Morrissey is the quintessential New Englander of the bunch, with New Hampshire in particular serving as his geographic anchor. “It’s not where I grew up, but I first moved up here in ’69, and I’ve lived here longer than anywhere else,” he says. “I’ve lived in California two or three times — lived in Berkeley, and Santa Cruz, and L.A. I lived in Houston for awhile, and Philadelphia. But New Hampshire’s — home.
“I remember in 1975, living in this motel on the boardwalk in Santa Cruz, watching the World Series, and everybody back in Boston’s wearing down parkas and stuff. And I’m just going, ‘What am I doing here? I’m supposed to be home.’…It’s good to get out of New England, just to appreciate it. But I just bought a house up here in New Hampshire, and I’m very happy, and this is where I’m gonna settle.”
As a teenager attending high school in the Boston area, Morrissey made several trips down to Newport, Rhode Island, in the late 1960s to attend the legendary Newport Folk Festival. “You’d go to a ‘new faces’ concert there and see all these new faces like Joni Mitchell and Jerry Jeff Walker and Leonard Cohen and James Taylor and Happy & Artie [Traum] — all these people who were just getting discovered around ’67 or ’69,” he recalls. “Or Van Morrison; seeing Van Morrison play with just a guitarist behind him. Or Kris Kristofferson, who kept apologizing because he wasn’t much of a singer but he just kinda wrote songs. My eyeballs were wide open.”
The primary Boston venue for folk music at the time was Club 47, originally on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge and later moving to the spot eventually occupied by the venerable coffeehouse Passim. “Even though I was too young to go, my friends and I had older brothers and sisters who would go to Club 47,” Morrissey says. “So they would go in and go see Doc Watson or Skip James, stuff like that, and would bring home the records.”
There was one opportunity for underage fans to check out the music in person. “I was able to go to this jazz club on Sunday afternoons for a matinee; they would let minors in,” he remembers. “A buddy of mine who now works at Rounder, he and I would show up two hours early and get the front table, and sit there and watch John Lee Hooker or Big Mama Thornton or Spider John Koerner. Because we got to see what they were doing with their hands; we were both guitarists.”
Morrissey spent plenty of time in his youth scrutinizing records as well. “As a kid, I would always look up the songwriters, on the back of pop records and stuff,” he says. “I’d buy Rolling Stones albums, and see songs by Chester Burnett or McKinley Morganfield. And I didn’t know that that was Muddy, and it was Wolf; It took me a long time to put that together. I didn’t have Blues 101, you know. But that was part of the excitement too, figuring it all out.”
And also following the trail of history the music leaves in its wake. “You find one act in a certain genre that leads you to another,” he concurs. “Like I found Jimmie Rodgers, and that led me to the Carter Family. And at the same time, I was discovering Woody Guthrie, and that led me to Hank Williams. And then you hear Hank Williams, and that takes you to Lefty Frizzell. And then that goes on to, I think, country’s greatest period, the mid-’60s to mid-’70s, with George and Merle and stuff like that, where they were just at their peak.”
Still, it wasn’t so much country music that made an initial impression on Morrissey as it was the blues. “There was something haunting about the blues, more than country,” he says. “Although somebody like Bill & Charlie Monroe, that was haunting. And that was so close to the blues, and gospel. When I first heard Jimmie Rodgers, I didn’t know if he was black or white. You know, because he’s hitting blue notes where country guys didn’t.
“But what really got me, when I was a kid, were things like Son House, and Skip James, and Robert Johnson, and John Hurt. It was just — it was exotic. Maybe that was it. It was a far cry from small-town New England. And it was a whole other world with a whole other language, that I was dying to learn about.”
Hurt in particular became a fundamental influence on Morrissey’s own work — so much so that he recorded an entire album of his music, Songs Of Mississippi John Hurt, a couple years ago. “I just learned everything from John Hurt,” he says. “My right hand comes directly from John Hurt. And I was sort of amazed no one had done an album of John Hurt songs before. Because they’re so adaptable, they’re so good.”
Coincidentally, fellow songwriter Peter Case had a similar idea, and recently finished producing Avalon Blues: A Tribute To The Music Of Mississippi John Hurt, due out June 12 on Vanguard. Morrissey is on it, along with Lucinda Williams, Ben Harper, John Hiatt, Beck, Taj Mahal, Gillian Welch and others. “I was like the only name on it I didn’t recognize,” Morrissey jokes.
Case and Morrissey actually bonded over Hurt’s music many years ago. “The first time we really got to hang out, we were doing ‘Mountain Stage’ [the renowned West Virginia radio show], and we had both flown in, and they picked us up, and we went to the hotel,” Morrissey recounts. “And he called me up and he said, ‘Well, let’s play some guitar.’ And we spent all night playing John Hurt songs. I had no idea he knew this stuff, and he had no idea I knew this stuff. So we’ve been good friends since then.”
Among the other good friends Morrissey has made over the years is Iowa singer-songwriter Greg Brown, with whom he released a collaborative disc, Friend Of Mine, in 1993. Brown had dueted with Morrissey on the traditional tune “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” on Morrissey’s 1992 album Inside, and the positive results led them to record an album’s worth of cover songs shortly thereafter.
