Terry Trahan Jr.

Bob Dylan’s scratchy, whiskey-drenched voice crackles over the radio’s FM band, dipping and soaring like the wooden tracks of the Mega Zeph.

“Life is sad. Life is a bust. All you can do is do what you must; do what you must do and do it well,” Dylan sings on “Buckets of Rain.”

Like the iconic voices and songwriters that came before his time, Clay Parker tackles life with six strings and the truth about what’s going on around him. Whether musings about relationships gone wrong or a reflection on current events, he shares his message with the world with scraps of paper, a melody and a few friends gathered around a mic.

Clay’s message is a simple one—people will always seek something more, but they have to keep moving if they ever want to find what it is they’re looking for.

This idea is at the heart of “The Wind and the Warble,” the Thibodaux native’s first album released on an independent label. When he began writing lyrics and digging deeper into the catalogs of those he considers to be his influences—notably country legend Hank Williams Sr. and blues guitarist Mississippi John Hurt—he uncovered what it means to be a folk artist living in a modern world.

“It’s the experience of being human,” Clay says. “It’s not necessarily a guitar and a harmonica; it’s music for the people—sharing common experiences with somebody who lived 200 years ago if you can dial it in and really get down to it.”

As the 26-year-old singer-songwriter walks down a rural road that cuts through a field of windblown sugarcane, he stops, gazes at the cloudless sky and begins to strum a familiar melody. It’s one of those traditional tunes called “John Henry” that falls under the anonymous byline and has the humid air of the Mississippi Delta sticking to it.

The song has been passed down like a treasured heirloom from interpreter to interpreter. Clay’s voice adapts enough Southern drawl to sell his take on the idea and capture the spirit of railroad men back in the days when even life wasn’t free.

And for Clay, there has always been beauty in simple lyrics and melodies that tell stories. As if on cue, his fingers glide over the nylon strings and communicate a new thought on his mind, this time without saying a word.

He’s a quiet guy—has the height of an average man, but a thin build. His hair waves in the wind, and he dresses in denim from his ankles to his neckline.

THREE CHORDS AND ATTITUDE
Clay was no product of a musical family. Sure, they played music, but they didn’t play music. Together, they would gather around the stereo and listen to the classics. His dad loved Dylan and the more country-tinged stuff. When his family would take road trips, they never needed to crank up the radio in the car. Clay tried to steal lead, singing and humming along to tunes that managed to turn a monotonous road into a reason to let loose.

“My family would tell me that they would be aggravated by it,” Clay says. “I’ve always had a connection with music. As a kid, I remember understanding parts of it that my parents couldn’t. My parents would say they couldn’t hear things I was hearing.”

Around age 8, Clay’s grandmother, Loena Melvin, encouraged him to take up piano lessons. Though she wasn’t a virtuoso, she knew enough to play hymns and dabble with other traditional arrangements. But Clay didn’t feel the same connection to the instrument that she did, so he gave it up.

“I didn’t want to be there,” he says. “After I started playing guitar, everything opened up and I could relate a lot of other instruments to how it is on the guitar. That’s when piano became fairly easy.”

Clay’s introduction to the guitar coincided with the transition into his teenage years. While the other kids worshiped the latest hot, plaid-clad pop singer or boy band, he spent his time studying parallels in music. He wanted to know why he heard traces of Dylan in Bruce Springsteen’s work and folk elements in punk.

“There’s a big connection between punk music and old folk music,” Clay says. “With the protest side of folk music, there’s a lot of getting out your angst. Musically, they’re both very simple forms—nothing really flashy about it. Three chords is all you need. They say it’s three chords and then attitude.”

Attitude isn’t his game, but the singer-songwriter still clung to the punk-rock genre to get him through life’s most awkward phase—those six years that, at that time, make it seem like life will be over if something doesn’t go as planned.

It turns out that life does go on, and those volatile years have a funny way of shaping the course of one’s time on this side of living. That period of self-discovery led Clay to find out exactly who he was—a musician at heart with a story to tell.

In pursuit of his dream, he followed the local music scene to listen to what the artists had to say ... and how they said it. He had no interest in the mainstream—that’s not where the true art of music lived. Instead, he focused on his guitar playing, often trying to learn a new song before the track finished playing.

