"Jazz Age Thump"

Recorded live to tape
Nashville TN

Veterans of the American Underground

The Willies bring their version of Bessie Smith meets The Clash to The Black Rabbit every Friday night! There’s Dave Willie (Committee for Public Safety) fronting on bass. and Jen Jones,(The Camaros) fronting on piano. With the Flannery O’Conner styled Jeremiah Cline, on banjo, this 7 piece New Orleans inspired ‘horn band’  brings old-timey busking inside.  Expect energetic, muscular, rollicking, original music, peppered with Trad Jazz, Blues, and Oi style gang vocals.

The Willies are Nashville based roots artists conjuring the spirit of that time before bordello jazz & dirty fingernail blues were the background music for baristas and doggy bakeries. But as veterans of the American underground, the Willies aren’t interested in reenacting the rough and tumble legacy of 20’s swing & blues... they embody that energy. And these genres are only starting points... vintage bottles to contain several lifetimes of experience in the Jazz, Blues, Punk, and Americana underground.

The Willies are a sound collage... a musical hybrid where multiple muses reanimate street jazz as the throbbing expression of a vibrant & disreputable counter culture. With the Willies punk meets ragtime. Or cat house jazz is driven by a drugged ska beat. Oi gang vocals layer the blues or a stride piano accompanies an elaborate revenge fantasy. Banjos chunk. A trumpet blares. The vocals pour out sultry, or comic, or crooning or just plain over the top. These influences reveal a mixed bag of legitimate bohemian back stories.  Singer Jen Jones commandeered a road unworthy van and spent years shuffling musicians and authentic swing from NYC to California, with The Camaros. Dave Willie broke ground and broke bones in the embryonic hardcore punk scene, his band CPS doing shows with Minor Threat and Black Flag.  Jeremiah Cline cut his teeth in the subterranean world of urban hillbilly music. Stellar jazzbos Kyle Morgan, Eric Snyder, and Ian Stobino hail survived rigorous music programs at Belmont, MTSU, and UK, with spirit intact, and guitarist Chris Roberts adds grinding rhythm and completes the circus that The Willies live show has become.

The Willies are counter cultural zealots. You can see it in their live shows. Their raucous stage banter. Their energetic reworking of traditional standards. But most of all this passion comes through in their original compositions. Their raison d’etre. This is the place where Willies get to catalog their influences... to construct new wholes from past memories... eagerly looking forward but always open to the influence of the ghosts and demons from a wildly entertaining past.