Wife Nancy’s harmonizing vocal group the Angel Band (for whom David plays guitar) had recorded some tracks at Target Studios in Elkton, Maryland, and when that studio moved to Wilmington, right across the street from the violin shop, she and David took to walking in on a Sunday, if they felt like it, and just playing the sort of traditional acoustic music Bromberg was focusing on. They’d record it, but not even play it back to check it. He may have had no intention of making an album, but Nancy culled the tracks from those sessions that became Try Me One More Time, and is credited as producer.
Bromberg’s own reformed band still mixes horns and fiddles and is now on a limited touring schedule, finding a new-generation audience awaiting at places such as last year’s Merlefest. He can now, he maintains, spend an afternoon playing with a guitar ace such as Tony Rice and have fun — without the old competitive “impress them” impulse rising. “These days,” he says, “I pick and choose. I don’t play anywhere I don’t want to, I don’t do two sets a night, and I don’t play many bars at all.”
If Bromberg has chosen to let go of some old tendencies and ambitions, he’s also chosen, lately, to speak out publicly on some national political issues at his shows — specifically about presidential power. This is something he was not especially known for doing previously.
He’s been using a song he wrote and introduced in the mid-’70s, “Kaatskill Serenade”, toward that end, and some may detect a bit of irony, since the song originally was written about Rip Van Winkle reawakening, after decades, to a profoundly changed world. “What has become of my beautiful town?” Rip wonders in Bromberg’s lyric, as he did in the post-American Revolution Washington Irving story. “This must be the end; my house is tumbled down.”
“When I wrote the song,” Bromberg recalls, “the closest I could come to explaining to someone the feeling that you get when you come off the road was to say you feel like Rip. When you live on the road, pretty soon all you know is the road, and you start writing songs about that. But how many of those ‘Oh, babe, it’s so lonesome out here, so won’t you come back to the motel with me and make it better’ songs do you have to listen to? I tried very hard not to write one of those. Then when I played that song in Tarrytown, New York, where I grew up, they always assumed that it was about that town — which it wasn’t!
“Now lately I have been taking it to refer to what’s happened to the country. I’ve taken it to a different place from where I wrote it.”
Inevitably, not every audience member has gone for this turn, but he’s tended to speak right to the ones who voice objection.
“I don’t want to preach to the choir,” he affirms. “So I’ll say, ‘I have just as much fear about the power that’s now in the hands of the president if the next one is a Democrat as I do with a Republican. You may think George Bush would never do anything bad with the power he has taken, but how about the next president, and the one after that?’ When civil liberties are gone, they’re very hard to get back.
“One of the things that separated the United States from the Soviet Union during the Cold War was that we had habeas corpus; you could not be arrested without being charged and brought to a speedy trial. And we don’t have that any longer. To me this is terrifying.”
And, adds the man who’s worked so long on finding who he is himself, “Some of the things we have lost are, to me, basic to our national identity. I can’t believe, now, that the United States would ever say, ‘Look, torture is no big deal.’ I wasn’t raised in a country that would say that. We were the good guys with white hats who wouldn’t shoot a guy in the heart when we could shoot him in the leg!”
Whatever his political fears, Bromberg shows every sign of looking toward his own musical future with relish.
He speaks of putting together an outright blues album over time, one that might include his work with a young band he’s fostered, Johnny Duke & the Aces, fronted by John Duke Lippincott. (He describes Lippincott as “the best blues guitarist I’ve ever played with,” which would be saying something.) But it’s still hard to imagine Bromberg settling into any one genre of music forever.
“Maybe,” he reflects, “I won’t ever be taken seriously as a blues musician by some critics and fans because I’ve played some bluegrass. And I’ll never be taken seriously as a bluegrass musician because I’ve played some blues — or as a rock ‘n’ roll musician because I played folk music.
“So it could be I made a big mistake in making my records like anthologies — but those are my favorite sorts to listen to. I was the best David Bromberg there was; I did that well — well enough for some people to like it. I think I was doing the right thing back then, for my age. And I think I’m doing the right thing for now, with a little more maturity. Not many people at the age of 25 are content to be who they are — but I’m at the point where I’m pretty happy to be myself. And that’s the difference.”
ND senior editor Barry Mazor is hard at work on a new book on the multi-genre musical legacy of Jimmie Rodgers, for Oxford University Press.
