Album Review: Otis Gibbs - Joe Hill's Ashes (Wanamaker)

When Billy Bragg invited Nashville-based Otis Gibbs up onstage at the Wold Top Marquee during last year's Beverley and East Riding Festival, we knew instantly that this singer-songwriter was the real deal. Vocally a mixture between the Tom's Waits and Russell and physically a hybrid of Billy's Gibbons and Connolly, Otis Gibbs growls from the heart with a voice not unlike a set of rusty harvesting blades.

Much more than just a folk singer, having allegedly planted over 7,000 trees, slept in hobo jungles, walked with nomadic shepherds in the Carpathian Mountains and having been strip-searched by dirty cops in Detroit; not the usual common or garden folkie it has to be said. He even has an FBI file. Having toured extensively, Gibbs frequently finds himself travelling across America and further a field, chronicling the world around him both in song and with a remarkable series of stunning monochrome photographs.

Growing up in Wanamaker, Indiana, Gibbs' first stage appearance was at the age of four, singing the old Jimmie Rodgers song Waiting for a Train. Much of his formative years were spent in bars, where he sang for tips, which was then transferred into more booze for his uncle who was supposedly looking after him. Eventually dropping out of a conventional lifestyle and with a meagre income found himself sharing apartments with artists, musicians and radicals during which time he began writing literally hundreds of songs.

Some of those songs materialised on a couple of albums 49th AND MELANCHOLY (2002) and ONCE I DREAMED OF CHRISTMAS (2003), a seasonal collection of songs written for people who don't particularly like Christmas. ONE DAY OUR WHISPERS (2004) gained critical acclaim and spoke to those who felt uncomfortable with the direction America was heading. Billy Bragg included The Peoples Day in his Wall Street Journal list of the Top Five Songs with Something to Say, placing Gibbs alongside the likes of Bob Dylan, Sam Cooke, Chuck Berry and The Clash. Last year's GRANDPA WALKED A PICKETLINE saw Gibbs touring once again re-visiting the UK, Ireland and Holland and spending six weeks in the top five on the Americana Radio Chart in the States.

Otis Gibbs' latest offering JOE HILL'S ASHES follows hot on the heels of GRANDPA WALKED A PICKETLINE and features a handful of Nashville-based musicians on hand to help out including Thomm Jutz (bass, mandolin, vocal), Deanie Richardson (fiddle), Mark Fain (upright bass), partner Amy Lashley (vocal) and Pat McInerney (drums). Co-produced by Gibbs and Jutz, the album has a crisp acoustic sound which brings to life the twelve songs covering a range of topics including departed friends, reminiscences of youth, West Virginia mining disasters and Greyhound buses.

If Woody Guthrie wrote some of America's greatest anthems from the caboose of a speeding freight train then The Town That Killed Kennedy chronicles many similar journeys but from the seat of a Greyhound bus. There's a lot to observe from the window of a bus and Gibbs vividly captures the desolation and loneliness of such journeys borne out of poverty. As he rightly says, you only travel across America on a bus when you're too broke to fly.

Two songs speak of departed friends from two different angles. Whilst Where Only The Graves Are Real provides a cautionary tale of maintaining an awareness of who your real friends are, Something More tenderly ponders on the question of why the good die young and eulogises absent friends.

The heart of the album can possibly be found in When I Was Young, a beautiful reminiscence of maternal childhood, where Gibbs recalls with clarity his earliest memories of sitting in his mother's arms with his ear pressed against her chest, her voice leaving an indelible mark upon him.

Packaged in an authentically designed sleeve with Shelby Kelley's etchings depicting itinerant worker and labour activist Joe Hill, Gibbs latest album is immediately fulfilling, rich in content and furthermore, reminds us once again that the legacy of Woody Guthrie is still very much alive and well.