Never mind his age: Guitar prodigy Julian Davis is an old soul
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I’m always a little nervous when talking to teenagers. It wasn’t that long ago that I was one of them, and it was a rather terrible time. But Julian Davis (who placed second in this year’s Kansas State Fiddling and Picking Championships for flat-pick and finger-style guitar) is far from your typical 16-year-old.
Davis has been playing guitar for a decade. His dexterity on the instrument is breathtaking — and not just for a kid. Davis commands the guitar with the confidence and heart of an artist. And he can sing. Davis can send his supple tenor soaring over complex chords or grinding against them.
Friday, November 13, he plays a record-release show at the Westport Saloon for Who Walks In When I Walk Out (Little Class Records). I called him at his Pittsburg, Kansas, home to chat about his dedication to the guitar.
The Pitch: How did you get your start playing guitar and writing music?
Davis: I’ve been playing guitar since I was about 6 years old. I started at my mom’s photography studio — she had a prop guitar, and I would bang on that. Later that year, I got a real one, and that’s where that started. It’s just progressed over the years. I started writing about two years ago, in 2013. Doing covers was getting boring, so I started writing original material.
I wrote my first song in July 2013. It was called “Special Delivery.” It’s easy to remember because that song was about one of the famous St. Louis musicians Pokey LaFarge — he sent me a vinyl record in the mail of his new album, and it was a special delivery. It came on July 5. The songwriting factor came in then, and it’s continued since.
Are your parents musical?
No one in my family is musical. No one has ever touched an instrument in my family — no one is in a band or choir, nothing like that. But my mom has always had good taste in music. She would play lots of stuff as I was growing up.
I was definitely influenced by the White Stripes and punk and hardcore, heavier stuff. I used to play punk stuff religiously, and I just got tired of it. I wore myself out on it. I wanted to move to something a little more challenging and intricate, so I went from punk to country, which is really not that different, technically speaking. Then, in late 2012, I heard Pokey LaFarge for the first time, and that got me inspired to play the music from the ’30s and ’40s, stuff that has balance and heart to it. I used to mimic Pokey LaFarge completely, trying to make big-band sounds with just my guitar, but you’ve got to make it your own. And mimicking, it got boring.
I heard Tony Rice around that time, around mid- or late 2014. That got me interested in bluegrass. I was writing my own songs, and I would put these bluegrass runs and Tony Rice licks into a big-band-sound format. That’s kind of where I am now.
What is it about the instrument that keeps you interested, that makes you want to work at it?
I hear all this music that I enjoy and I know I can do it, and that’s the biggest part that fascinates me. What can I do that will impress myself? Things I think I could never do. I can run all the way from the F-note to the G-string, and it’s perfect, neat, matched. Technically, that’s not very impressive, but the fact that I can make all this music with those notes — I’m able to make so many different styles of music and sounds.
The challenge never stops. it keeps going. I don’t think I’ll drop the style of music I’m doing for a while because people like it, and there’s a lot of rebirthing going on in the genre — Americana, whatever you want to call it. There’s a desire for it among a lot of people. So I’ll keep doing that but I’ll incorporate new styles.
I’d like to start ’30s and ’40s swing music, with those advanced jazz chords. Right now, my thing has been with working classical music. [Beethoven’s] Sonata No. 1 — I’ll take bits and pieces I’ve learned from that and put it into my own music, on the guitar. That’s really hard. It was all written for a violin and piano, and trying to force it onto the guitar is a major challenge.
Does performance come naturally to you?
I started performing back in 2012. I was playing a local open-mic night — where I was doing my punk music — and there was a house drummer, and he learned all these White Stripes songs. We’d play five or six songs once a week. And then that place got shut down, and I had nowhere to perform for a solid year. I stayed in my room and I learned all this new stuff. Occasionally, here and there, people would offer me a gig to play around town, and it wouldn’t pay, and no one would listen, but I’d do it anyway.
Luckily, now, I’ve been able to find a bass player from St. Jo, Seth Campbell. He’s got the same outlook on performing as I do. I love it. I’ve never had stage fright. I can’t control my enthusiasm before I go on. I can’t wait to get onstage and give it all of my energy. I see a lot of performers today who have no energy or no smile or pizazz or bounce — they’re just there to play and get their cash and leave — and that’s not me. I get onstage and give it more than 100 percent.
