Singer C.W. Stoneking comes from a very different deep south

C.W. Stoneking was born in 1974 in the sunburnt city of Katherine, a town of around 6,000 souls in the Mad Max moonscape of the Australian Outback, and spent his childhood in various locations in the antipodean desert.

You’d never know that though from listening to the singer/guitarist’s swampy, juke-joint music, a reverential take on the rural black blues of the American South from a half-century before his birth.

Over the course of three albums, including the recently released Gon’ Boogaloo with such tracks as Goin’ Back South and Mama Got the Blues, he has turned heads with an approach so stripped-down and lo-fi that his work could almost be mistaken for a field recording.

But Stoneking says anyone who only sees a cultural disconnect or appropriation here needs to move along.

“Musicians get into all sorts of things,” he said by phone from a tour stop in Seattle in his slow, languid Australian accent. “Some guys like Italian opera and some like Appalachian music even though they’ve never been there. Americans like English punk music. That’s the whole point of it.

“I don’t know what the rules are,” he continued. “Music is uplift. I don’t want to pin it down and hold it down to politics. It’s more of a clean, holy thing than that to me.”

Certainly, many agree with him. He has been lauded in Australia, winning several industry awards and in 2008 was shortlisted for the Australian Music Prize for his album Jungle Blues.

On this side of the Pacific, he is in the midst of a major American swing which last week had to be suspended because of the death of his father, poet-teacher-filmmaker Billy Marshall Stoneking. Several shows, including his performance at Three Links in Dallas on Sunday , will have to be rescheduled. However, the tour picks up in Austin on Monday before moving on to El Paso.

At least one prominent American, Jack White, has been wanting to work with him for a long time now.

“He’s still sort of interested in doing something,” Stoneking said. “It’s just our schedules and things have never been able to click in at the same time. There’s still talk going back and forth about something, but nothing is set in stone right now.”

Born to be blue

Christopher William Stoneking had the kind of upbringing of which most American kids can only dream.

“[Australia’s Northern Territory] was an interesting place to be a kid in,” he said. “It was very wild, not a lot of infrastructure of any type, right in the middle of a gigantic, sparsely populated country.”

But he does have a connection to the U.S. beyond his interest in music. His dad was American, a teacher by trade, who was also a fan of the blues. A compilation in his father’s collection, Living With the Blues, caught young 11-year-old C.W.’s ear.

“I used to listen to all sorts of stuff,” he said. “I used to listen to a lot of old blues music before I was really thinking about playing the guitar ... After I left high school, I was busking a lot [in Sydney] and I met up with a bunch of people who were very much into that sort of music and I played with them in a couple of groups.

“Through some of the older guys, I found out about some other old artists.”

He says he’s not sure about what it was about the blues that appealed to him so deeply.

“I was taken with a lot of the various approaches on the guitar in that early style of the blues,” he said. “So many artists were unique ... It was just interesting from the perspective of an instrumentalist and a singer.”

His back-to-blues-basics approach is really on display on Gon’ Boogaloo, recorded live in two days with with just two microphones and no overdubs. Even by his standards, it’s pretty primitive.

“I wanted to make a simple recording,” he explained. “Mostly, I didn’t have a lot of time to do it and I didn’t want to spend a lot of time mixing it.”

Moving north

It’s possible that Stoneking, after years of loving the music of American South, might actually become a Southerner, maybe even a Texan. He’s thinking about moving here.

He hasn’t lived in the Outback for many years and recently has been living outside Melbourne after residing for a time in England, a place where he didn’t feel like he fit in.

“I couldn’t find much inspiration in the environment, I have to say,” he said, noting he and his family moved there because he didn’t want to be so far away from home while maintaining a heavy European touring schedule.

“Before I moved, we had a baby and I was away half the year on tour and we were going to have another baby the following year.”

He likes what he has seen of the U.S.

“We’ve thought about moving over,” he said. “I’d like to do it. I like being able to tour a lot. In Australia, there are so few [big] cities and I like to keep busy on the road so it’s nice for me over here.”

One thing about the South surprised him, though.

“Some of the landscape was different from what I imagined,” he said. “For instance, in Mississippi, I imagined it to be more arid, more like northern Australia — hot and arid. It’s not like that.”

Globespinning is an occasional look at music from around the world.

This story was originally published July 20, 2016 at 7:25 AM with the headline "Singer C.W. Stoneking comes from a very different deep south."