The Clonakilty Guitar Festival is an annual event on the West Cork music calendar. It usually takes place on the third weekend of September and provides a colourful and diverse spread of music in a pub and small club atmosphere, often generously offering free matinee shows in the town's flagship venue, the mighty De Barra's.
The buzz around town is palpable. Groups of 16-year old guitar slingers wander around in groups, struggling over chord shapes in nearby Emmett Square while De Barra's itself is packed to the rafters at 3.30PM for CHARLIE PARR'S first-ever show in the heart of West Cork.
Whether white men can really sing the Blues with any conviction is usually a rhetorical question, but there's always the rarest of exceptions and this hunched, heavily-bearded figure clad in ancient plaid overshirt and arguably the world's oldest bobble hat is just that: the real, rural country-folk-blues-singin' deal.
Hailing from Duluth, Minnesota, Charlie Parr's songs inhabit a mysterious landscape that evokes images of the frozen wastelands of 'Fargo', but also hitch-hike south to sup from the murky waters of the Mississippi Delta on their summer holidays. Hallowed names like Charley Patton, Robert Johnson and Missisippi John Hurt are frequently bandied around in his reviews, but for once the signposts are deadly accurate.
Parr plays a wonderfully viperish National steel-bodied guitar and supplements it with lashings of wicked bottleneck slide, while his sturdy work boots beat out a steady stompin' rhythm on the floor in the time-honoured John Lee Hooker tradition. Material-wise, he is a veritable walking Smithsonian Institute and makes reference to numerous wandering minstrels too obscure to register on this writer's radar.
The tunes themselves speak sombrely of hard times for (dis)honest men and his generous set mixes and matches highlights from the Skip James catalogue, choice cuts from his last two albums (including a hard and edgy 'Jubilee') and even finds room for a Victorian-era murder ballad from Atlanta called 'Delia' which could eat Nick Cave for breakfast. "Johnny Cash's version of that is the most violent, but Spider John Koerner's is still the best," he notes modestly as the residue of his own smokin' version finally disperses around the small room.
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With a sorceror's skill, he saves the most venomous treats of all for the finale. Even without the potent fiddle and extra guitar of the version closing his fine 'Roustabout' album, 'God Moves On The Water' is full-blooded, percussive and capable of shaking the very foundations of your soul. If anything, though, it's topped by his remarkable version of the Reverend Nix's 1931 belter 'Black Diamond Express': a Biblical epic par excellence full of fire, brimstone and retribution where needs must and The Devil drives. Literally.
As with all such near-religious experiences, it's all over far too soon and before we know where we are, W&H are queuing up to but an album from a soft-spoken gent who seems bizarrely at odds with the possessed character channelling the Gestalt from Satan's very own divining rod when those fingers are flying up and down the frets. Once we're over the shock, we beat a hasty retreat to check out 'Roustabout' in all its' earthy glory. Making sure there's no hellhound on our trail in the rear view mirror on the way, naturally.
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