EMORY JOSEPH
LABOR & SPIRITS
By Jim Musser

Emory Joseph has a pretty good idea why his music sounds the way it does. "When I was growing up, it was obvious that even if the races and the classes in St. Louis weren't mixing much, the music surely was. At any time of day--if we weren't listening to Jack Buck doing the Cardinals on KMOX, the AM dial was giving up everything from hard-core soul and rock’n’roll, to sanctified gospel, jazz singers from back in the day, saccharine sweet pop, Southern rock--you know, good ol' fashioned Southern-ass rock, everything -- EVERYTHING.

“And at night time, when everyone else was asleep and the cloud cover was just right, my transistor hauled in signals bouncing home New Orleans soul, Memphis R&B, Chicago blues, and ‘The Opry from the Ryman’--it was Heaven in a little boy's head."

Obviously, it ALL found a home in an ultra-absorbent noggin -- Joseph’s remarkable recording debut, LABOR & SPIRITS, cuts through the decades to deliver a melodic, across-the-dial celebration of ALL that is ‘Americana Roots’ music, unencumbered by any notions of niche-marketing, beats-per-minute, current trends or hip video cachet. It is a literate, lusty, evocative, good-humored and refreshingly, unabashedly romantic piece of work.

In short, it is pure music for its own, glorious sake. That an artist can pop up -- seemingly out of nowhere -- and arrive as mature, fully-formed and self-possessed as Emory Joseph has is mind boggling. But from jump street, the thirty-something singer/songwriter has purposely and steadfastly been at work in and around music, while avoiding the usual musicians' paths.

"I've had a quite a few records worth of material over the years -- it seems I've always been involved with some studio or another. But my instinct has always been to wait for a time when I was sure that the music I'd be putting out matched the life I wanted to live. I never wanted to run the risk of failing the one thing in my life that's always been pleasant and sure to me. I'm glad for how just exactly how things have turned out. I've had a lot of adventures, learned a bunch of trades, and lived to write about them. This, all-music time is like the gravy on the spuds. I'm having a ball."

On the self-produced "with a whole lotta help" LABOR & SPIRITS, he's treated his tunes to the kind of “anything goes” stylistic cross-pollination that once found Robert Palmer enlisting Little Feat and The Meters to sneak Sally through the alley, sent Ry Cooder to help Randy Newman burn down the cornfield, and freed up the Wicked Pickett to turn "Sugar Sugar" bubblegum into greazy, rib-stickin’ barbecue. He says that, using a slightly-modified definition, his music fits neatly under the "Americana/Roots" umbrella. His version welding the usual folk, blues, bluegrass and country fare to what he calls the "true-blue American rock roots" of the Crescent City, Stax/Volt, and Muscle Shoals. “My goal,” says Joseph, “was to make an album that's more like a new pony than a piece of industry product. Something you wanna sit with and get to know. Something unpredictable -- that you'll notice something new about every time you're with it.”

continued on page two>