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.”
Continue reading for more on Honey Don’t…
Honey Don't by JT Thomas
Looking for Something Real
Well the neon signs and the long white lines are all gone gone gone
Greasy spoons and all night saloons they‘re gone
No no no no
Now they got that freeway honey but it don’t feel free to me
You can drive all day but there still ain’t nothing to see
- “You Can’t Get Your Kicks on Route 66”
As the songs on Honey Don’t explore Americana by-passes and pit stops, the search for some genuine cultural currency in this increasingly homogenized country materializes. There is perhaps no better evidence of the cookie cutter American landscape than the interstate system, where just about every rest stop has the same gas stations, golden arches and frozen yogurt. This concern is explored in the song “You Can’t Get Your Kicks on Route 66.”
“Me and my wife are both nostalgic people, particularly for the ’40′s and ’50′s,” Powers describes. “Just in terms of decor and the vibe, people smoking cigarettes and drinking hard liquor. Neither of us smoke, but I like the aesthetic of what was going on at that time. Of course, I didn’t get to live through it, but now there’s just a shell of what Route 66 was. There does seem to be a lot of people that want to bring it back, or at least recognize it or prop it up. But it’s never going to be what it once was.”
“In a lot of ways, I think I almost established the idea of the band Honey Don’t off of that song,” Powers says, reflecting further on this cut. “I had this idea that I wanted to do this rockabilly thing with acoustic instruments. That song was the epitome of how I heard the music. Talking about Route 66 also referenced a period of rockabilly music and that hard road travelling. Not that people don’t do it now, but it was somehow a little more glamorous with those neon signs. It really had to do more with images that I’ve gathered in my head of what Route 66 means, and various references to travelling bands. People don’t have 20-piece bands anymore. But Bob Wills and others used to travel up and down route 66 hauling huge bands. It’s basically my lament that I didn’t get to live through it.”
For the vast majority who hear it’s calling, the musical life has always been a rough path to travel, although these days provide unique difficulties for musicians. “Who Took the Jukebox” explores one troubling development in the industry, as the song’s protagonist heads down to his favorite watering hole for his daily routine. He orders a beer, and then wanders to the jukebox to play a song with his change, only to discover the jukebox is missing.
With major label sales slumping, companies like BMI and ASCAP have been trying to draw more revenue from the jukeboxes in bars. As Powers explains, “If people have a jukebox in any form, whether it’s satellite or whatever, they have to pay a flat rate, let’s say for example 1200 bucks, rather than paying a royalty on every single song that’s played. [The companies] are tracking them down. The jukebox disappeared because probably a lot of people were like, ‘You want me to pay you how much? For something I’ve never had to pay for ever before? This is the first call I’ve gotten and you’re telling me you’re going to sue me and take me to court if I can’t cough up 1200 bucks because I have this jukebox?’ I think that people have been needled enough by the ASCAP and BMI folks that it freaks them out. They don’t want to get sued.”
Powers describes how he was told by a bar owner, ” ‘I used to be able to pay live musicians this amount to be here, but now that I have to pay 1200 dollars a year, that cut my budget for live musicians in half. So now I can’t pay you, a real person, to play here, because I have to pay too much money, this ambiguous number, for all this other stuff that’s coming over my jukebox.’ There’s something weird about that. I’m never going to see that money. That money is all going to Janet Jackson, it’s not going to people like me or Benny Galloway. So what it does for me, is it just [creates] another door that just got closed in my face.”
Honey Don't at The Boulder Theater by JT Thomas
In many ways, the album is a reminder not to take the things we love for granted. In that spirit, many of the songs feature beautifully-rendered imagery and details that pop out and ask for closer examination, particularly “Talk to Me Tennessee.” Over a wistful pedal steel, Powers sings of a, “Southern dream,” and “Country roads all paved with gold,” as he wishes for a lover to take him back to Tennessee with their words.
Powers co-wrote this tune with the aforementioned Galloway. He had been a fan of Galloway’s for years, even covering his song “Eliza Lowry” in Sweet Sunny South. He first heard “Eliza” on a compilation called Just Passin’ Through. It was made by a friend of his who had a home studio in Nederland, Colorado, and would record his musical buddies as they stopped through town.
