Mikee Pruitt lifts up Twenty Thousand Strongmen

Mikee Pruitt has spent the past three years in North Bend, Nebraska, building a farm from the ground up with a friend, and he looks the part: blue flannel shirt, tan corduroy overalls, dark-brown corduroy blazer. He wears an Abe Lincoln beard and a haircut that could be the product of jagged kitchen scissors. His brown eyes crinkle at the corners when he smiles, which is often.

It’s off-season now, so Pruitt has rolled back into his native Kansas City on what he calls his “vacation time.” He’s here only a few weeks, and he’s keeping a busy schedule.

Earlier this year, under the name Twenty Thousand Strongmen, Pruitt released Be Strong, Little Brother, a bluesy, banjo-intensive record filled with mountain-and-prairie folk songs that sound like they were raked together on a back porch. He’s here doing a handful of local shows, then it’s on to St. Louis on a short tour before he heads back to the farm.

A couple of other players are on Be Strong, but Twenty Thousand Strongmen is really just Pruitt, who has made music as a one-man-band since he left Kansas City six years ago. Drinking a $2 Hamm’s at Davey’s Uptown Ramblers Club, Pruitt, 28, recounts patches of his saga.

“I’ve been playing music my whole life, for the most part,” he says. “I started off when I was, like, 7 or 8. My mom tried to teach me piano and cello, and that didn’t work out for me at all. But Jim Curley — he used to run the Mountain Music Shoppe — he went to our church, and my mom got him to give me free lap-dulcimer lessons. That was the first instrument I learned, and that just kind of evolved.”

Around 2006, he answered the call of the open road and started traveling. There was no agenda and little money. Busking earned him enough change to get from town to town — and lent him the sound you hear on Be Strong.

When I ask Pruitt how he became Twenty Thousand Strongmen, he grins and warns me that this is where his story turns a little morbid. He sliced the knuckle of his left index finger a few years ago — he was drunk at a Halloween house party, he says, trying to carve a bow out of wood to play a saw.

He holds up the digit — now a pale, knobby thing — and explains how he “forced” the knuckle to heal. Pruitt says he has no feeling left there.

“I went traveling by myself, down to Georgia, and I had to still busk because I had to make money, but I couldn’t bend my main finger that I use for the banjo,” Pruitt says. “So I made a drum kit out of trash. I was sitting on a suitcase with a backwards bass pedal and a tambourine taped to my shoe. That’s how that started, and then once my knuckle healed and I could play banjo, I was like, ‘Well, maybe I should just try doing what people in New Orleans do.’ That’s where the one-man-band thing comes from.”

Thanks to Pruitt’s tumbleweed travels, though, he can now draft from an army of musician friends in various states, ready to parachute into Twenty Thousand Strongmen on short notice.

“Originally, I was putting out an album where I was recording all the instruments, all the vocals, everything by myself,” he says. “I wanted to come up with something that sounded like it was a whole bunch of people. I wanted to come up with something kind of cheeky, and I thought of [the name] Twenty Thousand Strongmen — because I’m not strong. I’m puny, and there’s one of me. But it’s grown into the name. Now it’s at the point where, when I travel, I pick up members. Most towns I go to, I have people that’ll back me up, and we can play shows.”

Pruitt takes another sip of his beer and traces the edge of the wide-brim hat that he has set on the bar. He says he picked up the fur-trimmed felt piece on trade for one of his CDs in Lincoln. I tell Pruitt that he seems to be leading the gypsy life, and he laughs.

“Yeah, I suppose I’ve been called that,” he says. “But I like tramp better. Tramp is a good term for me.”

It’s a good word for Be Strong, too, which comes off as scrappy and determined. But under its rollicking roughness is an old-fashioned folk record on which Pruitt’s canyon-rich voice stretches wide over banjo and harmonica.

“It’s language,” he says of his music. “I just want to speak to the universal collective. I’ve always said that once I write a song, it’s mine, but once I play it for someone, it’s not mine anymore. That’s it. It’s out there now. You’ve released that energy, and now it’s out there. You can’t go out there and collect it back.”