Dirk Powell is a rebel. He realized this early on, back in high school when most of his friends were listening to punk rock and spouting nonstop declarations of nonconformity. He knew that punk music was strong and reactionary, but it was also an image that was being sold.
"The ultimate rebellion to me was to go to something that was not commercial at all," he says in his mishmash of Ohio, Kentucky and Louisiana accents. "When I sat and listened to those old songs my grandfather was playing, I knew that was real nonconformity, to be listening to and playing music that wasn't done for profit, but for pleasure, for being social."
The songs his grandfather, James Clarence Hay, played with him as a child became even more important to Powell when he started recording his third solo album, Time Again, released in late February on Rounder Records. The album plays like a visit with Hay, punctuated by snippets of conversation and picking that were recorded in 1990, the year before his grandfather passed away.
Time Again is also a sort of history of Appalachian music, beginning with Hay lamenting his loss of memory regarding songs and ending with his urging for Powell to eat his cake and get something to drink, just like any other visit with a grandparent. But there is something much deeper in these spoken vignettes, a reminder that old-time music -- despite spurts of popularity -- is always in danger of being chipped away, since so much of it is passed down orally.
In many ways Time Again is also a celebration of the rebellious nature of old-time music. The album brings together the dark and the light, the fun and the misery, the lyricism and the all-about-the-music picking that makes traditional music such "a living thing," as Powell repeatedly refers to it.
As a child, Powell was plagued by a pulsing sense of rebellion he didn't quite understand. He was raised in and near Cleveland, Ohio, but always felt like a displaced person. "I knew that what I was really connected to was left back in Kentucky," he says. "I was always looking for my place in the world and never really fit in until I started spending so much time with my pap-paw."
Powell's parents both came from Kentucky by way of the migration out of Appalachia when people went north to find work and/or education. As further proof that you can take the boy out of the country but you can't take the country out of the boy, Powell longed for the mountains. So he spent as much time as possible with his maternal grandparents, who lived near the heart of Appalachia in Sandy Hook, Kentucky. Powell formed a bond with his grandfather through music, and together they played banjo, fiddle and guitar.
Before discovering that old-time music was the thing he loved best -- and the perfect way not only to be different but also to find his place in the world -- Powell had been playing piano and Baroque harpsichord. Although his parents divorced when he was very young, Powell spent equal time with his father, who taught at Oberlin College outside Cleveland, and his mother, who lived closer to the city.
"I was tiny when they split up and music saved me during that time," Powell says. "It saved me, over and over." Both parents encouraged his love for music; he was influenced by his father's finger-style guitar playing and his mother's piano playing.
"Even from the age of 8 or 9, I always had a sense that old was better; that's why I loved classical so much," he says. "By the time I was 12, I started to see that -- for me -- classical was all about preparing, practicing. You prepared for one recital that may or may not come and then you just started preparing again. There was never any play. The music was glorious, but it was rarely fun."
Around age 12, he began to spend more time back in Kentucky, where he was constantly exposed to his grandfather's picking. "It all just clicked. I heard that music and I found what I had been looking for," he says. "And it was even more than that. Just watching my grandfather pick beans, smelling those beans cooking on the stove; being in that place informed me about the music. Things like that taught me where I came from, how my people lived, and why the notes of that music were clamoring to be let out."
Right away, Powell knew the land was tucked away in the notes of the music. "Old-time fiddling moves up and down, in ridges like the land," he explains, "whereas Cajun fiddling calls for a flatter movement, the way the land is flat."
Powell believes that lineage plays a huge role in music. "I don't believe lineage is absolutely necessary to being a good musician, but it sure helps," he says. "It's a mix of nature and nurture, but things really do reside in our blood."
In a sort of awestruck voice, Powell relates how his 2-year-old daughter dreams of fiddling. "She'll be fiddling away in her sleep -- her arm moving back and forth as if she's holding a bow, and she'll mumble 'fiddle, fiddle, fiddle.' People can say that we've projected that on her, but we haven't. It's in her blood."
It's not only in Powell's children's blood (he also has a 16-week-old daughter), it's coming at them from both sides. Powell is married to Christine Balfa, whose father, Dewey Balfa, almost single-handedly revitalized interest in Cajun music during the 1960s, particularly with a performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964.
After wandering the mountains and settling for a while in North Carolina, where he worked the traditional music circuit, Powell happened upon the Balfa Family at the Washington, D.C., Folklife Festival in 1985. He was drawn to the Balfa Brothers by their music, but a young woman playing the triangle quickly caught his eye. This was the first time he saw Christine, and he was immediately impressed by someone who hoped to carry on her family's musical tradition, just as he did.
