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CK: Well, it seems like the audience, you know, and a lot of them, they love blues are sort of
my age and older. I'm 61, so I'm kind of the kid in the scene. So a lot of my fans and blues fans
can be up to 80 or 90 years old [chuckling]. So it was a really a generational thing that I kind of
got in on more of the tail end of it because, you know, I guess I'm considered a baby boomer,
but towards the end. So all the people that I was hanging out with, and all of my heroes were
either a generation older or, you know, ten or 12 years older than me, so that's where I was
first learning my music was from, that generation of people.
BiTS: I remember Stefan Grossman saying
many years ago that one of the things that
fascinated him about the UK was that he went
to play in the gig, and you could always tell that
there were a load of guitar nuts there because
they would sit in the front row with their eyes
locked on his left hand.
CK: [Laughs] Yeah, well, there are. I mean, my
audience is also a lot of fellow guitar nuts, so
for sure, I mean, if you are into people like
Bukka White and Son House and Skip James
and music that went back to that earliest era
of blues, it's highly likely that they'll be guitar
players.
BiTS: Tell me something about the album.
Well, first of all, where did you get the music
from? I mean, there's a wide range of really all
kinds of stuff, including moans and heaven knows what else? How did you go about collecting
the music?
CK: Well, it's sort of the process when I make all of my records, which is to just list out my 100
favourite songs to begin with, and then I just sort of start working on the music. And after, you
know, two or three months of that, 15 or 20 cuts will come out that and feel like they're ready.
And so it's really just my kind of wide range of interests in what's really based in pretty much
an old-time country blues. But there are other songs too, like I have a big interest in early gospel
music, which there's two or three cuts on the record. I did one from Blind Joe Taggart called
‘God's Going To Separate The Wheat From The Tares’, and he was an artist that was always
exciting to me, so it was cool.
BiTS: Well, let's talk a little bit about some of the
tracks. What about the title track ‘Wild Ox Moan’?
Where did you find that one?
CK: Oh yeah. Well, that's an old Vera Hall song and
she recorded all her songs, I believe, from what I
remember, were just a cappella pieces. In other
words, they were just moans that she sang that were
unaccompanied and so that song ‘Wild Ox Moan’ is Vera Hall
one of those pieces from her and that song's been in
my head since I was a kid, and I always loved it. I thought someday I'm going to record that
song and then when I kind of started making a version of it, the slide guitar came in as sort of
a second voice that was sort of singing harmony with me.