HoW to Kill a Horse

Following on from the haunting delta sounds of Folk Songs for the American Longhair, the new opus, entitled How To Kill A Horse takes things up to the next level. BM! were lucky enough to hear an early copy of the album and here Dege Legg himself talks us exclusively through track by track.

THE BLACK SEA. Big riffing shot across the bow. Next evolution of the slide and roots music and badass riffage, which is kind of missing from modern music.

DARKER SIDE OF ME. Accepting and sort of celebrating the darker side of the male psyche. Hemingway type shit. Delta slide riffage.

HOW TO KILL A HORSE. Redneck noir, spaghetti western, movie-scape, sonic slide. On the high plains, rodeo of the modern world. Addiction. Dreams. Love. Darkness. Violence.

JUDGMENT DAY. Old world, apocalyptic brimstone, preachy freakout. Signature Brother Dege, ghost-haunted midde 8/slide solo section with middle eastern melodies, unheard in blues.

O’DARK 30 (INSTRUMENTAL).Tomorrow Never Knows slide guitar, dragging modern roots music into the 21st century. Total thrown down. Apocalypse Now. Syrian carnival fireworks. Americano Bad Karma machinegun train.

POOR MOMMA CHILD. Delta style thumper. Man. Woman. Children. Temptation. Infidelity. Promiscuity. Etc.

WEHYAH. A post-modern, trance/chant. Big reverse slide guitar solo. Hendrix/Are You Experienced. DIY spiritual. Lotto Gospel.

CRAZY MOTHERFUCKER. John Lee Hooker Boogie Chillun meets crash and burn love. Meant to lighten the darker tone of the album.

THE RIVER. You can’t control anything. The meaning is in the journey. Not the destination. Hard won lessons. Acceptance of circumstance.

LAST MAN OUT OF BABYLON. Dudes in the wind / Middle-eastern / Old Testament Mecca trekking. Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness).

story though is for another time and place.

Whilst playing with Santeria, Dege started to introduce some acoustic slide guitar into the music, initially just to add some texture and variation. In early 2002 Dege bought his first Dobro and started to teach himself slide Delta blues. Incredibly the first song Dege remembers writing on Dobro was the title track, House of the Dying Sun.

‘I was like WOW! Where did this come from? Although my life has been hard, I’ve always been lucky in song and I am thankful for that. The gods have always been good to me because without the gift of song I don’t know if I’d be here on this earth. The songs, which are like little messages have kept me here. I don’t know why every time I want to leave or give up the universe, or God or whatever sends me a song.’

Dege continued to practise and write until around 2006 he felt he was getting good enough to finger pick, sing and slide at the same time without embarrassing himself or the Delta tradition. This is an important point, as Dege says, ‘ White people have a long history of ruining things that black people have invented. The Delta blues is no different. I didn’t want to be another honky, throwing shame on the game. That’s why I didn’t start playing solo as Brother Dege until around 2006, because I didn’t want to take from the tradition. It was only at that point I realised I had something to add to it.’

By 2009 Dege started recording the debut Brother Dege album, Folk Songs for the American Longhair. Consisting of ten great delta blues songs recorded in a shed behind his house in Louisiana in the tradition of the original giants of the genre, Bukka White, Son House etc. Released in 2010 to critical acclaim, sales were slow to begin with but word was spreading. Eventually the track, Hard Row To Hoe was picked up by producers on the Discovery Channel programme ‘Deadliest Catch’. The culmination of this was getting a call from Quinten Tarratino requesting permission to use another track, Too Old To Die Young on the Django Unchained soundtrack. Dege admits at first he thought it was a hoax, but suddenly sales have picked up as his music is heard by a whole new audience.

Since 2011 Dege has been writing and recording his new album How To Kill A Horse, due out in November. The whole album has been recorded in an empty warehouse in Lafayette and is as atmospheric and chill inducing as that suggests.

Dege is much more than just a musician recording blues music. He is a multi artist who has recorded nine albums with Santeria and various other projects, all worth checking out. Between 2004-05 he was part of C.C. Adcock’s acclaimed touring band The Lafayette Marquis.

In addition he has written two novels, and often has an ability to turn difficult times into something positive. In 2003 Dege started working as a nightshift cab driver in Lafayette but turned his experiences into first a blog and then a book, Cablog, Diary of a Cabdriver. In 2007 he lived in a homeless camp and wrote a feature story about the experience, Slipping Through The Cracks, that appeared in the Independent Weekly and won a Louisiana Press Award. This has always been a cause close to his heart and since 2011 Dege has held down a full time job as a case worker in a homeless shelter as well as recording and performing.

