Tyrone Cotton: 21st century bluesman

Tyrone Cotton: 21st century bluesman
August 4, 2009
Michael Jones
Examiner.com

Seidenfaden's Café, located at the corner of Breckinridge and Vine streets, was not built with live music in mind. Until owner Jimmy Heck opened up the small pool room in the back about a year ago, this Germantown hole-in-the-wall consisted of little more than a bar, five or six tables and two bathrooms. On a good night, it’s still hard to hold a conversation over the din of the televisions or the music from the stereo. But all of that changes on the last Friday of each month when Tyrone Cotton takes over the place.

Cotton and his band usually set up right in front of Seidenfaden’s main entrance. He sits on a stool playing into his guitar and singing into a microphone, while the band -- guitarist Mark Hamilton, bassist Danny Keiley, and drummer Jesse Hall -- spread out behind him. With all of their equipment, the musicians take up nearly half of the space in the room. Cotton says the venue reminds him of a rich lady’s shoe closet.

The customers never seem to mind the close quarters. They pay a $5 cover to crowd in the space between the bar and the few tables scattered about the room. Many of them are regulars who sing along with the tunes like “Night Wind” and “Most of the Time.”

I can follow the path, I can read the signs/ Stay right with it until the road unwinds/I can handle whatever I stumble upon/I don’t even notice that she’s gone, most of the time

Tyrone Cotton has a voice that merges the gravelly moaning of country blues pioneer Charley Patton with the sweet tones of Smokey Robinson. His music has a haunted, romantic quality about it. Cotton is usually referred to as a bluesman and most of the themes in his songs fit comfortably in that vein. He sings about floods (“High-Water Rising”), women (“Sally Ann” and “Naomi”), and the coldness of the world (“As Befits A Man (Don’t Mind Dyin’).” But there are also touches of jazz, ragtime, gospel, and folk in Cotton’s music. His repertoire even includes a few poems by Harlem Renaissance poets Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer that he has set to music.

“There is a Blues influence in the music,” Cotton explained. “To call it Blues and leave it at that would not be accurate. At times, it is bluesy, but there are other things in there. There are a lot of other things there. Like I’ve been writing some new tunes and I wouldn’t call them bluesy at all. … I thought on the last (self-titled) CD, ‘Evening Song,’ had a country vibe to it. It wasn’t country, not Nashville country, but it had that little taste.”

Growing up in a neighborhood off of Westport Road, Cotton had a lot of different musical influences. At home, he was hearing a lot of R&B music from his family. At school, most of his friends were into rock music. He got his first guitar at 13 and found himself gravitating towards distinctive, lyrical artists like Bob Dylan and Marvin Gaye. “For some reason, even then I liked old stuff,” he said. “A lot of the music that was contemporary at the time, I didn’t really care for. I hated AC/DC and I hated bands like the Cars. They were so popular back then. For some reason, I tended to look back to stuff that was 10 or 15 years older. I don’t know why.”

After he entered Eastern High School, Cotton formed a band with a few of his friends. They did covers of popular songs. Looking back, Cotton laughs at how horrible they must have sounded. At the time, they thought they were better than they were. Aside from gigging with his friend, Cotton was getting a serious music education, although he didn’t know it. He was hanging out with an older friend who possessed his own place and a huge record collection. “We use to spend a lot of time in his apartment,” Cotton said. “He’d have just a few people over and we’d listen to lots and lots of music. He had a lot of blues. He had all of these records. I was probably about 15 or 16. He had everything, things I never heard of Johnny Winter, Muddy Waters. Everything seemed so fresh.”

Cotton’s friend was a drummer, so they recruited a bassist and started playing as a blues trio. “He knew this incredible bass player,” Cotton said. “They were probably the best guys I’d ever played with at that time. …They actually had real gigs and I remember just doing a few things with them. We would actually perform at cookouts and stuff.”

Cotton was still too shy to sing in public, but he was in love with the guitar. His father had gotten him a Gibson Firebird, the bicentennial edition. Today, he says, one of the biggest regrets of his life is selling that guitar. He spent hours playing that Gibson along with Jimmy Hendrix bootlegs that he got from a friend. Those bootlegs were influential because they included extended jams and some blues covers. Cotton was also listening to John McLaughlin and a lot of jazz fusion. During this period, Cotton felt alienated from the contemporary music his peers were listening to.

