Scott Ainslie - The Compleat Folksinger Consummate: Guitarist, Singer, Writer, Historian, Activist by Richard CuccaroIt's mid-November, 2003, and I'm sitting in the darkened Starlight Room of Kutscher's Hotel & Resort. We're listening to blues singer Scott Ainslie preface a performance of Robert Johnson's "Crossroad Blues." He's one of the featured main showcase performers at the Northeast Regional Folk Alliance Conference. In the middle of the brightly lit, circular stage, he gives us the facts behind this classic blues song. For the first time, I learn of the after-dark curfew for black men that existed in the deep South in Johnson's day. A black man caught out on the highway after dark risked death at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan or the local sheriff. As the bottleneck glides over the strings of Ainslie's 1931 National Steel guitar, I can envision Johnson standing on a dirt road, guitar case in hand, with the sun setting. I'm reading Johnson's mind with grim clarity as Scott sings: "I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees / Asked the lord above for mercy, say boy, if you please / The sun's goin' down, That sun's gonna catch me here / Lord I'm standin' at the crossroads, I believe I'm sinkin' down." There's something about Scott Ainslie that spurs a desire to sit down and share a beer or two. Maybe it's the way his face lights up when he's telling you about the dusty delta history behind a blues ballad. Perhaps it's the powerful baritone that holds each song aloft like the crown jewel he believes it to be. Could be the impressive slide guitar technique honed from years of traveling around the country, learning from the masters. The beard and sideburns have gone gray, but there's a gold earring in his right ear. While he's a master of the blues idiom, he also covers songs by Sam Cooke and Van Morrison. Aside from his technical virtuosity, a fire for human rights burns inside of him. His left-of-center political orientation bleeds into his conversation both on and off stage. After the concert, I spoke to Scott briefly, to secure an interview for Acoustic Live. He agreed. In early January, we set a time for a conversation. At the appointed time, my phone rang, and, after exchanging greetings, I asked him how old he is. He said "52." Given his musical tastes and societal perspective, I expected him to be older. I said that I anticipated a higher number. He laughed, responding, "It's not the years, it's the mileage." No doubt there's been a lot of blacktop and white lines that have passed beneath his wheels. My mouth watered for that beer. I was eager to know about the trajectory of his life. I asked about his early years and the story unfolded. Early Upheavals Scott was born in Rochester, New York. After spending part of his first ten years there and part in northern New Jersey, his parents moved to Virginia in 1960. He was eleven when John Kennedy was assassinated, and stood watching in Washington, D.C. as the funeral procession made its way down the esplanade. He said, "I watched his body roll down a very, very quiet, very, very packed Constitution Avenue. The quiet of a crowd that size is more awesome than the applause that they would make… It was deafeningly quiet. I also got to go to the Poor People's March on Washington and watch a local live TV feed of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. I grew up going to the Anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. I grew up with an eye on politics. " A Gravedigger's Seduction By his early teens, Scott still hadn't taken up the guitar. His brother had. Scott felt that "He'd gotten to that territory before I had and sibling rivalry being what it was, maybe I shouldn't pursue that." In 1967, when he was fifteen, that changed abruptly. He went to a Mike Seeger concert to further his curiosity about folk music. In the middle of the concert, a black gravedigger named John Jackson was introduced to play three songs. Jackson walked onstage in denim overalls and sat down to play. He'd never heard a roots-style guitarist. Scott had been expecting something in between the strumming styles of Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel. What poured forth was an alternating bass line plucked with Jackson's thumb underneath sweet-sounding, rollicking treble notes played with his forefingers. Scott was stunned with wonder, thinking "What kind of guitar playing is that?" He was getting his first taste of the ragtime fingerpicking style called "Piedmont," played in North Carolina and below, in the Southeastern states. He'd find out later, about the "Delta" blues style. He started playing on borrowed guitars the rest of the summer, before getting his own. The liner notes of his first CD, Jealous of the Moon, read like a memoir of a lover's tryst: "We had a big front yard… when my brother was outside playing football, I used to sneak upstairs to his