One Man, One Guitar, One Foot in the Grave

The Essential

Charlie Parr

Warmup

First Set Blue Collar Roots My First Love Not What They Wanted to HearWest Bank “See What Happens”

Second Set Guitar Heroes Two Guitars and a BanjoSinging and Stompin’Banter Song Writing Recording Collaborations

Third Set DiscographyTours and PerformancesSpecial Projects

Fourth Set Lyrics

Encore

Set List

Hi, I’m Charlie Parr, a self-confessed failure and modest to a fault, I’m nonetheless stubborn enough not to quit. I released my first record-ing, Criminals & Sinners, to mild local acclaim in 2001. In any case, since that first recording, I’ve man-aged to release eight additional raw, lo-fi albums right up to the latest, Barnswallow, and perhaps my best-known, 1922.

I’m amazed at my amount of success for a folk-singer and songwriter of my untrained abilities. This might be attributable to my all-encompass-ing and encyclopedic knowledge of the American folk, country and blues cannon, and self-taught guitar playing that includes a mix of slide, finger-picking and quasifrailing technique, played on National reso-nator guitar, 12-string and banjo.

I’ve travelled throughout the US, Aus-tralia, the UK and Europe playing every-where from fancy theatres to punk rock dives where the toilet seats are always missing. Folks seem to like me just fine, in spite of my less than heroic efforts at self-promotion, etiquette or hygiene.

I seem to be comfortable only when playing my guitar or sitting quietly star-ing into space. This all started years ago when my dad traded a perfectly good John-son 9.9 outboard motor for a guitar in an effort to en-gage me, age seven, in some constructive activity.

These days I travel more than ever, cooking modest meals on the exhaust manifold of my mini-van and sleeping in rest areas, listening to digitized blues re-cords from the 1920s and overcoming personal de-mons.

I’m still as stubborn, bull-headed and obstinate as I was at seven years of age, wrestling with a Gibson 12-string and fishing from the dock.

There may be hope for us all.Charlie

Sorry, Charlie. We think you’re anything but boring. And we’ve created this book to

prove it. Read on!

SET ONE

Blue Collar RootsCharlie’s inspiration is drawn from the alter-nately fertile and frozen soil of Minnesota. Parr grew up in the Hormel company city of Austin, Minnesota (population 25,000) where most of the world’s favorite tinned meat, Spam, is still manu-factured.

The combination of industrial meat factory where both of his parents worked proud union jobs, set in a largely rural environment, had a broad impact on Parr. “Every morning you’d hear the [factory] whistles blow, when I was a kid they had the stockyards and animals there, so you were surrounded by this atmosphere,” Parr says. “My mom and dad would come home from work, their smocks would be covered by paprika and gore.”

But out the back door were soybean fields, as far as they eye could see. “As a kid I thought it was kind of boring, but now I go and visit my mom and I think it’s the most beautiful landscape there is.”

What leisure time was available was spent at an uncle’s farm a few miles away in Hollandale, where Charlie would pick the potatoes and other crops that would feed their families. Charlie’s father and uncle would buy whole cows from a lo-cal cattle farm. The family rarely ate Spam.

Charlie’s father grew up on a tenant farm in northern Iowa with 17 sib-lings and rode out the Great Depression on freight cars. He rode them to Appalachia and Texas and every other corner of the country. He finally settled into a job shoveling ani-mal parts at the Hormel plant in Austin, where he got active in the union and met his wife.

The job cost Parr’s father two rota-tor cuffs and literally broke his back. He quit just before the long and tumultuous strike of 1985, but volun-teered at the union hall until lung cancer took him in 1995. Parr’s mother stayed through the strike but refused to return when the strike ended, disgusted with its resolution. She and her daughter live in Austin, and Charlie visits them as often as he can.