Six years later, Powell and Balfa started dating. Powell would drive from Maryland to Louisiana to see her, often steering with his knees so he could practice the newest instrument he had been turned on to, the accordion.
Powell formed a deep bond with his father-in-law. "I could actually see and feel where Dewey was coming from," he says. "He played from such a deep place; his music had passion and emotion that was sometimes overwhelming."
His wife was also a major influence on the new ways he was looking at music. "I had always loved Cajun music, but after I met Christine, my interest went way up," he says with a gentle laugh. Powell is prone to ending his sentences with short, soft laughs that seem somewhat self-deprecating. The laugh is informative: In its curled edges, one realizes Powell is a complex person, eager to please but also firmly rooted in his own beliefs. It is a laugh of both great self-confidence and comfortable politeness.
After Dewey Balfa died in 1992, Powell and Christine, along with longtime family friend Kevin Wimmer and Christine's sister Nedla Balfa, formed a band called Balfa Toujours that became one of the most popular Cajun groups in the country. "Playing with Balfa Toujours and being a part of the Balfa family definitely took my playing to a higher level," Powell says. They toured the world for about ten years before settling down in Louisiana and having their first child.
During his tenure with Balfa Toujours, Powell was also playing music with the likes of Tim O'Brien and Tony Furtado, as well as cutting solo records for Rounder (If I Go Ten Thousand Miles in 1996, and Hand Me Down in 1999). That first record led to what would become a lucrative career in film work.
This time, Powell's quiet laugh precedes the story. "That's the case of the best record I never sold," he says. It seems a record producer was scouting the bins at Tower Records in Manhattan looking for traditional musicians who might supply good music for an Ang Lee movie set during the Civil War called Ride With The Devil. "He had a whole armload of CDs, but when he got up to the counter he noticed that someone had thrown a CD down in the bin near the register. Apparently they had been about to buy it and decided not to. He looked at it, saw my picture on there and thought, 'Hey, that guy's holding a fiddle,' so he added it to his stack and bought it." Shortly thereafter, Powell got the call to play fiddle and banjo for the film. Its soundtrack included "What's Simple Is True", a song recorded with Jewel that played over the end credits.
Powell also scored the classic documentary Stranger With A Camera, the story of a Canadian photographer who is murdered while documenting Appalachian Kentucky, and worked with director Spike Lee on the soundtrack of Bamboozled. His music was also featured in The Brothers McMullen, Stevie, Coastlines, and the stage musical Riverdance. He recently joined forces with rapper/producer Danja Mowf to work on an Appalshop documentary called From The Holler To The Hood, about Appalachian prisons.
In 1997, Powell realized that he not only liked scoring movies, but also had a desire to make "companion music" for literature as well. He was profoundly moved by Charles Frazier's National Book Award-winning novel Cold Mountain and was struck by Frazier's use of old-time music throughout the book. He approached his old friend Tim O'Brien, who calls Powell "a soul mate," about putting together an album of the music used in the novel. O'Brien had been thinking the same thing, and they enlisted North Carolina banjoist John Hermann to help them with the project. The result was Songs From The Mountain.
"Lots of people had approached Frazier about doing such a project, but he only gave us his blessing, and after some legal wrangling we were able to put the album out," Powell says. The recording, originally released in 1999 on O'Brien's Howdy Skies label, received new attention (and a new release from Sugar Hill Records) upon the release of the Cold Mountain film in 2003.
When the official soundtrack of the movie, produced by T Bone Burnett, was released, some traditionalist fans were vocal in their belief that Songs From The Mountain was a far superior tribute to the spirit of the book. This might seem flattering to Powell until one takes into account that he was very much involved with the soundtrack and filming of the motion picture. "Songs From The Mountain is more a companion to the novel, while the soundtrack is much more exclusive to the movie, so we had a little more freedom in what we could do with traditional music," he says.
Powell plays banjo on six of the soundtrack's cuts and is featured, along with Stuart Duncan, on one of the highlights, "Ruby With The Eyes That Sparkle". The film's director, Anthony Minghella, also asked that Powell be flown to Romania to be on set during some of the pivotal scenes. He played on the set and offered suggestions on how the actors portraying musicians would react to their instruments and compositions.
"Minghella is a genius and is unusual in that he always starts the film process with choosing music," Powell says, explaining that the director started the production with about 300 traditional songs that he pared down to 20 tunes. "That's one of the most important things to him, since he is also a musician."
