“We can play a country church in Mississippi, or we can draw a crowd at a hipster club in Brooklyn. We connect with a wide-ranging audience,” says veteran musician Walter Parks, speaking of the music on his debut LP album, The Unlawful Assembly (out via Atomic Sound). “The joy, gratitude, pain and yearning in these songs is universally felt.”
After studying guitar under jazz guitarist Robert Conti, Parks was a sideman to the legendary Richie Havens for 10 years. He was part of a folk duo called The Nudes, with cellist Stephanie Winters, and has been part of an on-again, off-again band for several years now, called Swamp Cabbage. Parks is known for his swampy style and gravelly vocals, as well as being an astute music historian. In 2020, he was invited by The Library of Congress to archive his research on and perform his arrangements of music made by homesteaders in the Okefenokee Swamp. Now living in St. Louis, MO, Parks originally grew up in Northeast Florida (or what he calls “the Georgia part of Florida”). “That was during the Woodstock era, and in spite of the peace and love aspects of that movement, I was bullied for being tall, skinny, short-haired, and also playing the ‘very uncool’ viola,” says Parks.
During the pandemic, Parks dove deep into hymns and spirituals. Parks regards spirituals as a common denominator – an undeniable sonic glue born out of the bonds of slavery, now binding us all together for the common good as reimagined by The Unlawful Assembly, with collaborator/drummer/producer Steven Williams, Ada Dyer on vocals, Paul Frazier on bass, Michael Bellar on organ, and Andrae Murchison on trombone.
When I was first approached with the opportunity to interview Parks, I was backed up with grad school work and work work. So I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Parks’ publicist, Bobby Cleveland for conducting the interview for me — and to both Bobby and Walter for their patience as I found a lull in the semester to transcribe the interview. Any errors here are mine.
Tell us about your favorite show you’ve ever played.
I mean, you know, there are many! One of the most meaningful shows I ever played was playing with Richie Havens at Madison Square Garden. I realized how much power one or two performers have. When you’re sitting in a huge arena like that, and the arena is packed, it’s a matter of how you connect with them and not necessarily how big you connect with them.
And at one point, we were singing the song “Freedom,” and mind you, we only have one song to do. It was a big celebration for Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday, and I knew in that moment that it was going to be a very, very important moment of my life. And I was really taking it in.
And at one point, Richie stopped singing for a moment and was getting the whole arena clapping. Now, mind you, we were two people on stools. We didn’t have a huge band, no drummer. It was just two acoustic guitar players. And I was Richie’s I had some minor technical issues during that show.
After the show, I was so unhappy with, with my role in it. And then I saw a video of the show on PBS, and you wouldn’t even know that there was any problems. So what I did in that moment is I got all sidetracked by all this technical stuff! And I forgot the importance of honoring Pete Seeger and honoring the guy that I was playing with: Richie Havens.
I learned that the audience wants you to win. Since then, whenever I’ve had any kind of a technical, I was like, “it’s not that important.” All of that stuff can be overcome by by just remembering that connection with the audience is what it’s all about.
What are some of the best venues you’ve played other than Madison Square Garden?
There’s a club that’s and I’ve always loved playing at called Skippers down in Tampa, Florida. It’s underneath these huge oak trees and the audience kind of just sits where they can on these wooden benches. So you really feel like you’re in the swamp or something and it’s never comfortable to play there — it’s always hot as hell.
But there’s something about when you play in those situations, it brings you back to the source of the music. You have to say to yourself, the people who made a lot of this music in the old days, it doesn’t matter if they came from the Mississippi Delta, where they came from the fields and in in Louisiana, you know, cutting cane or singing spirituals out in old, old churches, all of the music that influenced me — none of these places were comfortable. So you realign yourself with the purpose of what you’re there for and the source that put you there.
I also love…it’s a log cabin, right outside of Barcelona in Spain, La Traviesa. There’s sand on the floor. Most of my best gigs were played in Spain because the Spanish people, and Europeans in general, will turn out in droves for something that is unknown. They don’t have to have heard about it from some media source before they will accept it. That’s one of my beefs with American audiences is that people, they have to have heard of something before it registers as worth checking out. When I first started playing there, I would play in these places in the middle of nowhere and the like a hundred people that show up or 200 and pack it out.
There’s one other place in Florida that I want to tell you about, called the Bradfordville Blues Club. It is on land owned by a Black family who’ve had it since emancipation. It’s on the old chitlin circuit in Florida. I’ve played in Carnegie Hall and I’ve played in the Bradfordville Blues Club. And, you know, I had more fun at the Bradfordville Blues Club.
This is definitely a very broad, overarching theme throughout the you know, album itself. But how are you using your platform to support marginalized people?
Given the nature of the project, being that I’m taking historically black music, or music that came out of the horrors of the experience of being forced to do labor in the South, my primary concern with this project is improving the relations between Black and white cultures in this country.
One of the things that I love doing is, when I perform in a town, if I can find a youth organization or an inner city organization, that is especially interesting to me and meaningful, that would like to have our band members come and perform a little bit or speak about historic Black music.
Often we get sponsorship from elsewhere so that we can do these concerts in schools and organizations in black communities, we do them free of charge to those communities. I’m constantly trying to do is solicit funds so that I can pay my band members to give these concerts at no charge in these marginalized areas.
What I find time and time again, is that when we get a chance to perform for younger black audiences, most of the time, the young people don’t have any connection or knowledge of historic black roots music, meaning spirituals, work songs, field hollers, even music that inspired gospel music and early ‘70s R&B or something. They are not even aware of it. And the blues of course, blues and jazz. It’s not even a part of their experience. Sometimes gospel will seep through because a lot of folks who were involved in the church, but a lot of times, knowledge of historic black music is just not taught or doesn’t reach them.
It’s a real thrill for me to be able to share some of this music that didn’t come from my culture, being a white man. But it certainly has influenced me because when I was a kid growing up in the early ‘70s, the music that interested me the most was pop and soul music that came directly from gospel and spirituals, meaning Al Green, Stevie Wonder, The Staples Singers, groups like that.
Is there a professional bucket list item that you would love to check off?
Professional bucket list item? Yeah. There are two things. They’re both a little bit silly and they’re certainly not anything that’s going to change the situation of world peace. But I want to do a tour of the great opera houses in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Are you aware that during the, the lumber boom in the early 1900s. Some people in Wisconsin and Minnesota and Michigan, were making tons of money off the timber business, stripping bare these first-growth forests. The people had nothing to do up there. So they had these grand opera houses up there, and they’re still there, these European-style opera houses that don’t really function as opera houses.
The other is something I’ve always wanted to do is I want to play a concert in a bullfight arena in Spain. I want to take the Unlawful Assembly in the same way that Pink Floyd played at Pompei in the old Roman amphitheater.
I hate bull fighting and that’s part of, one of the reasons I want to do it, just to symbolically put a different vibe in those places.
Walter Parks and the Unlawful Assembly’s album is available on all streaming services now.
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