“That really, really stuck with me,” Powers says of the song. “I played it in garage bands, I was probably playing it for ten years before I met the people that formed Sweet Sunny South. I loved that song. I loved the feel of it, I loved that he had this kind of Jerry Garcia-ish voice and the guitar playing was really nice. I knew I really resonated with his writing, and was highly influenced by even just this one song. I aspired to be able to write something like that. So I had this weird history with the guy without having ever met him. [But] for a long time, I didn’t know who wrote that song. I couldn’t remember, and I lost the tape. I knew all the words to to the song and how it went, but I didn’t know who did it, I didn’t know who wrote it. So I’d been playing it forever and never even knew how to credit it. And then, The Broke Mountain Bluegrass Band – I heard them playing ‘Eliza Lowry.’ Yonder had already put out Old Hands [their 2003 album of Galloway songs], and I had of known the name Benny Galloway, but I didn’t really know who he was. Then all of a sudden I was like, ‘I know who wrote that song!’ All at once, I realized who the guy was.”
Having mutual friends in Sweet Sunny South fiddler Obert and wife, Powers and Galloway became acquainted. Galloway then ended up working in Carbondale, about an hour north of Paonia, a couple of winters ago. He spent a couple nights at Powers’ house, nights that ended up being valuable lessons in songwriting.
“He’s very generous when it comes to writing,” Powers says of Galloway. “There’s a lot of songwriters out there that write great songs, but are very particular and don’t want to sit down and spend time with just anybody. They really have it down, they don’t want to give stuff away. But he’s just not that way. Man, he’s like, anybody, anytime, if he can, he’ll sit down and write a song with them. I very much admire that spirit. I don’t even know if I have as much of that spirit as I wish I did.”
It was through these lessons that “Talk to Me Tennessee” gelled.
“It was a tune that I had been working on, where I had the idea of what the song was about, and what I was writing it for. When I expressed to him what I was trying to write, he was like, ‘No no no, don’t have an end. I don’t want to write a song where we already know what it’s about. I want to write a song where I don’t know what it’s about!’ I’m thinking, ‘I don’t want to fuck with this song. I want to defer to you, I want to learn from you, but I don’t want you to fuck with the song.’ He ended up throwing in another couple chord ideas that he ran past me which I loved, and were just what it needed. Then we sat and went line by line, back and forth. He just tried to encourage me not to try to get to the ending, to what I preconceived the song to be about, and to just keep writing. Let it not matter if we don’t know what that line means or why that line is there, or that reference.”
Powers took that advice, that sometimes it’s just better to let it flow freely onto the page, without the initial self-editing, to heart.
“I just took that as a good lesson. I still do write songs with an end or something in mind for what it means. But lately I have written a number of songs where I knew what I wanted to write, but it wasn’t coming out. So I just said ‘Screw it,’ and started spewing stuff, and ended up coming up with pretty much just what I wanted to do in the the first place, but without trying.”
Shelley Gray by JT Thomas
The Greatest Place That You Can Be
I know the world’s a mess
A big spinning ball of pain and stress
And you know all you can do is do your best
Let it go
Let go of all the rest
And you’ll see the bright star shine
And you’ll know its going to be just fine
-“For the Sake of Love”
The dynamics between wives and husbands often don’t translate into harmonious chemistry, much less the ability to share a musical spotlight. But talking to Powers, it’s obvious that he and Gray work with a deep level of mutual respect, as well as love, and a recognition that music takes different, but complimentary, roles in their lives.
Gray was a schooled dancer before she became a bassist, something which is obvious when you soak up her sense of rhythm, but, as Powers describes, “I would say that music, in her realm, is not necessarily the thing that makes her tick. She got to jump on the wagon as it was rolling, and jump into a band [Sweet Sunny South] that was plowing straight forward … But for me, I’m constantly thinking about music. It never stops, to the point of detriment in a lot of ways. But for her, that’s not necessarily what she’s thinking about. So a lot of times I’m trying to drag her into my world. ‘I’m working on these songs and can you come and play the bass?’ And she’s like, ‘Actually, I’m doing this, that and the other.’ [laughs] So we have all this different stuff going on.”