room to play his guitar. On the edge of his bed, with the late afternoon sun pouring in onto the carpet around my feet, I'd guiltily finger her strings and listen as she whispered under the sounds of the game outside." When he got to college -- Washington & Leeds in Lexington, Virginia -- he met a geology professor named Odell McGuire. Odell was interested in old-time music and learning to play banjo and decided to visit old musicians and try to learn from them. Rather than go off by himself, he extended an invitation and Scott jumped at it. Together, on weekends, they visited the aged members of the Hammons family in West Virginia and Tommy Jarrel in North Carolina. Jarrel and the musicians of the Hammons family were in their 70's and 80's. Word was circulating that Library of Congress researchers were coming to record the music of Jarrel and the Hammons, and eventually, they did. Although the records became available in the mid-1970's for those interested in learning the music, Scott felt blessed to have visited them and learn it first-hand. I remember hearing seminal folk artists at outdoor festivals in the early 70s'. Something happens on a cellular level when the sound of a banjo or fiddle played by an early master reaches my ears. A sense of connection with a primal source takes hold, especially when the sound is filtered through a leafy glade. I can only imagine that this effect was heightened by visiting the source and learning the music there, on the porches and in the parlors. Scott said, "I learned this music from their hands, and it made a difference to me." Sitting in the company of these legendary practitioners made their music live and breathe. Scott inhaled it and it became part of who he is. Scott played fiddle, guitar and banjo in college. In the fall of his sophomore year, he built a banjo and in his junior year, he bought a fiddle. During the week, he was composing, analyzing and performing atonal music as part of his Music Theory and Composition degree. In addition, he'd pick up the guitar and emulate the recorded work of Mississippi John Hurt. On weekends he'd accompany Odell to West Virginia and North Carolina. He said, "It was kind of a schizophrenic world. Maybe bipolar would be a more apt expression."
Scott demonstrates the "Diddley Bow," a "cigar box" guitar which slaves used to play and from which Bo Diddly got both his name and the shape of his guitar. Describing the pull of the guitar during those weekend runs, he remembered, "I usually pulled out the guitar when the rest of the fiddle and banjo players collapsed. Then I would grab a guitar and play into the wee hours of the morning as people fell off to sleep." He recalled that, after graduating: "I ran into John Jackson four or five years after I had seen him again at a fiddler's convention." He says, "It was a great piece of timing. John and I went on to become friends for almost 30 years before he passed away. He was a dear man." In late 1979, early 1980, Scott was living in New York and was cast in an original production of the Broadway show "Cotton Patch Gospel," a bluegrass retelling of the New Testament. This proved to be a turning point in his development as a singer. Harry Chapin wrote about 15 or 16 songs for the show. His brother Tom Chapin, a singer/songwriter known for his children's shows, was the musical director. "Tom and I have been friends ever since," Scott says. Telling of the experience, he recalls: "I was singing 8 shows a week in Lamb's Theater [on 44th street], which seats nearly 500 people. As part of a 4-piece bluegrass band, I had to sing over the music with no microphones or sound reinforcement. You either learn how to sing loud and be heard in the back row or you get fired. There's no way around this. I walked out of there with 2 or 3 times as much vocal power." The show lasted about 10 months and finished up its run in early 1981. Talkin' 'Bout the Blues Playing blues exclusively happened this way as he recalls: "Around 1982, I played in an old-time band in New York called the Fly-By-Night String Band with 3 New York musicians for 2 years. I sang and played dobro, fiddle, banjo, mandolin and occasionally guitar. We cut a record and then broke up almost instantly. Later, at solo gigs, I was playing fiddle, banjo, mandolin, and two different guitars. I got tired of carrying everything around, so I decided to go back to my first love and spend some time learning to sing and play the blues. I 'apprenticed' myself to the blues singers, looking into Gary Davis's guitar parts and going back to Robert Johnson's recordings. I just really dug into that stuff." Then, Scott's next move completed his transformance to blues historian: "I eventually moved out of New York in 1984, transferring to North Carolina. In 1986 I got work in the Visiting Artists Program in North Carolina. Community Colleges got state funds to hire professional artists to work at no charge in