Little Class Records has something for the cowboy in all of us

Jody Hendrix has always had big goals when it comes to music — for his own, yes, but also for other artists’, and where he might be able to take it. He remembers booking his first music festival, in Liberty, when he was 14 years old, to help raise money for a mission trip his friends were making. Since then, Hendrix has seen a few more summers, and along the way, he has had multiple stints as the booker or talent organizer for local venues and organizations. Now he controls the calendar at the Westport Saloon. But his main squeeze is Little Class Records, the roots label he founded in 2010.

“I want to leave a footprint in musical history that depicts what is happening and the good stuff going on here,” Hendrix says. “The genre that we’re working with has always struggled, not just in our city but in a lot of the cities I’ve been to. I want rockabilly and hillbilly music to be recognized and for people to know about it. I want to take a huge snapshot for the world to see.”

Part of getting recognized means, for Hendrix, displaying some of the local and regional talent that has found a home on Little Class Records. So on Saturday, Little Class Records and the Westport Saloon are putting on the first-ever Westport Roots Festival, with two stages and 27 acts, including the legendary Billy Joe Shaver as headliner.

“We want the Westport Roots Festival to be successful and the first of many,” Hendrix says. “We want people to be as excited about Westport Roots Festival as they are about Farmageddon or Muddy Roots — and that’s ambitious.”

Eddie Crane handles publicity and marketing at Little Class Records and attests to the label’s commitment to bringing real artists to the front of the lines.

“Jody, Matt [Dennis, Little Class co-founder] and I are drawn to music that is real, not fabricated,” Crane says. “You can plop these bands on any street corner in the world, and they will be relatable. I love the way a ripping banjo sounds, and I want everyone else to be as happy as I am when I hear it.”

To coincide with the festival, Little Class Records is releasing four albums Saturday: two from local and familiar names — Cadillac Flambe and Billy Beale — and two from excellent regional acts. They’re reviewed here, in case you need further encouragement to witness the talent live at the Westport Roots Festival.

Old American Law

Cadillac Flambe

Since forming in 2003, Cadillac Flambe has touted the influence of Mississippi Delta blues on its sound. On the band’s latest full-length, the necessary cogs and parts are still there — gut-wrenching slide-guitar reels, window-rattling rhythms, and both Kris and Havilah Bruders’ earthquake vocals — but these new songs are faster and angrier than anything Cadillac Flambe has put out before. The record opens with the furious “Shakin’ Baby,” a speedball jam that dares you to dance or die trying, and the pace only increases from there. “Bullets” is positively hellish; by the end of the song, Havilah Bruders will have you convinced that she is summoning demons from the netherworld. The only respite from all this energy comes with album closer “Goin’ Home,” on which Kris Bruders assures you, with his deep voice, that you are indeed going home.

…And So the Devil Named Them County Graves

County Graves

W.T. Newton has a hell of a voice. One moment, he’s growling into the microphone with a metal show’s worth of ferocity and menace (“I Don’t Need No Dead Man”), and the next, he serenades you with a western-swing tale of woe (“Hell and High Water”). On most of this record, though, Newton turns up the growling and hollering and downplays his crooner side. The Carbondale, Illinois, group makes the most of Newton’s splintery chops, filling the record with just enough lap steel, fiddle and harmonica to build a solid soapbox for some popular themes: namely, the devil and death. Some songs border on murder-ballad territory — a style that the County Graves could probably master easily — but for the most part, this Devil keeps to simpler stories. Newton and company tell them just fine.

Clawhammer

Clawhammer

Springfield, Missouri’s Clawhammer seems bent on confusing people. Named for a difficult style of banjo picking, in which the player forms a claw and picks downward (group banjoist Jason Childress sometimes does it this way), Clawhammer offers songs here that take the old-time hillbilly genre and unravel it, thread by thread. Things start innocently enough with “Set Me Free,” a washboard-heavy jaunt, but the song ends with an ominous, distorted mass of electronic crashes. “Love Sick” follows, and Chelsea Childress’ chilling, siren alto glides like a lullaby during a nightmare. “Run Rabbit Run” brings back the washboard chink, but by the end of the first verse, there’s also an electrified web of synths and effects pedals. None of these things should work together, but Clawhammer so carefully stitches up its sounds that you’re compelled to keep listening, trying to decipher the mystery.

Hard Time

Billy Beale

Beale wrote Hard Time‘s 11 songs during a three-year stint in prison, and the influence of that environment is audible. Some songs get rhythmic jangles from the rattle of heavy chains. It’s not that hard to figure out just how I got here, on this long, hard road that I’ve been on, Beale sings on “Long Hard Road,” his voice plaintive and rusty. And on the heartbreaking “Chains,” he attests to a truth that he has come to know from the inside: One night the devil come to me, and he whispers in my ear/“Billy Beale, I’ll never take you down, ’cause you’re in hell right here.” If the theme is delivered with a heavy hand, the album remains a poignant, graceful collection from an unlikely source.