Joe McMurrian - A New Voice For Traditional Blues Article by Ken Condit, BluesNotes, December 2005 Photos by Greg Johnson

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     Born to parents who both pursued interests in the arts, it is no surprise that Joe McMurrian inherited a passion for artistic expression.  Since childhood he has had a zeal for drawing, painting and music and has stoked these creative fires throughout his life.  Fortunately for fans of acoustic Blues, he has directed a major part of his artistic passion toward performing songs firmly rooted in that great American art form. 

      As a singer, songwriter and guitarist Joe is a performer who is skilled at pulling together various influences of “old-time” American music and blending them together to create his own distinct sound.  He performs original tunes and covers of down-home country Blues with the touch of an artist who recognizes the timelessness of traditional sounds.  His fingerpicking and slide skills amaze and challenge listeners while his moving vocals draw them into the world of a true storyteller.

      Joe views music as a tremendous form of communication and clearly loves the ability of traditional music, particularly the Blues, to relate stories about everyday people while delivering deeper underlying messages.  His creative nature is also attracted to the opportunities for improvisation that some Blues and related music styles provide with their open-ended formats. 

      He cites early Blues legends Skip James, Big Joe Williams, Fred McDowell and others as some of his main influences.  But he has found himself engrossed by the many interrelated styles of American roots music and his artistic flair has drawn him to more unique and groundbreaking performers of roots music.  He also lists as important influences a wide range of performers from the relatively obscure to the world renowned.       

     One of his biggest musical inspirations has been the lesser-known Louisiana-native Robert Pete Williams.  Williams performed Blues that were highly derivative of Field Hollers and closely tied to African roots, yet his unusual approach has been dubbed avant-garde.  Williams’ free-flowing style and penchant for improvisation helped open Joe’s eye to new creative avenues.  Another key source of inspiration for Joe was found in the banjo picking of old-time performers Doc Boggs and Roscoe Holcomb.  Like Robert Pete Williams, Boggs was an idiosyncratic performer whose styles stepped beyond the usual bounds.  And though Boggs played what might be generally described as pre-bluegrass mountain music, he took the bold step of actually learning material directly from African-American Blues players. 

      Although it has only been the last dozen years or so that he has really concentrated his musical efforts on a solo Blues career, Joe has managed to get around quite a bit.  He has performed with or opened up for the likes of Keb Mo’, Little Charlie and the Nightcats, Charlie Musslewhite, and others and he has played at the Pasadena Blues Festival, the Utah Founders Title Blues and Bluegrass Festival, the String Summit and many more.

      Having relocated to Portland just four years ago, Joe has also managed to make quite an impression locally as a performer.  He has played at three of the last four Waterfront Blues Festivals to rave reviews and manages to find steady work playing as both a solo act and in a trio with a drummer and bassist.  In addition to performing along the west coast, Joe has been doing a steady gig at the White Eagle every Tuesday for the past year.

      The move to Oregon with his wife and two children came about when they decided it was time to leave the asphalt jungle of the L. A. area and find a better place to raise a family.  As a child, Joe had became enamored with the Portland area when he would travel to this region with his father on fishing trips and he had dreamed of moving north ever since.  Joe ostensibly moved here to enroll in the Fine Arts Masters program at Portland State University, but was also drawn to the healthy Portland music scene.

      Currently, Joe is putting the finishing touches on two new CD projects, one of studio recordings and one of live material; both of which he hopes to release in January.  Like his previous CDs, Under The Sun and Dredge, this new one will consist mostly of original material, but will still be focused on the traditional music Joe loves.  Given his varied talents, the production of the CD is largely a solo effort, but he has relied on drummer Jason Stewart, bassists Jason Honl and Dan Davis, and harmonica player David Lipkind to provide instrumental support.       

      Joe’s primary focus as a musical performer has been Country Blues whether from the Delta, the Hills, the Piedmont or points in between.  But like so many young performer’s, his path to the Blues had some twists and turns before his arrival.  He grew up in a small town in Northern California with plenty of music in the home.  Given that his father was from Oklahoma and his mother’s family was from Texas and Arkansas, it stands to reason that traditional Country, Rhythm and Blues and Blues were the music varieties Joe heard most often at home.  In fact, his father had performed as a guitarist both in Oklahoma and later in California, mostly in the lap-slide guitar style common to Country music. 

     Joe’s uncle also performed as a fiddle player and Joe recalls how his imagination was stirred as his Grandmother related the story of his uncle fashioning his first fiddle from a gourd and forming a group that would entertain in town.       

