The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band stomps and hollers like nobody else

WHAT HAPPENS IN THE WOODS ... Something about the Rev’s rural blues makes people want to get naked.

Josh “Rev” Peyton can sing and play guitar, and maybe play some harmonica if the mood strikes. His brother Jayme can bang on the drums, or the bucket if that’s more handy. Rev’s wife Washboard Breezy, well, she plays the washboard. It doesn’t sound like much, but when all three family members are on stage making their special brand of rural blues—what a decrepit old-timer in a rocking chair might shake his cane at while yelling, “Quit that confounded racket!”—the Big Damn Band is every bit as large as the name indicates.   

Based in Indianapolis, the trio became full-time touring musicians only within the last few years, when demand for their raucous performances started putting an impossible strain on their day jobs. It wasn’t destined to be a musical life for Rev, however. He grew up in rural Indiana—his father split time making concrete and trapping animal furs—to the sounds of blues-oriented rock, and played guitar from the age of 13. But a strange condition in his hand locked it up, and he had to drop out of music, working in a hotel, barely able to turn a doorknob, much less finger a fret.

“I spent a year and a half trying to fix it,” Rev says, “going to different doctors, and basically ran out of options. Then I met this fella from the Indiana Hand Center who just felt my hand and said he thought he could fix it. But the only way he could tell for sure was to cut my hand open. I said let’s do it.” The surgery was a success, not only restoring his mobility, but granting his hand newfound flexibility that allowed him to play finger-style guitar on a six-string—basically picking out the bass and lead guitar lines at the same time. “It’s very old school,” he says of his technique. “Not many people do it anymore. Everybody plays with a pick. It ain’t done with pedals or effects.”

During his re-emergence as a musician, he met Breezy, and the two found they had an enormous amount of unusual tastes in common. Now, the trio plays rip-roaring shows all over the United States and Europe. Rev Peyton has been appointed a Kentucky Colonel by the governor of that state—the highest civilian honor available—and audiences are even starting to a pay a strange, if just as moving, tribute.

“The craziest show we ever did was this time in North Carolina, where everybody got naked,” Rev says. “It was outdoors, in the mud. They just started taking their clothes off. Must have been 400 or 500 kids, men and women, just buck naked. We still have people come up and tell us they were at the Naked Show. I’m so glad someone was there to see it. I thought I dreamed it.” Rev says he told that story to a college crowd in Wisconsin, and damned if they didn’t get naked there, too. “Maybe I ought to tell that story more often,” he says.

 Rev’s bellowing singing style is a perfect match for his astounding beard—which is no calculated put on, as the man has been shaving since the fifth grade—but it has been perhaps the last piece of the puzzle to lock into place. “Nobody ever taught me anything about how to sing, I just did it,” Rev says. “I just pull deep in my chest and sing from my gut. I’m not trying to sound like anybody else.”

The songs themselves spring from the place where good blues songs can only emerge: authentic experience. “I don’t write songs that I just make up. They all happen to me or are something I’ve seen,” he says. The band hasn’t stepped into full-time musicianhood gingerly; Rev estimates they played more than 250 shows last year, and hope to do more in 2008. “It ain’t for everybody,” he says, “but it’s for us.”

Bookmark

E-mail This

Trackback(0)

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Write comment

Name

E-mail

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via e-mail (Registered users only)

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment