Country music’s roots lie in folk music: That is to say, it is music of the people. With its commercialization, its mainstream has increasingly become sanitized in both its sonic and lyrical content, growing closer to pop and largely abandoning its populist roots.
But the old ways have not disappeared. They’ve just gone underground, where they’re maintained by artists like JP Harris, who now lives in — but is not a creature of — Nashville and its establishment. In his recent appearance at Jammin’ Java, Harris and his band brought the beating heart of tradition up to the present day.
The Father of Country Music, Jimmie Rodgers, was known as the Singing Brakeman for his time working on railroads. Ever since, the rails have inspired his successors, from Johnny Cash’s Ride This Train to Steve Goodman’s “City of New Orleans.” Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Harris’s family moved across the country, where he left school after eighth grade to hitchhike and ride the rails, eventually landing in rural northern New England as the new millennium began. There, he lived off the grid, working a variety of trades, including carpentry, sheepherding, logging, and farm labor, playing old country tunes at campfires.
As JP shared at Jammin’ Java on June 25, he never intended to “do this for a living.” He only started writing songs in his mid-20s, and, in 17 years, he’s only recorded and released five albums. “I’m not prolific,” he said, “there’s no rhyme or reason” to when he writes. Harris has a good-natured humor about himself — he had a good chuckle when I asked him, after the show, if he ever finds things in his impressive beard (“just baby birds”) — and the arc of his career. He described one song as his “closest thing to a hit single” because it plays in the background of a Netflix show in a scene with Sam Elliott: “When I Quit Drinking.”
Watch JP Harris perform “When I Quit Drinking” live for LR Baggs on YouTube:
JP’s humor’s reflected in the title of his latest album, last year’s JP Harris Is A Trash Fire, recorded over nine months in 2023 with Oklahoman Americana musician JD McPherson producing. Harris describes the album as “equal parts satire, reflection, and apology.”
Appropriately, Harris played what he described as a “honky-tonk meet and greet, a country music speed date,” while another tune is an attempt to “explain myself.” But he didn’t start with either of these, instead beginning with a number about “three grown-ass adults with an uncanny ability to always get away with their bad behavior. The moral of this story is, if you’re gonna be bad, you’ve got to be quick.” One song was about “being trapped somewhere between young and old,” while another explored how, “with all the wrong decisions, even the friendliest of places can feel like a ghost town.” He also did “a story about being cruel,” and he finished the show with surprising but effective Devo cover (“Beautiful World”).
Local artist Brent Funkhouser, who lives in Reston and grew up nearby in the Shenandoah Valley, opened the show with an acoustic solo set. His family has deep roots in the state, having settled here in 1708. This is part of the inspiration for a concept album he’s been working on for four years about Southern history and identity, which he tackled in “The Story Quilt.” The title of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” comes from a short story by the great southern writer Flannery O’Connor and is the first single from his album Moonrise, which comes out this fall. The album has nine songs, with each representing a phase of the moon. “Mary Keep the Faith,” he explained, is about “someone who made a different thing their whole identity every month,” because she was trying to find herself. Introducing “Blackberries,” he shared that he got married a month ago. Brent finished up with “Old Times Ain’t Forgotten.”
I wasn’t familiar with Brent before this show, and the quality of his songs was a welcome surprise. The quality of JP Harris’s songs was no surprise, but was just as welcome.
