Bard Edrington A journey through Americana music
the heat of August 2016, Bard Edrington V and a buddy hit the road for a 1,500-mile drive from Santa Fe to Chacala, Mexico. It was the beginning of a few very unfortunate days.
First, the truck broke down 30 miles outside of Santa Fe. After crossing the border the next day, the truck was sideswiped in Sonora, Mexico. In Mazatlán, they had to sleep in the car. And at one point, he was pulled over for not wearing a seat belt and found himself bribing a Mexican police officer to get out of the jam.
“We’d been driving without much air-conditioning. When we finally got to our destination, we had a bottle of tequila and we started puttin’ it back,” Edrington said. “We wrote a song about our adventure.”
That song, “Take Three Breaths,” is the fourth track on Edrington’s new CD, named for an agave plant used to make mezcal. All the songs are based in stories and stylistically range from bluegrass to country blues — honky-tonk to mariachi-infused — and from Delta blues to folk revival. Edrington described these genres of Americana as a “basket of roots music” that he dips into for inspiration. He often I writes about family and history, conjecturing, for instance, in the song “Southern Belle,” what it might have been like to be an injured Union soldier cared for by a Confederate woman during the Civil War.
“I came to and I saw red,” he sings, “and I woke up in some feather bed of a young maiden who took me in.”
Edrington performs and tells the stories behind the songs on at the Jean Cocteau Cinema at 8 p.m. Saturday, May 25.
When asked to describe Edrington, his family and friends tend to stick with variations on the phrase “Bard is who Bard is” — a sort of shorthand for his notable air of authenticity. This quality is remarkable, perhaps because, in a sea of hip Americana musicians clamoring for old-timey legitimacy, Edrington doesn’t seem to be cultivating an image. He doesn’t need to. At six feet, six inches tall, he stands out in any crowd. But his stature, which could be imposing, is actually comforting. He seems like the kind of person capable of being the calm in a storm.
“He can smell out inauthenticity, and he has a disdain for it,” said his wife, Zoe Wilcox. “He just knows who he is, and he’s comfortable with that.”
Edrington was born in Alabama and grew up there, as well as in Florida and Tennessee. He comes from a long line of Bards — men he called natural-born storytellers — although he claimed that he didn’t know his name was anything to live up to until he was a teenager and found out that was a Gaelic word for a professional poet or musician.
Edrington majored in wildlife and fishery science at the University of Tennessee, “And then I split the South,” he said during an interview at Betterday Coffee.
“Growing up in the South,” he trailed off, swirling the ice in a cup of milky coffee, his southern drawl neither subtle nor pronounced. “It is what it is. I grew up with this narrative of ‘the South’s gonna rise again’ and ‘those damn Yankees coming down here,’ and ‘the elitists in the North.’ ” He shrugged a shoulder and scowled slightly, rolling his eyes at his memories. “I couldn’t stand it. I never jibed with that.”
Edrington and Wilcox have lived in New Mexico on and off since 2006, first in Albuquerque and now in Santa Fe, where he works as a stone mason and runs Living Edge Landscaping. He learned to play guitar when he was 18, and he picked up the banjo