Swell Productions :: Sacramento, CA :: Eric Bibb String Band

Eric Bibb
Like his friends and collaborators, Taj Mahal, Bonnie Raitt and Keb Mo', Eric Bibb lives at the intersection of blues, folk and gospel. He just won the 2012 Blues Music Award for Best Acoustic Artist. A four-decade career, 35 albums, countless radio and television shows and non-stop international touring have given Eric Bibb a world view that's tempered by curiosity and compassion, and the ability to see himself in other peoples' shoes.

Gotta help one another
Like the ol' folks used to do
A hand is on the gate
Let a brother walk through
- Eric Bibb

The new album offers the spirit of hope and optimism in difficult times, in a friendly, warm-hearted and generous manner. To find your way though these darker days, he seems to say, you have to dig - as the album title says - "Deeper in the Well."
Eric Bibb's father, Leon Bibb, certainly helped his son dig a little deeper. An acclaimed singer in stage musicals and a senior figure on the New York folk scene of the 1960s, Leon gave his son his first guitar when he was seven, and introduced him to a who's-who of musical icons. Eric's godfather was actor singer and activist Paul Robeson; his uncle was jazz pianist and composer John Lewis. Family friends included Odetta, Pete Seeger and Josh White.

A professional player at 16, playing in the house band for his father's television talent show, Something New, Eric went on to study (psychology and Russian) at Columbia University, but "after a while it just didn't make much sense; I didn't understand why I was at this Ivy League school with all these kids who didn't know anything about what I knew about," he says now. Aged 19, he left for Paris, where a meeting with American studio guitarist Mickey Baker focused his interest in blues guitar.

A few years later he moved to Sweden and settled in Stockholm, where he found a creative environment that, oddly, reminded him of his teenage days in Greenwich Village. He made a handful of albums, starting in 1972, and began meeting and playing with local musicians as well as newcomers from all over the world. He laughs: "There was a budding world music scene going on, long before it became a marketing concept."

His breakthrough album, Good Stuff, was released in 1997 and led to Eric signing to a British label, which in turn released Me to You, featuring appearances from some of his personal heroes, among them Pops and Mavis Staples and Taj Mahal.

The album furthered Bibb's international reputation and was followed by tours of the UK, the United States, Canada, France, Sweden and Germany. And so it went through the 90s and the first decade of the new century - he made consistently good records, and built audiences from Stockholm to Sydney, Vancouver to Vienna, Paris to Peoria, New Orleans to Newcastle, and from B.B. King's club in New York to the Bluebird Café in Nashville.

Over the course of many album releases over the intervening years Bibb has been nominated for multiple Blues Music Awards in several categories. In addition to the Grammy-nominated Shakin' a Tailfeather children's album (with Taj Mahal and Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir), other noted albums included Friends, which featured Odetta, Charlie Musselwhite, Guy Davis and Mahal as special guests. Two collaborations with his father (who lives in Vancouver) were A Family Affair and Praising Peace: A Tribute to Paul Robeson, which Stony Plain released in 2006. In 2010 Booker's Guitar, a tribute to blues pioneer Bukka White, on which he played White's steel-bodied National guitar.

See Eric's hit: "Don't Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down"

Dirk Powell
He's considered one of the world's leading experts on traditional Appalachian fiddle and banjo styles, along with carrying on the traditions of his late and legendary father-in-law Dewey Balfa as the accordion player in the Cajun group Balfa Toujours. But fiddler/banjo player/accordionist Dirk Powell first started playing music in the classical style. The future "Renaissance Mountain Man" started piano lessons at the age of eight, and by the age of ten he had moved on to the harpsichord. It was his grandfather in Ashland, Kentucky who first exposed Powell to Appalachian music and his own mountain heritage. Powell started playing mountain music professionally and felt that it shared the spirit and energy of the Cajun sound he was beginning to love. It was at a 1989 festival in West Virginia that he first met and played with Louisiana music royalty Dewey Balfa, a musician whose performance left Powell "captivated." When Balfa passed away in 1992, Powell joined Balfa's daughters, Nelda and Christine (Powell would later marry Christine) and formed Balfa Toujours. The band would go on to record five albums for Swallow and Rounder.

In 1994, Powell won the annual Mulate's Accordion Contest and started teaching accordion at home and abroad. He released two instructional videos on Cajun accordion, but he also started to refocus on the banjo and fiddle, releasing his solo 1996 Rounder debut, If I Go Ten Thousand Miles. Hand Me Down followed in 1999. In 2004, he issued Time Again on Rounder. His music has been featured in many films. His banjo playing in Spike Lee's satire, Bamboozled and The Brothers McMullen; his fiddle playing in Riverdance: The Show, and he appeared in the BBC documentary The Irish Empire, discussing Irish immigrant culture in the Appalachian Mountains in the 1700s. He scored the documentary Stevie, worked with with T-Bone Burnett on
the Cold Mountain score and Jewel on Ride With the Devil. Dirk collaborated heavily with Marco Beltrami on the score to the 2009 Louisiana-filmed adaptation of James Lee Burke's novel, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead.

Cedric Watson
Watson is a Creole artist from southern Louisiana who plays the fiddle and accordion. He made his full-length solo debut in 2008 with the Grammy-nominated album Cedric Watson, after establishing himself a few years earlier in collaboration with the Wilson Savoy's Pine Leaf Boys, Corey Ledet and several other acclaimed heritage players. Born in 1983, Watson grew up in Sealy, TX, and later moved to Lafayette, LA, where he found a musical scene befitting his talents. He made his commercial recording debut in 2004 on the album L'Autre Bord de l'Eau by the Savoy-Michot Cajun Band. The critically acclaimed album earned the Savoy-Michot Cajun Band praise from Offbeat magazine, which gave them its award for Best Emerging Cajun Band of 2004. In the wake of this acclaim, bandleader Wilson Savoy (accordion, fiddle, vocals) and Watson teamed up in a new Cajun band, the Pine Leaf Boys, who made their album debut in 2006 with La Musique on Arhoolie Records. The second Pine Leaf Boys album, Blues de Musicien (2007), was nominated for a Grammy Award. Watson left the band at this point and embarked on a solo career. He made his full-length solo debut in 2008 with the Grammy-nominated eponymous album. His second album, the likewise Grammy-nominated L' Esprit Creole (2009), features his backing band Bijou Creole. Watson headlined Alliance Française of Sacramento's 2010 Festival of Louisiana and Canadian French Culture.