Basically a bluesman, Gaskins covers other musical styles as well. His tendency is to a diversity of genres, an 'American-fusion' of sorts...
Thirty years ago when the heat of youth combined with the energy and declarative power of his style, Gaskins "coulda been a contendah". To make up for lost time, he now has three CD's out, ("Hughmanity", "Motel Angels", and "Back On Track"), making up for a fraction of a music life expressed mostly in the obscurity of dives and bars during cracks in the routine of a work-a-day daddy. The good side and the smoky side of this kind of music life (music in the cracks) is that the power and energy can not be contained forever and will break out because of, and in spite of the blues of it all.
"Yeah, I've got a CD now, twenty years after. Meanwhile, I just talked to an eleven year old kid the other day who is on his third CD. It's the era of personalized music CD's. They're like cell phones and everybody seems to have one. But, if nothing else there's an energy and undertow here, especially in the blues based stuff, which you should hear straight off."
"Hughmanity (The Blues Alone)" - Gaskins is alone and low-tech, on acoustic guitar, acoustic bottle neck slide, harmonica, electric lead guitar, ("with no effects other than reverb, all you would have gotten out of a little Kay amp forty years ago!"). This stuff is a fusion of blues styles with rockabilly and mountain music influences thrown in and a return to early influences such as gospel, Elvis, John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, Big Joe Williams etc. The other recording, "Motel Angels", is a melding of these influences with country, "Cal-Mex" and other sounds that came in between.
On Influences and Impressions - "My earliest memory is of singing 'Just a Little Talk with Jesus' in the front of the congregation of The Faith Tabernacle, a little church on what was then a country highway in New Bern, North Carolina. I remember being in a pew with my Grandma, a mother of fourteen (who is almost one hundred years old today) clapping and singing these gospel tunes. Now throw in Elvis on a black and white TV, an uncle or two singing somethin' about 'big legged woman, big legged woman put your dress tail down' or 'a wreck on the highway', my mom and dad singing behind the glass in some little radio station in the sticks, and these are some of the earliest musical impressions that come to me right off."
"Later, some of my family - cousins, aunts and uncles - stuffed in old Fords and Chevys, migrated 3,000 miles across the country to California. It was somewhere there, I guess, that the "Cal-Mex" thing (as opposed to Tex-Mex) filtered through on the wide band radio. It came not like the country blues, which came almost like memory, but like an immediate attraction - drifting in like a hot breeze in the night, through the open windows of a car on a desert highway. In the early 70's I played the bars in Mission Beach and all the free jams I could find down the beach alleys. Bare backed guys in faded blue jeans danced on the rooftops surrounding blocked off alleys while beach sunsets silhouetted and shone through the loose granny dresses of young women shakin' the shingles down!"
On who is listening - "Surprisingly for me, it's not my own generation necessarily. The people who approach me and respond to what I'm doing in the clubs now are in their early to late twenties. I find them open, generous and gracious in ways my own generation was not. Anybody over thirty was suspect with us, (we cut off whole worlds that way).
On American Fusion - "It happens whether you want it to or not, chosen or unchosen, and it's the best thing this country does - a fusion of diverse cultures. Like it or not, it goes on and is most obvious in the music: jazz, blues, gospel, cajun, zydeco, Tex-Mex, bluegrass, C&W, rockabilly, and an endless list of others. It just goes on. Along these lines nothing represents this idea better than the sight and sound of a young Elvis. I say young because that's when the black and the white of the man was still good and confused, mixed up in a way that could make you whole."
Currently – In addition to maintaining a busy solo performance schedule, often accompanied by an 89 year-old percussionist who goes by "Soulman", Hugh joined forces with bass man Charlie Gordon and drummer Dan Renwick to form The Hugh Gaskins Band in early 2006. In August 2007 the band was renamed Hugh Gaskins and the G String Daddies. They are frequently joined by Steve Piccus (who is also an internationally acclaimed hypno-therapist) on the "electric harmonica".
Gordon's jazz sensibilities and Renwick's rock background bleed into the Gaskins mix to produce a tight, crisp sound, but with a feel and musicality that moves and breathes. They cover a broad cut of the musical spectrum, and though they do a lot of Gaskins originals, no one is safe from having their work covered with the GSD stamp firmly affixed. From Johnny Cash to Woody Guthrie, B.B King to Grand Funk Railroad and a whole bunch in between, the band coalesces around the essence of a song, but often takes it on a little ride to a different part of town...
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