And then he discovered a new toy to play with.

“I was still into the music I was into and discovered a record player at my house,” Clay says. “I started looking through vinyl records, and I decided to set up the record player and pick out the two records that had the strangest covers. The first was the soundtrack to “Saturday Night Fever” and the other was a Bob Dylan record. I started listening to the Bob Dylan record—my dad was a fan of Dylan—and my dad asked me if I had ever heard of the song “Ballad of a Thin Man.” There was a rawness that drew me in like the punk thing did. It had run its course, but this was this new thing that was way older than I was. It was the roots of what I was listening to now. It was going back in time and finding out what I was into at that point, where that came from. You hear artists like Bob Dylan who are looking in a prism just so multifaceted—every record that he did is completely left field, and the next one would be completely the other way. You begin to approach Dylan records and find out about Springsteen through Dylan, appreciating gospel after listening to Dylan.”

PICKIN’ AROUND
By the end of his teen years, the artist in Clay left its translucent shadow behind to become the silhouette of a man searching for someone who would listen to what he had to say with a guitar and a few words of observation.

That’s when he met Pat Sylvest.

Pat had been playing with his old band, Folklure, at a coffee shop that Clay happened to be at. As he listened to bluegrass pour out of every note Pat commanded out of the dobro and mandolin, he recognized that the meeting was no coincidence.

“I figured this guy played dobro, mandolin and was a songwriter, too—there’s nothing in the world that stopped us from playing together,” Clay says.

The two hit it off and started booking gigs together. A nurse anesthetist by day and a musician by night, Pat joined Clay on stage whenever he could, even at the Neutral Ground in New Orleans at 1 a.m. for an open-mic session.

To change up the coffee house atmosphere, the two performed at Magnolia Cemetery in Baton Rouge as part of Magnolia’s Memories, a living history of the area’s citizens most would know on a first-name basis.

“People would come in and be guided by people dressed as angels,” Clay says. “There were actors at these grave sites that would act out these people’s stories—rich, old politicians. You’d have this first-person account like they’d be coming back from the dead to tell their stories. They would have music along the way, and we were one of the groups playing.”

By the time Clay and Pat settled into their new duo, the music deities began crafting a revised blueprint that would turn their condo-sized show into one fitting for a small house in the suburbs.

Pat had been playing the Stanley Brothers’ tune “Rank Strangers” during a random farmer’s market in Thibodaux. Recognizing the melody, Billy Finney walked up and began singing with his new best friend.

“It’s a two-part song,” Billy says. “Traditionally, it’s a call-and- answer, so I started singing the harmony part.”

When the three musicians got together, Pat introduced his son Matthew, a bassist, to the group; seemingly by chance, the four musicians had put together an ensemble that looked a lot like the Beatles’ Appalachian cousins, if they had any.

They called themselves the Moss Pickers.

Clay, Pat, Billy and Matthew still round up the gang once in a while for a show at the Grapevine Café in Donaldsonville, but they don’t practice much. When they do, it’s usually on stage in front of a crowd that would never know it.

“We haven’t practiced in probably a year,” Clay says. “The way we play is all around one microphone. You’re constantly staring at each other and can read eyes—almost know exactly what to do and where it’s going. The spontaneity is still there after playing together. We know how to read each other better, and that’s what makes a better performance.”

The Moss Pickers are big enough to draw an audience in, and just the right size to fit between two columns near the steps of the Thibodaux courthouse. As Clay and Pat take turns at the mic, Billy plucks the banjo and Matthew thunders in with the upright bass.

When the show is over, life goes on. For Clay, that means taking on a job at an oil field parts store to help pay the bills. It’s further proof that oil drives the economy in the Houma-Thibodaux community, which tends to reserve music and art as lagniappe.

FEELS LIKE HOME
But that doesn’t stop Clay from pursuing his own passion. He performs because he wants to, not because it’s expected of him as a singer. And, to him, performing doesn’t always look like a stage with chairs arranged in a semicircle.

“I go out on street corners downtown and play,” he says. “Some people really dig it. You don’t see that in Houma, so people are either freaked out and jaded about it, or look at you like, ‘Is this really happening here?’”