     Although his father had largely given up playing guitar because of the demands his job as a steelworker put on him, Joe found one in the attic as a young child and took it up.  He recalls that at about age 8 he began to play in earnest, or at least as earnestly as an 8 year old could.  Shortly thereafter his father showed him some chords and parts of Willie Nelson tunes, and the two worked out a version of Good Morning Little School Girl that was a hit at school.  Although his father provided some input, Joe basically learned on his own, generally focusing on picking out tunes rather than strumming chords.  As a youngster, Joe was attracted to the image of a Country music performer being a lone man wielding a guitar; an early image that seems to have helped shape his later  musical ambitions as a solo performer.       

     As Joe grew older his musical interests inevitably shifted toward that ubiquitous rock and roll.  Joe’s initial forays into performing as a professional musician were during high school when he was a guitarist in rock bands doing “Led Zeppelin covers and Black Sabbath remakes.”  But his interests pushed him toward experimentation and he tried his hand at songwriting.  During this phase, he concentrated on instrumentals, employing the flat pick “like Bill Monroe on speed,” as he investigated “cool arpeggios and scale formations.”  Perhaps in large part because of his creative drive and penchant for experimentation, Joe’s involvement in the Bay Area rock scene was destined to be short lived.       

     The shift toward roots music and the transformation as a solo performer that lay in waiting for Joe began when he was given the Robert Johnson CD box set one Christmas.  This welcome change further blossomed when he heard the recordings of many Country Blues artists from the 1960s Newport Folk Festivals.  He became obsessed with Folk or Country Blues, cast away the flat pick, and immersed himself in the fingerpicking styles of traditional Blues guitarists.  Soon thereafter he broke a tendon in the ring finger of his fret hand which prevented him from fingering the frets for a few months.  Like a true Blues performer, he turned to the bottle neck slide which he now wields with considerable skill.  

      In the early 1990s, with a new focus on playing traditional music as a solo act and a desire to further his career as an artist, Joe decided to leave his home in Northern California and move to L. A..  He spent ten-years living in and around L. A., studying and working in visual arts by day and following his own solo musical path by night.  He played at clubs throughout the area and met many excellent performers, including Blues singer, songwriter and guitarist Doug McCloud.  Joe remembers McCloud offering him some sound advice that helped his approach to the music.  Joe recalls “Doug always talks about getting inside a song, fishing within it for the real tone, the real substance of the song or emotion that guides it.”  Joe managed to get inside some of his own compositions and eventually released his first CD Under The Sun, which was primarily made up of new songs. 

      Interestingly, when Joe talks about his career in Art, he’s generally seems to be referring to his life-long interest in drawing and painting; an interest nurtured by his mother who loved to draw her own folk art.  Joe’s fascination with painting has resulted in both a bachelors and a masters degree in Fine Arts and public showings of his paintings.  He also finds the time to teach freelance at various private colleges.  Of course, the story of his pursuits in non-musical art forms isn’t for these pages.  But Joe’s talents and work in the visual arts have played an interesting role in his musical development.  Not only was the art program at PSU a lure that helped bring him here to Portland, but a job that he took in the mid 1990s as a mural painter led to a meeting with one Jack Owens, a key figure in the Blues style known as the Bentonia Sound.

      While living in Southern California, Joe had the opportunity to travel to Mississippi for a company that painted large-scale murals for hotels and casinos.  Naturally, with his interests in painting and the Blues, Joe jumped at the offer.  Given the heavy demand for his mural-painting services, he worked out of Memphis, Tennessee and Tunica, Mississippi for weeks at a time.  And though he spent plenty of time on Beale Street and down along the Mississippi River playing his guitar, it was a field trip into central Mississippi that made the strongest impression on Joe.   

      Aware of the significance of Bentonia, Mississippi, hometown to the legendary Skip James, a friend of Joe’s looked up where Jack Owens, a one-time partner of James, lived and they resolved to travel to Bentonia for a visit.  This journey to meet a living link to the roots of the Blues proved to be an important moment in Joe’s performing career.  Given his love of Skip James’ recordings, he knew it was an extraordinary opportunity when he found himself at the home of the “proprietor of the Bentonia Sound.”

 

      At Owens’ request devotees brought some liquid refreshment as a kind of entrance fee and were granted a sitting with the veteran Blues man who at the time was pushing 90 years old.  As Joe relates it, “This guy was alive and full of songs and crazy good guitar work that typifies that region.  To sit with and hear a person like that is a rare thing in this world.  It was all I needed to legitimize applying myself fully to acoustic blues based performance.  He talked of music like it was a thing that lives with all of us, not just those who grew up in the south.  He made sure we understood it was a universal thing that doesn't have borders.”

      Many different forms of traditional American music have been recognized, recorded and, mostly for marketing purposes, labeled.  These various musical styles tend to overlap to such an extent that distinctions between them inevitably become blurred.  As the labels are pulled and stretched to cover performers and their work, they steadily lose meaning.  But the music itself remains as vital as ever for those willing to give it a chance.  And, with a talented performer like Joe carrying on these musical traditions, we can hope that plenty more people will continue to give it a chance.