Jeff Norwood

'While he might not be as recognizable as Elliott & The Untouchables or Drink Small, Norwood's no slouch when it comes to representing Columbia as a blues behemoth. He's represented us at The King Biscuit Blues Festival, and he's off to Alabama this weekend for the Sweet Gum Bottom Blues Festival. His performance at Bogart's celebrates the release of East Of Mississippi, recorded at The Jam Room with Lil' Jimmy. The album is 12 acoustic cuts of Delta Blues, a Norwood specialty. - Free times

Thursday, March 20, 2008


YES! Weekly SC bluesman hoes a hard row

SC bluesman hoes a hard row

Tuesday, February 05, 2008



Jeff Norwood, a bluesman from Camden, SC, has gone back to the pure roots of the form.
The lights streak along North Main Street and Eastchester Drive in High Point on a recent Friday night, cars destined for movie theaters, bookstores and restaurants. Their passengers head for places like Bimini’s, a cheerful, well-lit, beach-themed seafood restaurant tucked discretely in a strip mall like practically all the city.

It’s mostly a family crowd, with a little singles action at the bar. Some graying couples, the men shunning ostentation and the ladies sporting an extra smear of lipstick and twinkle in the eye, fill the tables, followed by workaday, middle-class couples with children in tow. A dude by the name of Jeff Norwood tuning an acoustic guitar on the corner stage is up from Camden, SC. The 46-year-old bluesman wears his brown curly hair medium length, and rolls with heavy-rimmed glasses and a gray Kiss T-shirt. He notes the bite in the air since the sun’s gone down and he’s journeyed north roughly 175 miles.

A Palmetto State son of the soil steeped in the country blues of the Mississippi delta, Norwood first played the original Bimini’s in Myrtle Beach, and when it franchised into High Point, he followed, packing a handful of CDs with him to sell, along with a faded wooden Pepsi crate repurposed as a foot-percussion instrument. Since he first played Bimini’s in High Point last fall, Norwood has made the acquaintance of a songwriter named Davis Tucker, who in turn introduced him to Gary Redd, the blues eminence of High Point.

"It’s kind of happenstance, but it’s cool," Norwood says. "Really nice people around here. Kind of a roots Piedmont scene."

The diners don’t exactly look like blues aficionados but it seems to suit the journeyman blues stringer fine. He’ll interrupt a song with a "thank you, dear" as a grade school girl accompanied by an aunt or grandma drops some coins into the white tip bucket.

"Earlier you get a lot of families," he says. "The common denominator is roots music. The kids like it. I’ll play an obligatory Jimmy Buffet song if they cross my palms with silver."

It’s a hard time to make a living as a musician. Disposable income is scarcer and it’s harder to get people to come out for live music. Record labels, never exactly known for scrupulous business practices, have demanded more front-end investment from artists while the labels’ command of the market weakens. If you think blues musicians enjoy some kind of exemption from the malaise, well you don’t know much about the blues.

Norwood played in a band called the Headnecks - so named because one of his band mates noted that the country folk in South Carolina listened to Metallica and smoked dope but still drove pickups - "but we ended up being broke rock musicians," he says, "and the whole thing kind of went up in smoke."

He doesn’t envy bands their overhead and logistical challenges.

"I know these guys, God bless ’em," Norwood says. "They’re out there every night busting their butt, playing for a percentage of the door with three or four other bands, trying to sell merchandise to get gas money to get back home."

Of course, coming from a farming background, Norwood understands that anything worth pursuing is done for its own satisfaction, not for the money. He’s made his way in the world through several means, going to college mainly to get into a band, helping his dad with a farm in Chesterfield County for five-odd years, studying video and animation, switching his major to English with the thought of teaching British literature, doing public relations for an insurance company when fatherhood forced him to cobble together an income and eventually settling into the life of a journeyman musician.

The family farm is gone now.

"It has some parallels to the music business," Norwood says.

His grandfather grew sweet potatoes and peaches, as well as lespedeza, a reclamation crop used in strip mines and interstate embankments to prevent soil erosion. His father took over the farm, and the grandson pitched in. To keep the farm afloat, the family had to keep borrowing from the federal government, which gradually wrested operational control away, dictating how to reinvest ever-declining revenue.

"One time my dad cashed a check for twenty-five thousand dollars," Norwood recalls. "He told me to go to Timmonsville and buy some fertilizer. I was nineteen years old. I’d never had that kind of money in my pocket before. I guess it was kind of like taking your paycheck and spending it on crack."