That’s nothing new, and he knows it. Clay’s quiet personality has adjusted to the local music scene by allowing the crowd to choose whether or not they like what he’s playing. Either way, the music comes from deep within because it means something to him. Each song tells its own story, and he uses that same voice and those same six strings to tell each one. Sometimes he even throws in a harmonica for added texture.

“I don’t really feed off the crowd,” Clay says. “I don’t make that my focus because that’s a slippery slope. If you’re not in front of a crowd that likes what you’re doing, then you’re done. If you just do it because that’s for your soul—that’s why you feel you’re there to do it—you go and do it and decide if they like it or not.”

Clay picks up his Gibson guitar and strums the melody to the first track off of his album. The humming falls in, and the song comes to life—a creation that started with a vision and the hollow wood in his hands.

“Guitars are like snowflakes—everyone is different,” the musician says. “There’s something about being able to pick it up and play it. It makes sense to me. I love the sound of an acoustic guitar. I pick up an electric guitar occasionally, but once I move back to an acoustic, it feels like home.”

That’s where the singer-songwriter feels most comfortable—with a guitar resting on his lap and his fingers trying to keep up with the rhythm of a hummingbird’s wings.

Clay is an old soul. He’s that guy who pauses before he utters a word, who speaks slowly so he gets every phrase exactly right; he’s that guy who willingly surrenders to patience, even when the thing he wants can be readily had.

DRAWING BLUEPRINTS
What he has wanted for years is his own album. He could have finished it a year ago, but he waited because he wanted to do it in a way that was most comfortable for him—using analog equipment.

That want found Clay purchasing a four-track tape deck off of eBay because he couldn’t find a machine locally. He wanted to record and mix the record on magnetic tape because that was the way his influences spoke to him.

“My favorite records were recorded in the way we chose to do it,” Clay says. “This is how they did it—why can’t it work now?”

Determined to capture that sound, he booked extra gigs to pay for the album before the first note ever hit the tape. Venues began requesting to hear a few recordings before they would invite him to play a show. What had become his plan to finance the album turned into the main incentive for getting serious about actually recording it.

Clay had been busy building his arsenal of songs. Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt spent hours traveling into one ear, but never leaving out of the other. Their country-folk influence had something to do with what “The Wind and the Warble” would become. Clay selected songs that shined with a full band, but he kept quieter moments in his back pocket to share when the naked stage forced him to go it alone.

“I was already really deep in that world,” he says. “I had a vision of recording the ones you hear with full bands that have a country sound—that was the direction I was going in. About midway through recording, I was also sitting on these songs that didn’t have that feel to them, but wanted to put them on record. I decided to do them solo acoustic.”

When he felt he was ready to press record, Clay called in the Moss Pickers and a few friends he had met along the way. He and steel guitarist Paul Buller had crossed paths in Baton Rouge, and he had heard fiddler Jordan Bell at Nicholls State University.

“She was down from Oregon going to Nicholls,” Clay says. “Billy was a biology student getting his master’s at Nicholls, so I met that whole circle. A lot of them are good hippie types who play guitars and fiddles.”

Billy had been staying at an old house on West 8th Street in downtown Thibodaux. It had been gutted, but its living room remained intact. A piano added “authenticity” to the space, and cedar walls enhanced the acoustics.

PRESS PLAY TO RECORD
A pelican in her piety watched from the Louisiana state flag as the TEAC A-3440 tape deck etched the first notes onto the quarter-inch tape. Because every inch of tape counted, each take was similar to playing live. Clay would press record, and any sound made in that room would be captured in the session.

“We all treated it seriously because we knew it was important to Clay,” Pat says. “You realize that you’re documenting something that will be there forever.”

From the first track, the influences that have molded Clay into the artist he has become show their timeless faces in the sound waves that ripple from deep within his soul. Dylan is there with just a tinge of rasp; Woody Guthrie is there keeping time with his feet; and Mississippi John Hurt is there to keep it Southern.

Clay didn’t go into the recording sessions searching for them. They came to him because that’s who he is. Whether country, folk, gospel or blues, the music happened as it happened because it’s born within.

“It’s the most comfortable music I’ve ever played in the sense that it’s coming from myself,” Clay says. “Life is what life is, and you can be lonely and laugh about it at the same time. Most blues songs are pretty funny. A lot of them are crippling, but a lot of them are really funny. I get a lot from the blues.”

