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Nathan Salsburg
Photo by Tim Furnish
Nathan Salsburg was born in that Diamond City, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania—she of anthracite glimmer and Babe Ruth's 1926 long ball—and is a longtime resident of Louisville, Kentucky. He is the curator of the Alan Lomax Archive and a producer and presenter of traditional music for a variety of outlets. His first solo record is called Affirmed, and it's about race horses—Affirmed, Bold Ruler, and Eight Belles, specifically—and desire and reckonings of the spirit. It's an almost entirely instrumental affair, save his elegiac rendering of the traditional tune "The False True Love."
While comparisons to John Fahey may be inevitable—and there are worse curses, to be sure—the similarity that Salsburg bears to that great master is mostly one of maverick aesthetic. For where Fahey spent his career a hungry ghost in some supernal Valley of Tears—in the process paving the way for a million joyless ragas by pickers that learned the wrong lesson—Salsburg's brambly rags and sundowner hymns incorporate an arch, bittersweet harmony that marks the best work of guitarists like Reverend Gary Davis, Ry Cooder, and Nic Jones. He plays like he knows that happiness is made of sad, and every tragedy is kind of funny, in its way.
I hear it took Salsburg a long time to make Affirmed, and it sounds it. Not because the picking is complicated, which it is—I suspect Nathan will eventually be recognized as among the foremost American acoustic guitarists, for anyone keeping that score—but because there is so much emotion here, so much full-grown, that it must have taken a life, at least.
Affirmed is a personal record—for Salsburg, surely, but for me too. I'm getting older, and my relationship to music now develops vertically rather than horizontally. I need something that has some stake to it, because I'm trying to find the light myself. We used to play for silver; now we play for life. Like that. So I'll damn right sing you every note on Tom T.'s Old Five and Dimers Like Me; but if art's not open—and that's the word I use to describe Affirmed: open—then what good is it to your soul? I'm talking about grown-up things here, things that set the bitch of this whole journey in relief: Barry Hannah's Ray, or Sammi Smith's version of "Saunder's Ferry Lane," or Duke Ellington's "Blue Indigo." I count Affirmed among these.
Put another way: It's easy to write a song in a minor key and play it sad, but so much harder—though truer to life, I reckon—to play blue in a major key. Nathan Salsburg does this with Affirmed. He does it so well. Hats off to him.
—M.C. Taylor, Durham, NC, 21 Aug 2011
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Nathan Salsburg