Charlie Parr

Charlie Parr was born in Austin, Minnesota, in 1967, spent part of his childhood in Hollandale and got his music career moving in Duluth, and his records carry that northern chill in their bones. This is country blues from a man whose guiding lights are the old masters: Charlie Patton, Bukka White, Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt and Dave Van Ronk, plus the guy he calls his hero, Spider John Koerner.

His toolkit is gloriously rickety: a Mule resonator, a National, a banjo with no frets and an open back, and a twelve-string, usually worked in the rolling Piedmont style, with a voice that sounds like it's been left out in the weather. From Jubilee through Stumpjumper, Dog, Last of the Better Days Ahead and Little Sun, he has kept the songs plain-spoken and the picking restless, and "817 Oakland Avenue" is as good a way in as any.

The music has wandered further than you'd guess. "1922" landed in a Vodafone TV spot in Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, which got the album of the same name reissued in Australia on a Melbourne label, and he toured Australia with Paul Kelly in 2009. Several of his songs turn up in the Australian film Red Hill, which rolls its end credits over "Just Like Today". And before Koerner died in 2024, he handed Parr his 12-string Gretsch and asked him to keep playing it on stage: about as clear a passing of the torch as folk music gets.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.