Things move a bit slower on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina -- 45 miles per hour to be exact -- and commercial vehicles are not even allowed.
Singer-songwriter Malcolm Holcombe lives near the parkway in small, rural Swannanoa, N.C., which is not far from Asheville, a town about as musically hip as Austin, Texas.
Malcolm Holcombe
8:30 p.m. today, White Water Tavern, West Seventh and Thayer streets, Little Rock
Admission: $7
(501) 375-8400
Listening to Holcombe makes a music fan think that he could just have easily come out of Mountain View -- another area known for its isolated location and resistance to the onward march of time.
Meanwhile, Holcombe marches on, returning today to one of central Arkansas' most enduring watering holes, the White Water Tavern, where he stops almost annually. On July 7, Holcombe wrote on Facebook, "Just about time to stop working the garden & contemplating chickens & hit the road again for a couple of weeks."
He released his latest album in February -- Another Black Hole -- and a new album is always a good excuse to hit the road.
"My wife suggested that name and I thought it was a pretty good idea," Holcombe says. "I really trust her opinion, which has proved itself over our 14 years together."
Born and raised in Weaverville, N.C., not far from Swannanoa, Holcombe, a true man of the mountains, made the obligatory musicians' trek to Nashville, Tenn. A record label signed him, recorded a debut album, changed its mind and put the album on a shelf for five years before he managed to get it out to fans who were starting to discover him. The album was named A Hundred Lies.
Holcombe returned to North Carolina and charted an independent career that allows his family a calm country life when he is not out on the road. But when he performs, calm is not his preferred style.
Combining a country blues attitude, poetic lyrics and a gruff, sometimes raw voice with a wildly strummed acoustic guitar, Holcombe has released 13 more albums. But prolific is not a description he accepts, even though his recording career has picked up speed since 2014, when he released Pitiful Blues. It was followed in 2015 by The RCA Sessions, a different sort of career retrospective of his work from 1994 to 2014.
"I took 16 songs from my first 10 albums and went into the RCA studios in Nashville and did new versions of them, with some of my favorite musicians, and we also made a DVD to go with it," he says. "That's the first time I've ever made a DVD, so that was an experience."
His name is frequently mentioned alongside some of his fellow singer-songwriters, including Townes Van Zandt and Billy Joe Shaver, and he has opened shows or shared stages with Richard Thompson, Merle Haggard, Wilco, Shelby Lynne, Leon Russell and John Hammond. Holcombe's as likely to write and sing sensitive love ballads as he is to create sarcastic social commentary.
Over the past decade, he has toured extensively in Europe, Scandinavia and the United Kingdom, with creative song craft sometimes a result of his travels. The new album contains such songs as "Heidelberg Blues," inspired by a historic German town that escaped bombing during World War II (supposedly due to its beauty), and "Papermill Man," about a 40-year employee of an industry ubiquitous in the South. (The song features Louisiana legend Tony Joe White on electric guitar.)
Style on 07/19/2016