Jeremy Lyons & the Deltabilly Boys

During the second to last song, Jeremy Lyons decided to climax the concert. Through their blues and rockabilly swagger, Lyons, bassist Greg Schatz and drummer Paul Santopadre had built up the crowd's interest and energy at the Popeyes Blues Tent Friday afternoon.

Then, Lyons decided to pull the trigger with a blazing guitar solo. The crowd went nuts, and my jaw dropped. I've seen Lyons play before, but if there's a place to up the ante and show what you're made of, I guess it's at Jazzfest. I was just happy the out-of-towners were seeing a once struggling New Orleans street musician succeed during a pivotal moment. The crowd gave Lyons a standing ovation after the song.

Lyons and his boys rocked fast with songs whose emotions ranged from haunting to playful. A highlight of the set was when the band played a song Lyons wrote for his young daughter. The upbeat, poppy song grew in swinging speed until it dissolved. Another highlight was when Lyons played a slow blues that was so beautifully dark I fell into its black spell.

Lyons and Schatz were great performers. Schatz's hip-shaking and playful sideman vocals worked well with Lyons' confident position as keeper of the songs. Add to that the gregarious and tight drumming of Santopadre and I had myself a good time.

These guys rocked. If only Elvis and Robert Johnson could see them now.
- Live New Orleans (website)

It would be easy to insert Jeremy Lyons into a standard story line: Former street musician makes good in the clubs. Yankee travels south in search of the nation's musical soul. College professor's son shuns academe because, frankly, it's more fun to play music than to analyze it.

All true, and all pretty interesting. But to those who've followed his journey's - and by most accounts, it's a staunchly devoted and quickly growing bunch - the most important thread of Jeremy Lyons story is much simpler.

This guy, they insist, puts on one of the best shows in town.

In the eight years since he landed in New Orleans and talked his way into a French Quarter street band, Lyons has built a reputation as a top=drawer interpreter of blues and rockabilly classics, an engaging storyteller in his own right, and one of the most mesmerizing slide guitarists on the circuit. His shows fronting the Deltabilly Boys band have been known to pack clubs on a Monday, normally the deadest night of the week.

This past year of so has been full of breakthroughs for the 30-year old upstate New York native. First came daughter Luciana Matilde, whose early arrival last summer cut short Lyon's European festival gig. Fall brought his record label debut, "Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch," for Louisiana Red Hot Records. This afternoon at 4:20, Lyons hits yet another milestone when he takes to the Lagniappe stage for his inaugural gig as a headliner at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

Up-and-coming Star

Tom Thompson, owner of the Baby Arts Entertainment management company and manager of breakout star trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, has been helping Lyons with bookings and says the new found attraction is well-earned.

"He's a prolific writer, and he's an excellent guitar player as well," Thompson said. "I think he's one of the up-and-coming stars on the New Orleans scene."

Which genre? Good question.

At club shows and on his two CDs (the first one was self-produced), Lyons plays some of his own material and also covers blues from Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Leadbelly, as well as old-time country from Johnny Cash. Lyon's own term, deltabilly swing, incorporates Delta blues, rockabilly, hillbilly and swing. Thompson said even that doesn't fully describe it.

"He's kind of doing his own thing," he said.

The roots of Lyons' "Thing" are equally complicated.

Raised in the college town of Ithaca, N.Y., by a Cornell University philosopher father and social worker mother - both '50's radical types and folk music devotees, he said - Lyons absorbed his parent's ideological approach to the field.

"I was sort of into the populist idea of music," he said.

Lyons picked up a guitar at 14 and took lessons from guitar master and now fellow New Orleans transplant Martin Simpson.

He then headed off to Hampshire College in Massachusetts, where he studied music and social history, eventually earning a degree in ethnomusicology, and where he spent much of his time boning up on the repertoires preserved on scratchy old records at the college library. His thesis tracked the history of country blues guitar. His song "Coffee Rag," an homage to espresso and latte featured on his first CD, dates to those highly caffeinated days.

Lured to New Orleans

Lyons considered sticking to the academic track and, like his father, becoming a professor. But after graduating in 1992, he found himself drawn to New Orleans for an education of a different sort.

Lyons had first heard the Big Mess Blues Band, a ragtag, constantly evolving crew that used to set up shop at Jackson Square or Royal Street, during a vacation a few years earlier. When Lyons returned to town, that's where he headed, and he soon earned a spot in the group's rotation.

His new teachers included Butch Trivette, who fronted the band in Lyon's only previous Jazzfest appearance, and Augie Rodola, Jr., Big Mess band leader and a genuine French Quarter character - a cross between Archie Bunker and Lenny Bruce, Lyons says, as well as one of the best blues singers in the city.

