Hogan & Moss

Maria Moss flips open her instrument case and pulls out a worn reproduction of a resonator guitar.

"This thing is a cannon," she says.

Sure enough, the guitar - a hollow-bodied instrument with cones inside that project a booming sound - is easily heard. Her partner Jon Hogan's archtop guitar also looks like it has survived decades, but it's a fairly recent creation by Arkansas luthier Bayard Blain.

Hogan and Moss are dressed in warm, unforgiving fabrics, particularly for Houston, and topped by vintage felt headgear. "We didn't dress up for you," Moss says. "This is just what we do. We'll hit the Stop and Go for a Topo Chico and get strange looks sometimes. I guess young bands tend to prefer flip-flops and baseball caps."

Hogan and Moss then strike up "In Dreams I Go Back Home," a song that sounds decades old even though it was written by Hogan for Moss and isn't old at all. They work through "The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane," a song that sold a half-million copies for Fiddlin' John Carson in 1923. Then they play a newer tune: Leonard Cohen's "The Future." Despite the three disparate sources, the songs flow together like tributaries into a river. They're informed by Hogan and Moss' playing, which is crisp and assertive, as well as their voices, which dance closely in harmony.

"Authenticity" is a word bandied about carelessly in music criticism, often to convey contemporary music that sounds older and is unfettered by modern measures like sales or downloads. But Hogan and Moss present an authentic music, not because of the songs' ages, or how they dress or the instruments they use. Theirs is authentic because of an earnest belief that a song is a timeless narrative device.

"It's the simplest things," Moss says, "the idea of history in writing. Old-time music is about the story. It's in the line of a tradition of storytelling."

Hogan adds, "It's such a deep and rich and exciting, almost-unknown history we draw from. Some people are more interested in others where it all came from. If you sing a Carter Family song you get a lot of people who say, 'Johnny Cash!' And that's great. But there's so much more to it than that."

Which is the point Hogan and Moss try to make in their shows, which include musical stories that span nearly a century. Little themes arise here and there, but the big two are love and death, which lend themselves to the duo's two primary modes: the bleak minor key "scorch folk," in which they belt out tunes about dying, and the ballads, which balance the mix lest it tiptoe toward the void.

Sometimes, of course, the love songs are about death, and the death songs are often about love. But that's what makes music from the first half of the 20th century so universally appealing. Past, present, future - it all melts together. Cohen's song may be about the future, but it's not an optimistic one, with its refrain of "repent" and the observation, "I've seen the future brother. It is murder."

Carson's tune concerns one man's last days. "He sings, 'I ain't got long to stay here,'" Hogan says. "So on one hand he's letting you know the song's almost over. He's stopped feeding. He's too old to work his farm. He's trying to live contented while he remains. That song has this thing inside all of us. That's human experience. It reaches across time and space. The things we'll remember."

Moss gets sentimental about "In Dreams I Go Back Home." She grew up here, studied journalism at the University of Houston and always worked in or near the arts, serving for years on the board for the alternative art space the Orange Show for Visionary Art. She was involved in the inaugural Art Car Parade in the '80s.

"The Orange Show was crucial to my development as an outsider artist," she says. "I don't think I'd be playing this music if I hadn't grown up in Houston and taken in this 'outsider' art. Life just changed, and now I'm on the other side of it."

Moss, 58, took a stab at music years ago, but decided the indulgent lifestyle that went with it lead nowhere positive. She kept her guitars, but quit playing in public. Ten years ago she was diagnosed with breast cancer. "It was a life-changing experience," she says. "I had to deal with my body in a new way. I got my guitars back out. It was a physical therapy that also aided my spirit."

A year later she met Hogan at the Kerrville Folk Festival. Hogan says he grew up in "the American West" in a family that played 78s - the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers - rather than contemporary music.

"I guess I respected some of the pop music of the day, but the music of the '30s intrigued me more," he says. "It's about understanding what came before. You hear the wildness in Fiddlin' John Carson and you can understand where Aaron Copland got 'Appalachian Spring' from."

Hogan started playing guitar as a teen and writing songs at 24, mostly performing out West. He had only recently moved to Texas when he and Moss met and bonded over their affinity for old-time music. Today, they play around 220 shows a year, which means the closest thing they have to a home is Austin. "We get our mail there," Moss says, "and we keep a storage unit there. But it doesn't make sense to pay rent."

They spend most of their time working nights, keeping a century-old tradition feeling alive, "a spiritual mission," Moss calls it, "because you're not going to make a great living in folk music." They travel with a dinged-up trailer that Hogan, 42, built with know-how and duct tape. Though their music requires a stand-up bass, the instrument is so bulky they don't travel with a bassist. They find assistance where they play. They've enlisted Ned Mefford from Spring for their Houston shows.

Hogan and Moss have made albums of old material and originals. They have a new set of original songs recorded, with hopes to release it next year.

As for the old, they like to tug on the loose strings of songs and see where they lead. They hear a lot of old-time music - especially the Carter Family - in the music of Texas singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. They've worked "Choctaw Bingo" by rock/roots singer-songwriter James McMurtry into their sets. They will tiptoe around the source material when it's older: "A lot of younger people do the Carter Family, and it's soft and folky, too sweet," Hogan says. "We do it as straight and pure and true as possible."

Other times they take a familiar song and make it almost unrecognizable. They listen to songs deeply, which is how they identified the possibility for a sugary vocal in the '90s alterna-psych-rock hit "Pepper" by the Butthole Surfers. "Pepper" is a surreal song - even without the odd video, which starred Erik Estrada - but one that fits the tradition of songs about the end of the line.

"They were all in love with dying," goes its refrain, "and they were doing it in Texas." - Houston Chronicle

On the 2011 album Go Lightning, Jon Hogan has taken traditional tunes and made them sound like they’ve been lit on fire. No wonder he and his band call themselves “scorch folk.” This is music for those who love Devil Makes Three, Murder by Death, Scott H. Biram and Drag the River. Hogan and his guitarist, Maria Moss, are less punk, more folk than those bands, but the sound and sentiment is there. The group’s rendition of “Shady Grove” is intimate but still wildly danceable, lovely yet creepy. (I’ve always shuddered at the line, “If I had a needle and thread as fine as I could sew / I’d sew that pretty little girl to my side and down the road we’d go.”)

The band also makes awesome old-time originals. They recently recorded six tracks in Nashville with the bass player for Robert Plant’s Band of Joy who also plays with Emmylou Harris. They also had the fiddler from Ricky Skaggs band, Andy Leftwich, on board for the session. Moss has an interesting background: She wrote for the New York Times, edited a few of Houston’s city magazine and freelanced for a decade. She left journalism after fighting breast cancer, and finally landed in the band with Hogan.

“We’re serious songwriters with roots in Appalachia, the Carter Family, and the old-time mountain music that predates bluegrass,” Moss tells me over email. “We’re more Shovels & Rope than Gillian Welch, but we share listeners with a pretty broad post-Oh Brother Where Art Thou listenership.” The band hosts an annual Townes Van Zandt tribute near Big Bend National Park. They’re big fans of the late Blaze Foley, who wrote songs that became hits for Merle Haggard (“If I Could Only Fly”) and Lyle Lovett (“Election Day”) and John Prine (“Clay Pigeons”). The duo creates posthumous co-writes with the singer.

This is a group that feels like they’re on a quest. That they once received the Key to the City of El Paso for preservation of American heritage music is no surprise. Live, the band seemed uncorked. Hogan and Moss both look like strumming maniacs, possessed by old time music. It’s as though if you touched them, they might electrocute you, they’re so saturated with energy.

—Erika Fredrickson - Missoula Independent