About the Show
Music City Roots
A weekly concert and live radio show presented from The Loveless Cafe Barn in Nashville, TN.
Here’s a sensational show of songwriting, mostly easy going but sparked up by John Nemeth’s Memphis blues. Mipso from Chapel Hill, NC. Matt Urmy with a new album saved from a fire that was produced by Cowboy Jack Clement and the exceptional duo of Will Kimbrough and Brigitte DeMeyer.
Brigitte DeMeyer is a very visible artist in the Americana movement. Her work has stirred accolades in national media. She has been tapped to open for Bob Dylan, among others, and performs frequently at home and abroad. She writes songs as weavers thread tapestries, her most vivid colors being a Southern feel, a churchy soulfulness in her vocals, and a way with words that bears comparison to literature as easily as to the best contemporary lyrics.
With album number six on the horizon for the acclaimed independent singer-songwriter, “Savannah Road” (due out in early 2014), DeMeyer has built a solid foundation with her first five albums, collaborating with giants of the Americana world-world class drummer/producer Brady Blade, Buddy Miller, Sam Bush, and more recently, guitarist/songwriter Will Kimbrough—and has shown herself to have a wonderfully natural feel for soul-steeped, blues-infused roots music.
The daughter of Belgian and German immigrants, she was born in the Midwest, and at a young age moved to Southern California with her family where she started latching onto rootsy sounds, from Etta James, Mavis Staples and Sly Stone, to her discovery of The Allman Brothers, Steve Earle and Patti Griffin.
Though DeMeyer took to soulful southern-tinged music, she also early on, acquired a non-musical Bachelor’s degree and pursued Post Baccalaureate studies working assorted jobs to produce a steady income, all the while making music on the side, (even studying with vocal coach Judy Davis, who had been a mainstay instructor for Janis Joplin and Barbara Streisand). “I loved studying with Judy, but I always felt my best lessons were from the folks I listened to and played with, and more from my mistakes in life which made me want to write. You gotta work at it, but it all helps to make you better as an artist,” says DeMeyer. She ultimately turned the by-the-book plan on its head, taking a brave leap into pursuing music full-time. The roundabout route has served the substance of her songs well. As she puts it, “I had to struggle for a while, paying the rent, getting my heart stomped on a time or two, but got the insight I needed to start and continue to write. Instead of it all being there on my sleeve, it’s on the paper now, and in the air”.
It didn’t take DeMeyer long to find kindred musical spirits. Brady Blade and DeMeyer hit it off after DeMeyer approached him to guest on her 2nd CD, Nothing Comes Free. He signed on to play, and produced her following two CD’s, Something After All and Red River Flower, and co-produced DeMeyer’s 5th CD, Rose of Jericho, with DeMeyer, all along bringing in a small army of masterly players and singers he knew would appreciate what she was doing. Players like Buddy Miller (with whom she’s since shared the stage on more than one occasion), Steve Earle, Ivan Neville, Daniel Lanois, the Indigo Girls’ Emily Saliers, the McCrary Sisters and steel ace Al Perkins (who invited her to join two European tours). On her 5th CD Rose of Jericho, DeMeyer expanded her impressive stable of collaborators with contributions from full-throated force of nature Mike Farris, guitar gurus Kimbrough and Doug Lancio and mandolin virtuoso Sam Bush.
With a 2010 relocation from California to Nashville, DeMeyer has been delving deeper into southern musical territory. Gaining momentum and visibility as a performing artist, she has built a strong partnership with guitarist/songwriter Will Kimbrough, with whom she has toured and performed with extensively since her last release. The songs DeMeyer has been writing, primarily with Kimbrough, are a thick and swampy blend of steel and slide guitar, fingerpicking, blues inflection, and literary imagery. “Acoustic soul” as they like to call it. The songs stem from DeMeyer and Kimbrough’s musical chemistry, and are brought further to life with additional players Brady Blade, keyboardist Jimmy Wallace, guitar/mandolinist Guthrie Trapp, and bassist Chris Donohue. Also featured are friends the McCrary Sisters, and Ricky and Micol Davis of Blue Mother Tupelo.
With DeMeyer’s lyrical skill, ease with melody, and expressive vocals, combined with Kimbrough’s mastery of strings, the result is Savannah Road, a spooky and soulful collection of songs, taking the listener to another time and place. A sure standout in the coming year’s musical landscape.
