Catfish Keith

Catfish Keith in conversation with Michael Ford. Previously published in Blues in Britain magazine and reproduced here with kind permission of Michael Ford, Editor, Blues in Britain.

Catfish

Well it was the Disco era, so there was some of that floating around and friends I had were into Heavy Metal, groups like AD/CD and Black Sabbath. One was kind of a record collector, he was into Yes, stuff like that.

Michael

What was their reaction when you played them Son House?

Catfish

They didn’t know what the heck I was into. I loved acoustic guitar particularly so I would get records that had some acoustic guitar playing on it. I’d get early Bob Dylan records, Paul Simon I liked, Simon & Garfunkle was nice and I got into finger-picking style and then I discovered Leo Kottke and that made my head pop off with the possibilities of solo guitar.

Michael

Had you started playing by this time?

Catfish

Yeah. I had sort of had a false start with guitar when I was twelve, meaning that the folks got me the guitar, signed me up for lessons, I took lessons for about a year, but I wasn’t really that into it. I was just being taught from guitar books and all those songs, I’m into these days, but as a kid, but as a kid it was hard for me to get into songs like Juanita and Fascination. This was an old guy who was a WWII veteran and I would go have lessons in his basement, but I lost interest in that and just put it down for a couple of years.Then when I was about fourteen or fifteen I was at a party and this friend of mine, she was playing guitar and she was just making songs up and a big light-bulb went off in my head, thinking

“You can make stuff up? Oh, that’s different!” So once I got the idea that it was a creative instrument for your own experimentation and that you could make all these sounds all by yourself, I was playing solo guitar and I was off and running then. I pulled the guitar back out and proceeded just to teach myself pretty much everything, I know now, I was pretty much self-taught.

Michael

To hear you talk about Son House, because if you talk to nearly everybody it’s always ‘Robert Johnson, Robert Johnson, Robert Johnson…’

Catfish

Well, I have his records too.

Michael

But why has he taken on this pre-eminence amongst so many Delta Bluesmen of the time?

Catfish

I don’t really know. Certainly Johnson, his gifts and his music’s very powerful, but the turning thing for me was Son House and I can’t even say any particular reason why. It’s more of an emotional thing that strikes you, but then that sort of started the whole thing rolling for me, just getting into finding as many old Blues records as I could. I’ve always been interested in quite a wide variety of American Roots Music and actually there are British artists too that were part of that. Finger-pickers like Bert Jansch, Davy Graham. There are a few ex-pats that lived over here, like Stefan Grossman was one. He was one of the first people who sort of showed you where to start to put your fingers to play that kind of music and I ended up being on, Kicking Mule Records. It was an LP that came out in 1985 and that was a label that was started by Stefan Grossman and Ed Denson. So it ended up that the label so many of my heroes were on was the label that I started my career being on.

Michael

That must have felt good.

Catfish

Oh it was great, ‘cos as a young fella I was sending my demo tapes out to all these different labels, all over the place, some getting rejection letters or no response at all, but Ed Denson wrote back from Kicking Mule and told me how much he liked it and maybe we could do a record. I was in my very early twenties at the time, so it was quite a galvanising and exciting thing for me because, since I was fifteen or sixteen I knew that that’s what I wanted to do for my living and my passion in life was going to be a solo acoustic fingering style- Blues based, foot-stomping, deep-Delta Blues and all that kind of good stuff and along the way I learned a repertoire. My period of intense study with that music was very deep and lasting, at least ten years where almost all the time, almost all my day was spent either listening to music or learning or playing music, so from about fifteen to about twenty five years old, that’s about all I was doing, besides fooling around like young people do (laughs).

Michael

I read somewhere that Muddy Waters’ favourite artist was Gene Autry, ‘The Singing Cowboy’, but he did Blues because that’s what paid. It doesn’t sound like you’re doing this because this is where your living is, it sounds like something you want to play.

Catfish

The style I play now is the same style really that I started out wanting to do, so anything that I learnt along the way just sort of added to that. My vision for my life has always been Country Blues, played all by herself, quirky, weird guitar, slide guitar, all those things that are really what have really become the trademark of my music now.

Michael

Your new CD Sweet Pea has got some originals and some ‘from the treasure trove’. When you’re writing originals are you writing in the style of the music from Son House and the other ‘masters’?

Catfish

Yeah, it’s inevitable. Any of my original pieces sound like they might have been on scratchy old records, because that’s just what my background is.

Michael

Do you write about experiences of your own?

Catfish

Yeah I do, but when I listen back to them they sound like they’re of the exact same tradition, so if I look back at any of my pieces that I’ve recorded that are originals, it’s kind of hard to tell that they’ve come from modern day, because I’m not saying ‘woke up this morning and clicked on my computer’ (laughs). I’m saying more universal things about relationships and what life is like and a lot of the poetry of the Blues tradition, that’s also what fuels what goes into my original songs.

Michael

Did you write numbers for your new CD or had you been doing them live for a period of time?

Catfish

Sort of a combination. A lot of those songs I learned way way back and just had never played live or had never recorded yet, but there’s a handful of them that I had been playing live, even recorded before, twelve, thirteen years ago. So it’s a combination of all those things and certainly there are a handful of numbers that I was sort of playing, but dusted them off and polished them up to record on the new record. This Sweet Pea record is unique in that I recorded using seven different guitars that I have, five of which are National Guitars and one of those is a National twelve-string guitar and that’s the first time I’ve recorded with a twelve-string. First time I’ve had such a wide palate of guitar sound on one record, so that was fun. Half the cuts feature an old buddy Marty Christensen. He also played on my Twist It Babe album that I did in 1997. We have a really good rapport and I like to add that excitement, big-bottom sound of the stand up bass. It’s really fun. We did them all live in the studio and that’s always the way I’ve been recording, so it leaves in all those human things that some people might think are mistakes. We didn’t edit anything out.

Michael

What about working in schools? I know a couple of years ago at Colne you worked with the local schools. You’re working in this school, you’re working in another school next week. What do you get from that?

Catfish

It’s kind of fun but the tradition of education goes back in my family. Both my parents are teachers and I never really stayed in school long enough to get any school’s accreditation for something like that, but it seemed natural for me to want to teach music and as you get older, it becomes more important to do that. You know, as a younger person you’re more self-serving, but I’ve been in the music business almost twenty-five, thirty years now and I just like to be able to pass it down. It’s a great thing.

I love to expose this music to the young generation of kids, because, just if anything, to pass music on. So many of the audience for Blues is the Baby-boom generation and older and I just love to pass it onto kids and let them hear something that maybe they would never have heard otherwise and who knows, maybe one of those kids will hear it and it will touch them in a way that maybe they’ll make that their life’s work. You just never know. I love playing for kids, I love the energy they give back and I don’t have any kids myself, so I feel like I can be ‘Uncle Catfish’ to everybody.

In conversation with Michael Ford

Thanks to Michael Ford, Editor, Blues in Britain magazine for permission to publish this interview.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Interviews – Catfish Keith

Catfish Keith