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Silver Bluff Estates
$9.99
2007
BUY NOW
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When looking at the life and career of Jeep Rosenberg, what comes to mind is the Johnny Cash song “I’ve Been Everywhere.” Many people have sung that song – but Jeep has lived it, and with it has come the wisdom and knowledge that informs his music, most recently on his new album, Silver Bluff Estates. The album is a summation of accrued experience in a life of continual musical and personal exploration all over the world, from folk dens to the U.N., from the Army to Austin City Limits.
Born during World War II, Rosenberg spent his formative years in the South, instilling within him an appreciation for the magic and mystery of the region, during a time when music wasn’t just in the air, it was the air. Taking up the guitar at the age of eleven, country artists like Roy Acuff, Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb, and Gene Autry were among his first loves, and his later appreciation of great Southern writers like William Faulkner and Flannery O’ Connor would inform his love of language and poetry; a passion that would take him into far reaching places.
He started in the folk revival venues of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., playing in legendary venues like The Cellar Door and The Main Point, where names like Browne and Springsteen also got their start; he got his MFA in Poetry while studying with John Ashbery and Allen Ginsberg (“Studying with John completely transformed my sense of what is possible through language,” Jeep declares.); he spent the better part of a decade, from 1985-1994, collecting, preserving and sharing the G.I.-written folksongs of the Vietnam War in support of the VN Veterans Oral History Archive, and recorded some of those songs under the name he was known by while serving as Army Special Forces Sergeant, Chuck Rosenberg. The album was released on Flying Fish/Rounder, and Jeep was featured in a special segment of “Austin City Limits” hosted by Kris Kristofferson. The work won him notice and acclaim from writers such as Studs Terkel and publications including the New York Times, Sing Out, Guitar Player and Penthouse.
Perhaps the most colorful tale that encapsulates both Jeep’s devotion to music and the tenacity with which he pursues it, is how he won an National Endowment of the Arts fellowship to apprentice with jazz and blues guitar legend Teddy Bunn, a pre-Charlie Christian guitarist who played with a myriad of jazz artists, including Sidney Bechet and Duke Ellington. Jeep explains, “My finding Teddy was a personally funded, obsessive manhunt. Almost everyone I spoke about Teddy with thought he was dead. It took a couple of years of searching and gaining the confidence of folks who were wondering what the hell I was doing in their neighborhood to finally find him; post-stroke in post-earthquake San Fernando, California.”
A self-described internationalist (“It makes me feel more American,” explains Jeep), for the past 12 years, he worked as a civilian peacekeeper for United Nations missions in Mozambique, Haiti, and Kosovo, earning a treasure trove of musical experience during his various assignments, such as singing old-time country songs as a guest in the wilds of Mongolia, where as Jeep remembers, “Jimmie Rodgers went over the best, but I couldn’t help but notice that there were wolf tracks as big as pancakes a hundred meters away.” He also led a roadhouse combination called the Kosovo Mad Cowhands, featuring a lead singer from Cameroon and a sax player who was a North Tulsa cop. Internationalist indeed.
While in his last two years at the U.N. before he retired last year, Jeep began recording the songs that would comprise his new album, Silver Bluff Estates. Co-produced with Robert Steven Williams (they met at a Jimmie Dale Gilmore songwriting workshop) and engineered by Jon Gordon (Suzanne Vega, Madonna), the album is, according to Jeep, “…a harvesting of everything I’ve learned. They’re songs that have something to say; I think that even a fun song should say something.”
That mindset is evident on songs like “We’re In The World’s Worst Places (For The World’s Best Reasons),” most likely the most illuminating (and occasionally heartbreaking) song ever written about those who commit their lives to the cause of justice and peace, and the wear and tear the mission puts on their lives and families. The wry, poetic heart of “Darling, I Miss You When You’re With Me,” is a slyly funny tale of love gone cold that would make Hank Williams proud. And “Whatever Happened To Mercy?” is a jazz-influenced lament of an indifferent world that retains its dignity amidst a planet of degradations.
Jeep is playing dates in the New York area and is planning New England and Northern Plains tours for the spring of 2008. It’s obvious that for all of his experience, Jeep Rosenberg’s musical story is now entering perhaps its biggest chapter of all; now freed to pursue his music full time, he is pursuing it with a zeal fitting of a man who has lived his whole life just to get back to his true love – words and music, and with the experience of an extraordinary life, he is eager to share it all with his audience.
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