On a long, hot Sunday afternoon, there can’t be many places better to be than at one of the most laid-back of festivals, Folk by the Oak, which is held in the grounds of Hatfield House. Seasick Steve was the penultimate performer on the main stage, and he strolled on as the heat of the day was fading and the sun settling down towards the tree line. The Folk by the Oak main stage had already had a prominent drum kit and a comfortable-looking wooden chair wheeled onto it, in preparation for one of the most distinctive of blues duos; Seasick Steve on a range of musical instruments that come under a general guitar label, even if they may be short a string or five, and drummer Dan Magnusson on wild and powerful percussion. Things got underway, though, with Steve solo on a fairly regular acoustic guitar, opening with a leading question, “This is a folk festival, right?” adding that he should probably play some folk, before playing the uncharacteristically gentle Matilda In Ottawa, a yearning love song that could have walked right off a Sixties folk album, it’s actually from Steve’s latest upcoming release.
Switching to a cigar box guitar, and with Dan now on the drums, the tempo switched dramatically up with the stompin’, crowd-pleasing Don’t Know Why She Love Me But She Do taking the set into the kind of raw blues that Seasick Steve is known for. It also heralded something else that has become part of his gigs: a different guitar for every song, a significant number of them of the home-made variety.
There was more stomp on Self Sufficient Man, an anthem for independence that leans into a rough and ready Chicago electric blues, drawing somewhat of a line back to Mannish Boy, and full of swaggering bravado in its insistence that all nay-sayers should “say it to my face next time we meet“.
There followed the crowd-pleasing Diddly Bo, which sounds like a variation on the classic Bo Diddley riff and is played on the simplest of lap guitars, exactly as the song describes it’s just a plank, a couple of nails and a wire. Seasick Steve plays it with an old screwdriver “just because“. It’s amusing, but it also has a real message that it is possible to make a more than pleasing racket with the simplest of instruments and a whole lot of enthusiasm. Music making for the masses, well, here’s the solution: it’s not all about $3000 guitars.
There’s another side to Steve, though, as well as the unbridled enthusiasm for his music and his back-to-basics instruments, and that’s his penchant for storytelling: go back far enough and these used to revolve around his hoboing and train hopping, but things have evolved, and the introduction to Hobo Low is more of a roughly worded appreciation for his drummer. As Seasick tells it, one of the biggest of his early gigs, an appearance at the Royal Albert Hall, he cannot recall after the point of going on stage – but his own awe at the room was, if anything, overshadowed by his amazement that Dan could make the gig having recently undergone major surgery. He then adds that by rights he shouldn’t be at this festival either as he’s had another major health issue. Dan stays silent, and lets his drumming indicate whether or not he was up for the performance.
Next up was a different kind of story, one about a journey that Steve and his wife took driving across America: it was meant to be a wonderful homecoming, but instead they encountered endless scenes of poverty and billboards screaming about Trump and Anti-Abortion sloganeering. As Steve succinctly put it, he finally concluded, “My America has gone to the shitter.” They ended up in New Orleans in a bar in the jazz quarter; there were great players and two very straight-looking trombonists turned up and, although it looked doubtful that they’d cut the mustard, they were invited to play. Very long story short, they blew the room away, but the band leader had asked, when he discovered they were Belgian, if they’d “come to see the last season of America.” And that is how the new album got christened, and the title song was Steve softly singing a melancholic lament for the country he loves and the terminal decline that he sees it going into. There are a lot of songs on a lot of albums, but, as atypical as it might be, this might also be the finest song Seasick Steve has produced. And it was almost as if he didn’t want to leave the song behind as it ended, as he repeated the singing of the final refrain “it’s the last season of America / and we’ll never watch again the show that we love / And there’ll be no re-runs all the sponsors have gone / They’re shutting the whole thing down – all that’s left is the theme song.” Truly moving.
Ever the deft showman, Seasick Steve tempered that seriousness with a pivot to the lighter Summertime Boy and followed this up with Walking Man, including the pulling from the audience of a young lady to sing this love song directly to. Being a shorter-than-normal set length, there was a final flurry of stomping blues to ensure that everything ended on a high, including the appearance of a number plate fronted 4-string cigar box guitar and the ever popular Morris Minor hubcaps and a broom handle guitar. Even after he ran out of time, Seasick Steve was still giving; wandering down to the front of the audience, shaking hands, signing cigar box guitars and papers. And this is why Seasick Steve retains such a faithful following; he’s committed to the music, conveying genuine excitement with every fuzzed-out note; he spins stories which may have some exaggeration in them, but he tells them well; he’s a crowd pleaser with his handmade Frankenstein instruments, and then as far as possible he breaks down the barrier between stage and audience. On top of all that, he can also throw into the mix the occasional beautiful love song or thoughtful assessment of the state of the world. A many-trick pony.
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