Shooter Jennings And Jason Boland Perform At Songbirds Guitar Museum

  • Saturday, December 16, 2017
  • Mark A. Herndon
It was another masterly scheduled event crafted by Songbirds to bring more quality performances to its stage.  It's true Songbirds is a world class museum of the largest known private collection of  iconic and historic guitars, banjos, amps etc. In addition, it hosts some of the best singers/songwriters from all genres of music. 

Two things that hit a high note with me: One is the love of the public supporting the #ChattanoogaLiveMusic scene and the recent addition of the world class Songbirds Guitar Museum.
It's uniqu
e with its revolving iconic and historic collection of the finest and rarest string instruments. Second is the awesome two listening rooms built for the pure enjoyment of the selected highly skilled and talented singers/songwriters /musicians at scheduled events. The Songbirds Guitar Museum could have selected any location in the world but its home is in Chattanooga with the finest staff (talent and instrument curators, equipment, stage and floor managers. All of this is located at the historic Chattanooga Choo Choo complex on Station Street.

Currently, USA Today is voting for the BEST new  attraction of 2017 in the USA, and Songbirds Guitar Museum is 7th out of 20 in the votes.  The voting period ends Jan. 1. Click this link and give a vote to Songbirds Guitar Museum and move to them to the top. http://www.10best.com/awards/travel/best-new-attraction/songbirds-guitar-museum-chattanooga-tenn/ 

The recent guest was Shooter Jennings and Jason Boland in an acoustic dual of greatly written and performed outlaw country songs.  The photos capture many of the moments with Shooter, Jason and Songbirds.  They were warmly received by a full house. Sound engineer Kan Munson and Jimmy Kelley, light master, had a great set up tuned in for photography and videography.  Additional photos and videos will be published on Facebook pages of Songbirds and Chattanooga Live Music soon.
 
Below is info from the websites of the star attractions:

SHOOTER JENNINGS

When you hear about the son of two country music legends, the product seems inevitable…
But what you get from Shooter Jennings is a little bit of that, and a whole lot of what you didn’t realize you wanted.
 
A musician, songwriter, producer, and video game creator, Jennings has released eight studio albums, two live records, and has produced and released various projects courtesy of his own record label Black Country Rock. Jennings’ career hasn’t ever stuck to one format, and you can find him all over the map when it comes to where he is at in the game.
 
His latest album, released in 2016, Countach (For Giorgio), came in at #7 on the US Dance/ Electronic charts and was Jennings’ ode to electronic music innovator and songwriter, Giorgio Moroder. The album features songs with various artists including Marilyn Manson, Brandi Carlile, and Steve Young.
 
With his 2005 debut solo record, Put The O Back In Country, Jennings enlisted Dave Cobb as producer (who remained a producer on his first four solo records) and the album included southern rock tracks “4th Of July” and “Steady At The Wheel”. The record debuted at #22 on the US Country chart.
 
Fast forward to 2010, and you’ll find Jennings releasing Black Ribbons, a heavy, psychedelic- a country-rock concept album that included narration from Stephen King as the album’s character Will O’ The Wisp. At the time, the album was a left turn for Jennings, but created a new path for fans of all genres, and somewhat of a cult-following of the record. Black Ribbons will be re-released on November 8th, 2016 (Election Day) as an “Ultimate Edition”
 
While some stay in the safe-place of their genres, Jennings continues to place himself where he wants to be and creates exactly what he feels is needed for the time. Music. (We know Waylon would be proud of Shooter's accomplishment too.)

JASON BOLAND

It’s admirable when a musician gets back to his roots, there’s no questioning that. But in a lot of ways, it’s even more admirable when an artist has no need to do that – having never lost touch with those roots in the first place. Jason Boland falls squarely into the latter category, having spent the better part of the last 15 years entrenching himself in the so-called “red dirt” of his native state of Oklahoma and adopted home in Texas and while spreading his musical branches to cover a remarkable amount of territory.
 
“I’ve always thought it was important to keep one foot in tradition and the other pointed in the direction you want to go,” says Boland. “I didn’t invent the G chord, so I’m standing on the shoulders of the giants that did, and on the shoulders of some great songwriters that have come before me. I’m using an old stencil, but adding my own colors.”
 
On their new studio album, Dark And Dirty Mile, Boland and his compatriots use a wide array of hues to illustrate 11 songs of rejection and redemption, dark clouds and silver linings, all assembled in the rough-hewn manner that’s earned him an ever-growing fan base – a following that’s snapped up more than a half-million records over the past decade and change.
 
