He plays an acoustic antique National Steel guitar and sings his own unique arrangements of rags, jazz, & blues songs from the 20's & 30's and many originals with wordplay, humor, and throat singing. The Rogues Gallery CD, produced by Johnny Depp and Hal Wilner in connection with The Pirates of the Caribbean film, landed Baby Gramps on the David Letterman Show.īaby Gramps is a high energy humorously entertaining performer with an endless repertoire. He is credited with making Seattle audiences aware of old blues and novelty songs that the rest of the world has mostly forgotten.īaby Gramps toured England and Ireland this past summer (2008) as part of the Rogues Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys CD Concert Tour with Tim Robbins (actor), Martha and Rufus Wainright, Jenny Muldaur (Maria and Geoff's daughter), Lou Reed, The Watersons, Martin Carthy and Eliza, Suzanne Vega, Ralph Steadman, and many other internationally know performers. “Baby Gramps’s performances on “Rogue’s Gallery” (Anti), a two-disc set of sea chanteys produced by Hal Willner, are among the album’s best, and that’s saying a lot: among the other contributors are Sting, Lou Reed, Lucinda Williams, Bono, Bryan Ferry, Nick Cave, Van Dyke Parks and Bill Frisell.” - Ben Ratlif, The New York TimesĪccording to an article in Seattle Metropolitan Magazine, Baby Gramps is acknowledged as one of the top 50 most influential musicians in the last 100 years along with Ray Charles, Jelly Roll Morton, Ernestine Anderson, John Cage, Bill Frisell, Jimi Hendrix, Quincy Jones, The Wailers, The Ventures, Sound Garden, and Pearl Jam. His voice is a cross between Popeye the Sailor and a Didgeridoo and the plinkity plink of his VERY worn National steel guitar, sounds like a wind up jack in the box. His singing styles include throat singing. His busy and unusual guitar style includes flat and finger picking, and "chording" with the back of his hand and his elbow. Read Full Bio Baby Gramps plays a mixture of styles and eras including traditional blues, children's and labor songs, and his own compositions. Whether live or on their new record, Three For Silver is a band for this moment, when it is hard to imagine the future and all too easy to focus on the past, when the rules no longer seem to apply, and when what you never thought possible is the only choice you’ve got.Baby Gramps plays a mixture of styles and eras including traditional blues, children's and labor songs, and his own compositions. With nary a manager or booker in sight, their monomaniacal devotion has already led them all over the country and the world, performing in clubs, bars, theaters, boats, festivals, farmer’s markets, living rooms, and most recently partnering with the US State Department for ongoing cultural exchange tours to other countries thirsty for truly original American music. Three For Silver has hit the road since 2013, unleashing their idiosyncratic sound on over 200 audiences a year, blind to anything but the next stage, the next audience, the next night. He writes string quartet arrangements like he’s writing his own name, and generally classes up the joint. Greg Allison (strings, mandolin, arrangement) is the master of pure sound, beating the ungainly ideas of Warford and Sertain into something resembling songs. Willo Sertain (vocals, accordion) hails from the woods of North Carolina, her distinctively pure tones and haunting melodies act as a natural foil to the madness of Warford. His one-of-a-kind basses are the platform upon which he yowls and raps his end-time visions of the world. “The acid baby of Tom Waits and Les Claypool,” as NW legend Baby Gramps once called him. Lucas Warford (vocals, basses) is the thumping heart of the band, a chugging diesel engine of bass and growl. A freewheeling collective in which the only rule is to survive and perform, an elastic conglomeration of musical freaks as likely to be found in a grand theater performing for foreign dignitaries as busking on your street corner for spare change. Three For Silver is post-collapse, post-apocalyptic, post-rock, post-everything.
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