| |
|
|
 She sounds like she might have been born a coal miner’s daughter in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, or maybe grown up next door to her daddy’s blacksmith forge outside Winchester, Virginia. But while Zoe Muth (pronounced Mewth) has the authentic honky tonk angel aura of Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline in her voice, she’s the woman who is helping to turn Seattle, Washington, from the capital of grunge into a north-west heartland of purest Americana.
Zoe’s songs about cold-hearted beaux, faithless love and her own ability to serially pick the ones who swear they won’t but always wind up making her blue, follow in the classic country tradition and her band of top notch pickers - The Lost High Rollers - including mandolinist Ethan Lawton, pedal steel guitarist and dobro boss Dave Harmonson and banjo man Jason Stewart, frame every story with suitably sobbing lines, tough-as-nails vigour and a rockin’ bar-room beat.
She started teaching herself to play the guitar in high school, found role models in Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie and graduated to include influences such as Texas country-blues poet Townes Van Zandt, from whose song No Lonesome Tune she appropriated her backing band’s name.
By the early noughties she was singing in the better bars along Ballard Avenue, Seattle’s equivalent of Austin, Texas’s main drag, and she’s now progressed to scoring lyrical bulls-eyes, offering the lovesick solace with 24-carat country style and transporting them back to a time when classic voices delivered the classic songs.
The debut album, Zoe Muth and The Lost High Rollers was greeted like good ole blue collar manna by country music fans who had grown tired of having their odes to heartbreak popified and their tales of crying tears into beers click-tracked to anaemic perfection. On its release, the CD shot straight to the Number 1 position on the hugely-influential FAR Chart, indicating coast-to-coast acknowledgement of something great.
No surprise as Zoe’s the real-deal, shooting from the hip and delivering country aces from a straight deck. |
|
Copyright © Brookfield Knights 2010 - Site by Dialogue Web Design Edinburgh
