Deep south Oates
John Oates explores roots influences on new album and plays The Kate Monday
Mississippi John Hurt. Tampa Red. Memphis Minnie. Texas Alexander. Louisiana Red. And ... Arkansas John Oates? Maybe not on the latter. Not completely, anyway. But Oates, known throughout the solar system for the dozens of pop-soul pastries he recorded with partner Daryl Hall, was initially obsessed with folk and rural blues musicians far more than any rock or R&B stars one might expect.
A native of New York City raised in Philadelphia, Oates’ East Coast roots would seem to preclude a fondness for artists like Hurt, Son House, Pete Seeger and Doc Watson. In fact, Philadelphia will forever be known as a fertile crescent of R&B and soul music, and those sonic ingredients are richly present in the Hall & Oates catalog — which includes millions of albums sold and earned both memberships in the Rock and Roll and Songwriters halls of fame.
“Growing up in Philly meant constant exposure to (soul producers) Gamble and Huff and Philly R&B, and that was a good thing,” says Oates. “But what a lot of people don’t realize is that, in the ’60s, Philadelphia was also very much a hotbed of folk music. Other than Newport, Philly has the second oldest folk festival in the country.”
In fact, for years before he met Hall while the two were attending Temple University, Oates was taking guitar lessons from a close friend of Dick Waterman, the famous photographer and music promoter who routinely booked archival blues and folk artists through Philadelphia.
“Dick was a very important figure in the folk revival, and there was an overflow of these artists playing the Philly folk festival,” Oates says. “Several of them ended up sleeping on Jerry Rix’s couch, and he was my guitar mentor. Through him, I managed to meet quite a few of those artists and see them play first hand. It was amazing and very influential to me, stuff that was buried but not forgotten when the big pop rocket ship took off for Daryl and me.”
Oates is speaking by phone from Nashville, where he moved with his family five years ago. Living in a southern music capital is convenient and probably appropriate in the context of Oates’ latest solo album, “Arkansas.” The recording is a bit of a follow-up to Oates’ 2011 “Mississippi Mile” album. While the earlier disc paid tribute to Dixie blues and R&B, “Arkansas” is a heartfelt, gritty homage to Southern roots music that spans the possibilities of Americana in all the best ways.
Oates is on tour behind “Arkansas” and performs a sold-out show Monday at the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center. The show will be taped as part of CPTV’s ongoing concert series “The Kate.”
Interestingly, “Arkansas” started out as a strict tribute to the songs and musicianship of Mississippi John Hurt, the blues artist with intricate acoustic guitar picking patterns and a warm, gospel-tinged voice.
“He fascinates me because he’s not really a Delta blues player. He plays like John Hurt, and from the first time I heard him, I wanted to know how he did it,” Oates says. In the studio, though, after laying down “Spike Driver Blues” with just Oates on guitar and vocals, a realization hit.
“It sounded pretty good,” Oates says. “But it was only pretty good. I was never going to be as good as him, so why do it?”
Oates had the idea to keep the core of the song as he’d recorded it but augment it with a full band arrangement. He brought in heavyweight Nashville players: mandolinist Sam Bush, pedal steel player Russ Pahl, cellist Max Smith, electric guitarist Guthrie Trapp, drummer Josh Day and bassist Steve Mackey. Oates says, “It was a wild experiment — almost desperate because I was no longer sure what I was trying to do — but we did a take of ‘Stacker Lee’ and just looked at each other. The engineer clicked in from the control room and said, ‘I don’t know what this is, but it’s very cool. Let’s keep doing it.’”
With that strategy percolating, Oates continued to research Hurt and discovered the artist was a big fan of Jimmie Rodgers.
“That was a big moment,” Oates says. “I thought, ‘Hey, the album could be a snapshot of radio and records in the infancy of the whole thing. Hurt’s style was more ragtime than Delta, which suggested Blind Blake. In that spirit, do one of his songs. And it all went from there and became this rich tapestry. It happened totally organically. I wish I’d had this grand vision from the start, but the music led me to this place.”
Once Oates curated an album’s worth of tunes, the band recorded the whole thing live on an oldschool analog deck in the studio. The only overdubs were on a few vocal parts. Oates’ famous voice has a raspier tone than radio fans might expect, and part of that was by design; the artist, now 69, wanted a vocal tone that reflected the musical styles they were exploring.
“And part of it’s that I’m definitely getting older and my vocal chords are worn out,” he laughs. “I was hyper aware of what key we were in because I wanted the songs to fit a certain place in my register. We even used old RCA mics from the 1930s to help get the sounds we were looking for.”
It’s very cool that Oates contributed two excellent and contextual songs to the album, the title track and “Dig Back Deep.” They actually were added at the end of the sessions. Oates says he didn’t do anything particularly different in terms of craftsmanship but very much wrote from inspiration.
“We were through recording, and suddenly I was just in that frame of mind to write,” he remembers. The song “Arkansas” sounds as though it could literally have come from the 1930s, while “Dig Down Deep” has a different vibe. “I took time-honored blues and folk traditions and added a chorus more typical of what my career would suggest. It became a musical double entendre of sorts.”
John Oates, 7:30 p.m. Monday, Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center, 300 Main St., Old Saybrook; sold out; (860) 510-0473.