Lay Down My Burden – Grant Dermody and Friends

 

Grant Dermody is a Seattle based harmonica player, music instructor, vocalist and song writer who has honed his skills over the years playing with acoustic bluesmen John Jackson, Guy Davis, Honeyboy Edwards, John Cephas and Phil Wiggins, Louisiana Red, bluegrass guitar wizard Dan Crary, and a variety of top notch old timey and folk / blues musicians. In recent years he has been touring with Eric Bibb and appears on two of his CDs “Spirit I Am” and “Booker’s Guitar”. He also plays in an acoustic trio with Orville Johnson and John Miller, in a duo with guitarist Frank Fotusky, and in the eclectic acoustic old-time band “The Improbabillies”.

 

Lay Down My Burden is a recording that is drenched in the blues, and has some hard-core blues on it, but it is not a blues record. If you need a label, you could call it American Roots music. It is the music of immigrants who came to America for a new life, strangers in a strange land, freedom seekers, slaves, indentured servants, the lunatic fringe and the divinely inspired. They all brought musical traditions that collided and created a rich landscape of new musical expressions.

 

Grant dives deep into this musical landscape through his mastery of the diatonic blues harmonica, and a kind of blues that can seep into an Irish fiddle tune, a modal Appalachian melody, old-timey music, gospel music, and popular music of the last few hundred years.

 

This song cycle took form during a time in Grant’s life when he lost of both of his parents, his wife Eileen, and a couple of close friends. You might expect dark, melancholy music to come out of a time like this, but instead what you have is music full of the joy that is the essence of the blues.

 

I heard a two-word phrase in an interview with Coleman Barks that nails this essence of the blues. Coleman translated thousands of poems by the Persian mystic, Rumi. He described the timeless quality that Rumi and his fellow Sufi mystics brought to their work with the phrase “ecstatic grief”. Ecstatic grief sounds at first like an oxymoron, an impossible state, but it describes a wholeness that feels good, excludes nothing, is full of darkness as well as light. To feel the deepest emotions from sorrow to joy at the same time, and to live to tell about it.

 

As Grant puts it: “You just find yourself reaching down for strength you didn’t know you had. Or if you thought you had it, you didn’t know where it was. A lot of it is just showing up and doing what you have to do. You persevere, you look for joy where you can find it – and that’s the blues.”

 

There are two songs back to back on this recording that express the extremes of this ecstatic grief that is the blues.

 

“Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” has the late John Cephas on vocals and guitar, Grant on harmonica. This was John’s last recording and he expresses the almost unbearable heartache and desolation of Skip James with an immediacy that could only come from a lifetime spent living the blues. Grant meets him right where he is with his Marine Band harmonica, following him note for note into this haunting sonic landscape.

 

There is an extra-long pause after this cut, and I assume it is there on purpose to give you a chance to catch your breath and let what just happened sink in.

 

What follows is an ecstatic romp called “Rain Crow Bill”, two harmonicas chasing each other through a delirious version of an old-timey / blues harmonica instrumental by Henry Whitter. Fat chord rhythms, fox chase whoops and hollers, and melody lines with the exuberance of first graders pouring out of school for recess. Mark Graham joins Grant on this and somehow they manage to get through it without falling down laughing.

 

Grant recorded with twenty six of his friends on this project, people with incredible chops in a wide range of musical styles. The combinations range from duets to a full band with drums. Grant got his start working with other musicians at the age of 18 in Fairbanks, Alaska. Fairbanks was at that time a wild renaissance town, a creative outpost of folks building their own houses and going back to the land. They also had a vibrant music scene with a dozen places to hear live music on any given night. Everything from Blues to Bluegrass, Old Timey, Irish, to straight ahead Rock ‘n’ Roll. Grant found a way to play it all on the harmonica, how to back people up, how to learn things on the fly, when and how to take a solo.

 

There are many highlights on this recording: Grant sings lead vocal on 8 of the 16 songs, including the Reverend Gary Davis tune “I’ll Be Alright” with Eric Bibb on guitar, a lonesome banjo and harmonica version of Dirk Powell’s “Waterbound”, and an a cappella arrangement of Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More”. Grant also wrote 3 of the tracks including the title cut “Lay Down My Burden” a riff tune that built into a full band arrangement.  Grant’s work as a harmonica sideman with blues greats John Dee Holeman, Louisiana Red and John Cephas is raspy, raw, and right in the pocket. There is also a righteous harmonica duet with harmonica master Joe Filisko, “Twelve Gates To The City”,  a gospel tune with a heavy dose of Sonny Terry style harmonica.

 

The last track takes us to yet another level. As Grant put it “This started as a record I wanted to do with people I respect musically, and it turned into something cathartic, something healing, something to help Eileen and me during the hardest thing we ever went through. It was becoming a prayer and I thought what better way to end the record than with an actual prayer by my Buddhist teacher, Kilung Jigme Rinpoche.”

 

Orville Johnson’s dobro and Grant’s harmonica meet this prayer with startling harmony.

 

This is a fitting end to this musical trip that will grow on you and with you every time you listen to it.

 

For more information on this CD and others by Grant, go here: http://www.grantdermody.com/cd.html