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- 6/8/2013
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Joe Lewis' heavyweight sounds is turning heads
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By ANDREW DANSBY
Three weeks ago Joe Lewis got fired from his job shucking oysters at
an Austin restaurant. It was curious work for a man who plays guitar.
“I’ve stabbed myself in the hand a couple of times in that place,”
says Lewis. “But that’s the goal, to try to not have to do that (stuff)
anymore. I guess I’m going in the right direction.”
Lewis’ vocational fortunes have changed because his band, Black Joe
Lewis and the Honeybears, has become the most exciting live band on
the road today. They play a gritty, funky style of old soul that
sounds authentically soulful after more than two decades of pristine
R&B.
Authenticity is a finicky word to use in describing music. It can be
difficult to discern where singing ends and acting begins, especially
when the narrator is as humorous as Lewis can be. But there’s
something earthy and real about Lewis’ tale. He started as a kid from
Round Rock who wasn’t interested in his father’s soul records. His
first album was MC Hammer’s Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ’Em, though Lewis
says his mother wouldn’t let him get a Hammer haircut. He didn’t really
start paying attention to music till after high school. Now, at 27,
he’s a Next Big Thing who courts old-soul fans and indie-rock
enthusiasts.
Lewis’ stage name is worth noting because he embraces a certain
blackness lost in soul music. As the genre was pulled from the South
into New York, the snarling sorts of rural singers with one foot in the
church and one in the nightclub — Wilson Pickett, James Brown, James
Carr, Joe Tex, Otis Redding, Jimmy Hughes, the list goes on — were
replaced by homogenous New Jack practitioners virtually
indistinguishable from one another.
To read the rest of the feature, click here