“If you’re hearing the Cars on the radio and you’re listening to ‘Bitch’s Brew’ all the time at home, it’s a totally different world,” he explained. “Punk was out then. I was never interested in it. I don’t know why. I was somewhere else. A lot of the pop stuff at the time like Billy Joel, I really hated it.”

After he graduated from Eastern, Cotton moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he studied classical guitar at Western Kentucky University. The experience gave him a different perspective on the instrument. There is still a hint of classical style in Cotton’s playing. He sometimes plays arpeggios instead of simply strumming his instrument like most blues guitarists.

At Western, Cotton started following his own muse and incorporated the different sounds he heard around him. One of his roommates was a bluegrass fan, so Cotton became familiar with that genre. He also had a friend who collected 1950s jazz, so that was another influence. “I think sometimes you go through phases, personal phases, the way you are or whatever it is,” Cotton said. “It affects the music and the way it comes out. For some reason, what I was doing started to really change. It started to change a lot. Maybe it was because I had a lot of people around me and I started to listen to the things they were listening to.”

Cotton said something special started to click for him after he heard “Freight Train” by Elizabeth Cotten, a self-taught blues guitarist and songwriter. Cotten, a left-handed guitarist, had an unusual playing style. She held her instrument upside down, playing the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. “Something about ‘Freight Train’ just knocked me out,” Tyrone Cotton remembered. “It had this strange, unorthodox guitar. I realized there is so much more to this (blues) music than what is on the surface. The lyric was simple. She wrote it when she was 12, my god! After that, I started listening to a lot of Charley Patton. The lyrics, the stories and the guitar playing in the blues got to me. What great songwriters. Sometimes people think blues is simple or whatever. The blues has such a great songwriting tradition.”

After Cotton dedicated himself to the blues, he literally found his voice. At his early solo performances at Mr. Cee’s, a coffee shop near the WKU campus, Cotton started to sing blues covers and Langston Hughes poems that he had put to music. Hughes was a poet known for the blues imagery and rhythms in his work, so it is not surprising that his poems served as a template for the young songwriter.

“I found Langston Hughes by total accident,” Cotton said. “I had never heard of him. I was in the library and I just picked up a book. It happened to be a book of Langston Hughes poems. I started reading some of it and I just found it fascinating. One of those poems I read, I started messing with it and turning it into a song. Some of it is just so lyrical. It has the rhythms of blues and jazz. It just seemed so natural for a song.”

In 1988, Cotton moved to Boston for a couple of year. He didn’t play out much, but he spent a lot of time practicing and going to shows. Cotton said he learned that a good performer takes their audience on a journey. Even a vocalist without the strongest voices can break a person’s heart if they have the right song. Cotton applied those lessons to his own music.

Cotton moved back to Louisville in the early 1990s and began performing at coffeehouses and small clubs. It didn’t take him long to expand his audience internationally. In 1997, he took his guitar with him for a three-month trip to Japan. He was able to book some shows through people he met on his trip and he decided to return the following year. Before his second Japanese visit, Cotton recorded an album. Most of it was solo guitar tunes, but jazz guitarist Ron Hayden arranged three songs for the record.

The second stint in Japan lasted six months. Cotton rented a tiny room in Osaka that he used as a home base. The romanticism of his music appealed to the Japanese audiences, although they didn’t always know what he was singing about. “I made the mistake of not putting the lyrics on the CD,” Cotton said. “A lot of people said they wished they had the lyrics so they could look at them and try to figure out the words.”

Cotton still returns to Japan occasionally to perform. From his home in Louisville, Kentucky, he also works a circuit that includes regular gigs in surrounding states and even New York. He’s gone to the Turning Point, a club just outside Manhattan in Piermont, New York, to open for legendary bluesman Johnny Winter and Grammy-nominated artist James Hunter. Cotton alternates between gigs with his band and playing solo, him and his guitar just like in the early days at Mr. Cee’s in Bowling Green.

Lately, Cotton is spending more time writing songs than performing. He said writing provides him a creative spark that carries over to the gigs. “I want to explore some things and grow,” he said.”Art inspires art. I want to expose myself to things that knock me out, that are exciting, where the world is new again. I can’t think of any better inspiration than that. It’ll keep you going.”

You can check out the results on the last Friday of every month at Siedenfaden’s.