The Sweet Serendipity of Honey Don’t
Bill Powers and Shelley Gray by JT Thomas
Words: Sarah Hagerman
We’ve been a-rockin’ honey
We’re just a-rollin’ money
We’re gonna to try to kick a hole in the sky
You drive that rhythm like a ball-peen hammer mama
You make John Henry want to wake up and fly.
Those lines from “Big Buck in the Road,” the opening track from Honey Don’t‘s self-titled debut album (released September 2009), pull you in from the get-go, an exciting call to arms to start flying down the pavement with a devil-may-care attitude and a dog-eared road map flapping on your dashboard. It’s the latest project from Bill Powers , whose best known as the mandolin player, guitarist and principle songwriter of Paonia, Colorado’s Sweet Sunny South, as well as a DJ on public radio KVNF. With his musical partner-in-crime and wife Shelley Gray (bass and harmony vocals, Sweet Sunny South), and with Greg Schochet (mandolin and guitar, Halden Wofford and the Hi-Beams and Swing State) and Ryan Drickey (fiddle, Expedition Quartet and recent Rockygrass fiddle contest winner) along for the ride, it’s a group whose musicianship is nothing short of stellar. But, although the album draws on old-time and bluegrass for some tracks (instrumental “Ol #1,” “Ellia Jewel” and “Cuckoo,” which features Gray on lead vocals), the main focus is more on a folk and Americana roots sound, with a potent rockabilly swing in the heart. Powers’ writing, which is influenced by the likes of Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia, and Texas singer-songwriters like Robert Earl Keen, positively shines on the originals. This is a thoroughly satisfying batch of songs, that lingers in your head well after it’s spun.
“What I realized was that I was more of a songwriter,” Powers reflects. “If I just played to what the song was asking for, it didn’t really turn out to be bluegrass. [The album] has that feel, but I don’t even play guitar in the bluegrass style. I play banjo and mandolin in Sweet Sunny South, but guitar was my first instrument, and I was writing songs and spending more time with the guitar. And as my wife had gotten better and better on the bass, and we played more together, we realized that we had a different kind of groove when we played together and wanted to explore it..”
Sweet Sunny South itself had evolved from bluegrass into more of an old-time realm. The band had found it’s musical feet (Gray herself played bass only a handful of months before formerly joining the group in 2003), and a fan base, over the past decade, but Powers felt like they were never going to quite make it as a strict bluegrass band.
“Our fiddle player [Corey Obert] realized that old time fiddling came more naturally to him than bluegrass fiddling; that was what he really loved. We really loved it because we didn’t have to try to be bluegrass players then. We could just play with the rhythm. We’ll tease ya sometimes on stage and say old-time music is lazy man’s bluegrass [laughs]. But there’s really a much bigger difference. Rhythmically, you can be as intricate as you try to make it, but at the same time it can be the kind of music where you just don’t have to be on your game so much all the time. You can just have a good time with it. It’s like dance music, and groove music. We would fit in our original stuff along with the old time, and that became Sweet Sunny South. I think we eventually got comfortable with what we were doing, and for me, I just wanted to stretch out further.”
Honey Don't by JT Thomas
When Powers was first hatching the idea for the band that was going to become Honey Don’t, however, Gray was unsure if she wanted to be involved with the project.
“There was also a time when Shelley was about to back out of playing music. [She said] ‘Alright, I want you to go get a group together, I think I’m holding you back from what you want to do.’ That’s what she thought. I said, ‘Ok, if you want to do that, that’s cool.’ I mean, I argued with her a bit, but I also didn’t want to drag her into something else if I’d already been dragging her into something that she didn’t necessarily want to do. So I started to put together a band, and I talked to Greg and I talked to Ryan, and the bass player was going to be Eric Thorin. He’s a fabulous bass player of all kinds of styles, and a great singer. I was thrilled about him singing backup, if I couldn’t have Shelley. I talked to him about doing it and he agreed, and somewhere in the interim Shelley got cold feet about not playing music. I think the more she thought about it, the more she was like, ‘Oh, maybe I do want to play music.’ So I was like, ‘Ok cool! You’re the bass player!’”
With the line-up in place, the four went into the studio with producer Aaron Youngberg at his Swingfingers Studios in Fort Collins, Colorado. Schochet and Drickey had been given demos and some ideas from Powers beforehand, but their skills at arranging proved invaluable when it came time to lay the songs down.
“I wanted guys playing on this record that were better than me basically,” Powers says with a self-effacing laugh. “The record ended up being a little time capsule of the four of us. We ran through [the songs] for like twenty or thirty minutes and worked out the arrangements. Those guys are great about arrangements. They had experience in all of this, with arranging and being in the studio, doing it all on the spot – hearing when something had gone on too long, how you want to get out of that break, how to approach the kick-off to a different tune. I was interested in hearing people that could play really, really well, and just play to the songs and give them all the sweetness and honey they could have.”
Honey Don’t is definitely an appropriate name for the group. Their sound is warm and glowing, but it’s substantial, not light and sugary. The group was originally going to be called Silvertone Devils but, “We looked at the songs, and it was just me and Shelley singing, and there’s this obvious kind of sweetness about it. The songs, not just the material, the words to the songs, the delivery, her kind of nice, sweet-sounding voice – Silvertone Devils just didn’t ring true to the music.” Instead, Powers took that name for his electric group.
Bill Powers by Sally DeFord
“Honey Don’t” is also a Carl Perkins song, the b-side to “Blue Suede Shoes.” Perkins was part of the Sun Records roster in the 1950′s, the label that launched the careers of Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis. But despite this company, and the massive hit he had with “Blue Suede Shoes,” Perkins never saw the fame and fortune of his label mates.
Although Perkins’ rockabilly sound was an aesthetic inspiration for sure, it was while traveling through northern Mississippi last May after Honey Don’t had been recorded that Powers gained a deeper appreciation of his legacy. He was reading a biography of Perkins during that trip, and Powers as describes, “That’s when I realized how underrated he was, and the struggles that he faced that other people didn’t. Carl Perkins did a lot of his traveling up through rural Tennessee and northern Mississippi, the same places where I grew up and where I was coming back to visit family. I was reading that book along the way, and it was talking about these juke joints and these [types of] places. How he was picking cotton when things got bad and he wasn’t making enough money.”
It struck a personal chord with Powers. He and Gray are raising two boys in Paonia, and the reality of making a living, much less trying to make art, is a constant concern.
“I don’t really have stars in my eyes or concerns about being a star,” Powers muses. “I would like to be in the place financially where I could just follow my muse, you know? Just some recognition among other writers that I like, that’s the thing I sort of crave in some way, but I don’t really care about being a star. I just want to be able to do what I do and not have it be a burden on my family, or me. I looked at Carl Perkins and thought, ‘If this dude can do what he did at the time that he did it, when life was so hard, and he had so many adversities – ‘.”
He pauses for a second then says, “It just came to me, that wow, our band was really appropriately named.”
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