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Article published May 7, 2009 Down south jukin': Blue Mother Tupelo stretches for the sky and the soil on new album
By Steve Wildsmith of The Daily Times Staff
Listening to "Heaven and Earth," the new CD by Blue Mother Tupelo, and it sounds as if the husband-and-wife team that makes up the band, Ricky and Micol Davis, were born in the wrong time.
With another listening, it also sounds like they may have been born with the wrong skin color. Leave it in steady rotation on your music player, and by the time you've scrutinized every note of all 15 tracks, and you'll be ready to swear on a stack of Bibles that there's no way ... just absolutely no way ... that a young white couple can muster up that much soul, that much passion, leastways not without striking a bargain with the devil.
Because "Heaven and Earth" sounds like it was made by two people who spend their days working under a hot sun, callused hands driving a mule team or swinging a hoe, and spend their nights in a ramshackle juke joint barely visible through hanging moss, a place where smoke and stale beer and pine sweat from untreated boards hang thick while the two beat and wail and share their joy and sorrow and love and anger with whomever will listen.
"It's a spiritual kind of thing when we're on stage," Ricky told The Daily Times this week. "We're just in the moment, and you know you're making good music when you're out of your own body and just kind of grooving with it. It's a tough place to get to, but fortunately we've been able to figure out a way to make it happen. It's not a conscious thing, and sometimes it's hard reaching that plateau if the sound quality isn't right.
"I think a lot of times folks in the audience don't understand the sound engineering aspect of things, because the artist is hearing something different than what the audience is hearing. And if the artist is hearing things good, then we're off in our own little world, and we want everybody to come join us for a while."
Tonight, Ricky and Micol Davis invite their many Blount County fans for the unveiling of "Heaven and Earth." It's been a long-time coming -- more than half-a-decade since the group's last studio album, "Delta Low, Mountain High," was released -- and when it came time to deliver a new album, Blount County seemed like the best place for the two to do it.
"We probably spent a year talking with fans and friends and family, hashing out where the perfect place would be to have our CD release party, and 'The Shed' (at Smoky Mountain Harley-Davidson, where the group performs tonight) just felt like the right place," Ricky Davis said. "It's a fantastic music venue, it's outdoors but it's protected by the covering and it's family friendly. Knoxville has a lot of good venues, but the folks in Blount County and Maryville have been good to us, and 'The Shed' seems like a really good place for music in general. They just love music, and we love music lovers."
A love of music is what brought the two together, years ago when they first met in Knoxville's Old City. Both are East Tennessee natives -- Ricky graduated from Doyle and Micol went to Clinton -- and it was a fateful encounter that night. Ricky asked Micol out, and the two ended up dating, playing music together and eventually marrying. They moved to Nashville more than a decade ago to further their music career, and when they released "Delta Low, Mountain High" in 2001, they didn't anticipate that their burgeoning career would keep them so busy that a follow-up would take eight years.
"There were songs that we had started out with back in 2004 and 2005, and over the years since then, both of us had written other songs that we felt like had to go on there, too," Micol said. "We would come in off the road and take a day or two to settle in and record, and that's a hard thing to do. We just took it day by day, just come in off the road and work on it when we could. It's an adventure, and you've got to keep working at it all the time."
For "Heaven and Earth," the two considered renting studio time, as they did for "Delta Low," but the more they discussed it, the more sense it made to do it themselves. They purchased recording equipment, rented what few instruments they didn't already own and set out to make an album.
"I thought, heck, I can play most of the things I want on this record, so doing it like this just felt easier to play the music the way I felt like it needed to be played," Ricky said.
The end result is like a meal of homegrown vegetables -- technically, they're the same as the stuff you've eaten before that's come from a grocery store, but there's something so much fresher, so much more authentic, about ingesting something that's been lovingly cared for and hand-crafted. It's a slurry of sound from a grab-bag of Southern soil -- rich silt from the Mississippi Delta ... thick loam from the cotton fields of north Alabama ... wet peat from Louisiana ... red clay mud from East Tennessee. It's earthy and gritty and celebratory -- it's the sound of two people who aren't afraid to get that dirt beneath their nails, who recognize that callused hands and muddy jeans are hallmarks of a hard-working man or woman to be worn with pride.
"That's what we wanted to come through," Ricky said. "I've listened to this record probably 10 trillion times between laying my parts down and producing it to sitting down with the mastering guy. It's kind of like having a kid in a way -- you hope you raise them right, but at some point you've got to let them out to the world. That's the way it feels with a record -- you've just got to put it out and hope it does well."
"To me, this record feels like it's about accepting and loving humanity, about being OK with life's ups and downs and all of our flaws," Micol added. "That's the earth part, and the heaven part -- that's love, pulling us all through this together. It's the hanging in there with somebody, about not letting go. You can be distracted by so much in life, but when it boils down to it, it's about hanging onto what you believe in."