TAKING NOTE
Like most songwriters, Clay sees the world differently. His eyes and ears act as filters, sifting through life to find those precious nuggets of gold that help those who miss what he doesn’t to see what he sees.

Often, the inspiration comes from everyday experiences. Clay’s cheek bones rise as he thinks back on “Ways of a Woman Blues.” One of his past odd jobs required him to deliver furniture with a man in his 50s. While en route, the driver would take phone calls from his wife. He was always “sweet” to her, but would rant about their conversations as soon as he hung up the phone.

“He hangs up with her one day and looks over at me and says, ‘Clay, I tell you what, man. Women just love to put on heirs.’ It was so funny the way he said it.” He pauses, holding in a hearty, belly-rolling laugh. “I literally wrote that song while driving down the road with this guy. I didn’t have a pen or paper. I repeated it to myself until I could get home and scribble it down. It was what it was. We were having a late-night recording session, and I just pulled it out. I started playing, and they fell in with me. That’s how it was recorded—it’s the version you hear. Just one take.”

Clay sits on the front porch of the same wood-frame house on West 8th Street that opened its door to his musical soul months before. Cars pass by, but he plays on, unfazed by the rattle and hum of their wheels. He settles into what he refers to as the the album’s thesis: “Poor Boy a Long Way from Home.”

It’s the album’s closer that moves like a steam-powered locomotive across the dusty countryside, tossing smoke stacks into the air.

For Clay, the song tells the tale of those who travel in search of something and never stop looking, even if they never find what they’re looking for. It’s an homage to the lifestyle of a singer-songwriter who becomes a modern-day troubadour to share his rambling perspective with those who are most comfortable at home.

“I’ve traveled through your towns and they all say the same: ‘He’s just a poor boy a long way from home,’” Clay sings.

WORDS OF THE WARBLER
As the harmonica fades, so do the recording sessions. Clay had run out of tape—a mile and a half of it.

But that was enough to create that record he had set out to make. He and Billy listened to the tape and sequenced the tracks so that they tell a story. Billy’s brother, Chris Finney, popped in at the sessions once in a while to give a few pointers. His résumé drops names like Dr. John and the Neville Brothers.
“The Wind and the Warble” never touched digital technology until it made its way into the hands of Carl Saff, who mastered the album in the Windy City.

From there, Clay sent his “baby” to Josh Evans, founder of Old House Records. Josh began signing artists to the Texas-based independent label in 2006. The two met in Thibodaux, where Josh hosted house shows while living in the area. He started the label as a way to give artists like Clay the opportunity to cut a record and make enough off of that record to help another artist cut a record. The support system would lead to more albums by a band of creative minds that would have the means and experience to craft better music.

“It’s like creating a tradition,” Josh says. “I see Clay as someone who appreciates all music. He’s true to that tradition. It makes him comfortable.”

Indeed it does. After all, music is where Clay feels most at home.

Tracks from “The Wind and the Warble” now play out of the same wooden speakers that house the voices of legends that found their way into Clay’s old soul. His awe-shucks attitude has kept him from joining that company, but he has the invitation to do so.

“When I played the CD for my father, he said it sounded like it was coming right out of the Victrola,” Pat says. “It’s timeless.”

Timeless—Clay’s way of staying true to folk. He sets out to tell a story; it just so happens to be one stuck on repeat. And we’ll never get tired of listening to it.

“Humans have always been human,” Clay says. “They’ve had very similar experiences down the line. It’s the times that have changed.” PoV

Keepin' It Reel

A mile and a half of magnetic tape was all Clay Parker needed to live the dream he had been chasing since Hank Williams meant more than that guy his parents listen to.

For Clay, Hank was among those on the short list of recording artists who inspired him to recreate that sound of yesteryear—a time before 0’s and 1’s captured a voice and guitar that could be erased with the touch of a button.

When the modern-day troubadour gathered his closest musical allies to begin recording sessions for his first album, “The Wind and the Warble,” he had a game plan drawn from the playbooks of those who had walked down that same road a time or two before.