The tips were decent - $100 apiece on good days, $30 on not-so-good days - but playing long hours and sleeping at curbside to stake out prime performance spots left Lyons with little energy to build a career. In 1997, he left the streets behind to focus on playing the clubs.

His band eventually coalesced into Jeremy Lyons and the Deltabilly Boys, rounded out by local drummer Paul Santopadre and Lyons' childhood chum, Greg Schatz, the trio's undisputed clown, on upright bass. All three are part of a second combo, Schatzy, an original roots rock band fronted by Schatz on accordion.

Lyons and company started picking up gigs around town, including regular slots at Margaritaville. But it was at the now-shuttered Dragon's Den that things really took off.

By 1997, the faithful, sometimes more than 100 strong, were piling into the cramped upstairs hideaway on Monday nights for musi - Times-Picayune, New Orleans

There seems to be an unfounded obsession in music journalism for the public in terms of type. It manifests itself in a bad habit of slapping a label on every artist that comes along, and then later cursing him for deviating from a genre that he may have been locked into unwillingly. Consider Jeremy Lyons against this background, and it just doesn't jive. His view of music as art and as entertainment do not concur with the need to describe music in terms of categories. Where Jeremy Lyons is concerned, things can be far more interesting than that.

"I actually saw music as a way that I could perform outside of the confines of someone else's structure," says Lyons of his initial attraction to the art form. He had flirted with the theater as a performance medium, but found it to be too limiting, and so was drawn to music that much more strongly. Blues music appealed to him originally because of its flexibility to the individual personality. "It was being able to put on a one man show... blues is something that can sound full and complete with just one guitar and one voice." How does a white kid from upstate New York end up with a degree in ethnomusicology and a passion for American roots music? "I realized when I first started to try to write my own songs, that I needed to learn a lot more about other people's stuff first. So, I decided to start from scratch and go to the most basic music I could find... I was into rock 'n; roll first, and I just went back from there."

These days it is plain to see that Jeremy Lyons and his band have developed into something far more colorful than straight Delta blues. Lyons expresses the dissatisfaction he had with originally being billed as a blues act, "I found myself trying to push voicing that weren't always there... You get to this point where it's like always painting in the same color... You have to be true to yourself. I have a lot of other roots influences. At the same time that I was listening to Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, I was also listening to Elvis Presley and bluegrass stuff, too. Those rhythms were somehow subtly infiltrated into the Delta blues I was playing." Thus was born, "Deltabilly Swing," the title of his first record and catch phrase for his signature style, a true fusion sound encompassing all of the bits and pieces of influences Lyons has picked up from the full plate of musical experience he has under his belt.

Upon his arrival to New Orleans in 1992, Jeremy started out as a French Quarter street musician playing with, most notably, the Big Mess Blues Band, an ever-changing conglomerate of musicians playing everything from fiddles to washboards. Though he remembers his days in Jackson Square as a magical time of musical discovery, he eventually found himself worn out by that lifestyle, "I figured if I kept doing that I'd just be coasting along, remaining anonymous to the world even though thousands of people had seen me play. So I quit the street thing cold turkey and dedicated myself to building up a reputation in the clubs and getting a record out." That record, released in 1998, is a collection of examples of just how interesting roots music can be in different combinations. The blues influence is certainly out there, and some of the songs are Delta blues covers like Robert Johnson's "Stop Breaking Down Blues," and Leadbelly's "Keep Your Hands Off Her," but to only mention these would be to miss the point entirely. It's what Lyons does with the blues that is refreshing and altogether original. For one thing, he lightens it up. His original songs are often more numerous than lamentative. With lyrics like, "I tried to quit coffee but it made my head hurt/So I guess I'll have to die with these stains on my shirt," combined with his quick, country finger-picking style, Lyons shows his audience that roots music, unbeknownst to many hardcore blues fans, can be farcical and fun. According to Lyons, much of the lightness has come from the influence of his bass player, Greg Schatz, "Greg is this hilarious guy, and he helped me lighten up the stage."

By the time Lyons recorded his second record, Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch, he had settled in with his sidemen and his sound had solidified: "Greg started to do more rockabilly bass and slide bass... I quit playing the National guitar on stage and started playing electric. That really shaped things. People heard the rockabilly influence more in my picking style." Paul Santopadre also provided a major influence, and Lyons maintains that his drumming is the best thing about Count Your Chickens. Whether or not you itemize them, there are enough good things about the record to land it a spot on Offbeat's list of Best CDs of 1999. It includes songs from here and there, some amusing originals such as, "Cafe Au Lait" and "Hurricane Way" (chronicles of New Orleans culture), and some traditional covers arranged brilliantly by Lyons himself. His version of Leadbelly's "In the Pines" is my favori - OffBeat Magazine (New Orleans)