From the days of playing greasy local juke joints to headlining major festivals, JJ Grey
remains an unfettered, blissful performer, singing like a blue-collar angel over the
bone-deep grooves of his compositions. His presence before an audience is
something startling and immediate, at times a funk rave-up, other times a sort of massabsolution
for the mortal weaknesses that make him and his audience human. When
you see JJ Grey and his band Mofro live—and you truly, absolutely must—the man is
fearless.
Onstage, Grey delivers his songs with compassion and a relentless honesty, but
perhaps not until Ol’ Glory has a studio record captured the fierceness and intimacy
that defines a Grey live performance. “I wanted that crucial lived-in feel,” Grey says of
Ol’ Glory, and here he hits his mark. On the new album, Grey and the current Mofro
lineup (Anthony Cole on drums; Andrew Trube on guitar; Anthony Farrell on organ;
Todd Smallie on bass; Dennis Marion on trumpet; Jeff Dazey on saxophone) offer
grace and groove in equal measure, with an easygoing quality to the production that
makes those beautiful muscular drum-breaks sound as though the band has set up in
your living room.
Despite a redoubtable stage presence, Grey does get performance anxiety—
specifically, when he's suspended 50 feet above the soil of his pecan grove, clearing
moss from the upper trees.
“The tops of the trees are even worse,” he laughs, “say closer to 70, maybe even 80
feet. I'm not phobic about heights, but I don't think anyone's crazy about getting up in a
bucket and swinging all around. I wanted to fertilize this year but didn't get a chance.
This February I will, about two tons—to feed the trees.”
When he isn't touring with Mofro, Grey exerts his prodigious energies on the family
land, a former chicken-farm that was run by his maternal grandmother and
grandfather. The farm boasts a recording studio, a warehouse that doubles as Grey's
gym, an open-air barn, and of course those 50-odd pecan trees that occasionally
require Grey to go airborne with his sprayer.
For devoted listeners, there is something fitting, even affirmative in Grey's commitment
to the land of his north Florida home.
The farms and eddying swamps of his youth are as much a part of Grey's music as the
Louisiana swamp-blues tradition, or the singer's collection of old Stax records.
As a boy, Grey was drawn to country-rockers, including Jerry Reed, and to Otis
Redding and the other luminaries of Memphis soul; Run-D.M.C., meanwhile, played
on repeat in the parking lot of his high school (note the hip-hop inflections on “A Night
to Remember”). Merging these traditions, and working with a blue-collar ethic that
brooked no bullshit, Grey began touring as Mofro in the late '90s, with backbeats that
crossed Steve Cropper with George Clinton and a lyrical directness that made the
group's debut LP Blackwater (2001) a calling-card among roots-rock aficionados.
Soon, the group was expanding its tours beyond America and the U.K., playing everlarger
clubs and eventually massive festivals, as Mofro's fan base grew from a modest
group of loyal initiates into something resembling a national coalition. Grey's manager
describes the musician as “a preacher who never found the church.” These concerts,
perhaps, are the next best thing.
Grey takes no shortcuts on the homestead, and he certainly takes no shortcuts in his
music. While he has a few near-perfect albums under his belt—Country Ghetto and
Orange Blossoms are just masterpieces—on his new album, Ol’ Glory, he spent more
time than ever working over the new material. A hip-shooting, off-the-cuff performer
(often his first vocal takes end up pleasing him best), Grey was able to stretch his legs
a bit while constructing the lyrics and vocal lines to Ol’ Glory.
“I would visit it much more often in my mind, visit it more often on the guitar in my
house,” Grey says. “I like an album to have a balance, like a novel or like a film. A
triumph, a dark brooding moment, or a moment of peace—that's the only thing I
consistently try to achieve with a record.”
Grey has been living this balance throughout his career, and Ol’ Glory is a beautifully
paced little film. On “The Island,” Grey sounds like Coleridge on a happy day: “All
beneath the canopy / of ageless oaks whose secrets keep / Forever in her beauty /
This island is my home.” “A Night to Remember” finds the singer in first-rate swagger:
“I flipped up my collar ah man / I went ahead and put on my best James Dean / and
you'd a thought I was Clark Gable squinting through that smoke.” And “Turn Loose”
has Grey in fast-rhyme mode in keeping with the song's title: “You work a stride /
curbside thumbing a ride / on Lane Avenue / While your kids be on their knees /
praying Jesus please.” From the profane to the sacred, the sly to the sublime, Grey
feels out his range as a songwriter with ever-greater assurance.
The mood and drive of Ol’ Glory are testament to this achievement. The album ranks
with Grey and Mofro's very best work; among other things, the secret spirituality of his
music is perhaps more accessible here than ever before. On “Everything Is a Song,”
he sings of “the joy with no opposite,” a sacred state that Grey describes to me:
“It can happen to anybody: you sit still and you feel things tingling around you,
everything's alive around you, and in that a smile comes on your face involuntarily,
and in that I felt no opposite.
It has no part of the play of good and bad or of comedy or tragedy. I know it’s just a
play on words but it feels like more than just being happy because you got what you
wanted — this is a joy. A joy that doesn’t get involved one way or the next; it just is.”
Grey's most treasured albums include Otis Redding's In Person at the Whisky a Go
Go and Jerry Reed's greatest hits, and the singer once told me that he grew up
“wanting to be Jerry Reed but with less of a country, more of a soul thing.” With Ol’
Glory, Grey does his idols proud. It's a country record where the stories are all part of
one great mystery; it's a blues record with one foot in the church; it's a Memphis soul
record that takes place in the country.
In short, Ol’ Glory is that most singular thing, a record by JJ Grey—the north Florida
sage and soul-bent swamp rocker.