Legendary performer Swamp Dogg talks ‘Blackgrass’ music ahead of Thursday’s Free State Festival

Swamp Dogg. // image courtesy the artist

While you might not be familiar with legendary musician Swamp Dogg, you know his work.  If nothing else, the song he co-wrote with Gary “U.S.” Bonds, “She’s All I Got,” was a number two country hit for Johnny Paycheck and is still a staple on classic country radio. In 2013, Alive Naturalsound Records reissued his first two albums, Total Destruction to Your Mind and Rat On!, bringing them to a whole new audience and acquainting a slew of young folks with the musician’s psychedelic R&B.

Now, he’s getting even more plaudits, thanks to the new documentary, Swamp Doff Gets His Pool Painted, which plays this Thursday, June 26, as part of the Free State Festival in Lawrence. In addition to the film screening, Swamp Dogg will perform afterward. We were delighted to hop on the phone with the musician to discuss his career ahead of the screening and performance.

The Pitch: What’s it like to have somebody make a movie telling your story at this point? Usually, when movies get made about people, they’re not around to get to see ’em.

Swamp Dogg: Well, anyway, it’s great and it, it feels real good, that’s all. It doesn’t do anything for my ego, but I’m seeing me as other people see me and they don’t see me quite as bad as I thought I was, or I think I am.

Does it make you feel younger to perform for younger audiences?

No, but it makes me feel blessed. It makes me feel talented because most of them heard about Swamp Dogg and heard Swamp Dogg through their grandmothers and fathers and mothers, and some of them come just to see what it is their parents were talking about and luckily, my show was the same as it was in 1959.

I guess it hasn’t changed, so they’re getting to see what their parents saw. Then, to look out there a lot of times and see of the parents out there has said, “Hey, I grew up with you,” everybody out there around my age, and it’d be like, 4-500 people, it’s great. It’s really great and it makes you proud. Makes me proud to be alive. A lot of people aren’t proud to be alive, that’s why they jump out hotel windows and shit. But it makes me feel great.

When you’ve got so much material to draw from, how do you put together a set list to like make all of the fans happy?

People have been listening to things that I had no idea. Every time I play, at least one person screams out of the audience a song title–naturally, it’s one that I’m not doing, but I work it in as soon as I can, as fast as I can, because I’m quite sure it’s more than that one person. I add songs as I come back around to different places

I keep adding, but I have to take things away when I add, because I actually do a two hour show but then, some places they only want me to be up there 30 minutes or 45 minutes and I usually end up running over, not deliberately, but that’s the only way I can get the stuff in. I try to do a 13 song set and that number doesn’t have anything to do with shit. It’s just a matter of that’s how my stuff runs. Then I usually go out into the audience and shake hands with everybody out there that I can get to, and that takes about close to 15 minutes out there.

The ending song is usually “Sam Stone,” which will always be in my repertoire. I got a couple things that I gotta keep in my repertoire: “Sam Stone” and “Synthetic World.”

I love the fact that you also regularly play “She’s All I Got.” That was a song I didn’t know you co-wrote until they reissued those first two albums you did. When I heard those albums, I was just like, “I can see how this all goes together because that song sounds so much like you.”

Uh-huh. All my shit sounds alike. That’s why I use so many horns and springs and shit. You may walk away saying, “Seems like I heard that before, but it wasn’t that song.”

The most recent album you put out was the Blackgrass album last year. Why did you want to make a bluegrass record?

A Blackgrass record. First of all, I found out that a lot of the instruments that are being used in bluegrass were made in Africa and they got over here some kinda way. Apparently, the Africans could make ’em, but they didn’t know how to play ’em, so by the time they got ’em to West Virginia, they jumped into it and made music.

I’ve always wanted to add a few horns in certain songs, strings in certain songs, and give it the country sound. I wanted the country, bluegrass, and Black soul all meshed together, and that’s where the Blackgrass came from. And as I’m doing it, actually, there’s no one who can tell me anything wrong with what I’m doing because it’s my concept only. Right now I’m the expert and no one can challenge anything that I call blackgrass.

That album starts out with a song, “Mess Under That Dress,” that feels like vintage Swamp Dogg. Even though like the the instrumentation is a little different, it’s still funky.

Well, that’s what I’ve been like all my life. I’ve been thrown in all kind of categories, but then I, it comes out the same way. I was talking to someone this morning and they were telling me how many millions of hits on Spotify that I had on certain songs, like 5 million, 6 million. I was pleasantly shocked, because I don’t know your background, but whatever it is that you call your heart, what is you’re doing–what you want in your heart, from your heart or wherever your fucking heart happens to be, you find that other people are enjoying it sometimes more than you.

As much as other people are enjoying it, if you’re still making music now, I have to imagine you’re enjoying the absolute hell out of it.

Yeah. I demoed a song last night called “Hot to Trot” and it’s fucking great. The people I sent it to last night who got it this morning, they thought it was just fantastic, and so do I. I’m happy with it. I started writing on it like three weeks ago. Don’t usually take me but few hours to write a song but this one had to be just right because a delicate subject and it had to be done delicately, but I didn’t want it to turn out to be a little ugly musical mess.

You’re coming to Lawrence next week for the first time. What should folks who have never gotten a chance to see you be prepared for?

But for the fact that I never heard of Lawrence in my life, it might be the people that landed out there in Arizona, New Mexico, and the government still has locked up in a shed or some shit, where the hell is Lawrence?

It’s in Kansas.

Okay. Yeah, that’ll be fun. I only played Kansas once and that was early Swamp Dogg. That was like, 1971, and I liked it. I don’t know if I’d want to live there, but for the couple days I was there, it was great.

A screening of Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted, along with a live performance from Swamp Dogg himself, takes place at the Lawrence Arts Center as part of the Free State Festival this Thursday, June 26. Details on that show here.