Charlie Parr interview: “Ten-hour drives are not pleasant, but my reward is getting to play the guitar”

It started when he was six. That’s when Charlie Parr first heard a Mance Lipscomb record and everything changed. Fifty years later, with over 17 impeccable country blues albums now to his credit, he’s still following the path that childhood epiphany laid out.

The LP was Lipscomb’s 1960 debut Texas Songster, one of a stack Parr’s dad had left to play through on his record player’s autochanger. “I remember hearing Johnny Horton – ‘The Battle of New Orlean’s,” Parr tells me. “I remember the clunk of the next record coming down, and it was Mance Lipscomb. I remember thinking, ‘This is heavier than anything I’ve ever heard.’ That whole record was astounding to me.”

He played the disc again and again till his parents begged for a break; he got his first guitar at eight and learned his way around it by copying Lipscomb. Next in his education came Lightnin’ Hopkins, then his town library’s copy of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Pretty soon, he was a decent guitarist – and then a very good one. When he hit 35, he quit his day job as an outreach worker for the homeless and began taking every gig he could find.

For over two decades now, Parr’s been playing a steady schedule of roughly 200 shows a year, undertaking epic drives from one venue to the next in a beat-up old minivan with the rear seats ripped out and an old mattress in the back. When he can snatch a few hours’ sleep, it’s in a truck stop’s parking lot where he hopes the natives will be friendly. It’s not an easy life, but he wouldn’t have it any other way. “This is what I wanted,” he points out. “Sure, ten-hour drives are not pleasant, but my reward is getting to play the guitar. Performance is something that I value very highly.”

He’ll have an extra task at his coming UK gigs, retooling the new record’s full-band arrangements for just him and percussionist Mikkel Beckman. It’s a job Parr relishes, though. “I love that process,” he says. “For me, songs are never done. When I play a show, I want to be fully present. And the way I do that is by constantly taking stuff apart and reassembling it. Mikkel and I are interpreting these new songs – not quite band and not quite solo. It sounds like a two-person jug band.”

“I enjoy coming to the UK a lot – I feel welcomed there. I think the people who are into the kind of thing that I do have a bond over all the countries that I play. Once you sit down on stage and you get to touch those strings, geography goes away…. If it ever stops being like that that’s when I’ll start worrying.”

Charlie Parr begins his UK tour on September 20. His new album, Little Sun, is out now on Smithsonian Folkways

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue, read the magazine online – subscribe today: magsubscriptions.com