Chapel Hill’s indie Americana quartet Mipso are influenced by the contradiction of their progressive home and the surrounding rural southern landscapes. Currently celebrating the release of their new album Coming Down The Mountain (April 7, 2017), Mipso ventures further than ever from their string-band pedigree to discover a broader Americana where classic folk-rock and modern alt-country sounds mingle easily with Appalachian tradition. Adding drums and electric instruments to their intimate four-part harmonies and powerful acoustic meld, Mipso’s music is lush and forward moving, with words that sear and salve in turn. Hailed as “hewing surprisingly close to gospel and folk while still sounding modern and secular.” (Acoustic Guitar), and recently recognized by Rolling Stone as a favorite 2016 festival performance, Mipso brings a distinctly unique sound- full of wistful beauty, hopeful undercurrents, and panoramic soundscapes.
Look for Mipso touring with expanded instrumentation in 2017 in support of their new album.
Matt Urmy is a singer songwriter moving up in the world. Although he was born in New York City, and raised by parents who were from New York and New England, Matt spent his childhood and adolescence in Nashville, TN. His early exposure to the music studios and the craft of songwriting shaped Matt’s world view, and his vision for what his life would be about.
After years of playing in bands, like the Knoxville-based honky-tonk band, The Whiskey Scars, Matt began focusing more on his individual craft as a songwriter and storyteller. He dove into the catalogs of the greats like, Guy Clark, Springsteen, Townes, John Prine, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and others…while also earnestly studying great poets like, Lorca, Neruda, Merwin, Muriel Rukeyser and Mary Oliver.
He was 29 when he met ‘Cowboy’ Jack Clement, and the two quickly decided to make an album together. To that point in his life, Urmy had not ever had an opportunity to work so closely with someone who had accomplished so much in music. Urmy had loved Jack’s work from afar, and never dreamed that he would one day get to hone his own craft under the guiding hand of the Maestro (as he was often called).
The sessions began in the original Cowboy Arms Hotel & Recording Spa, which was a studio upstairs in what had once been the attic. All the Nashville greats had done sessions there, and it was the most vibed-out places Matt had ever seen.
Sessions began in December of 2010, and by spring, mixing was well under way. That’s when disaster hit. Jack’s home and studio were lost in a fire, and with the album gone, and Jack’s life in a massive recovery mode, Matt began work on a software startup project called, Artist Growth, which was a vision to build an artist management system. The company was launched in early 2012, and today serves many of the industries premiere acts and managers.
It was summer of 2012 that Matt received a call from Cowboy’s engineer notifying him that despite all odds, a few albums had been recovered from a hard drive that had been salvaged from the ashes the morning after the fire, and Matt’s album was one of them. Due to his commitments for Artist Growth, Matt was unable to return to work on the project right away. But, later that year, the team went into Sound Emporium Studio A and cut two new tracks for the album, one of which was the Allen Reynolds song, We Must Believe In Magic, which is the song Jack played for Matt the night they met.
By 2013, Jack’s home and studio were rebuilt, and the team reassembled once more to record the final track that Matt had written for Jack called, Out Of The Ashes, in the new studio. That was also the year that Matt and long-time friend of Jack, Dub Cornett, co-produced a tribute show for Jack at the War Memorial Auditorium, and it was a star-studded night of tribute to the Cowboy’s life and work.
After the song was mixed, Matt connected to another one of his heroes, John Prine. He sent Mr. Prine a rough mix of the song attached to an email, and asked if he would like to sing on the track, since they had both been at Cowboy’s house the day of the fire. Mr. Prine replied that he was in Ireland on vacation at the time, but that he had a friend in the next village who had a studio, and if Matt would send an instrumental version of the song and the lyrics, that he’d go over there and cut some vocals and send them back.
A couple weeks later, a teary-eyed Urmy, sat in his office at Artist Growth and listed to a vocal-only track of Mr. Prine’s voice, singing through the words and melody of the album’s title track. The final mix was completed only 4 weeks after Mr. Clement passed away in the fall of 2013, and it’s only now that Matt has been able to release the album that he and Jack began 7 years prior.
Don’t try to snatch him back and hold him, he’s a man on the move. John Németh had already established himself among the very top ranks of blues musicians and modern soul singers when he decided to break the mold with his new record, FEELIN’ FREAKY. Németh fearlessly crushes all barriers of style and genre with an album of original songs that defies all the usual pigeonholes. Drawing from his strong influences in blues and R&B, as well as contemporary sounds in hip hop and rock & roll, John creates music that is personal as well as universal, and owes its origin to no one but John Németh. John’s songs are groove and melody-driven, laced with thoughtful lyrics and nuanced humor, and cover themes from social issues of gun violence and class values to the pure hedonistic joy of dancing, sexuality and marijuana. He creates his songs from melodies and phrases he draws from the sounds of life, from early-morning Memphis songbirds to the din of the city. For this album John brought his new songs to his great touring band, the Blue Dreamers – Danny Banks on drums, Matthew Wilson on bass and guitar, and Johnny Rhodes on guitar – so they could hone the groove and finish building the album as a group. Under the simpatico guidance of Grammy-nominated producer Luther Dickinson (North Mississippi Allstars), FEELIN’ FREAKY emerges as a modern personal masterpiece.
