Roustabout

Excellent follow-up to his '1922' album and national tour with Paul Kelly, this album release was followed by his own Australian tour over Summer 2009/2010. Charlie Parr is a folk and country blues musician, whose tools of a lived-in rasp of a voice, National resonator and 12-string acoustic guitars, a banjo are put to use in his own songs and re-workings of well-travelled numbers by Mississippi John Hurt, Charley Patton and other cohorts from another time. Charlie Parr's songs are inhabited by wandering gamblers, union workers, criminals and sinners, and tell stories that occupy the dark places where regret and remorse part company. Charlie Parr grew up in Austin, Minnesota, in a house filled with the music that would inform his style. His late father loved the music found on collections like the field recordings by Alan Lomax released on the Folkways / Smithsonian label and Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. Hearing his father's first-hand accounts of growing up during the Depression, riding the freight trains and travelling to places like the Piedmont region (a North Carolina country blues mecca), made the music all the more visceral to Charlie. The child of union workers at Austin's Hormel plant – picket line fixtures during bitter labour strikes in the mid-1980s – Charlie himself got a first-hand view of what those old songs were talking about.