Carnival of Soul

“It was one of those things where I didn’t really understand my place in the world until I started playing guitar,” the Rev. Peyton reflects on his musical beginnings.

Peyton picked up the guitar as a preteen and within two months was playing lead guitar for some of the bands at the high school — before he was 13. Then he started taking lessons.

“I just took to it so quick.”

And now the musician confidently states if it’s got strings, he can probably pick it — which he demonstrates in a YouTube video where he performs one song on 18 different instruments. (You can search “Rev. Peyton plays 18 instruments.”) He doesn’t travel with quite that many for shows with his country blues group Big Damn Band, but audiences like the one on Sept. 26 at The Blue Lion in Fort Smith will get to experience Peyton’s talent on a medley of devices.

“I rotate them out so they can be weird, almost like folk art instruments like axes and cigar box guitars and vintage stuff like Harmonies and Kays and Supros — and of course my National guitars, I’ve always got to have at least one resonator with me,” he explains.

The group saves room on their travels by having only three members in the “big” band. The bass player is his thumb, Peyton jokes, so it leaves plenty of space for his plethora of guitars and string instruments.

“That style where you’re playing two things on the guitar at once, I just have always been drawn to that,” he shares. “I think it’s incredible. It’s one of the most amazing styles of American guitar picking, and it’s early.

“Another thing about it that really drew me to it, when you go back to those early blues, there’s fewer rules,” Peyton says of tracing the musical roots back to players like Charley Patton and Fred McDowell who sparked his interest. “It’s less about 12-bar shuffles with turnarounds. It’s one-chord boogies; it’s very deep, anxious scales. And also the stories are of rural people. Being a rural, American guy myself, that kind of storytelling always spoke to me a little bit more.”

From there, Peyton says, he built his music on all styles of American country blues — from the Delta to Piedmont to Appalachia, his self-proclaimed brand of “front porch blues” is a blend of it all.

“And I try to take it to new places and create new melodies and new songs that I think speak in a timeless way to people now, but hopefully could speak to people in any era,” Peyton says. “Real, handmade music that’s from the heart, I don’t think it will ever go out of style. I don’t think it has a genre, and I don’t think it has a shelf life. So that’s what I try to do.”

NAN What’s Up on 09/22/2019