Blue Mountain began making music in the green hills of
North Mississippi seven years ago, and now there are
growing enclaves of fans all across the country. Cary
Hudson and Laurie Stirratt write the songs and they play the
guitars while Frank Coutch accompanies them on drums.
With the addition last year of George Sheldon on bass, the
band has rounded into a solid four-piece group, people who
are comfortable with eachother, like cousins.
I’ve seen them play in Laurie’s kitchen. She’s always
cooking something, so it smells good in there. On the
windowsills sit old glass bottles, Native American artifacts
found in those same hills, a tin sign that hung on the side of
some store fifty years before. A woodburning stove sits in
the corner. They have lots of dogs. A man might say it feels
right homey there.
I’ve heard so much music in that room. The walls wear the
memory of it the way the heart bears an invisible scar. When
they talk about the music they heard growing up you see the
shine of love in their eyes, a reverence for the songs that
shaped them and inspired them to make their own.
Laurie talks lovingly of her family and the instruments they
played, and how there was always music in the house when
she was growing up. Cary talks about Skip James and
Robert Johnson and The Who, and all the great guitarists he
listened to. To see him play is to hear a distillation of all that
rock and roll combined with the mastery of a style
completely his own. Frank turns me on to old Hank Williams
tunes and delights the crowds with his own rendition of
“Mama’s got a Squeezebox” while hammering on his drums.
George jams and grins and sweats in the corner, and late at
night on his own piano sometimes plays a primal kind of
Frankenstein music that lives in George’s fingers.
Before they went on the road the last time, they let me
watch them rehearse. Frank wasn’t playing his drums, but
he was tapping the beat on his leg, and George was in there
with them in Laurie’s kitchen. They were playing without a
crowd, or lights, or smoke, not in an overheated room with
people talking, just in the kitchen with a few small amps
hooked up. And as it usually happens, the Wizard (what I
call Cary behind his back) got to doing some of his wizardry
on his guitar, and even Frank, there at the end of the table,
who has heard something like it hundreds of times before,
was smiling and shaking his head. Cary was making a
sound come out of that electric Gibson that was totally of its
own being, some pleasureful and powerful living thing that
flowed within that place like something that had been
trapped and was in the process of escaping. It steamed and
rattled, hooted and whistled, and you couldn’t stop from
moving your body to it, letting the music live inside you for a
while.
I spent some nights in the studio this spring, watched them
play and sing solos and listen to songs over and over,
checking this, reducing that, adding that. Dan Baird was
helping them, and there were so many positive vibes in that
room that it felt great just to stand in it and hear the music
pour.
These songs were mixed by Mark Howard at Teatro. They all
worked hard putting this one together, Frank and Laurie and
George and Cary, and it’s so nice to see all these songs
finished and breaking more new ground for BLUE
MOUNTAIN. Here’s one true thing for you: The truly good
only get better.
It’s kind of them to let me hang out in Laurie’s kitchen and
listen to them play. They’d be doing it even if they didn’t
have a record label. Doing it because they love it. If you get
to do what you want with your life, then it’s cool. And if you
happen to make somebody else happy along the way, like
somebody really enjoying a book you wrote or a song you
recorded, then its way cool, and everything is usually mostly
right in those green hills where we all live.
-- Larry Brown
July 25, 1999
Yocona, MS
