Jim and Royann Calvin have been playing bluegrass and old-timey music together for years, first at family gatherings in Royann’s native Louisiana, then as regulars on the regional club and festival ......circuit. The husband-and-wife team isn’t exactly a household name, but along the way they’ve sat in with some legendary pickers, including Bill Monroe and the late Dewey Balfa. Now, as the Americana boom gains momentum, the couple hopes to find a wider audience. Only time will tell if their down-home sound has commercial viability, but the Calvins stand apart from other performers trying to cash in on the movement’s current popularity by virtue of the fact that their music is rooted in a genuine country existence.
Unlike a lot of alternative country-rockers, the Calvins’ grasp of rural culture isn’t limited to what they’ve read in Southern Lit class or seen from behind the wheel of an antique pickup truck. Jim and Royann wear denim overalls and straw hats because they’ve always worn them, not because they’re the latest in country kitsch. Jim’s lyrics can get a little corny (e.g., “I’ve got acres and acres of sugar for you”), but corn is exactly what the couple raises in their backyard.
Local honky-tonkers BR5-49, Greg Garing and Marty Stuart sure didn’t need to be convinced of the Calvins’ authenticity. In fact, they were all so impressed with the couple’s unselfconscious approach to stringband music that each volunteered to play on the Calvins’ new self-released CD, Hillbilly Boogaroo, which is due out later this week.
The duo got to know Garing and the guys from BR5-49 two summers ago when, as part of Lower Broadway’s then-nascent honky-tonk revival, they had a weekly gig in the back room of Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge. Meeting Stuart was more of a chance encounter. “We met Marty when we were playing over at Dollywood,” says Jim Calvin, referring to the couple’s days as roving pickers at the Pigeon Forge theme park. “He was doin’ a show at their celebrity theater and Royann found him backstage at his bus. He was fixin’ to go on and do a show and he was tired and said, ‘Aw, man, I wish I could drop all this and just go be your mandolin player.’ We reminded him of it at a guitar show back in Nashville. We told him we were fixin’ to make an album and could sure use a good mandolin player, and he said, ‘Just call me.’ ”
Stuart’s mandolin and flatpicked guitar can be heard on four of Hillbilly Boogaroo’s 13 tracks; BR5-49’s Smilin’ Jay McDowell and Don Herron play bass and fiddle/steel guitar, respectively, on virtually every song. A well-programmed selection of instrumentals and vocal numbers, the record features plenty of red-hot picking, with breakdowns like “Barney Stomp” and the title track opening and closing the proceedings with jaw-dropping displays of virtuosity. The former song has Jim Calvin, Stuart and Herron trading licks on banjo, mandolin and fiddle, while the latter hitches the Dobro of Uncle Josh Graves to a locomotive for an exhilarating cannonball run.
And yet, unlike so many bluegrass sessions, flashy formalism never puts a chill on the warm, communal spirit of the Calvins’ back-porch picking party. Indeed, the juggy soul of “Ease My Mind,” the gentle melodicism of “My Home’s Up in the Woods,” and the fiddle-and-steel interplay of “Texas Swing” give the record just the right balance. “Ophelia,” one of four instrumentals, is as lovely a piece of hillbilly chamber music as you’re likely to hear; it wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Norman and Nancy Blake’s Rising Fawn String Ensemble records.
At the center of it all is Jim Calvin’s remarkable facility as a banjo, fiddle and guitar player and Royann’s irrepressible rhythm guitar—and, on “Bear’s Creek Stomp,” spoons! Jim wrote all but one of the album’s songs and lends his molasses baritone to nine of its 10 vocal tracks. “Try It Again,” the only number penned and sung by Royann, sounds like nothing else on the record; it’s a lean, sexually-charged rockabilly tune that gets an extra kick from BR5-49 frontman Chuck Mead on lead guitar and snare drum. Here, Royann Calvin sings with the breathless urgency of Gram Parsons on Burrito Deluxe’s “Lazy Day” and “Older Guys.” Clocking in at a mere two minutes and 14 seconds, it’s the kind of song that demands immediate repeated listenings.
Surprisingly, neither of the Calvins, who met and got to know each other at a series of jam sessions in Covington, La., were originally drawn to bluegrass and old-time stringband music. “Actually,” admits Royann, “Jim was the first bluegrass musician that I’d been around. I grew up on Boots Randolph, Hank Sr. and Fats Domino, but the first genuine bluegrass music I heard was out of his banjo. I’d been playin’ guitar for about a year. I guess the reason I liked it was that it went so fast.”
Jim Calvin grew up in a musical family. “My mother played violin with the Cleveland Orchestra back in the ’40s,” he says, adding that he started taking piano—“Beethoven Lessons,” he calls them—when he was 5 years old. During high school, he fell under the spell of Sonny Boy Williamson and other Delta blues singers. But it wasn’t until he signed on for a hitch in the Navy that he got his first real exposure to bluegrass music.
“I went to see Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee in New Haven, Conn., when I was going to submarine school up there,” recalls Calvin of what proved to be a musical epiphany for him. “A bluegrass band opened the show, and I’d never seen such a thing. These guys were having more fun than I’d ever seen, and I just flipped out. The next day, I went out and got a banjo and I’ve been playin’ ’em ever since.”
The Calvins just returned to Nashville after a 10-show tour of East Texas and Louisiana, where they were featured performers at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and on the Piney Woods Opry, a show syndicated on National Public Radio that has since adopted Hillbilly Boogaroo’s “Barney Stomp” as its opening theme. The couple will be releasing their new CD 7 p.m. Sunday in the back room of Tootsie’s. Those willing to brave the Fan Fair pilgrims paying homage to the Lower Broadway shrine won’t be disappointed; among others, Greg Garing is rumored to be putting together a honky-tonk band just for the occasion. But, regardless of who shows up, the Calvins’ party should promise hot licks and homegrown good times.
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