Root Cellar Sound and Broad Brook Community Center are pleased to present the second concert in the free community concert series: blues guitarist Ryan Lee Crosby.
Steeped in Betonia Mississippi blues style, Ryan has is touring to promote his new album 'Live at the Blue Front': "Old school music the old school way by a contemporary torch bearer of a traditional Delta blues style" says Premier Guitar Player magazine.
Listen to Ryan Lee Crosby: https://ryanleecrosby.com/
Opening the concert will be local Guilford-based band, Flume, featuring Pete Ginter and Gray Zabriskie. This electric guitar and percussion duo play folk blues rock B-sides and originals to get you toe-tapping and singing along.
Concert starts at 6pm, with doors open at 5:30 for light snacks and refreshments.
ABOUT RYAN LEE CROSBY:
Ryan Lee Crosby is currently based in Rhode Island, but his musical heart is in Mississippi. He has released numerous albums, toured internationally and is a leading practitioner of the Bentonia School of rural Delta blues, as well as a world music explorer. Smithsonian Magazine praised his ability to "bring influences from Africa and India to the Bentonia sound.”
Crosby's new album "At the Blue Front" (featuring Grammy nominated bluesman Jimmy “Duck” Holmes) offers a haunting, hypnotic meld of Bentonia and Hill Country blues. Recorded on reel to reel tape over two afternoons at Holmes’ iconic Mississippi juke joint, the album was produced, recorded and mixed by Crosby, with a selection of original compositions, traditional repertoire and fully improvised songs.
Crosby’s music has already positioned him as a major new guitarist in the blues and American Primitive styles, earning spotlights from Guitar Player, Aquarium Drunkard, WBUR (Boston NPR station), Smithsonian Mag, Premier Guitar, American Blues Scene, Vintage Guitar Mag, Acoustic Guitar Mag, and the Nashville Scene. He has opened concerts for Pokey LaFarge, The Hold Steady, Chris Smither, and Charlie Parr, is a regular at Clarksdale, MS’ Juke Joint Fest, and worked with producer Bruce Watson, from which his song “Down So Long” was added to Spotify’s official Blues on the Rocks playlist.
Under the tutelage of the last of the Bentonia, MS bluesmen, 77-year-old Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, who runs the Blue Front as his mother did before him, Crosby patiently learned the Bentonia style. The Bentonia blues, which Holmes learned from the form’s originator Henry Stuckey as well as Jack Owens, depends upon a minor key open guitar tuning called crossnote and is often accompanied by falsetto singing. Its most famous exponent, Skip James, had stopped Crosby in his tracks when Ryan first heard the sound, and now Crosby has recorded in a room where James often performed. Even as he is respectful of the tradition, Crosby develops the style in his own way, using a 12-string electric guitar.
“Playing with Jimmy and learning from him,” Crosby says, “it’s the joy, it’s the process, it’s the connection and transcendence and what feels to me like a fulfillment of life’s purpose.”