JP Harris, known across the americana world as a craftsman of outlaw country and old-time music, has announced his sixth full-length album. Shaving A Dead Man, produced by and featuring GRAMMY-winning musician Chance McCoy (Old Crow Medicine Show), will be released October 23rd on Bloodshot Records. Harris and McCoy recorded the album at Hunter Springs Studio in Greenville, West Virginia.
Harris shared the first single, Say Darling Say alongside the official music video, which you can see below this article, noting: “Bits and pieces of this are lodged in childhood memories of mine, though I don’t recall the exact source I learned it from (possibly Lindsay McCaw) as it was widely played on the fiddler’s convention circuit and recorded many times over in recent decades.”
The lore of JP Harris precedes him. Raised between Alabama, the Mojave Desert, and Las Vegas, he set out on his own at 14 years old. He delved into punk rock, both the music and lifestyle; living on the road and working wildly varied trades, including but not limited to shepherding, logging, banjo-building, and historic restoration carpentry. Harris’ first taste of settled life was in rural Vermont, where he lived for years with no power and water he himself drew from a spring. He first came upon traditional Appalachian music from cassette tapes, and within it, recognised a sense of profound belonging. Harris followed the old-time convention and festival circuit; Clifftop, Galax, The Harry Smith Frolic, like a gypsy caravan. “If you’re gonna eat canned beans and sleep in the back of your truck, you could go for months on end and never not be somewhere playing old-time music,” he says, having lived it.
Harris moved to Nashville around 2010 and quickly emerged as a leader of the East Nashville music underground, a mentor to precocious talents like the late Luke Bell, a fixture at the American Legion’s Honky Tonk Tuesdays, and a curator at the Newport Folk Festival and AmericanaFest. He has released five albums in twelve years; Sometimes Dogs Bark At Nothing, released in 2018 on Free Dirt Records, won the Independent Music Awards’ Country Album Of The Year. With Shaving A Dead Man, the suggestion is that Harris embraces Appalachian music with a history and integrity that confounds the 21st century’s dystopian decline. Performing this heirloom repertoire, he and McCoy are attempting to bring a subversive power and a healing, analogue humanity.
“I just turned 43 in February, and trying to get one more rung up on the commercial performing ladder of country or americana music isn’t really something I’m looking to expel calories doing,” says Harris. “This album offers an identifiable element to people who want to access old-time, not necessarily through Smithsonian field recordings. I’m not just some museum-quality reproduction piece. Planting this flag in the mud is saying that I’m still a fringe element, even if I am a traditional roots musician. It makes it identifiable to the next generation of little weird music kids like me.”
