song, ‘Arkansas.’”
The song’s video, aptly, was recorded in Wilson.
There’s yet another Oates connection to the Natural State, this one familial. His uncle, Anthony DePalma, was a Fayetteville doctor who died in 2005.
“After World War II, he relocated to Fayetteville and became a professor at the university and had a private practice. He was one of the first plastic surgeons and was a real pillar of the community,” Oates says.
Oates will hit the road in support of Arkansas and, while there’s no date set in the state for the first leg of the tour, he says he plans to play here in the fall after a summer Hall & Oates tour.
“We will be back for sure.”