“This was my first experience doing it,” Clay says about his determination to go analog. “I listened to a ton of records to get some ideas of how things should balance out. Digital music is convenient, and that wins out every time, but to get the sounds they were getting back then, they believed highly in vinyl records.”

Clay wasn’t necessarily going for a physical vinyl record, but he did want magnetic tape to be the medium his first collection of folk songs was recorded on. To get that done, he turned to the Internet to locate and purchase a TEAC A-3440 four-track, reel-to-reel tape deck straight out of the ’70s.

The decision to abandon digital soundboards for an analog recorder meant there would be limitations in the recording process.

For starters, Clay had to learn how to use the machine. Quality records don’t sound the way they do because someone pushed the record button and left it at that. He had to consider placement of microphones and the mixing process before the recording ever started.

The tape deck provided him with four tracks to work with. That meant he had four microphones, one feeding into each track, to capture the rich detail of the country-folk tunes he had picked out for his setlist.

Clay dedicated one microphone each to his vocals and the upright bass. The other
microphones captured a blend of everything else happening in the room—a banjo, mandolin, dobro, fiddle and pedal steel guitar. That was the way the Beatles recorded their earliest albums, so Clay listened to those tracks closely to get a sense of what that arrangement would sound like. The catch was that decisions about how each song would be played had to be made before the recording ever started because the signals were being mixed down at the same time.

If something went wrong, there was no going back. Clay would either have to accept the flaw, or record all over again. And that wastes tape.

“You have limitations in the mix,” says Billy Finney, who played banjo, guitar and bass on the album, and helped Clay record and sequence the project. “If I wanted to bring up the banjo, I’d have to take up the mandolin.”

In other words, the process didn’t lend itself to what New Orleans musician Dr. John refers to as “tricknology,” or being able to easily manipulate what hits the tape.

Though Clay was a rookie at mixing, he took baby steps to figure it out. Mixing is as important as making that transition from the crawling stage to the walking stage because it takes the album one step closer to maturity. It’s the process that balances the sound, evening out volume and tone.

“That was the most frustrating,” Clay says. “To me, it was past the creative stage. It was pure science.”

With all 10 tracks mixed, Clay sent the album to Carl Saff, a mastering engineer in Chicago, to “smooth out the record” by taking care of the harsh p’s and other nuances that steal the listener’s attention during playback. That was the first time the project encountered digital technology, but there was no way around it.

Clay may have lost that battle, but he won the war. After all, his tracks were born and raised under an analog roof.

“There came a point when they wanted to bring it to the computer and edit and mix on the computer, but I didn’t want it done like that because I like the workflow with analog gear,” Clay says. “You literally put your hands on it and turn knobs. You’re very delicate with the tape as you thread it through everywhere it needs to go.”

As the singer-songwriter studies a plastic-wrapped copy of “The Wind and the Warble” in his hands, he smiles at the realization of a dream come true. It wasn’t an easy road—the tape deck broke down during one of the sessions, and he literally ran out of tape while recording the last track—but it was a fun one. And when the time is right, he’ll assemble his troops and walk down that same road once again.

Molding Clay

		Hank Williams If you’ve never heard “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” you might want to check your pulse. Then again, you’ve likely heard “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” and never realized that Hank was that guy in the song obsessed with crawfish pie and filé gumbo. Did we mention he had a thing for classic country, too?
		Mississippi John Hurt There’s something in a name when it comes to this bashful blues man. The Mississippi Delta floods the room when his fingers start pickin’ and his voice starts achin’. He made a name for himself during the Roaring Twenties, but the only noise he heard in his neck of the woods was the sound of a hammer driving nails on the railroad ... and the hum of six lonesome strings when he got home.
		Woody Guthrie Though he was no sheriff, Woody knew how to command a crowd. Never afraid to get political, and always on the move, he wrote “This Land Is Your Land” because he believed every word of it. His folk roots paved the way for his successors like Bob Dylan to take charge and write a lyric that got people thinkin’.
		Gram Parsons If rock ever officially accepted a proposal to marry country, Gram would be the celebrant of the wedding. He would flirt with rock, but take country home. In his spare time, he tried out the long hair look and a few bands, but that didn’t work out like his solo gig did. So he stuck with what he did best—a whole lot of country and a little bit of rock ’n’ roll.