root salad Luke Winslow-King
Blues, gospel, jazz and New Orleans permeate his music. Cara Gibney cranks up the Skype.
Winslow-King. “It’s a little sheltered from the rest of the world,” he told me. “It’s very pristine and very fresh, and people’s attitudes reflect that.”
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The multi-instrumentalist who blends his own inimitable style with Mississippi Delta blues, roots rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, folk, pop, and innumerable traditional American sounds, grew up in the arms of a Baptist church, indeed his family line descends straight from the Mayflower. “So I was exposed to gospel music,” he explained, “Southern gospel music.” His father is a musician and his parents supported him every step of the way with his musical career. “They provided me with the tools, but they never pushed me.”
Nowadays the 33-year-old Winslow- King calls New Orleans home, but when I Skyped he hadn’t actually been there for months. He spoke to me from a festival which was coincidentally just outside Michi- gan. He had recently completed an exten- sive European tour with his band promoting his new album, and had then returned to the US for the festival circuit. “It’s a good time in my life and in my career and I’m just trying to strike while the iron is hot.”
It’s good to hear such a positive take from Winslow-King. The album title – I’m Glad Trouble Don’t Last Always – was a statement of fact for the era in his life around which the record was written. It chronicles the minutiae, the rawness, the anguish that the collapse of his marriage caused him. It lyrically and instrumentally sees him through the dark and brings him out the other side. It takes his honed experi- ence from busking on the streets of New Orleans, draws from his knowledge of the jazz guitar he studied at Interlochen Arts Academy, and utilises the like of his signature bottleneck slide guitar, to sonically recreate his world as it crashed, burned, and slowly, subtly started to heal.
“The album is incredibly personal, yeah,” he said when I checked that he was OK to talk about it. “I would have made it anyway whether any- body listened to it or not, you know.”
he unspoiled environs of Cadillac, Michigan, were the childhood backdrop for guitarist, composer, singer, and producer Luke
I’m Glad Trouble Don’t Last Always shifts from blues to country to gospel and beyond. In the country folk Heartsick Blues he references the smallest, crystallised details of infidelity through embedded clas- sic song titles and coded lyrics accompanied by porch fiddle and acoustic guitar. The long, bending blues notes that open On My Way, on the other hand, shift to gospel when Winslow-King starts singing. “I think that’s something everyone can relate to,” he said of the song’s message. “Just keep in mind that it’s rough now but you’re going to have to get through it if you want to keep living.” Final track No More Crying Today is the album’s “epiphany song… I wanted to finish in a place of forgiveness; moving on, finding a way…”
There’s a myriad of areas of musical insight and knowledge flowing through the album that Winslow-King has gathered over the years. He studied jazz and classical music at college including masters like Miles Davis. Then his move to New Orleans shifted his musical world. He started busking, and while he was thus employed during daylight hours, he was working the clubs at night. “I discovered a form of people’s jazz … New Orleans jazz has a story of something that might have happened to you, and you can
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go home and sing the melody to someone the next day. It’s simple enough that you can strum it on the ukulele or the guitar or the piano. You can remember the rhythm and the melody of the song and have it become part of your life.” The impact of this discovery was huge for the young musi- cian. “That’s people’s music for me, and that’s one of the reasons why I stayed in New Orleans. My worlds collided.”
uring his time in New Orleans he worked with luminaries like the jazz singer John Boutté, honed his skills on the bottleneck slide guitar through blues virtuoso Roberto Luti who has become a mentor for Winslow- King and features on the new album. Then he joined the jazz mischief-makers Meschiya Lake’s Little Big Horns – eventual- ly featuring on their album Lucky Devil.
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Winslow-King’s musical story has been compacted into five albums. His 2007 eponymous first album echoes his classical credentials and his home-based folk. 2013’s The Coming Tide brought together Ameri- can folk songs, old jazz, delta blues and that Southern gospel he was brought up on. I’m Glad Trouble Don’t Last Always mines his deepening well of styles and sounds to cap- ture this particular moment in time. The day he can listen to this album and the pictures it conjures up don’t sting, is the day the last track has kicked in.
lukewinslowking.com F
Photo: Akasha Rabut
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