The sound of LP Kelly comes broadly from the
early days of American roots music: when bluesmen sang from front
porches on hot afternoons; when swing bands played dances in speakeasies
late into the night; when troubadours were tradesmen and not
celebrities. From his base of operations in the Appalachian Mountain
town of Blacksburg, VA, Kelly has worked tirelessly to encourage a
renaissance in music that has a history and a place – not a watered-down
Americana that could exist anywhere on the Internet, nor a rigid
recreation of the past, but original music that demands the listener dig
deeper to find its roots in geography and time. It’s original music
that still sounds familiar. A couple of guitars, a banjo or two, a
suitcase of harmonicas, and a whole lot of guts.
A child of a military family, LP Kelly (born Liam Patrick Kelly) got
used to travel at an early age, and roots were something that other
people had. Every few years, the family would pick up and move to
another navy town in another part of the country, and the process of
trying to blend in would start again. Learn how to talk like the locals
talk. Pretend to be interested in their sports teams, their churches,
their food. Listen a lot and don’t say too much. As an adult, old habits
die hard. Kelly kept moving, became a musician, and tried on a dozen
different roles. Irish musician, punk musician, folk singer, alt-country
guitarist, sea shanty singer, etc. But in the old-time music of the
mountains of Southwest Virginia, Kelly found something that he hadn’t
seen before: a music inextricably tied to geography. Tunes that were
played differently from one county to the next. Square dances that were
called differently from one mountain to the next. With it came the
realization that while you could travel and learn to play the music from
a place, you weren’t really taking the music with you. You were just
borrowing it for a while, and you needed to give it back eventually.
So LP Kelly fell in with The Jugbusters, a band with a twenty year
history in the region, and for the first time in his life, he stayed in
once place long enough to become a co-creator of a local tradition
instead of just a borrower. The Jugbusters were an old-time mountain
string band turned honky-tonk band, and played every tiny country dance
hall in the central Appalachian mountains. They shared the stage with
pig farmers; they shared the stage with two governors and Senators of
the state of Virginia. As before, Kelly learned to listen hard and not
say too much, learned to fit in and talk like the locals talk. But
unlike before, he actually went native. In places like the Floyd Country
Store where he had first gone to take photos as a tourist, now the
tourists were taking photos of him. He learned to square dance, and then
learned to call square dances. He learned to play fiddle, banjo,
upright bass, and won ribbons at fiddlers conventions in each. He took
pedal steel guitar lessons from the great Buddy Charleton, steel player
for Ernest Tubb, Patsy Cline and Porter Wagoner (to name but a few).
When the Jugbusters finally folded due to the death of their fiddle
player, LP Kelly formed The Streetsweepers and started writing new
material. It wasn’t exactly old-time Appalachian music, nor honky-tonk
country, nor western swing music, but it unmistakably came from all of
those places, from all of those years spent playing in the dance halls
of southwest Virginia. Elements of clawhammer banjo merged with elements
of pedal steel guitar. Old-time mountain fiddling melded with
honky-tonk piano and swing drum rhythms. A new music was born, but not
born from nothing. It still belongs to a time and place, but it knows
how it got there.
A veteran of other recording bands (The Jugbusters, The Don’t Tell
Darlings), LP Kelly (formerly Old Man Kelly) released his first solo
album, Songs, Stories, Shanties, and Shenanigans in 2013 and his second album, Off My Lawn, in 2016. The start of 2021 brings Love Songs For Loners,
a new collection of ten original songs. In the intervening time, LP
Kelly has made hundreds of public appearances at bars, festivals, swing
dances, square dances, radio shows, house concerts, and on any other
stage run by folks who understand that American music has both a past
and a future, and that being there matters.
https://lpkelly.com/
