Guitarist Joseph Allred Explores the American Primitive Sound

In Music, Music Stories by Eric Dawsonleave a COMMENT

Many acoustic guitarists who work in the American Primitive tradition also delve into avant-garde and experimental music. Jack Rose and Glenn Jones both started out in bands heavy into improv, Marisa Anderson played in a free jazz group, and Ben Chasny punishes his electric guitar—and listeners—as often as he finger-picks. Sir Richard Bishop has an album called Graviton Polarity Generator that sounds like its title. Jim O’Rourke has made just about every kind of noise you can imagine, and on and on.

As sort-of-local 12-string guitarist Joseph Allred points out, it’s part of the tradition. The godfather of American Primitive music was creating sound collages on some of his earliest records.

“John Fahey did that sort of stuff even back in the 1960s,” Allred says. “And when he was sort of rediscovered in the 1990s, the albums he made were full of noise. I think when some people get down so far they start to appreciate sound as sound, and it doesn’t matter if it’s coming from an acoustic guitar or a gamelan record or a train whistle.”

Allred seems to love many kinds of sounds. He was in Nashville-area doom/psych/rock bands Hellbender and Across Tundras before he began making ambient and noise-type recordings, both solo and in the duo Graceless, with Matt Johnson. During a recent live set he worked with turntables, keyboards, and effects to build an all-enveloping atmosphere that called on ambient, noise, and drone music.

But it’s the acoustic guitar that seems to have most of his attention. He began to play the instrument in earnest around four years ago, to cope with a family crisis.

“When my dad was diagnosed with cancer, that’s kind of how I dealt with it,” Allred explains. “I started played guitar all the time. It was about the only thing I could do.”

Allred has lived in Knoxville off and on over the last decade or so; attending the University of Tennessee, he moved to the small mining community in Overton County, outside of Cookeville. Having grown up in nearby Jamestown, he’s now inhabiting land that’s been in his family 200 years. He says he’s trying to find his place in the family legacy. Even without knowing his history, you can recognize a searching, if not spiritual, quality to much of his music.

Allred has recently started writing lyrics and singing, accompanying himself on harmonium. His songs have a hymn-like quality, and at a recent show he even performed the great Methodist hymn “Idumea.” Though he first encountered the song via apocalyptic folk band Current 93’s eschatological song cycle Black Ships Ate the Sky, Allred grew up in a Methodist church. It wasn’t until he began to write songs that he realized just how much of an effect that had on his compositions.

“I wrote lyrics and had chords but I just couldn’t figure out how to make it work with guitar,” he says. “I couldn’t sing until I got a harmonium, which makes sense, in a way, because Christian missionaries carried them around to play hymns on. They were introduced to India by missionaries and had a big impact on that music.”

Indian music is a current fixation for Allred, and he’s recently taken up playing the sitar. An explanation of its appeal leads to a digression on the history of Indian instruments, his trip to that country last year, and why there is a contemporary backlash against harmoniums there. I ask if he’s had any formal music training, but it turns out his degrees are in philosophy and religious studies.

The restless curiosity he exhibits in his music and conversation seems to extend to his recording practices as well. His duo, Graceless, currently has three records (one a double album) at the printing plant, and he’s just finished recording two solo records. You can sample some of his music via the Bandcamp page for his Meliphonic Records label, but that may not last long.

“I think I’m going to stop using Bandcamp,” Allred says. “I’m getting fed up with a lot of things. I put a lot of attention into the packaging and the artwork my friends or I do, and I want to make as tangible mark as I can on the world rather than just throwing things out in the digital world.”

Eric Dawson is Audio-Visual Archivist with the Knox County Public Library's Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, and with Inside the Vault combs the archive for nuggets of lost Knoxville music and film history to share with us. He's also a longtime local music journalist, former A&E editor of the Knoxville Voice and a board member of the nonprofit performance venue Pilot Light.

Share this Post