This album is a testament to power with taste and restraint, dramatic dynamics through the use of space. Németh’s striking tenor vocals are already legendary, with a pitch-perfect purity of range and power that has drawn comparisons to soul singers from O.V. Wright to James Brown. He keeps that power under a tight leash, letting it rip at just the right places, using his voice to deliver and serve the song. Németh is also a very accomplished harmonica player who can boogie with the best of them, in various diatonic positions as well as on the mighty Chromatic harp, yet he plays relatively little on this record. What he plays are largely horn lines, trumpet-like staccato blasts that serve to create dramatic dynamic shifts, tension and release, all in service to the song, not the ego of the player. The few solos he delivers are concise, tasty and powerful.
FEELIN’ FREAKY was recorded at the Dickinson family’s Zebra Ranch Studios in Mississippi and Willie Mitchell’s legendary Royal Studios in Memphis. Németh’s touring band on their instruments and background vocals is at the heart of the recordings, along with musicians hand-picked to complement the individual tracks. John often works with horns, and Memphis players Marc Franklin (trumpet, flugelhorn) and Art Edmaiston (Tenor, Bari sax) deliver echoes of classic Memphis sound all over this record. Németh and Dickinson agreed that the B-3 Organ parts had to go to Charles Hodges, who contributed so much to the Hi Records sound on albums by the likes of Al Green and Ann Peebles. For extra depth and sweetness, they added strings by J. Kirkscey, B. Luscombe, J. Munson and P. Tsai.
A little history:
As a Boise, Idaho teenager in the early ‘90s, John Németh was drawn to the hard-edged hip hop sounds and rock bands of the day – but when a friend exposed him to Buddy Guy and Junior Wells’s classic “Hoodoo Man Blues,” he was hooked. John played harp and sang in local bands, often opening the show for nationally touring blues acts. John soon caught the ear of established blues musicians, and before long he was releasing his own CDs – THE JACK OF HARPS (2002) and COME AND GET IT (2004), featuring Junior Watson – and performing in Junior Watson’s band. John relocated to San Francisco in 2004, where he wound up doing a two-year stint with Anson Funderburgh and the Rockets, filling in for the ailing Sam Myers.
Németh immersed himself in the deep musical waters of the Bay area, absorbing more of the soul and funk grooves of what he calls “the early East Bay Grease sound” of San Francisco and Oakland bands. John’s reputation continued to grow, and he soon signed a recording contract with Blind Pig Records. His national debut for that label – MAGIC TOUCH (2007), produced by Anson Funderburgh and featuring Junior Watson on guitar – received an ecstatic response from fans and the media, and he was hailed as the new voice of the Blues. Living Blues Magazine enthused, “Magic Touch gives hope that the blues will survive.” In 2008 Németh was recruited by Elvin Bishop to do some performances and contribute four vocal tracks to his Grammy-nominated album THE BLUES ROLLS ON.
Németh released two more albums on the Blind Pig label – LOVE ME TONIGHT (2009), NAME THE DAY! (2010) – earning critical raves and strong sales, both hitting #6 on the Billboard Top Blues Album Charts, and beginning his long string of Blues Music Award nominations, numbering fourteen at last count. John also won two Blues Blast Music Awards – Best New Artist Debut Recording and Sean Costello Rising Star Award – voted on by nearly 11,000 blues fans. John followed up with two independently released live albums, BLUES LIVE and SOUL LIVE in 2012.
In 2013 John relocated to Memphis, Tennessee, where he quickly became a key player in the city’s rich musical scene. He teamed up with producer Scott Bomar and his classic Memphis Soul band, the Bo-Keys to create an album of revisited Soul classics, MEMPHIS GREASE (2014), on the Blue Corn label, which debuted at #4 on the Billboard Blues Chart. John won the 2104 Blues Music Award in the Soul Blues Male Artist category, and MEMPHIS GREASE took the prize for Soul Blues Album in 2015.
John Németh continues to be one of the hottest stars in the musical firmament, touring nationally and internationally with his Memphis band, taking the world by storm. He is currently nominated for a 2017 Blues Music Award in the category of B.B. King Entertainer of the Year . FEELIN’ FREAKY will be released in May 2017, on John’s own Memphis Grease label, and it’s already generating a firestorm among his devoted fans and the media. Stay tuned….
