Hugh Gaskins & the G-string Daddies

Basically a bluesman, Gaskins covers other musical styles as well. His tendency to a diversity of genres, an 'American-fusion' of sorts is, he says, both a strength and a weakness.

Thirty years ago when the heat of youth combined with the energy and declaritive power of his style, Gaskins 'coulda been a contendah'. To make up for times lost he now has a couple of CD's out, (Hughmanity and Motel Angels), making up for a fraction of a music life expressed mostly in the obscurity of dives and bars during cracks in the routine of a work-a-day daddy. The good side of the smoky side of this kind of music life (music in the cracks) is that power and energy can not be contained forever and will break out because of and in spite of the blues of it all.

"Yeah, I've got a CD now, twenty years after. Meanwhile, I just talked to an eleven year old kid the other day who is on his third CD. It's the era of personalized music CD's. Ther're like cell phones and every other person seems to have one. But, if nothing else there's an energy and undertow here, especially in the blues based stuff, which you should hear straight off."

On Hughmanity (The Blues Alone) - Gaskins alone and low-tech., on accoustic guitar, acoustic bottle neck slide, harmonica, electric lead guitar, ("with no effects other than reverb, all you would have gotten out of a little Kay amp forty years ago!"). This stuff is a fusion of blues styles with rockabilly and mountain music influences thrown in and a return to early influences such as gospel, Elvis, John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, Big Joe Williams etc. The other recording,
Motel Angels, is a compilation of these influences with C&W, "Cal-Mex" and other sounds that came in between.

On Influences and impressions: "My earliest memory is of singing 'Just a Little Talk with Jesus' in the front of the congregation of The Faith Tabernacle, a little church on what was then a country highway in Newbern, North Carolina. I remember being in a pew with my Grandma a mother of fourteen (who is almost one hundred years old today) clapping and singing these gospel tunes. Now throw in a black and white t.v. Elvis, an uncle or two singing somethin' about a 'big legged woman, 'big legged woman put your dress tail down' or a, 'wreck on the highway', my mom and dad singing behind a glass in some little radio station in the sticks, and these are some of the earliest musical impressions that come to me right off."
"Later some of my family, cousins, aunts and uncles, stuffed in old Fords and Chevys migrated 3,000 miles across country to California. It was somewhere there, I guess, that the "Cal-Mex" thing (as opposed to Tex-Mex) filtered through on the wide band radio. It came not like the country blues, which came almost like memory, but like an immediate attraction drifting in like a hot breeze in the night, through the open windows of a car on a desert highway. In the late 60's and early 70's I played the bars in Mission Beach and all the free jams I could off the beach alleys. Bare backed guys in faded blue jeans danced on the roofs surrounding blocked off alleys while beach sunsets silloueted and shone through the loose granny dresses of young women shakin' the shingles down!"

On who is listening: "Surprisingly for me, it's not my own generation necessarily. The people who approach me and respond to what I'm doing in the clubs now are in their early to late twenties. I find them open, generous and gracious in ways my own generation was not. Anybody over thirty was suspect with us, (we cut off whole worlds that way).

On American Fusion: "It happens whether you want it to or not, chosen or unchosen, and it's the best thing this country does, fusion of diverse cultures. Like it or not, it goes on and is most obvious in the music: jazz, blues, gospel, cajun, zydeco, Tex-Mex, bluegrass, C&W, rockabilly, and an endless list of others. It just goes on. Along these lines nothing represents this idea better than the sight and sound of a young Elvis. I say young because that's when the black and white of the man was still good and confused, mixed up in a way that could make you whole."