{"id":20802,"date":"2021-04-07T05:30:00","date_gmt":"2021-04-07T09:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=20802"},"modified":"2021-04-08T08:46:58","modified_gmt":"2021-04-08T12:46:58","slug":"kirk-fletchers-pathway-to-and-through-the-blues-part-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2021\/04\/07\/kirk-fletchers-pathway-to-and-through-the-blues-part-three\/","title":{"rendered":"Kirk Fletcher’s Pathway to (and Through) the Blues, Part Three"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Continued from Part Two<\/a> …<\/i><\/p>\n

When Fletcher was 13, an affiliated congregation invited him to play guitar with their youth choir. He recalls thinking, \u201cOkay, someone wants me to come join something else. It\u2019s not just at the church where my parents and everybody I know is.\u201d He looks back on that opportunity as an important turning point in his musical journey. \u201cThat was really big for me,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Fletcher continued to discover, listen to and learn from the best guitarists. \u201cI got into Stevie Ray Vaughan when I was in high school,\u201d he says. \u201cI really liked him, B.B. King and all of the main \u2018food groups.\u2019 I was just a sponge; I liked all<\/i> those guys. I just like guitar<\/i>, but the blues spoke to me more than anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n

As much as he enjoyed the pop music he heard, the blues resonated most deeply. \u201cWhen I heard Howlin\u2019 Wolf for the first time, \u2018Little Red Rooster\u2019 or something like that, it kind of sounded like my dad when he was excited in church, giving a sermon.\u201d But there was an important difference. \u201cIt was a little bit freer,\u201d he says. \u201cBecause the blues was about more things than just religion, God and all this super holiness kind of thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fletcher\u2019s appreciation for multiple styles of music would serve him well as he grew toward adulthood. \u201cI always kind of had to fit in into whatever was going around,\u201d he says. So he applied his guitar prowess to most every kind of music. \u201cI was always the kind of musician who thinks, \u2018This guy\u2019s playing funk, so I\u2019m<\/i> going to play funk.\u2019 Because it\u2019s music<\/i>. I come from this really positive, beautiful experience with music, and you just share it with everybody. I\u2019m a born accompanist.\u201d<\/p>\n

That approach characterized his attitude toward playing once he moved beyond the church. He even played hip-hop. \u201cUp until a certain point in my life it was like, \u2018I\u2019ll just be the one to fit in, because nobody fits in with all of the stuff that I<\/i> like.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Fletcher recalls another turning point, one that took place in 1988. \u201cMy brother said, \u2018I have two tickets to the Long Beach Blues Festival.\u2019 I was ready to pass out then; I was so excited!\u201d Albert Collins was the headliner, and the bill also featured The Staple Singers with Roebuck \u201cPops\u201d Staples. \u201cI still get goosebumps, talking about it to this day,\u201d Fletcher says. \u201cTo be 12 or 13 years old and to see that?\u201d He says the experience changed his life. \u201cI wrote papers about it in school and everything. That\u2019s the day I decided, \u2018Someday, I want to do that!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, he was still playing at churches, and those experiences led to others. \u201cWhen you get a little older, you start to meet some people that play R&B, funk and top 40,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd that\u2019s how I made the transition into it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fletcher was so inspired to play that he found himself moving in several directions at once. \u201cI was playing in a blues band with Kris Wiley, a female guitar player from the L.A. area,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI was playing in the hip-hop gospel choir; I was still playing in the church. And I was playing in another quartet. It was like four or five different things all at once, doing it all.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"In his early 20s, Fletcher met bluesman (and veteran of countless Ash Grove appearances) Al Blake of the Hollywood Fats Band. \u201cWe were playing R&B at a gig at Los Angeles City College, and Al was there playing solo acoustic guitar and singing,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI think he said something like, \u2018Man, I like the way you play guitar.\u2019 For him, to see a young<\/i> black guy playing some blues, he was intrigued. So we connected, and he invited me to his house to play records. He really took me under his wing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fletcher would head to Blake\u2019s place in Laguna Beach every Sunday after church, and he\u2019d learn about country blues and more. \u201cFrom probably two or three o\u2019clock in the afternoon to eight at night, he\u2019d play me everything,\u201d Fletcher says. \u201cI knew about the more well-known guys like Lightning Hopkins, but he really opened the door to a lot of things that I didn\u2019t know about. To have a mentor to tell you about all these obscure guys that you\u2019ve never heard of was invaluable to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fletcher says that his time with Blake helped him progress from not really understanding how traditional blues works, to accompanying a harmonica player and understanding Chicago blues. But those lessons weren\u2019t always easy. \u201cI will pat myself on the back a little bit,\u201d Fletcher says, emphasizing that it took \u201ca lot of hard work and a little bit of talent.\u201d<\/p>\n

The experience transformed Fletcher, who still maintains a deep friendship with Blake. \u201cI sold all of my records that weren\u2019t traditional blues,\u201d he says. \u201cAl was instrumental in telling me about the history of blues and all different sides of it so I could connect that with my family from Arkansas.\u201d He soon came to a realization: \u201cIt was so natural for me to play traditional blues, so I said, \u2018Enough with all the other stuff; I can come back to that some other time.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite their attitudes toward secular music, Fletcher\u2019s parents were as supportive as they could be. \u201cThey had their beliefs and everything,\u201d he says. \u201cBut when people get older, it seems like they loosen up and they think about things in a different way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because Kirk was still living at home in 2001 \u2013 he was only in his mid-20s \u2013 when he started playing out-of-town gigs with Charlie Musselwhite, his father would regularly drive him to the airport. And even earlier, when he found himself short of cash when working on demo recordings for what would become his debut album (1999\u2019s I\u2019m Here & I\u2019m Gone<\/i>), he asked his mother to help out.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was like, \u2018Well, you know, the Devil\u2019s music\u2019 and everything like that,\u201d Fletcher recalls with a gentle laugh. \u201cI was like, \u2018Mom, you know, just like you all sing all these songs that I played and accompanied y\u2019all, I\u2019m doing the same thing with my music. I\u2019m just talking about life.\u2019\u201d His mother gave him the money he needed. \u201cShe said, \u2018Hey, do your best.\u2019 I\u2019ll remember that for the rest of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Click here to continue<\/a> \u2026<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part Two … When Fletcher was 13, an affiliated congregation invited him to play guitar with their youth choir. He recalls thinking, \u201cOkay, someone wants me to come […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20815,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,41,49],"tags":[4493],"class_list":["post-20802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blues","category-interview","category-new-release","tag-kirk-fletcher","cat-9-id","cat-41-id","cat-49-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20802"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20835,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20802\/revisions\/20835"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}