Vancouver, Washington-based guitarist, singer, and songwriter
Kelly Joe Phelps expanded the parameters of modern blues through his strong commitment to literary songs and his expressive yet simple guitar stylings. While casual listeners often called
Phelps a bluesman, his playing was fluid, dexterous, and improvised, with the soul of a jazz musician.
Phelps was raised in a music-loving household in Sumner, Washington, near Tacoma. The son of Seventh Day Adventist parents,
Phelps' father was an air conditioning and refrigeration specialist and his mother worked as a housewife and Tupperware salesperson. "They didn't have a large record collection," he recalled in a 2000 interview, "but the influence from them musically was the fact that they played music, at home, almost daily."
Phelps' parents didn't play music for religious reasons, but merely for emotional ones.
Phelps' father played guitar, fiddle, piano, and harmonica while his mother played guitar and some banjo. His father liked country & western music, but also developed an ear for blues, and brought home albums by
Meade "Lux" Lewis,
Pete Johnson, and other boogie-woogie piano players. "I can remember being five or six and hearing him beat out these boogie-woogie tunes on piano,"
Phelps recalled.
Phelps got interested in jazz guitar when he was in his teens, so he ended up paying equally close attention to
Miles Davis,
John Coltrane, and
Led Zeppelin.
Phelps switched from jazz to blues while he was still living in Portland, Oregon, because he saw the blues as a way to continue expanding his parameters and challenging himself. He moved from Seattle down to Portland, Oregon in 1980, and there he found equally vibrant jazz and blues scenes. He began to hit the jazz clubs and heard live jazz in clubs four and five nights a week. He spent the better part of the next ten years playing bass in small jazz groups, but at home and in private, he would continue to play guitar, occasionally experimenting with a slide, to coax bluesier tunes from his instrument. In the late '80s,
Phelps heard an album by classic acoustic bluesman
Mississippi Fred MacDowell that turned his career around. "Once I heard the country blues players, I wanted to figure out a way to improvise like a jazz musician would, but at the same time play a style of music that was more closely linked to folk forms," he recalled. Like a jazz musician, he could read his audience carefully and worked without the aid of a song list at his live shows.
Phelps' debut for Burnside Records led him to American Records, but after that company folded, he got picked up by Rykodisc. That company in turn was acquired in part by Palm Pictures, an interactive music/film company run by Island Records founder
Chris Blackwell.
Like many blues artists,
Phelps averaged more than 200 nights a year on the road, and he always carried a notebook with him, jotting down song ideas as they popped up. But, like many others, he did the vast majority of his songwriting at home. His recordings include Lead Me On, his 1994 debut for the Portland-based Burnside Records label, followed in 1997 by
Roll Away the Stone for Rykodisc. His other releases for Rykodisc included
Shine Eyed Mister Zen, in 1999 and
Sky Like a Broken Clock, in 2001. Since 2001, other releases included the
Beggar's Oil EP,
Slingshot Professionals, Tap the Red Cane Whirlwind,
Tunesmith Retrofit (a 2006 release for Rounder Records), and 2009's
Western Bell, his first for the Black Hen label. By blues standards,
Phelps took a left turn in 2010 with Magnetic Skyline, a collaborative project with singer and songwriter
Corinne West.
Phelps released
Brother Sinner & the Whale, in 2012; the set was a collection of mostly original blues and folk tunes about spiritual themes; it was produced by
Steve Dawson. In 2013,
Phelps was diagnosed with ulnar neuropathy, which led him to retire from touring and recording.
Kelly Joe Phelps died in Iowa on March 31, 2022; he was 62 years old. ~ Richard Skelly