If you’re searching for a modern take on traditional Delta slide guitar blues check out Brother Dege. Final words to Dege, ‘ I don’t consider myself a bluesman in the traditional sense, a la BB King, SRV, I am a self taught artist that is drawn toward all music and media that has a soulful quality to it. It all functions on a subconscious level. It’s the weird thing that gives you the chills or makes the hair stand up on your arms when you feel it. I don’t really understand it, I just go with what feels right.’ f or the l Atest news on b rother d ege check out his website: http://brotherdege.blogspot.co.uk wAy b A ck when i used to pl Ay this g A me c A lled ‘w h At i f?’ A nd A s A 99 ye A rs to lifer, dyed in the wool, blues fA n A nd long-time musici A n, the wh At ifs would usu A lly include sever A l fA ntA sy blues b A nds

For example, what if Robert Johnson had access to a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. What if a tape recorder had been at one of Charlie Patton’s great Saturday night Delta Blues in 1920’s Clarksdale with a young Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Big Joe Williams in attendance. But by far my biggest ‘what if’ may surprise you. It was simply what if Robert Johnson had been able to record using a National Resophonic acoustic guitar? (After all, first year of production was 1927 so this what if is entirely possible) My reason is simple, it’s because to me Terraplane Blues, Walking Blues, Come Into My Kitchen, etc., played on that magical, clangey, virile, rinkydink, old-fashioned mystery music box of an instrument, surely does conjure up enchanted, dark secret sounds from places deep in the very heart of the Mississippi Delta. In fact I say that playing a slide blues on a National Resophonic acoustic guitar is the nearest thing you can get today to walking down that old dust road where it all came from way back down in the Mississippi night. OK, now I’ve got you all fired up about the use of Resonator Guitars in the Blues, I guess I had better start by telling you what a Resonator Guitar actually is.

It all started with a man named John Dopyera who came to America with his family from Austro-Hungary in 1908. The family business they started was a cabinet making and general repair shop, but during the 1920s they began to manufacture Banjos and it was in this period that two incidents took place which were to change everything. The second incident was the introduction and popularity of the new Victrola Gramophone. The connection between the two ideas was volume. The Victrola produced a sound so quiet that it could not be heard unless amplified many times. Basically, how it worked was that when the needle attached to the gramophone head was placed into the etched and pressed rotating spiral of the shellac record, the resulting vibrations moved up the needle to where it made contact with a plate of metal or other material in the gramophone head called a Resonator Plate. They were converted back into the speech and music of the record which was then amplified many times using a brass horn. So here we have it, the magic combination of ideas and technology which gave birth to the wonderful Resonator acoustic guitar. The problem to be solved had already been highlighted by Mr Beauchamp, and it was growing bigger by the day. The Blues had been used as entertainment for a small groups of people – in the home, at a country supper, busking etc. Volume was not a problem, but leisure activities were changing, and people were starting to take their leisure time entertainment in much larger more formalised groups now, in barrel houses, juke joints, bars etc. Also, the coming drift of rural populations to large national cities like Chicago put the entertainers and musicians into situations where audiences were even larger, noisier and wanting to party. With wooden acoustic guitars too quiet to be heard well enough, and the electric guitar yet to come on the scene, so it was that the National Resophonic guitar became a kind of half way. OK, so far we have talked about volume, and the problems that the early Bluesmen had to fret. But, something even more vital was achieved, almost by accident – and that is the sound! In the process of amplifying the acoustic guitar. John Dopyera also used a

Resonator Plate, an idea he had taken from the Victorla Gramophone, he placed the thin circular alloy metal plate inside the body of the guitar, just under the bridge and this alone completely changed the whole sound, tone and character of the instrument.

Not only that but the National Resophonic guitar company founded by John Dopyera was producing its first Resophonic guitar in the late 1920s, not with a wood body like almost all other acoustic guitars, but with a body made from brass, often coated in highly reflective nickel steel. Also, the sound hole was not the standard circular hole common to most acoustics, but instead F holes were used, which are more common to a Violin. When you play the strings the sound is transferred to the interior of the sound box through the resonator plate (also known as a cone) which resonates giving a totally unique character to the sounds produced – there is a richness, a grittiness, a shaft to the heart, a down-home, back porch, Saturday-night dirt road feel to the sound of a well-played National Resonator guitar which is unique, and can’t be produced by any other instrument. There is one more magic ingredient to throw in the mix, and that’s the Slide. The whole of this guitar is based on resonance, it is suitable for slide.

The Slide is a glass tube placed on the little finger of the musicians’ left hand which is used to pick at the melody, then sliding it up and down the strings. Slide guitar does not work well when the guitar is in standard tuning, therefore the Bluesman has to put the guitar into a special tuning to play with a slide. This means that once the guitar is in special slide tuning, no normal chords will work. The musician has to work a different set of chords for each individual special tuning. (E is a good tuning to start experimenting with for Slide guitar). As already noted, the musician must play with the bottleneck or slide on his little finger, so he has one less finger to make chords with. If all that won’t give you the Blues, well I don’t know what will!

I just want to inform you about our company BLUE NOTE TOURS, LLC

We offer 20 trips,starting in 2014 from April 4th, through to October 21st. An Escorted Luxury Bus Tour from Chicago to, St Louis, to Memphis, to the Crossroads of the Mississippi Delta, and on to Vicksburg, Mississippito New Orleans.

This is a trip like no other for Blues Fans. From the clubs and juke joints, to the cotton fields of the Delta, to the Electric Blues of Chicago.

All hotels, breakfast, museums, attractions and a host of other surprises are included.

The Blues has had a distinct influence on so many musical styles – Jazz, Country, Motown and is directly responsible for Rock & Roll. We encourage Musicians to take the ride, we will be stopping at a lot of clubs and doing a lot of Open Mic Nights.

It doesn’t matter if your a Blues musician or a Blues fan, the trip is designed to have FUN while listening to some great Blues, with old and new friends. Our goal is to inform, entertain and some times testify to our love for the Blues.