Sonny Landreth – Bayou Blues
It was about this time that Landreth made the technical breakthrough which gives him such a distinctive sound. Usually a guitarist has to choose between fretting his strings with his fingers or sliding a bar across them, but Landreth found a way to do both. He presses the glass cylinder on his left pinky against the strings hard enough that the pitch changes as he slides the bar, but not so hard that the strings hit the frets. He then uses the other three fingers on his left hand to press certain strings down even further so they detach from the slide and lie against the frets to produce different notes from the simultaneous slide notes.
“I could see these other notes just beyond the glass, and that intrigued me,” he explains. “I had three extra fingers hanging out there, so I thought, what would happen if I kept the slide at just the right height so I could not only get the slide notes but also fret some strings under the glass?
“I tried it and all this weirdness came out of the amp. It sounded great, but I needed to control it. Slide guitarists usually use those extra fingers to dampen the strings and control the overtones, but I found I could do that with the edge of my right palm, as I had learned when I was doing Chet Atkins-style fingerpicking. Once I figured that out, I was on my way.”
Landreth and his bandmates continued to work the Gulf Coast bar circuit throughout the 1970s. Part of that circuit was a black-owned Lafayette club called Les Bons Temps Rouler that hosted a Wednesday “White Night,” a chance for white kids to dance to white bands. One night Landreth was sitting in with Red Beans & Rice on “White Night” when he looked over at a small table in the audience and spotted his hero.
“I was standing at one edge of the stage,” Landreth recalls, “and I looked over and said, ‘Oh, my god, it’s Clifton Chenier.’ This was 1979 before lightning struck that old place and burned it down. Between sets he called me over and invited me to go play a gig with him in St. Martinville. As I was playing that show, I thought, ‘This is the peak of my career.’ But Cliff asked me to play the next week in New Orleans, too. We were staying in this funky-ass hotel off Airline Highway, and someone came to my room and said, ‘Cliff wants to see you.’ It was like being summoned to see the king.”
Chenier had decided to make Landreth the first-ever white member of the Red Hot Louisiana Band. The 28-year-old guitarist spent the next year as a full-time member and three or four more years after that as a part-timer, filling in whenever the accordionist needed him. It was a cultural education as well as a musical one.
“The whole band would be in a car pulling a trailer,” Landreth relates. “We’d always arrive in a new town early in the day. We’d visit someone’s house, where they’d cook up this big feast and we’d play music and dance. After a full day of that, we’d get to the gig at a joint out in the middle of a sugar-cane field that you wouldn’t know about if you weren’t part of the Creole community, and we’d play for four hours without a break.”
Landreth recorded an album, Blues Attack, in 1981 with members of the Red Hot Louisiana Band plus longtime friends such as Ranson and harmonica whiz Mel Melton. But his breakthrough was 1985’s Down In Louisiana, which proved he was much more than just a Johnny Winter clone. He added a signature Louisiana syncopation to the blues and proved he could write songs that were more than an excuse for a guitar solo.
The key track was “Congo Square”, a tribute to the New Orleans park where the slaves used to drum and to the second-line rhythms they bequeathed. The song not only describes that tradition but evokes it as well. It has been recorded by everyone from the Neville Brothers and Kenny Neal to John Mayall. Landreth has recorded it three times himself, the latest on Grant Street.
The local release of Down In Louisiana caught the ear of an Epic A&R rep, who invited Landreth to Nashville to cut some demos in 1987. While he was in Tennessee, Landreth played on a Darden Smith session that Ray Benson of Asleep At The Wheel was producing. Benson said his pal John Hiatt was looking for a new guitarist and asked Landreth if he was interested. A few minutes later, Benson came back with a telephone, and Hiatt was on the line.
Hiatt had just released his breakthrough album, Bring The Family, recorded with an all-star crew of Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner (later they became Little Village). The challenge of scheduling and placating such in-demand talents was proving too much, and Hiatt’s follow-up project was foundering. In the meantime, he was looking for a slide guitarist who could play Cooder’s parts on the road.
“I told John on the phone, ‘I have the band that you want; I know this bassist named David Ranson and this drummer named Kenny Blevins,'” Landreth recounts. “He flew the three of us up for an audition, and after we played one song, ‘Memphis In The Meantime’, John told his manager, ‘That’s it; cancel all the other auditions.’ Which was a good thing, because that was the only song Kenny had learned!”
Hiatt dubbed his new backing trio the Goners, took them on the road, and cut his next album, Slow Turning, with them. Landreth, Ranson and Blevins took the parts created by Cooder, Lowe and Keltner and soaked them in swamp juice. The Goners have toured with Hiatt ever since — not every tour, but whenever the singer wants that funky feel again — and they backed him on his 2001 album The Tiki Bar Is Open as well as 2003’s Beneath This Gruff Exterior.