their communities. So I wandered out into Eastern North Carolina into counties that were 50-60% black people, to play music. The music that I got hired to play was blues. I immersed myself in doing concerts for people who, if they didn't have an active antipathy for black people (the whites out there), were certainly scornful of the culture and what it was. As a white person playing black music there, I had to explain myself." "To the black community, as a white person playing their music, I also had to explain where I was coming from, to the audiences, to have any legitimacy. I started using history and anecdotes about the performers in between songs. It veers dangerously close to being educational (laughs boisterously). My goal is to leave people slightly better educated, fully entertained and somehow in touch with their own part of what it means to be human. So, when another human being shows up, they'll go, 'Oh yeah, we're in the same tribe.'" Asked about his performance philosophy, he states: "This is not about self-expression… It's only about self-expression to the extent that you can express the community around you." His performance goal in a nutshell : "What do we have to do here, to make this place better?" Songwriter and Activist Scott's talents as a singer and songwriter deserve a close look. The title track of his first CD Jealous of the Moon is one of the finest love songs (written for the woman who is now his wife) I've ever heard. His interpretation of a little-known song by Joe Henry, "Date for Church," on the same CD, played with jazz overtones, is a tour-de-force and merits serious airplay. Finally, his stance as an songwriter/ activist shines when he sings a recent composition: "Don't Obey." He sang it recently at the Carriage Barn in New Canaan, Connecticut. Ominous chords provided a foundation as his voice reverberated from the rafters overhead as he sang: "When they speak to you of glory and colors bright and true / And using words like good and evil, say it all comes down to you / When they offer you a weapon and send you out into the fray / Don't obey… don't obey." Somewhere, somehow a message must be sent to the masses of this nation about the lies that have spilled men and women into their graves. Artists such as Scott Ainslie who bring such messages are treasures. Acoustic Live urges its readers to see him and cherish more than just an evening of entertainment. Listen, learn and absorb a character that has made the people of this nation so special, but today is in peril of being lost. It's anybody's guess at how many opportunities are left. Locally, Scott is playing The Minstrel Coffeehouse in Morristown, NJ on March 5th. Fri, Mar 5 8:30 p.m. Minstrel Coffeehouse Morris Township, NJ 973/227-4004 minstrel@folkproject.org Further Listings: Thurs, Feb. 5 Carson-Newman College Jefferson City, TN 7:30 p.m. teague@cnc.acc.edu Sat, Feb. 7 8:00 p.m. The Evening Muse Charlotte, NC 704/376-3737 themuse@queencitymusic.com Mon, Feb. 9 11:00 a.m. Southern Voices Performance w/Glenis Redmond Spartanburg Methodist College Spartanburg SC 864/587-4279 Tues, Feb. 10 10 a.m. & 12 noon Southern Voices w/ Glenis Redmond Peace Center for the Performing Arts Greenville, SC 864/467-3030 Sat, Feb. 14 7:30 p.m. Split bill with Zoe Speaks Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Columbia, SC 803/799-0845 jscorbett@mindspring.com Tues, Feb. 17 9:00 p.m. Lees-McRae College Banner Elk, NC 828/898-8753 gunn@lmc.edu Wed, Feb. 18 School Performance Kings Mountain High School Kings Mountain, NC 704/743-5647 Thur, Feb. 19 7:00 p.m. Gaston County Public Library Gastonia, NC 704/868-2164 x. 124 Fri, Feb. 20 8:00 p.m. Southern Voices w/Glenis Redmond The ArtsCenter Carrboro, NC 919/929-2787 Sat, Feb. 21 7:00 p.m. Southern Voices w/Glenis Redmond St. Paul's College Chicago Building Lawrenceville, VA 434/577-2833 micheleroehrich@hotmail.com Tues, Mar. 2 7:00 p.m. Southern Voices w/ Glenis Redmond Colby Sawyer College Ware Campus Center New London, NH 603/526-3784 sewillia@colby-sawyer.edu Fri, Mar 5 8:30 p.m. Minstrel Coffeehouse Morris Township, NJ 973/227-4004 minstrel@folkproject.org Sun, Mar. 28 Time TBA Sutherland House Concert Monkton, VT epact@sover.net Fri, Apr. 2 8:00 p.m. The Folkal Point Medford, MA info@springstep.org http://www.springstep.org Albums: Jealous of the Moon (1995), Terraplane (2000), You Better Lie Down (2002) Book Author: Robert Johnson: At the Crossroads Instructional Video: Robert Johnson's Guitar Techniques Scott's Web site: www.guitarpicker.com/Ainslie/Scott.htm Scott accepts subscribers to his monthly "Blues Notes" e-mails, which contain historical notes on blues masters and upcoming performance dates. He also gives educational concerts in schools. The section "Blues Notes" on his web site presents the entire illuminating outline of his school presentations. Contact: ainslie@musician.org Booking: Loyd Artists www.loydartists.com