Hezekiah Goode

When Hezekiah Goode sings, "the workingman's is a rough road, it wears many good souls down" in 'At the Edge of the Burying Ground', it sounds like he's speaking from experience. There's no need to speculate, though. He's happy to run through his resume for anybody who asks: "I was stackin' hay bales and fixin fence from when I was knee high to a grasshopper down in the Ozark country. I packed fish in St. Louis. I swung a hammer all over California. Hell, I even put in an hour or two doing grunt work on Wall Street. I been working all my life. Some folks like to write about aristocrats and what have you, but I wouldn't give a plug nickel to hear that sort of thing. I like to hear (and write) about regular people, folks with dented cars and crummy nine-to-fives." Goode has performed all over, playing honky tonks, coffee shops and street corners from San Francisco to Denver to New York City to Dublin. The music he plays is solidly in the vein of the old-time folk and country music that he grew up listening to in rural southern Missouri. There are backwoods adventure songs like 'Half-Brother to Leviathan', a story of three young romancers home from World War II who find themselves crossways of a bull "fathered by a funnel cloud, foretold in Revelations". There are tales of economic hardship, as when Goode sings impressionistically in 'Rosalie' of a mother with "children like fireflies flickering off" and landlords who "all seem to have tenement dreams". There are songs about starry-eyed fools and out-of-touch politicians. There are songs about unruly women - women with mean right hooks and hot-blooded wives who sneak out to dance burlesque. In addition to his own compositions, Goode draws upon an extensive catalog of songs by traditional country and folk singers such as Lefty Frizzell, Doc Watson, Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams Sr. Goode has a new album out entitled "The Shooter in the Tower", featuring some of Colorado's finest traditional musicians.