The cold war between Americanastan and Jambandistan is over.
When I got personally and professionally invested in roots music in the 1990s, I couldn’t help but notice a certain frostiness between the song-forward Americana community and the improv-focused jam band ecosystem. Fans and programmers of folk-based music would make snarky remarks about the twirling hippie fanbase and the marathon instrumentals.
And while it’s true that era’s jam band songwriting rarely reminded anyone of Townes VanZandt, I thought Americana could be stingy when it came to the musical side of things, with less absorbing grooves and more pedestrian song forms.
All the while, Jambandistan did not care. They were having a never-ending party and making good money with an active, engaged audience. And Americana sometimes looked right past certain jam band marketing tactics and concepts that might have grown its audience faster. All this is generalizing of course, but in the 2000s, the gulf was real. My late friend Peter Cooper and I embodied it to some degree when we were colleagues at the Tennessean newspaper. He’d go deep on Emmylou Harris and Eric Taylor, while he was quite happy letting me cover shows by Dave Matthews Band and Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe.
Where Peter had a point was that in the 90s and early 2000s, jam band music was light on blues and Southern soul, i.e. the foundation of Americana music at its best. It could feel lightweight and ephemeral. But times change. So all these years later, I’m here, launching a new four-part thematic block of the String, suggesting that those jam band critics should take a fresh look. Because something is going on in the overlap between Americana and Jam; it’s growing richer and more rooted. Leading the way I think is the Tedeschi Trucks Band, which matches vocal and instrumental virtuosity with horn and rhythm sections that could have burned down the Apollo Theater or either Fillmore in the 70s. Billy Strings matters here too, growing the jamgrass audience with thoroughly legit bluegrass music.
My guest this week - South Carolina native Marcus King - is another important case in point, with his substantial songwriting, his thrilling guitar playing, and a rare voice that channels Al Green and Wilson Pickett in equal measure. As with Tedeschi Trucks, the patron saint hovering over the Marcus King Band is the Allman Brothers, that astonishing Southern rock/jazz fusion unicorn from Macon, GA. It’s timely and telling that a second generation band from that lineage - the Allman Betts Family Revival - is also going great guns and attracting all kinds of Americana collaborators, from Sierra Hull to Sierra Ferrell, and others not named Sierra.
King is the focal point of Episode 339, but coming up soon are three other players from this playground. Next week we’ll hear from sacred steel guitar maestro and rocking gospel jammer Robert Randolph. He broke out in the early 2000s at venues like Bonnaroo and the late, great Wetlands in New York, but he’s been steadily and productively honing his sound ever since, and it feels like Americana has come to him instead of the other way around. Next up, another veteran who has long exemplified rooted American tradition on the jam scene, North Mississippi All-Stars founder Luther Dickinson. Then I’ll visit with a still-emerging star from the country music side of the cosmic jam, 30-year-old guitarist and band leader Daniel Donato.
Marcus King is about to turn 30 himself, which seems crazy given that he’s been a celebrated house-packing, road-dog badass for more than a decade. But growing up in and around Greenville, SC, he was practically raised to be a blues guitar god, working many nights a week by high school. He was taught by his father, a signed recording artist, and mentored by Govt. Mule leader Warren Haynes. He’s taken a wild musical journey through albums produced by Haynes, Dave Cobb, Dan Auerbach, and Rick Rubin. His latest partner is the eclectic Eddie Spear, and their new opus was cut at the historic Allman-blessed Capricorn Sound Studios in Macon.
On Darling Blue, which dropped in September, we hear a variety of song styles and textures, indeed some of King’s most adventurous and creative work yet. We also hear a man who’s been through the valley of the shadow and come out feeling healthy and blessed. He talks candidly here (as he has elsewhere) about losing his bearings and sliding into substance abuse amid all the chaos and intensity of his percolating career. He got over a big heartbreak and found new love in his wife of two and a half years, the former Briley Hussey.
“You know, a lot of (my) growth, career wise, kind of happened organically, in spite of myself,” he says. “There were a lot of things I was doing just self-destructively, physically, you know, relationships that I kind of squandered, just because (of) a lot of unchecked trauma that I hadn't really looked within myself to try to heal yet. So I'm most proud of the personal growth that I was able to achieve. And I kind of feel like I have a fresh start on life, a new lease, especially since I met my wife four years ago.”
We also spend time talking about what makes King a special voice on the guitar. He earned every extended solo with lessons learned at a fine arts high school in the early 2000s where he studied jazz harmony. Plus, he taught himself to study non-guitarists, including great singers like Aretha Franklin, as a way of learning how to construct lyrical journeys.
“I'm thankful that I have that insight, and I'm thankful that I leaned on vocalists like (Aretha),” he says, noting that he also listened critically to “harmonica, pedal steel, organ, anything that was not guitar - just different ways of phrasing, different ways of thinking about it. And studying jazz, I obviously listened to a lot of saxophone players. So I was really just drawn to the idea of playing like you’ve got to breathe, you know? And singers and saxophone players obviously have to take breaths. So it just kind of changes the way that you phrase things.”
There’s a lot more here, about working with Rick Rubin on his brutally honest album Mood Swings and about his journey into co-writing in collaboration with Auerbach. And as we close out, King addresses my theories about the evolution of jam and roots.
“You could see all these different styles of music (in the jam world), and then I feel like it kind of got cannibalized by a few very specific kinds of music, and the jam scene became a little less broad, and I kind of felt like my style of jam didn't really fit in anymore,” he says. “And maybe I'm wrong, but (Americana) allowed me to grow…and the Americana vibe kind of gave us a home.”
Also this year, King has been playing runs of shows as part of a soul/R&B/jazz quartet led by drummer Chris Dave at the storied Blue Note clubs on both coasts, so maybe the walls between Americana and jazz are the next to crumble.
