Greg Brown gives folk music a face and a name

Glen Arbor Sun

INTERLOCHEN -- His baritone voice still sounds like a mellow bullfrog’s croak resonating from some swamp, and his head swings back and forth like a bobblehead doll grinning like a child when he sings lyrics that border on the naughty, like “Everything with you is sex”. But Greg Brown has taken his act to a new level. The Iowa folk singer has become one of the most sought-after performers from the Midwest and draws crowds in the thousands when he sits down to strum a tune. He has released nearly 20 albums under the Red House Records label and has been nominated twice for Grammy awards. Brown was featured recently in The New Yorker – America’s premier intellectual magazine that sometimes seems to cast the Midwest as a mosquitoey backwater.

Lucky for local folk enthusiasts, Brown still makes regular pilgrimages to northern Michigan, where he never misses an opportunity to break from his touring schedule and fish in our majestic rivers. Brown mesmerized a sold-out crowd at Corson Auditorium in Interlochen on July 23, hours after failing to “catch one damned trout” in the Boardman River near Traverse City. This after playing a benefit concert for nurses in Petoskey in late May. Brown still reminisces about gigs at J.R.’s Warehouse in Traverse City, the dark establishment now called the Loading Dock where he often took the stage in a wife-beater t-shirt with sweat rolling down his arms. Over the years he has also graced the Bay Theatre in Suttons Bay and Bliss Fest in Cross Village, and Greg knows Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as well as any avid snowmobiler.

One of Brown’s hit songs, “Laughing River” on his Dream Café album, is about a minor league baseball player who hangs up his spikes to settle down on a river in the U.P., “way up in Michigan, where the laughing river flows”. It was at a benefit for such a river that Brown met the talented young harp and string band Steppin’ In It, which opened for him at Interlochen (and will play again on August 3 at Thoreson Farm, north of Glen Arbor, as part of the Manitou Music Festival.) Brown joked about the absurdity of playing a benefit concert for a river. “It’s kind of funny,” he said during the Interlochen concert. “You wouldn’t think people would threaten a river to the extent that artists would have to come in and save it.”

So it goes in troubled times. Folk musicians, especially, find themselves playing concerts with political undertones, singing for the environment or protesting a war. “Normally I don’t think politics and music make a very good combination,” Greg Brown told the Glen Arbor Sun during a telephone conversation while he waited in Chicago’s O’Hare airport for a flight to his next concert. “But with all of the stuff that’s been going on lately, I feel like I have to sing out about it.” Brown sang, “I want my country back … I don’t feel at home here anymore” to emotional applause at Interlochen. Nearly a dozen people, mostly senior citizens, left the room when he sang the same tune in May in Petoskey. “I’m really more of a storyteller,” Brown said. “There’s a political feeling in a lot of my songs, but that’s not the main focus. For instance, it’s inferred there’s a political reason that a couple is having trouble.”

Take The Poet Game, the title song of the album that won him an Indie Award for Singer-Songwriter Album of the Year: “I watched my country turn into a coast-to-coast strip mall, and I cried out in song. If we could do all that in 30 years then please tell me you all, why does good change take so long? Why does the color of your skin or who you choose to love still lead to such anger and pain?”

Brown’s lyrics and deep soothing voice have always been his main strengths, and one can hear the oratorical skills he inherited from his father, a Pentecostal preacher in southeastern Iowa where gospel music is a way of life. His mother played the electric guitar and his grandfather the banjo, which probably inspired songs like Billy from the Hills, about a hide-tough mountain boy living in the nearby Ozarks. “I’m a hick and I dance like one, I just jump around and grin. I know a guy who doesn’t dance too much, but when he does he gives everyone a thrill. You might run away or suck it up and stay when he dances: Billy from the Hills.”

No matter how famous Greg Brown becomes or how many household names cover his songs (they already include Willie Nelson, Carlos Santana and Ani DiFranco) he may always present the appearance of an outdoorsman who is more likely to shoulder a fishing pole than a guitar. He stopped by the Hofbrau House, Interlochen’s local dive, after that concert to mingle just as a local folk musician would.

Occasionally Brown will dress in an elegant black suit when touring with DiFranco and Gillian Welch, against whose personalities he must play the role of the older brother, but he’s more likely to take the stage in army overalls, sandals and a visor that barely covers his shaved head (One of his three daughters recently gave him a buzz cut). “I don’t associate myself with being famous,” Brown said. “I just stuck around for a long time and now I get to play at some bigger venues. No one recognizes me when I’m walking around.” But Brown recalls the time he and Bo Ramsey, his sidekick sometimes on the guitar, were boarding an airplane. “Someone came running down the gangway and tapped me on the shoulder, asking ‘Is that Barry Manilow you’re with?’”