At Bimini’s in High Point Norwood drops into some droning, Mississippi-hill-country stomp, recreating a one-man Robert Johnson orchestra by simultaneously knocking out a steady bass line and an animal wail on the high strings. The music is stripped down, warm and raw, lyri - SC Bluesman Hoes A Hard Row

LOCAL ACT ‌ Jeff Norwood
Vintage Blues Chestnuts: Jeff Norwood puts a Carolina spin on Delta blues

BY T. BALLARD LESEMANN


"I try to play at cool places," says Camden-based Carolina singer/guitarist Jeff Norwood. "If they aren't necessarily blues venues, I turn them into one, at least for the night I'm there. If I got three people in there who wanna hear some blues, that's all it takes. I just go straight for the throat. If families are eating with their kids and stuff, I'll start off with some crossover stuff ... then I'll go for the throat. Like I learned out in Mississippi."

Norwood grew up Chesterfield County, S.C. He worked on his family's farm, driving the tractor "from dawn 'til dusk ... and then some" and playing guitar on the side. He gigged around the Piedmont, playing roadhouses, juke joints, and small get-togethers. "I've played some pretty rough places and had to learn real quick how to keep folks happy whatever it took," he says.

Working mostly as a rock singer/songwriter, Norwood was tapped to play the King Biscuit Blues Festival (now the Arkansas Blues & Heritage Festival) in Helena, Ark., in 2004. The experience inspired him to dig deeper into the Delta and country blues genres and actually detour into the realm as a blues artist himself.

"That went so good," he remembers. "I was able to meet so many of the older cats and get really down into it. It gave me the confidence I needed. I know the flavors are different in S.C., but when people say you can't do this and you can't do that, man, that's bullshit. You're basically in failure mode to start out with, so I got emboldened and started whipping out the down-and-dirty stuff. It wasn't really a plan; it was something I felt passionate about doing. That's why it worked." —T. Ballard Lesemann - Charleston City Paper

Album Review: Jeff Norwood - Awendaw
January 14th, 2010

South Carolina acoustic bluesman Jeff Norwood conjures the spirits of Mississippi Fred McDowell and Robert Johnson on Awendaw. Using little more than (mostly) acoustic guitar, dobro, bass and footstomps, Norwood convincingly puts forth his tales in a style that’s authentic, not a mere pastiche. Familiar setting and characters populate Norwood’s song stories: the Devil, swamps, dusty roads and the like figure prominently in the nine songs. Singing in a voice soaked in just enough wear-and-tear to render the songs properly, Norwood turns out songs is spare arrangements that place the focus squarely on voice and guitar.

Norwood lives, writes and records in the titular locale, Awendaw SC, a tiny (pop. approx. 1200) coastal community between Charleston and Myrtle Beach, but likely worlds apart culturally from either.

“Horny Road” is electrified but still quite stark in its arrangement. A sly guitar figure references the Rolling Stones‘ “Honky Tonk Women,” a tacit acknowledgment of Norwood’s previous incarnation as a rock musician. The song includes lyrical references to online friends, SUVs, malls and other trappings of modern life, but they’re set against a chirping-crickets background. Listeners will swat away imaginary mosquitoes.

“Walking Catfish Blues” illustrates that humor is an important ingredient in the blues; it need not be all melodrama, and Norwood demonstrates this. All of the tunes save one are Norwood originals. “Call Me Money” features distorted slide guitar, and calls to mind some of Johnny Winter’s excursions into the Delta blues subgenre. On Fred McDowell’s “Kokomo Blues” Norwood lopes along; he makes the song his own while retaining the character of the composer’s style. Norwood also uses the tune to showcase his playing to a greater degree than on his original numbers.

Norwood manages three things on Awendaw: he serves up interesting and engaging song-stories that keep the listener involved; he plays in a style that purists would find little about to complain; and he changes things up enough musically to keep things interesting. - Musoscribe

I love the simplicity and authenticity of this CD. There’s virtually no digital manipulation. It’s just one lone acoustic bluesman singing, picking and stomping his own version of backwoods Delta blues.

Jeff Norwood is a superb storyteller. He doesn’t judge. He just tells it like it is – whether he’s singing about sex, race, religion, love, money or catfish, he just has a story to tell.

“Bad Ass Boogie” is “the way music was made, back in the woods, back in the day, everybody got high, everybody got laid, that was the tune that always got played, the bad ass boogie.”

“Walking Catfish Blues” really is about a big ole catfish walking around looking for love and something to eat.

