{"id":971,"date":"2010-05-10T14:15:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-10T21:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2010\/05\/artifice-and-artlessness-with-bonnie-prince-billy.html"},"modified":"2010-05-10T14:15:00","modified_gmt":"2010-05-10T21:15:00","slug":"artifice-and-artlessness-with-bonnie-prince-billy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2010\/05\/artifice-and-artlessness-with-bonnie-prince-billy.html","title":{"rendered":"Artifice and Artlessness With Bonnie Prince Billy"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other night I accepted an invitation to see the Kentucky singer-songwriter Bonnie “Prince” Billy at McCabe\u2019s Guitar Shop<\/a>. I came out of the show realizing that this enigmatic figure, whose work I\u2019ve known for about 15 years, is vastly more talented as well as much weirder than I had ever thought.<\/span><\/p>\n


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First, the show: The artist formerly known as Will Oldham<\/a> appeared in McCabe\u2019s 150-seat room, lined with string instruments, with sidekick Emmett Kelly. I would happily pay to see the baby-faced, angelic-voiced Kelly play his understated mix of folk, acoustic country and classical guitar solo. <\/span><\/p>\n

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Oldham, wearing a plaid shirt, khakis he kept rolling up and a pair of slippers without socks, has to be seen to be believed. With his long, scraggly beard, weathered voice and devotion to the Appalachian folk tradition, he seems like the kind of cat who would be obsessed with \u201cauthenticity\u201d and the plainspoken quality of mountain and hill music. I expected him to sit in his chair and brood.<\/span><\/p>\n

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But Oldham, a trained actor who appeared as an earnest boy preacher in John Sayles <\/span>Matewan<\/span><\/i>, has the body language and delivery of a Shakespearean. He\u2019s a recluse who refuses to give interviews to his hometown paper, but onstage he was both gracious and weirdly excited. I\u2019ve rarely seen an indie artist so committed to his material. Between the actorly impulse, the supposed naive quality of rustic music, and the multiple monikers he\u2019s used \u2013 I think Oldham was calling himself Palace Brothers when I first encountered him — there\u2019s a weird play on artifice and artlessness going on here. (Is it all an act? A friend who lives in Louisville talks about seeing him in slovenly dress around the coffee shops, looking like an escaped mental patient, and Oldham himself mentioned that he\u2019d glimpsed himself in the dressing room mirror and thought, \u201cWho is that homeless person?\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\n

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The other thing: Oldham\u2019s voice is as rich an instrument as I\u2019ve ever heard. It sounds good on record \u2013 including the new \u201cThe Wonder Show of the World,\u201d recorded with Kelly \u2013 but in that tiny room it was a whole other thing entirely, raw and piney but with great emotional shading. He opened with the album\u2019s first track, \u201cTroublesome Houses,\u201d singing while Kelly played guitar, and then played a song he called \u201c a Norwegian folk song. It was written by Norwegian folks.\u201d Both were tense and devastating.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Well, I could go on from here but the magic and intimacy of the night will be hard to recapture. I only hope this is one of those shows McCabe\u2019s chose to record. (The second night\u2019s show, apparently, was recorded without mics, which Oldham said he prefers.) The album is my favorite by him in years, and pretty stripped down, but like much acoustic studio recordings it is a little overproduced and some songs have an instrument or voice too many.<\/span><\/p>\n

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One of the advantage of seeing a show there is being able to check out the instruments and book collection on the way in and out. I was able to strum Lowden\u2019s Richard Thompson model acoustic guitar (!), and picked up an old Leadbelly songbook put together my Lomax and Mo Asch. Also met and spoke to Lincoln, who manages the shows, very cool guy and a serious music lover. In any case, quite a night and I will return to this shrine to the strummed and plucked as soon as I can.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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The other night I accepted an invitation to see the Kentucky singer-songwriter Bonnie “Prince” Billy at McCabe\u2019s Guitar Shop. I came out of the show realizing that this enigmatic figure, whose work I\u2019ve known for about 15 years, is vastly more talented as well as much weirder than I had ever thought. First, the show: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[66,276,64,40,106],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-971","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-alt-country","7":"category-bonnie-prince-billy","8":"category-folk-music","9":"category-indie","10":"category-mccabes","11":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}