The mountains and hollers of his native North Carolina haunt Malcolm Holcombe's music like the gaunt and impenetrable backwoods faces in a Shelby Lee Adams photograph—that mix of earthy and otherworldly that eludes description and makes city folk uncomfortable. Much like the man himself, who has the kind of rough edges and turbulent history that no stylist or publicist could fabricate. That might explain why Holcombe, whose 1999 album A Hundred Lies received a four-star review in Rolling Stone, and who's been championed by the likes of Lucinda Williams and No Depression magazine, isn't more widely known.
I Never Heard You Knockin' is Holcombe's latest record, and it's his most bare-bones one to date. "We just set up a couple mics," he says, "pushed 'record,' drank some coffee and chain-smoked for a couple days. I get bored when everybody runs their mouth. If you want something done, do it yourself."
The result is much like a typical Holcombe performance, his scratchy baritone croaking over his singular guitar playing, which alternates fluid fingerpicking with sputtering surges of notes that stop just short of derailing the rhythm. His songs blend gut-deep urgency with a knack for lyrical images rendered in the fewest words possible, and reflect his dual personality—part troubled soul, part front-porch sage.
Within the world of Appalachian music, Holcombe's work stands apart from some of his more popular, media-savvy peers in a couple of ways. First, he actually grew up in the world he sings about—he was raised in a small mountain town, Weaverville, N.C., and his dad was a bus driver. When he sings lines like, "Jesus loves me, this I know / 'Cause my mama told me so," he's likely speaking from his experience, unlike the suburban-bred artists who sometimes approach the music with the reverence of outsiders or the detachment of anthropologists. Secondly, and probably due to those roots, Holcombe feels less need to be a purist, and thus has developed a style that may not be faithful to the genre's old-time sounds, but is true to its spirit.
"Malcolm is as real as dirt, as hard as steel, but as soft as cotton," says Ray Kennedy, who's planning to produce a record for Holcombe later this year. "He couldn't follow a trend with a gun to his head."
Holcombe plays Thursday, March 10, at the Bluebird Cafe as part of a strong in-the-round lineup that also includes Ed Snodderly, Tony Arata and Jelly Roll Johnson.
—Jack Silverman
