Dustin Arbuckle and Wayne Long will celebrate the release of their debut album, “Gonna Be Justified,” on Friday, March 22, with an early show (6-8 p.m.) at The Shamrock Lounge.
The recording is the result of their longtime musical partnership, which was forged in part over a shared love of legendary musician Mississippi John Hurt.
Although Arbuckle and Long have played numerous shows together for well over a decade now, this set is their first effort. The pair recorded the material — which largely draws from a body of songs written in the pre-World War II era — in Wichita with longtime friend Tom Page at his TOPTone facility.
Arbuckle and Long recently visited the KMUW studios to talk about the album and the origins of their partnership.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve played together for a number of years, but this is your first record together.
Dustin Arbuckle: It was 2008, and we were each booked with separate acts: Wayne with Arthetta [Long], and I was with Moreland and Arbuckle at a benefit gig at the old Murdock Theatre. We got to talking at the end of the night about Mississippi John Hurt and our mutual admiration for his music. We decided we wanted to get together and try something.
Wayne Long: We did, and it led to a rabbit hole.
DA: After 15-plus years of occasionally gigging around town, occasionally doing a little bit of regional stuff, we thought we should probably document that this project has existed. [Laughs.]
WL: We did a few singles as holiday gifts for folks. We’d go in and do one or two [songs] and pass them out to friends and families.
DA: There’re enough people who have heard us over the years that [we figured] they might actually be willing to buy a record.
WL: Back when we first started, maybe our first or second time out, we played at a barbecue place. Dustin was very busy with his other projects, and we finished up, people liked it, and the [owner] wanted us to come back every week. We said, “Uh-oh! What’s going on here?” [Laughs.]
DA: We weren’t sure that we were going to be able to make that work, but we did play there quite a bit.
Let’s talk a little bit about the repertoire that you draw from. This is primarily early blues.
DA: Almost everything we do is what people refer to as pre-war blues. We do have some original material that we draw on from other projects that we’ve been a part of, and we’ve adapted them.
WL: It’s still in that style.
DA: The vast majority of the songs we play are things that had been recorded by traditional blues artists back in the late ’20s and early ’30s. Mississippi John Hurt was a big connection for us.
WL: That’s where we got started for sure. Then we branched out. We’d do some of those and then say, “Have you heard of Mance Lipscomb? Well, let’s try some of those.” One thing would branch to another from there.
DA: How about Reverend Gary Davis? We have such an admiration for that music, and we’re so tremendously influenced by those artists. I think it’s important to still have people playing music like this live so people can hear it in person, and it’s not just this archived thing in old recordings. It’s like this music still exists and is part of [what] people still want to listen to. Even almost 100 years later.
WL: Part of the intrigue for me is that I enjoy things that are fairly basic. Here we are: voice, harmonica, guitar. That’s it. There’s no real elaborate production to it at all. It’s the way it was back in those days. You were sitting around with your friends or whatever and [that’s how it sounded]. That’s what we do, I think. It’s real.
DA: I think it’s a very personal way of playing music.
How would you characterize pre-war blues?
DA: It was almost entirely before amplification. Right toward the end of the ’30s you do start seeing some amplification coming in with some of the early urban blues performers. A lot of people assume that all pre-war blues is country blues or rural blues. There were actually vibrant urban blues scenes in cities like Chicago. Not just there, but that was one of the big ones with people like Big Bill Broonzy and Tampa Red, Big Maceo Merriweather, Sonny Boy Williamson I. Leroy Carr, Scrapper Blackwell, I believe, were based in Indianapolis. There were people in St. Louis and Memphis. These vibrant Black music scenes that were not necessarily part of the pop consciousness but were definitely influential. A lot of really great timeless music came out of that.
Blues, as a form, maybe became a little more codified after World War II and after it became electric. There were a lot more regional subgenres [pre-war].
WL: The guitars we use are resophonic. They’re a little louder than your standard [acoustic guitar]. The guitar could really be heard. The standard acoustic is not something with strong projection like an electric guitar, so the players used resonator guitars that would cut through the noise of where they were playing.
DA: That definitely helps with the vibe but also if we’re playing in a louder bar setting. But, back then, it was the earliest attempt at amplifying a guitar so that you could keep up with pianos or horns or things like that.
WL: Technically, they’re referred to as “mechanically amplified.”
DA: Those kinds of guitars were common with guys like Son House, Tampa Red. I do think the variants from region to region and city to city [are interesting]. Blind Willie McTell is not very similar to Charlie Patton. All of it is what you would call blues, but it’s pretty different. While there continued to be some of that later, I think it was way more wide-ranging in the pre-war era.
How did you draw upon that body of work for this record?
DA: We tried to pick as many traditional as possible because we didn’t have to pay royalties on those. [Laughs.]
WL: That was a big one. Save some money.
DA: Working on a shoestring here, kids! I think some of it was wanting to present traditional tunes also because you can show how far back these traditions go. You’ve got some songs here that are definitely … even if they were recorded in the last century, some of these songs, or at least the themes they’re based off of, are at least over a century old. A song like “Frankie & Albert,” which is one of the great American murder ballads, which you can document goes back to at least the turn of the last century. Part of it was wanting to show the different musical vibes you can get.
WL: In researching [some of these songs we found that there are] so many different verses. Dustin, being the singer, picked out several verses of songs that you may know but [when they get going, you think], “Well, I’ve never heard that one before.” That was interesting. If you [put together those different verses] those songs would actually be very long. There’s a lot of verses that just didn’t make it to [the popularized versions].
DA: When you’re trying to entertain yourself for hours on end it helps to be able to keep the story going a long time.
WL: Sometimes when we’re playing, I hear a verse I’ve never heard before. Dustin’s good at keeping all of those in his head. Every now and then I get a good surprise myself.
DA: Sometimes I just have to think up something new because I forgot the words.
[Laughs.] “Frankie & Albert” was something I first encountered on Bob Dylan’s [1992] album “Good as I Been to You.” “Jesus on the Mainline” was something I was familiar with through Ry Cooder. Those songs have survived and been radically reimagined with virtually each iteration.
DA: Absolutely. You talk about Ry Cooder doing “Jesus on the Mainline” … I actually used one verse that I learned from his version but most of the rest of the song I learned from listening to Mississippi Fred McDowell, who would have recorded it around 1960 probably. But, obviously, a much older gospel song. That very much is that slide guitar, deep South gospel tradition. Black gospel tradition.
WL: The old spirituals. I love those.
DA: That one facet that we wanted to touch on because that’s one of the sub-styles of the music that we love. But we also wanted to get more into that melodic fingerpicking stuff like [you hear] on several of the Mississippi John Hurt tunes that we did. We keep coming back to him because he’s really the guy [that got us started].
WL: A lot of folks will think of “Frankie & Albert” as “Frankie and Johnny” from the country genre.
DA: You see in that song how folk music can proliferate. That’s one of the things that draws you to those songs. They’re good stories, and so people keep wanting to find their own ways to tell them.
Speaking of Mississippi John Hurt, you did “Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me” on this record. Out of all the songs, that was the one traditional tune that I was least familiar with.
WL: I found that through John Hurt and through one of my guitar mentors, Mike Dowling, showed me that song one time. It’s a happy song about dying, I guess. “Save the undertaker bills/let the mermaids flirt with me.”
DA: I’m done. Just chuck me in the water. It’s like the old country tune, “Driving Nails in My Coffin.” It’s this really chipper-sounding song about just being done with it all. I guess you gotta try to have a sense of humor about it.
