Tucson blues guitarist honors Big Jim Griffith with show

Around this time last year, Tucson blues guitar phenom Roman Barten-Sherman played a show at the MSA Annex as he set his sights on school on the East Coast.

He’s back at the annex for a follow-up show on Friday, Aug. 19, with his longtime collaborators Tom Walbank and Ralph White.

But “Future Blues” will show a side of the 19-year-old Tucson native that many of us have never seen when he digs deep into the vault of field recordings by the late Tucson folklorist and Tucson Meet Yourself founder Big Jim Griffith.

“I have this blank canvas that I get the pleasure of filling with all sorts of different strange and beautiful folk music,” Barten-Sherman said last week, days after returning to Tucson from the Port Townsend Acoustic Blues workshop in Washington State. “There’s going to be a bunch of blues going on, but a bunch of Appalachian mountain music and recordings I’ve been working on with Big Jim Griffith from the ‘70s and ‘80s.”

Barten-Sherman spent a year during the pandemic working with the University of Arizona Special Collections Archive to digitize Griffith’s collection of at least 35 quarter-inch reel-to-reel field recordings. The rare recordings, each with between five and 15 songs, date back decades.

“Everywhere he went he had a recorder in hand,” Barten-Sherman said.

Among the musicians Griffith recorded was West Virginia banjo player Bill Hensley, who came to Tucson in the early 1970s. Griffith made the Hensley recordings from the late 1970s to early ‘80s, Barten-Sherman said, and some of them, with the blessing of Hensley’s son, Bill Hensley Jr., are expected to be released this month by the Field Recorders Collective, a nonprofit organization that preserves and distributes non-commercial recordings of traditional American music.

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“That’s incredibly exciting to see (the recordings) finally on the precipice of being in the hands of people who will enjoy it and learn from it,” Barten-Sherman said.

“Future Blues” will feature Barten-Sherman playing guitar and banjo — an instrument he picked up during his time with Griffith — and performing old-timey songs from Griffith’s recordings. These are songs that the college sophomore, who is in a dual degree program at Tufts University and the neighboring New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, studied throughout his nearly 18 months with Griffith.

“Anytime I brought him some little banjo tune that one could see as so insignificant or small in the scope of how much stuff is out there, he would always find a way to connect it to a thousand other things and really put it in the context of human beings and geography and community,” Barten-Sherman said. “Every time I visited I would always come away with a beautiful laundry list of other rabbits to chase after. … Through that process, he taught me so much about playing the banjo and so much about the voice.”

In some ways, “Future Blues” is a tribute to Griffith, who died in December at the age of 86. Barten-Sherman, who made his debut in April at the legendary MerleFest roots festival in North Carolina, will share some of Griffith’s stories about the connectiveness of music, how blues and folk have commonalities that go beyond similar instruments and styles to a deeper historical connection. Expect to hear Mississippi Hill Country blues that he learned from one of his longtime mentors Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, and Southern Appalachian murder ballads alongside folk music that recalls the past and projects the future.

“I really want to take risks with this show when it comes to the scope of where I will be drawing from,” he said. “I want to explore my own role as an interpreter of these different traditions that is coming from a different place. I’m coming from a very different south.”