Musical Space 12/13: Moreland & Arbuckle

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KMUW / Mark Foley

Mark Foley describes the wide and rambling roots of Wichita’s Moreland & Arbuckle on this week’s Musical Space.

Wichita roots band Moreland & Arbuckle has been busy. The group has been together in one form or another for nearly a decade. In the last few years Aaron Moreland and Dustin Arbuckle have toured the U.S. and Europe extensively and scored a contract with a large independent label, Telarc.

Moreland & Arbuckle are true students of traditional American music and its great to hear musicians continue that tradition with such veracity. Aaron Moreland even plays a cigar box guitar that harkens back to the Southern tradition of playing on cigar boxes and broom handles.

But these guys are not just revivalists. They touch on the modern, stripped down rock aesthetic, throwing in dashes of soul, pinches of funk, and a taste of country. You can hear in their music, then, the natural progression of the blues as it followed in its own Great Migration, from the Mississippi Delta, through Memphis, and finally to Chicago, where the marriage of guitar and amplifier bore the roots of rock ‘n’ roll.

The group’s current album, Just A Dream, bears this out. The group has incorporated elements of classic rock into its sound and even thrown in a Tom Waits cover for good measure. This makes it harder to call Moreland & Arbuckle a blues band but much easier to call them a fine example of the many streams of American musical tradition.