“He is probably the most underestimated musician on the planet and is probably one of the most advanced …”
Eric Clapton on Sonny Landreth
The guttural moan of the slide guitar has defined the blues for close to 100 years. It can be understated and low, accentuating the vocals all the while packing a wallop of emotion into the music. Or it can scream, sending an aural arrow straight into your heart. Regardless of how it’s played, there is no mistaking a well-played slide; it barks, you listen.
And when it comes to slide guitar, there are few out there as good or better than Sonny Landreth. Never heard of him? You would be surprised. He’s recorded with some of the best musicians around and has recorded a handful of solo works that bring him the fame as one of the best slide players ever.
Born in Canton , Mississippi in 1951, the 62 year old Landreth’s family relocated to Lafayette, Louisiana when he was just a boy and if you ask him, Landreth claims the bayou state as his home. His family always had a musical sense and Sonny’s first instrument was the trumpet, something he picked up from his older brother while Sonny was still in elementary school. But there is no doubt that it was the guitar that called to him.
His very first guitar was a toy Elvis Presley model that had belonged to his brother. One day while the brothers were at school, the family dog decided to modify the instrument by chewing off the neck. Sonny replaced the toy guitar with a real instrument and took to it seriously. His first influences were Scotty Moore (Elvis’s guitar player) and Chet Atkins. He said that his only real training on the instrument was to sit and listen to Chet’s recordings and try to copy his intricate finger style picking note for note.
But as he told the Sante Fe New Mexican in an interview, it was Cajun power house, Clifton Chenier, that had the biggest impact on him. “I must’ve been no more than 16, 17 years old the first time I saw him play. Me and a friend wandered into the Blue Angel Club and he was up there on the bandstand. The guy just blew me away. We were the only white people in the place, but Clifton, he came right over and took us under his wing”.
“Growing up in Southwest Louisiana with a really rich cultural heritage, I got a lot of influences” he said to the Chicago Tribune in an interview. “I really feel fortunate to have that as a backdrop. One’s roots really are inspiring and they remain to this day”.
Sonny’s journey to becoming a master musician started innocently enough as a young man. Like so many others, he formed a band and began to play locally, all the while building up a strong local following. He quickly moved to doing session work and catching gigs as a back up musician in and around New Orleans and other hot spots in Louisiana. By 1973, Landreth had caught the attention of Columbia Records. He recorded a disc for Columbia but it was never released. Columbia was unsure of how an album of such local flavor would be received by a national audience. Not long after, Landreth was asked to join up and play with Cheniers Red Hot Louisiana Band. After his touring with the band in 1979, Landreth broke off and formed his own band, The Bayou Rhythm Band. The band released two albums in the Eighties, Blues Attack in 1981 and Way Down In Louisiana in 1985 for the tiny Blues Unlimited label out of Crowley, Louisiana.
But for Landreth and his band mates (Dave Ransom on bass and Gregg Morrow on drums) they found the sledding tough. Sonny left music for a short time, reappearing a few years later when he hooked up with enigmatic rock/blues performer John Hiatt. Hiatt, looking for a backing band to support the tour for his Bring The Family Album, secured the services of the Landreth and the Bayou Rhythm band whom Hiatt had renamed The Goners. Sonny’s first bit of work was to re-create the stinging guitar tracks that were set down on vinyl by guitar demi-god, Ry Cooder.
The result was so good that Hiatt brought The Goners back for his next album, Slow Turning, when session players failed to live up to what The Goners had provided on the road. The disc proved to be a pivot point for Landreth. It was a critical and commercial success for Hiatt and that success bled over to Landreth for his slide work. In an interview with the Seattle News Tribune, Landreth said “This was pretty much a once-in-a-lifetime things. We all knew it was something special”.
The success transferred over to a solo project for Landreth. The disc, Outward Bound, was released in 1992. The album is a tour de force of stunning slide guitar work and served as a springboard for Landreth to move from backing musician to front man.
The follow up, 1995’s South Of I-10, brought Landreth more accolades and continued to push him further up in the pantheon of celebrated blues guitarists. He returned back home to Louisiana to record the disc and the results practically drip with magnolia and humidity. In an interview with Guitar Player magazine, Landreth told the story of recording the disc. He had the run of an 11-acre estate along the Vermilion River and would often record at all hours of the day and night. ‘Then about three or hour in the morning … these tug boats barging shale from the gulf would be going thirty feet away, with the lights cutting through the fog. It was an ethereal experience.”
Since South Of I-10, Landreth and his band have been releasing new albums just about every three years, each one with that southern flavor blues sound. He has become a favorite of blues festivals the world over and has appeared three times at Eric Claptons Crossroads Blues Festival (2004, 2007 and 2010). And although he continues to tour and record with his own band, Landreth remains in constant demand to work with other recording artists as varied as Mark Knoppfler, Junior Wells, Jimmy Buffet, John Mayall, Warren Haynes, Buddy Guy and, of course, Eric Clapton.
But what it is that makes Landreth’s slide work so incredible? He has his own style and unique approach. Despite the clear influence of both Robert Johnson and Duane Allman, it was what he learned on his own that makes the mark. Landreth claims that his style came from combining the intricate picking style of Chet Atkins with the slide technique of Robert Johnson (Johnson played slide by pressing the slide hard directly onto the fret board giving it that eerie, soul stealing sound that set Robert apart from his peers). These combined with Landreth’s touch of slapping and tapping the strings behind the slide give him a sound that is truly his own.
Despite his advancing years, Sonny Landreth remains steadfast to the charge he undertook when he first started to play professionally; ‘to turn the world onto Cajun music’.
[FONT=Tahoma]"All I can do is be me ... whoever that is". Bob Dylan [/FONT]
