By DAN ARMONAITIS
Long before forming The Consumers, a Spartanburg-based band that began churning out edgy pop-rock in the mid-2000s, Joe Power was a serious student of early 20th century blues.
“I must have been 11 years old when I heard Skip James’ ‘Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues,’ and it scared me to death,” Power said. “I had never heard anything like it. That was the song that made me pick up my dad’s guitar — his acoustic — and actually start to learn how to play it.”
The hauntingly melodic tune was also the first song Power and Spartanburg guitar whiz Shane Pruitt played together when, a few months ago, they started collaborating as musical partners.
Billed as Hurt & Skip, a reference to seminal bluesmen Mississippi John Hurt and the aforementioned James, the duo was set to make its public debut in late March at Delaney’s Irish Pub in Spartanburg. Of course, social distancing measures related to the coronavirus pandemic canceled those plans.
Now, having since added Greenville-based percussion Jason “Slice” Phillips to the fold, Hurt & Skip will instead be officially launched to the public via a livestream concert to be broadcast at 7 p.m. Friday, April 17 from DRAY: Bar + Grill in Spartanburg. The performance is part of the “Sit Stay Dray” concert series and can be viewed on the DRAY Bar Facebook page.
Hurt & Skip will also kick off the Hub City Social Distance Fest, which features a full day’s slate of musicians and other artists, with a performance starting at 10 a.m. Saturday, April 18. That event can be viewed at http://www.localtakes.com/fest.
“I’ve known Joe for a long time, but this is the first time I’ve ever really worked with him,” said Pruitt, who is best known for leading the Shane Pruitt Band, a group that has been delivering soul-tinged, electric blues-rock for more than a decade. “It’s a breath of fresh air because he’s such an outstanding singer. He’s got real soul, but he’s got the sheen of a voice that makes it mass appealing.”
Power reached out to Pruitt after being impressed with some videos Pruitt posted to his Facebook page last November.
“He was just playing dobro on his porch, and I messaged him and was like, ‘you’re playing stuff that I grew up on (and) got obsessed with early,'” Power said. “I was like, ‘if you ever want to get together, that’d be cool. I mean, most of those songs you’re playing, I already know the words to.’ And he was like, ‘absolutely, let’s do it.'”
Although Power and Pruitt had been acquaintances for years, the experience was almost like a first-time meeting. They immediately connected on levels that perhaps wouldn’t have seemed possible, given their starkly different musical paths.
“He’s used to being in those loud rock ‘n’ roll bands,” Pruitt said of Power, who also leads a blues-inflected hard rock outfit called Buffalohead. “And I’m used to being a wild man on stage, so it’s nice to step back away from that and show some people that we’re more than just one-trick ponies.”
The project started out with Pruitt playing dobro and acoustic guitar while leaving the vocal duties to Power. That was to have been the setup for the since-canceled debut show at Delaney’s. Then, last week, Pruitt reached out to Phillips and invited him to join them on percussion.
“He’s a fantastic human being, and he’s just completely rounded out the sound,” said Pruitt, who noted that Phillips’ previous experience includes having played drums in the Marcus King Band and in The Piedmont Boys. “We got together the first time, and it blew ours minds. It’s almost like we’ve invented a brand new genre of music.
“There’s elements of honky-tonk and kind of Appalachian stuff, and then you’ve got the Hill Country blues kind of vibe. And now, with Slice, there’s also this tribal-meets-Native American thing going on.”
Power said he had never met Phillips prior to last week’s introduction but that he felt an instant musical bond.
“There’s not native percussion in a Mississippi Hill Country blues sound, but it works,” Power said. “We even extrapolated a Merle Haggard song into a blues setting, and then (Phillips) threw in some of that percussion on it and it sounded like a completely new genre altogether. And then with all the blues songs that Shane and I were already doing, Slice was like the link of the chain that we didn’t even know was missing until we had it.”
In addition to covers from blues artists that also include Furry Lewis, Hurt & Skip has also worked up some new material of its own.
“We’ve probably got 4 or 5 originals now,” Pruitt said. “Some of the stuff we’ve been writing is not necessarily blues; it’s blues-inflected and blues-influenced but it’s not really straight-ahead 1-4-5 (chord structure) stuff.”
However it’s defined, one thing is certain: the music is bound to be good, given the caliber of talent involved in the project.
“Shane’s an absolute superstar, so for me to even get to do a project with him is super special for me,” Power said. “It’s just one of those weird things where we both ended up having the same level of admiration for each other that we weren’t even aware that the other person had.”
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