“Horny Road” is the back country counterpart to suburbia’s Lover’s Lane, only the couples don’t stop.

In the same vein, “Shake” will transplant you to a street corner or a front porch on a sticky summer evening when temperatures and hormones are on the move.

Our faithful bard wrote all but one of Awendaw’s ten tracks. “Kokomo Blues” was written by North Mississippi blues guitarist/singer Fred McDowell (1904 – 1972).

Norwood, who grew up working on a S.C. farm, has paid his dues working some rough roadhouses and juke joints. Maybe that’s why he’s so matter of fact about his subject matter.

Awendaw, which is named for the small S.C. town where Norwood records, should be part of any serious blues collection. - Flyin' Under The Radar

A true Bluesman, Norwood plays anytime, anywhere. - The State

Nick Hilbourn/Morning News
Published: March 10, 2009

Hartsville bluesman Jeff Norwood bares the simple, sorrowful sound of the Mississippi Delta Blues, a bottleneck slide drawn painfully across his strings with nearly spoken-word lyrics echoing over their sharp rattling guitar song.
He’s a bard for the Pee Dee, juxtaposing his performance last Friday night with memories from high school (I think there was a reunion in town), and it fit with his performance, which uses mysterious, cryptic anthems to a steady style of Delta Blues, one of the earliest forms of blues music.
Norwood found the Delta Blues by accident while he was playing in bars across the Southeast. Yet, it’s been something he has held onto tightly and one that makes his act an easy and attractive listen.

Country Store Porch Troubadour
Norwood’s songs are part moralistic tale, part of nostalgic and part myth all spread atop a squealing, sliding acoustic guitar that refuses to let up.
When he came to the Rooster, he brought a crew of friends who made their own front row, eating dinner and cheering on Norwood. He had made the stage into his own front porch, setting little trinkets on it with him. It looked more like a country store porch he was playing on than a coffee shop stage.
Norwood’s songs are simple, sort of like church hymns, after a couple of lines you catch on, and you can sing along if you like. But if you allow yourself to be lulled into the sweet perfume of his song and sliding guitar, you’ll miss out on some of his song’s hidden gems and hints to the reasons behind his style.

There’s a bluesman in the room
Many of the songs he sang last Friday evening were off his new album “Awenda,” recorded in the South Carolina town of the same name.
Norwood opened his first set with heavy shoes and a guitar with his feet resting on a milk crate that he took to stomping on for percussion.
It was truly the blues. As he said in between songs, “Sell your drum sets and buy a milk crate.” Although Norwood is by no means a poor blues musician who has sold his soul to the devil for talent, he presents himself as such with songs of lamentation about missed chances, meeting the devil and trials and triumphs of making his way across the South as a catfish.
“Bad Ass Boogie” traces the history of his music style to the swamps of the Mississippi Delta. He admitted in the middle of the song, “The Bad Ass Boogie ... I’m not quite sure how to play it, but I can feel it when it’s in the room.” And that’s how his music comes out. It seems deceptively easy, but the play is all in the person, and the only person who can play it is Jeff Norwood. As humble as he appears, when he walks into a room, something changes, something is different. A bluesman has entered the fray.
A little later, he played “Horny Road,” a nostalgic piece about a road he remembered from his high school days that, if you can guess from title, was a favorite of many high school couples.

Organic blues
A clear characteristic of Norwood’s music is its organic nature. It’s something he recognizes and said he tried to catch on his most recent release “Awenda.”
It was recorded outside at times, he said, and the noises of the wildlife and insects was kept in the background.
Truly, the audience is as important to his show as he is, as they sing along to his verses adding to the cacophony going on with his clumping heels against the milk crate and any other sounds he manages to make while still keeping both hands on the guitar.

To get a better idea of Norwood’s style, visit his mySpace page at myspace.com/jeffnorwoodblues.
To listen to tracks or buy his new album, “Awenda,” visit cdbaby.com/cd/norwoodjeff.
- SC Now

Jeff Norwood
Awendaw
(Awendaw Green)