Dark And Dirty Mile is a song cycle of sorts, one that finds Boland seeking – and finding — beauty in life’s often-overlooked places, learning tough lessons through experience and overcoming obstacles with the help of others. That’s evident in the title track, which opens the album with a vividly drawn emotional landscape strewn with moments of regret and missed opportunities – but a clear bead on a clear horizon.
 
A similar dichotomy rolls through “Electric Bill,” a slow burn of a honky-tonk tune that conjures a picture of a man with an overdrawn checkbook in one hand and the hand of a loved one in the other – a sentiment he credits to his wife, who he says, reminded him that, “if everything is taken away tomorrow, there’s still love and hope in the world.”

Boland presents that sentiment without a drop of Hallmark saccharine, however. He doesn’t sweeten these tunes with easy studio tricks or the sort of pop trickery so often heard on Music City productions these days. The surface is anything but slick, and the sinew that runs through songs like the organ-tinged strut “Green Screen” and the high lonesome desert tone of his take on Randy Crouch’s “They Took It Away” lends a tone that’s ragged-but-right, ideal for Boland’s always-incisive lyrics.
 
“People don’t always expect to have a lot there in terms of lyrics,” he says. “Society says ‘if it sounds like this, you have to do songs about that.’ But if you just try to fit things together in the most simple way possible, you’re just trying to manipulate people, and I’m not interested in doing that.
“I think of myself as being in the Oklahoma tradition in the same way as Woody Guthrie – those of us who came up in Tornado Alley can all trace our lineage back to Woody.”
 
Boland has been mining that territory for pretty much his entire career. Bowing in 1999 with the regionally popular Pearl Snaps – a first teaming with Lloyd Maines, who Boland cites as one of several seminal influences on his sonic vision – the Stragglers built a rabid following from the Panhandle to the Gulf Coast. Over the intervening half-decade, the band would team with similar kindred spirits – from Billy Joe Shaver to Dwight Yoakam compadre Pete Anderson to the late Bob Childers – to create an uncompromising body of work, as whip-smart as it is body-moving.
 
“We’ve always been lucky enough to work with people who feel the same way we do about things,” says Boland. “The world doesn’t always make sense, but you meet people around the campfires who will be there for you. That’s the big secret, 99 percent of people will share and break bread with you when times are hard.”
 
Boland himself says that he started to figure things out in earnest around the time he and the Stragglers went into the studio to record 2008’s Comal County Blue, a set that, as Country Weekly put it, “vividly chronicle the thoughts of a regular guy trying to make sense of the world and only occasionally succeeding, while keeping one eye on the reasons he keeps trying.”
 
That disc brought Boland’s songs to a wider audience than anything he had done in the past, but the momentum was slowed a bit by his need to take several months off to recover from surgery to remove a polyp from his vocal cord. He took the setback in stride, and now says, in retrospect, “it was a good thing in some ways since it helped teach me to really sing and broke me of the habit of yelling – which is an easy habit to develop if you come up singing in Texas honky-tonks.”
 
By the time 2011’s “palpably redemptive” Rancho Alto (to quote the Austin Chronicle) came around, Boland had a firm rein on his instrument, which had grown into a burnished, evocative baritone, and further honed his pensive-but-not-pedantic writing style – all of which comes to heady fruition on Dark and Dirty Mile, co-produced by Boland and Shooter Jennings.
 
From the steeliness of “Only One,” with its unflagging belief in love in the face of adversity to the wistful regret of the album closing “See You When I See You,” that strength shines through. It emerges in the two-step friendly rhythms of “Nine Times Out of Ten” and it burrows deep into the soil on the soulful swing of “Lucky I Guess” – songs that evoke the sight, smell and taste of the red dirt of his home territory.
 
“The T-shirt sellers love that phrase ‘red dirt,’ because it’s so simple,” says Boland. “But it fits. It was coined by the people making the music – rust in the ground, blood in the dirt. It’s real and it’s where I come from – and what I refuse to give up, no matter what.”

Source Information: Songbirds Guitar Museum - Chattanooga TN
 

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Chattanooga Live Music, Mark A Herndon, certified professional geologist and professional photographer grew up in Chattanooga area, graduated from the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga.  Media affiliation www.chattanoogan.com    Check out more at www.facebook.com/chattanoogalivemusic    Email at; MAHerndon@ChattanoogaLiveMusic.com
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