Powell's best experience on the set was during the epic filming of the Battle of the Crater. He was brought in to establish the mood and played several laments and tunes from the era. "I would play right up to when he'd call action and it was very moving, having all that in front of me as I played." The film's Oscar-nominated star, Jude Law, later said that the highlight of the filming was witnessing Powell playing before the scene. "He told me that he was very moved by the music, and I appreciated that, because I think he's a very talented man," Powell says.
Fresh off his experience on the film, Powell began to record Time Again on his property in Parks, Louisiana. His studio is a cypress structure that was built in the 1830s and offers the "atmosphere that I'm looking to bring to my music," Powell says.
He decided early on that he would use the recordings he had made of his grandfather talking and picking. "My pap-paw is there to remind people of the connection to the past," he explains. "One of the things that's wrong with this country is that we're always looking forward, never looking back. In some way that negates or devalues the past. Americans think the past doesn't matter. And they couldn't be more wrong."
Powell is fascinated by American culture and the way the nation reacts to its history. "On one hand, Americans are obsessed with genealogy; we're desperately trying to find our roots," he observes. "But on the other hand, we're taught that we have to leave the past behind and go forward."
Even Powell's grandfather fell victim to the consumerism and technological advances of the nation, as expressed in the opening track, wherein Hay says, "Lord, I used to know I guess 150 songsaI picked it up and started to play the other night and something or other come on the television."
The first song on the album is one of only two compositions written by Powell, and it's also his favorite cut. "Waterbound" is about being stuck "on a stranger's shoreawith nowhere to go," and it's easy to see why Powell relates to its theme of displacement. After all, he spent his childhood feeling this way, and he knows that most lovers of traditional music still feel somewhat stranded in a sea of folks who don't understand anyone listening to anything that isn't on the radio.
The album goes on to run the gamut of Appalachian music in all its tenderness and coarseness. "That's what I love about this music; it's so diverse," Powell says. "On this album, I want to show that there's a wild, raucous, fun side, but also an intimate, dark, and warm side. I think Time Again conveys the whole palette."
Powell also wanted to find some sort of middle ground. "The trick is staying true to the music, finding that relaxed home feel but also being relatively free of flaws," he says. "I tried to strike that balance that would make the listener feel as if they were in a very comfortable atmosphere -- just on a porch or living room listening to music -- but also in a place where it was accessible to new listeners."
Powell's desire is to introduce new listeners to the music he loves so dearly while also keeping it down-home. His music is much like his laughter -- restrained enough to include everyone, but confident enough to welcome in old friends.
The tracks are a mix of the obscure and the familiar. Included are such well-known songs as "When Sorrows Encompass Me Round", performed with Riley Baugus "at two in the morning on my porch," with crickets singing in the background; "Sally Ann", with Tom Sauber picking the banjo; and the oft-covered "Handsome Molly". There are also lesser-known selections such as "Sow 'Em On The Mountain", a Carter Family song that isn't widely covered, and "Mother's Little Children", a meditation on being orphaned that is sung by Darrell Scott, whom Powell calls "one of my heroes."
Powell also turns over the singing to Jim Miller (of Donna The Buffalo) on "Prettiest Little Girl In The County"; it's another of Powell's favorites, particularly because of the line, "Swing 'em like you love 'em, boy, you ain't above 'em." The father of two girls, Powell is disturbed by modern music's constant degradation of women in songs. "With the advent of the women's rights movement, it's always surprising to me that there is not more complaint about the way women are put down in today's music," he says.
The set is further diversified by the rollicking "Police", which Powell calls "a song from the hard side of music," and "Goin' Where I've Never Been Before", a hard-driving song with heavy African American influences. "It's interesting to me that the banjo became a negative symbol of African-Americans and later became a negative symbol of Appalachia," he says, referring to 19th-century images of slaves lazily plucking at the instrument and such stereotypes as the mean-spirited banjo players of the movie Deliverance.
"What really matters to me is how American culture is a fusion of so many great things," he continues. "The banjo is really the original beat box. The origins of hip-hop and old-time are basically the same -- the banjo, the instrument for dancing."
Powell's observation underscores his understanding of the connections between the past and the present in American music. On Time Again, he brings those elements together, inviting everyone in for a listen without sacrificing any of the dignity of the music.
"I'm really trying to nail that balance and I think the best way is to just let the music speak for itself," he says. "It's a living thing."
Silas House was raised near the same area as Dirk Powell's family and is the author of three novels, most recently The Coal Tattoo, to be released September 2004.
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