"Black Dark" [Click to listen] Audio File

From the crickets that harmonize with Jeff Norwood on "Horny Road" (recorded from the Awendaw Green studio's porch) to the backwoods throw-down described in "Bad Ass Boogie," Awendaw sounds appropriately like the place it came from. In this stripped-down solo release, Norwood is equally authentic in his Delta-style delivery of the blues. Over raw, repetitive slide licks, Norwood paints the images of his own wandering and soul-searching, and the scenes, happy and forlorn, that he witnesses along the way. "See the town shut down/When the mill left town/Ain't gonna find mom and pop anywhere left around," he sings in "Black Dark." "The Devil" opens with a dirty slide-laden warning about Norwood's own struggle with "evil running through my veins." "Horny Road" and "Shake" are both clever pleas toward women, before "Save My Wicked Soul," a concise and rocking gospel tune, closes the album on an uplifting note. Norwood's genuine in his take on the blues, melding the best of life's lows and highs into both his words and finger work. (www.myspace.com/jeffnorwoodblues) —Stratton Lawrence

Norwood performs at the soon-to-be-open Fiery Ron's Home Team BBQ on Sullivan's Island on Fri. May 15. - Charleston City Paper

Jeff Norwood has spent his time. He’s studied. He’s a journeyman copping his trade where he goes. Primarily confined to the upper Southeast; Norwood has cut his teeth on the lessons of North Mississippi and Delta musicians surviving there today. Norwood, amongst a few others, is in a crop of modern day revivalists trying to bring both mainstream blues fans and regular music fans to where it all came from. Norwood branches out here with this 10 song set of modern country blues tunes.
Norwood isn’t quite adept vocally to convey the deep, brooding messages like those of his Delta and North Mississippi masters he’s learned from. However, his guitar work is very knowledgeable, whether he’s tweaking the steel slide on “The Devil” or getting down with a stomping, ruckus boogie like “Call Me Money,” you can hear him calling forth legends of Mississippi’s past.
The album, for a start, is a little imbalanced. The last half of the album seems to find Norwood in full stride as a fully realized man of the blues where the brooding, murdering, wickedness themes of the Delta blues are fully come to life and reinterpreted feverishly in Norwood’s original songwriting like “Black Dark,” “Save My Wicked Soul,” and the universally themed “Shake.” Norwood even gives a direct tip of the hat to Mississippi Fred McDowell as he presents his lone cover “Kokomo Blues.” The first half of the album is a mish-mash of Americana singer/songwriter meets the blues, reminding me of folks like Peter Karp, Walt Wilkins, or John Prine. “Horny Road,” “Bad Ass Boogie,” and “Walking Catfish Blues,” are delivered non-chalantly in a back porch style that wouldn’t have ran well with the deep darkness that many of Delta blues legends never played with. The lyrics don’t quite live up to the Americana masters I’ve referenced either, as some might find them adolescent, trite, or a bit hokey.
Norwood is not unlike a lot of his fellow acoustic revivalists. However, he sticks to the dark and brooding path with the subjects and the wants that no one likes to sing about anymore – he might find himself away from the pack. He’s got the guitar chops and the experiences to draw from already, a more fully recognized vision might help curb some of the harsher criticisms given. In other words, Norwood should journey on as a journeyman acoustic bluesman a bit farther and return when he’s got more angry, deep hurts to pound out on his guitar – like he did when he made the last half of the disc. - Benjamin Cox

Jeff Norwood's clear tenor and spare, clean guitar sound are a little atypical for Delta blues, a style which white artists often deliver with intentional gruffness. Intriguingly, Norwood's fresh-faced sound feels more real, less studied, than the efforts of some rougher-edged bluesmen. A big part of it is the down-home sense of fun in this set of ten original songs. Instead of worriedly trying his hardest to overtake a retreating "authenticity," Norwood writes and plays what inspires and delights him, and nothing else. Just the titles suggest this sensibility: "Bad Ass Boogie," "Walking Catfish Blues," "Horny Road." "Way up past the strip malls, back to the piney woods / Find a Horny Road somewhere baby that's gonna do us both some good."
He often sings of salvation, damnation, and sex, just like an old-time blues artist, and occasionally tries too hard to be elemental ("Shake"), but hits the nail dead-on in "The Devil": "It all seems much too easy / With Satan by your side / Once he gets inside you boy you're down for sure." The blues scale was meant for lines like this and Norwood matches it up perfectly. Another top track is "Kokomo," where he lets loose with a howl, sliding his voice all over the liquid growl of his slide guitar. It's followed by "Deep and Cold," a surprisingly convincing paean to the peace found only in death; then the disc closes by rocking out with "Save My Wicked Soul." It's not that the best songs are at the end; it's that this is that rare disc that intensifies as it goes along.
-Jon Sobel
http://blogcritics.org/music/article/music-review-indie-round-up-malcolm/page-2/
- Jon Sobel