MUDDY GURDY

Tia GOUTTEBEL, guitar, vocals / Fabrice BONY, percussion, choir / Gilles CHABENAT, hurdy-gurdy

What happens if traditional Auvergne music meets Mississippi hill country blues? It is worth asking a trio of musicians from France : Tia Gouttebel, a blues singer-guitarist, Fabrice Bonya percussionist specialized in Latin rhythms, and Gilles Chabenat, a hurdy-gurdy player expert in traditional music from Auvergne, France.

In 2017, Muddy Gurdy set off to record their first album in northern Mississippi. It was a kind of initiatory journey into the « hill country » where kudzu and a form of hypnotic blues once sung by Fred McDowell, Jessie Mae Hemphill, Junior Kimbrough and RL Burnside are well known.

Their second album « Homecoming » was recorded in the Auvergne area as a pagan pilgrimage back to their roots. In a barn, in chapels, in the former ballroom of a mountain bistro or with torches in the middle of the night in the crater of a volcano. Homecoming accompanies –and illustrates– a reflection on the similarities between rural music from around the world, but also on the Creole identity, on modernity and the modernization of cultural traditions.

- Selected for the Folk Alliance Festival in New Orleans in January 2020.