No matter what their various projects, they put their family at the forefront. At the end of the day, they are folks with unglamorous, and wholly relatable, lives.
“We’re always trying to figure it out,” Powers says honestly. “We’re taking a step in an interesting direction – next year Shelley is going to to start teaching. She’s going to be teaching special ed at a school through the winter, which is a really great thing. We’re really busy people, we do all kinds of things, but we don’t do very much that makes us very much money, and our kids are getting older. The stakes are starting to get a little bit higher as far as all that goes.”
Powers does concede he worries what this may mean for her music. “I think when she starts teaching, we’ll see what happens. Because teaching is what she went to school for. Her passion is kids, she has this great connection with kids. Using that to teach is something that just lines up really well, and I think it’s something she’s set aside all this time while we’ve been playing music. I think it’s something she’s going to get a lot of reward out of. It’s something that kind of concerns me. Gosh if she really gets into that, I don’t know where music is going to lie for her. She might try, and decide she likes being on stage more. She really loves that. She’s got a great radiant smile, and really, just loves playing. She says she doesn’t think about anything when she’s playing other than what a great time she’s having.”
“That is just a great place to be,” he continues, thinking of how his day-to-day concerns also disappear when he’s on stage. “I think it’s true of me too, whether it’s with Honey Don’t or Sweet Sunny South. When we’re actually in the moment of playing, that’s just the greatest place you can be. When you’re not thinking about work you’ve got to do or what work you didn’t do – you’re just in the moment playing music. I know she thrives on that, and wonders if music isn’t the thing she’s supposed to do, because she gets so many comments from people on how happy she makes them from watching her play. There’s this whole other thing that goes on with people, watching either Sweet Sunny South or Honey Don’t, where they just kind of talk about her presence. She hardly ever speaks into the microphone. She leads a few songs and does a little bit of harmony. She does bop around when she plays and feels the music, but there’s something about people watching her – they really do get a thrill out of it. I think there is a good argument to be made that if you are doing something that makes other people happy, and it makes you happy that you’re making other people happy, then you might really be on to something.”
It would seem like Honey Don’t may indeed be on to something. Last year, the album was number two in a survey of Colorado DJs when asked to list their favorite Colorado-based albums of 2009. The band is also nominated in the bluegrass category of the 2010 Westword Music Showcase ballot. But looking back on the road behind him and Gray thus far, Powers isn’t putting too much on it. There’s a sense of “que sera, sera” when you talk to him about the project.
“[Honey Don't] is not something that’s very likely to take over anything, but who knows what will happen,” he says. “As long as Shelley and me are together, Honey Don’t will be. Maybe good things are on the way. Because all this other stuff has happened without me necessarily planning or knowing. Just serendipitous things, that while they might not mean very much to anybody, when I look back on them and how they happened to me, to us – everything has had a purpose.”
Continue reading for some sweet videos and live audio from Honey Don’t…
“The Cuckoo” from October 29, 2009
Powers, Gray & Schochet tell us why “You Can’t Get Your Kicks on Route 66″
Look out for that “Big Buck in the Road”
Honey Don't by JT Thomas
And from our very own SPPS archives…
Honey Don’t Live at Rail Concert Series, May 5, 2009
mp3 / zip /stream (or stream individual tracks below)
Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor
You Can’t Get Your Kicks on Route 66
For info on more upcoming Honey Don’t and Sweet Sunny South dates, click here.
Powers and Mike Finder will also be providing the entertainment for a canoe trip scheduled for August 13-15th on the Gunnison River, 12 miles north of Delta, Colorado. Tickets are $325/adults & $300/children 6-12. Canoes, food, professional guides, and music included. Attendees can bring their own instruments to join along. No canoeing experience necessary. Register with Centennial Canoe, or call 1-877-353-1850.
