Smokestack and The Foothill Fury

For some reason sub-underground america and parts elsewhere has gone ape over one-man bands in the last couple years. It doesn't hurt that they are dang near crawling out of the woodwork these days with all my ex-hipster friends picking up cigar-box gitars, cigar-box ukes and ukes in general,as well as banjolins, banjoleles, Lowebows, diddleybows and the like. And in this day and age how can any band doing some crazy ideosincratic american roots music of one stripe or another be expected to make any serious dough? Financially you gotta be better off going solo with a quiver of oddly stringed instruments plus a stomp board or old suitcase/bass drum for percussion. I think at Deep Blues Festival '07 we were probably close to 50% one-man bands. This year in addition to the one-man bands and all the rest, as part of our Film Festival we'll even be screening a documentary called One Man In The Band on the OMB phenomenon. But still it's a weird enough phenom that a OMB can say they didn't jump on the band wagon but rather they were pushed off the turnip cart.

One of the OMBs who played DBF07 is Smokestack and The Foothill Fury. Smokey hails mostly from the hills of Georgia around Dahlonega. We were full-up of bands last year but Smokestack offered to haul himself up from G.A. to entertain busking style, as folks arrived. A self-made brother who, ladies, fixes his own car and cuts his own wood and digs his own holes. Now all the OMBs that I know somehow manage to rock various drums thru the use of various pedals. Johnny Lowebow goes a good two steps further by using three pedals as well as simultaneously strumming and smacking his snare drum. But Smokey rather than exercise his right hand like a sucker has slapped and cobbled together some kind of krazyass contraption that, thru the use of a pedal from what i'm guessin' is an old hi-hat stand and maybe some parts from an old erector set or something to make some sort of robot-esque dealymabob that manages to make a pair of attached drum sticks smack and shuffle on his snare drum. Which leaves his dirty foots free to stomp a pedal attached to a wood crate of some kind. All this of course leaves his hands free to spank the slide on his guitar to all hell and back. Like a lot of good stuff it might take a second for yr ears to adjust to the klack und Klatter but that sweet powerfilled slide will heal you.

Smokestack and The Foothill Fury on MySpace

Barren Land MP3
Mojo Workin' MP3
Fallen So Hard MP3

Smokestack and the Foothill Fury - Athens, GA 2007-07-07