Features ‘1922 Blues’ ... that song from the Vodafone ad where the guy folds up his stylish apartment, including sleeping girlfriend, and puts it in his pocket.

Most people don’t care about musical categories or trends – pop/alternative/nu-folk/emo/electro. You can call it whatever you like, but ask around, and most people just care about whether music is good, or not. Plenty of good music goes unnoticed – but when good music is given a proper airing, it never fails to find a large and very appreciative audience.

Say hello to Duluth, Minnesota’s Charlie Parr. Thanks to Vodafone’s current Australia/NZ television campaign which features Charlie’s song ‘1922 Blues’, this hard working but totally obscure old-time blues musician is one of the hottest acts of the moment. The finger picking, freewheeling swing of ‘1922 Blues’ as heard on that Vodafone ad is taken from his album 1922. It’s a tribute to Charlie’s late father – 1922 being the year he was born.

“It’s about my father hopping freight trains,” Charlie says. “I wasn’t thinking about yuppies when I wrote it. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

Charlie’s father loved the original folk and country blues music now found on collections of American folk music by archivists like Alan Lomax and on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. His first-hand accounts of growing up during the Depression made the music all the more visceral to young Charlie. As both his parents were union workers at Austin's Hormel plant – on the picket line during labour strikes in the mid-1980s – Charlie got a first-hand view of what those old protest songs were about. For every old song about a factory town, union battle, or soup line, Parr's father had his own stories from his travels.

Now a fourteen track album, it features a hand picked selection of Charlie’s best songs from his recent recordings, all of which manage to put a bright and lively face on material that doesn’t pull any punches. His self-taught mix of slide, finger-picking and quasi-frailing technique come together with a voice that’s low on drama and high on impact.

Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Westbound Rattler
2. Migrant Boxcar Train
3. 1922 Blues
4. Louis Collins
5. Mahtowa Stomp
6. I Wish I Were A Mole In the Ground
7. To A Scrapyard Bus Stop
8. Wreck of the Bernard K
9. Funeral Road Blues
10. Hogkill Blues
11. Jesus at the Kenmore
12. Will Bill Jones (bonus track)
13. Bonneville (bonus track)
14. 1922 (live) (bonus track)