Musical remixes have been with us since at least the 1960s, when Jamaican producers such as Lee “Scratch” Perry started making instrumental versions of existing reggae songs.
Remixes became standard in disco, rock and ultimately hip-hop music, but they aren’t commonly used to re-imagine traditional folk and blues. That’s where Tangle Eye, the duo of musician Scott Billington and producer Steve Reynolds, come in.
In a conversation with KNXK, Billington explained the origins of Tangle Eye, and their widely-celebrated record, Alan Lomax’s Southern Journey Remixed, which brought historic blues and folk recordings into the modern era.
Lomax inspiration
Tangle Eye's journey begins with one of the great folklorists and ethnomusicologists of the 20th century, Alan Lomax.
According to the Smithsonian Center for Folklife & Cultural Heritage, Pete Seeger described him as “the man who is more responsible than any other person for the twentieth-century folk song revival” and his recordings are considered definitive in the history of American field recordings.
From the 1930s through the 1990s, Lomax recorded traditional music and dance from the United States and around the world. His archive contains images, films and thousands of sound recordings. Lomax was the first to record artists who would go on to be musical legends – Muddy Waters, Huddie Ledbetter, also known as “Leadbelly,” and Woody Guthrie.
Lomax’s recordings entered the pop charts in 1998, when electronica artist Moby had a hit with the song “Honey” using a sample of Bessie Jones singing “Sometimes.” Moby struck gold again two years later with “Natural Blues,” which was built around a sample of Vera Hall’s vocals, also recorded in the field by Lomax.
“It was really thrilling to hear that Vera Hall remix. The changes he came up with were brilliant. You hear her vocal in a really new context,” Billington said.
It was these Moby tracks that inspired Tangle Eye to approach remixing music from the Lomax archive. In fact, they named their duo Tangle Eye after one of the singers Lomax recorded.
Birth of the remix
Over a period of two years, using their own money, they made what may be the first full album of its kind, Alan Lomax’s Southern Journey Remixed. The 2004 release contains 11 songs that remix Lomax’s folk and blues field recordings using modern sampling and looping techniques.
Perhaps no one was better positioned to experiment with remixing traditional blues than Billington and Reynolds.
Billington is a Grammy-winning artist, a champion of American roots music, and has produced albums for Irma Thomas, Bobby Rush, Gatemouth Brown, Buckwheat Zydeco and Solomon Burke among many others. Reynolds is also a Grammy-winning producer and audio engineer in New Orleans, Louisiana.
In the years leading up to Tangle Eye, Billington and Reynolds had been experimenting with sample-driven remixes of zydeco songs from Beau Jocque and Chris Ardoin. They thought the remixes might be popular in Houston dance clubs, where zydeco music was part of the local culture.
So, they already had a ‘toolbox’ of production techniques from that project when they took on the Tangle Eye album. But, they “wanted to bring an authentic roots sensibility to the remix, rather than making dance tracks,” Billington said.
Making old gems new
Tangle Eye set out to re-compose the a cappella songs in a way that honored their origin. The duo started by crafting rhythm tracks and loops that aligned with the voice recordings. Then, they invited some of their favorite drummers and instrumentalists, mostly from the New Orleans jazz and blues scenes, to play on the project.
The goal was “to take a beautiful old gem and put it in a new setting so that people can perceive it in a new way,” Billington said.
The simplicity and emotion of the original field recordings also helped Billington reconnect with the magic of folk music.
“For most of human history, folk music was made for the pure joy of singing and performing. The salient quality of these performances is that they were made by singers and musicians who were not seeking a professional advantage of any kind,” Billington said.
Once it was released, Alan Lomax’s Southern Journey Remixed was generally well-received and favorably reviewed by critics.
“Despite the high artistic quality of the original Lomax a cappella recordings, they don't necessarily encourage repeat listens,” one BBC review read. “The best thing about this collection is that it makes the Lomax recordings a joy to listen to.”
Ultimately, the project bridged eras and showed how traditional folk and blues might be revitalized respectfully and brought into the contemporary.
Billington and Reynolds don’t have plans for a follow-up album, but Tangle Eye has produced tracks for other contemporary blues artists, including Samantha Fish, Corey Harris and Bobby Rush.
