The last time I saw Kelly Joe Phelps we met at Captain Jack’s Bar in Sumner, Washington, his formerly bucolic home town, lately devoured by metastatic Tacoma. He had quit touring and was caring for his mom. I was passing through on the first solo tour after Billy’s diagnosis, feeling fairly lost, and we agreed to meet up for a beer and a hamburger on my way down the I-5. It had been a while.

I knew Kelly going back years, had opened the California run that became his live album Tap The Red Cane Whirlwind, split bills here and there, kept in touch. But back before that I was a youngster with a military fade, working time-and-materials jobs after college, trying to make rent and set aside time to write. My buddy Spider hired me to come up to Green Bay and paint his front porch, because he had a real job, and I was broke. I drove my little truck up there and spent three days painting, listening to Kelly’s new record Sky Like a Broken Clock start to finish, just so I could start it over again. I kept that going all day, and at night, Spider would come home from work and we’d have some supper, then sit on the porch and drink beer and listen to it again.

I’d worn out his early country blues records, but Sky was so different, a hard turn. It compelled and repelled in equal parts, sleek, ugly, and powerful. I couldn’t leave it alone. It was fearless, exploring the possibilities of language and form, using the blues idiom to present dark, oblique characters, in stories without resolutions, in hard, crass language that rarely rhymed. No trad tunes, no gospel tunes, none of the solo country blues lap slide pyrotechnics that he had invented, perfected, and abandoned. Just acoustic guitar, upright bass, and drums, and the utter mastery of the players.

The drummer was Billy Conway, and later, when he and I were on the road together full time, Billy told me that he and Larry Taylor had been hired for a week, but they just recorded each song twice or three times, varying the tempo, feel, and the phrasing wholesale, and they never even listened to playback. Kelly would turn to them both and ask, “Did you screw up?” and if not, they kept moving. They finished in two days, he paid the band for the whole week, and sent them home. The album they made is one of the most inventive and fulsome expressions of American music in the last quarter century, blues as an existential proposition, not a genre. A reaction to the pain of being alive, which is general, and the only antidote for which is love. Naturally, this triumph got Kelly dropped from his label.

My own record Blood Brothers was originally intended – studio booked, songs written – as a trio album with Billy and Kelly. A sort of low guitar / high guitar approach on two acoustics and two steel-body reso guitars, with drums. Kelly and I have similar enough voices and I had sung along with his records for so many years, I knew how we’d sound together. We spent some months talking over process, walking through the albums that were important to us (he steered me to Seven Steps to Heaven, a Miles Davis record I hadn't paid much attention to), talking through demo’s and keys, making a plan. Then one morning about a month out, with the studio booked, everything in train, I woke up with a bad feeling in my chest. I checked in with Kelly and asked how he was feeling. He told me he didn’t think he could do it. He’d taken a couple years off of playing after an injury, and he felt he couldn’t play at the level he wished, said he wasn’t ready. Who knows? We rain-checked. A few years later he disappeared again.

He could lift an audience up, or scare them shitless, just as he chose, and I watched him do both. He was the unironic modern incarnation of those early country-blues players, stranded between the bar and the church, the bottle and hymnal, Saturday night and Sunday morning. When he sang about the Devil, it was personal relationship, not a metaphor. Musically, spiritually, he could go places most of us can’t reach, and it could feel almost intrusive to watch him play, like observing someone at prayer, or sex, or self-immolation. He was a tight–rope act, and a carnie. His characters were the wounded and the meek. Listening to him now, as I go back serially through everything he made, I hear him reaching out in every song, always trying to break through the plane, his faced turned to God like a sunflower to the sun. Fiery fingers, fiery hands.

I’ve been trying to parse the news of his death, somewhere out in Iowa last week, at 62. I’m so tired of thinking and writing about death, and I’m reticent to bore anyone with further testimony. But then death has a way of commanding our attention, and my phone is starting fill up with numbers for people who no longer answer. It seems funny to use the internet to send smoke signals up to heaven, to try tell something about a guy who lived his life in such dedication to the real that he was unable to cope with our particular flavor of electronic serfdom. He killed his email, threw away his cell, and simply wandered away. But I need to say his name.

I’ve been looking back through our old letters, about daughters, booze, bibles, guitars, books. He was so haunted, and yet Lord he was sweet. Soft-spoken, gentle in his talk, with a sharply ironic sense of humor. Deprecating but noble. I hope he got square with the world and with himself, somehow, or found what he was looking for.

Go find any one of his records and listen all the way through. Then go read Thou Shall Not Kill by Kenneth Rexroth, because we just lost one of the greats.

He was full of faith and power.
He did great wonders among the people.
They could not stand against his wisdom.
They could not bear the spirit with which he spoke.
He cried out in the name
Of the tabernacle of witness in the wilderness.
They were cut to the heart.
They gnashed against him with their teeth.
They cried out with a loud voice.
They stopped their ears.
They ran on him with one accord.
They cast him out of the city and stoned him.
The witnesses laid down their clothes
At the feet of a man whose name was your name —
You.

MONTANA – In early July I'll be on the road in Montana with the band, starting Music in the Mountains in Big Sky (7/7), and moving through The Attic in Livingston (7/8), One Legged Magpiein Red Lodge (7/9), and a benefit for our friends at Swan Valley Connections, at Holland Lake, up near Condon (7/10). Later in the month I'll be back up in White Sulphur Springs to join Kris Delmhorst's band at Red Ants Pants Music Festival, and then in early August I'll be performing at the inaugural Centerfest in Lewistown (8/6), along with the Steel Wheels, Supaman, and others. I'll return to Montana later in September, and we'll announce those dates when we can.

WISCONSIN – In later July I'll be in Wisconsin briefly, to get my daughter off to summer camp, and while there Kris Delmhorst and I will play an intimate one-mic acoustic show, at the lovely Trempealeau Hotel in Trempealeau, Wisconsin (7/17).

SALMON RIVER – In September I'll be the musical guest on raft trip down the Main fork of the Salmon River via Middle Fork River Expeditions. The deal is, you sign up for the trip – September 15-20, 2022 and tell them I sent I you – and then we all show up in Idaho with a minimal amount of gear, and float that beautiful river. They handle logistics, food, and amenities, and crew the rafts. We enjoy the mountains and waters, maybe do a little fishing or swimming, and every night I'll play songs around the campfire. If that sounds like your cup of tea, get on it. The trip has a maximum capacity of 23 seats, and there are just a few left in play.

SISTERS FOLK FESTIVAL – Late September into October (9/26-10/1) I'll be part of the Sisters Folk Festival alongside a great roster of players, including the Milk Carton Kids and La Vent Du Nord. As part of the deal, I'll also be taking part in the Americana Song Academy. Everyone is entitled to my opinion.

TAKE ROOT, ETC – In November I'll be on tour in France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, and the UK most of the month. Official tour announcements to follow, but for now, we can announce that I'll be returning to the Take Root Festival in Groningen, NL, along with old friends Gregory Alan Isakov, and Aoife O'Donovan, and a pile of other bands.

In early '23 we'll hope to hit California and the Northwest, the Mountain West and the Desert Southwest, maybe get back overseas, and then figure out what happens next. There are a lot of new songs and I need to record them, but then, I don't like to rush things.

We'll see you out there.

Thanks,

JF

June 2022