Award-winning Alvin Youngblood Hart should not be missed, writes Larry Schwartz.
ALVIN Youngblood Hart never had to contend with a mysterious stranger to whom legend has it some musicians sold their souls at the crossroads in exchange for mastery of their guitars.
He had a benign old uncle instead, Uncle Ruben. The Memphis-based musician was just 10 when the old man picked up a guitar one of his brothers had received for Christmas and sparked his enduring obsession with the instrument.
“He came over to our house for breakfast and tuned it to some open chord or other,” Hart says. “The next thing you know we heard this kind of John Lee Hooker beat coming out of the guitar and we were dumbstruck, my brother and I. So we started paying a little more attention to our older relatives after that.”
Almost 30 years on, Hart, who has a repair workshop on his property, says guitars are “what I do from the moment I wake up until I go to sleep at night”.
Born Gregory Edward Hart, he has read claims that he took his first name from the harmonica-playing character in the cartoon group Alvin and the Chipmunks but attributes it to the “A” on the baseball cap he wore as a teen and a copy of Alvin Lee’s red Gibson ES-335 guitar he played.
“People write whatever they like,” he says. “People have written things like I was the second coming of Son House, or something.”
A note on Hart’s website says, “The cosmic American love-child of Howlin’ Wolf and Link Wray!”
“Yeah, I’ll take that one,” he says.
Six years since his last album, Motivational Speaker, Hart is recording a second album with the South Memphis String Band, a trio with Squirrel Nut Zippers founder Jimbo Mathus and Luther Dickinson, of the North Mississippi Allstars.
Previously, Hart has had some experience with movies. He was a guitar tutor to Samuel L. Jackson in Black Snake Moan. “He was a better actor but he was certainly a willing student,” he says. Hart also featured in Wim Wenders’s The Soul of a Man, Martin Scorsese’s series The Blues, the documentary Last of the Mississippi Jukes and played a juke-joint musician in The Great Debaters, directed by Denzel Washington.
“I’m a better guitar player,” he says, laughing.
He toured Mississippi schools with instructors for a non-profit education organisation set up by the family of jazz great Thelonious Monk. “Mostly it’s for serious music students at university level,” he says. “Me, I was just the guy from the garage they had come along.”
He’s been praised by artists from Bob Dylan to Eric Clapton.
Hart’s award-winning 1996 debut, Big Mama’s Door, was a mostly solo acoustic CD of original and classic blues by, or inspired by, such legendary bluesmen as Bukka White, Charley Patton and Blind Willie McTell. “That was my version of unplugged,” he says.
But he is an eclectic musician whose recordings have ranged from traditional blues to Doug Sahm’s Lawd I’m Just a Country Boy in This Great Big Freaky City.
“I don’t go under any banner,” Hart says. “I just play music.”
The Age, 12-Aug-2011
Larry Schwartz Writer 