IRA BARGER

ARTICLE BY VANELIS RIVERA
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANDREW BAILEY

One does not merely listen to the blues. The powerful and starkly poetic music form is an experience. Add a regional variant like the Delta blues, regarded as one of the earliest-known styles of the genre, and the end product is an introspective and soulful musical panorama of a region rich in fertile soil and yet steeped in generations of poverty. While the artform is currently revered all over the world (an exposure that has been long overdue), there was a time where you had to go looking for the blues. As a Mississippi native that was easy for Ira S. Barger to do, though what he also found was an onstage identity born of his own experiences in the Delta. Marked by a calm stance and hard-hitting vocals, he holds his band together without overshadowing anyone, which points to a respect of the artform and its reliance on all its moving parts.

Barger grew up in Isola, Mississippi, a town with a shrinking population narrowing toward six hundred, when his mother moved there in 1990. His mom’s side of the family were musicians, and as early as he can remember he heard about uncles Bobby and Sidney playing gigs all over the Delta and also in Dallas with the likes of Sam Myers, Little Bill Wallace, and Brian “Hash Brown” Calway. His grandfather was a seasoned musician as well; his band recorded at the legendary Sun Studios. Barger picked up the guitar around age nine but didn’t get serious until he was thirteen. “My uncle Bobby was really the one that showed me my first chords and my first lick,” he recalls. It was difficult to get a pat on the back from his uncle, who would show out whenever an eager Barger would want to display what he thought he had mastered: “He pushed me pretty hard to get better. Back then I thought he was pushing a little too hard, but now I look back on it and appreciate it.”

At fifteen he began tagging along with his uncles to various gigs, which is how he got introduced to people like Fat Possum recording artist Paul “Wine” Jones. “He was the first one that I really started watching and hanging around,” says Barger referring to the beginning of his blues influence. “So I started walking up to bars around that time just wanting to play, not wanting to drink, not wanting to party,” he says. The first place to give him a shot was 308 Blues Club and Cafe in Indianola, Mississippi, the hometown of B.B. King. “He’s actually buried right down the street from the club, and his club, Club Ebony, was right down the street from 308; still is.” Eventually, he worked his way into the music scene, linking up with drummer Marlow Dorrough, whose father Duff Dorrough was a past member of the Tangents and lead singer of the Yalobushwhackers of Thacker Mountain Radio Show. They started Solar Porch, a duo project with a hypnotic groove. He credits the development of his guitar playing to his experiences playing “through the Delta up into the hills,” which included winning the regional preliminary competition for the International Blues Challenge, held annually in Memphis, TN.

“Delta blues wasn’t as popular then, even in the Delta, as much as it is now,” informs Barger, referring to the early 2000s. “Back then, you had to go looking for the blues.” After the catfish industry went “belly up” (a hard hit to Barger’s family who were catfish farmers), “the Delta had to figure out some way to use what it had to keep the revenue flow because it is one of the poorest places in the country.” Deciding to capitalize on the music history of the region, places like Clarksdale became a hotspot for blues tourism. People from all over would come to the Delta looking for blues. Barger once heard of a group of North Europeans strolling through Indianola claiming to be looking for the heart of American music. “One of the places that I really cut my teeth was outside of Benzoli,” says Barger. There, Mr. Willie Earl and Mrs. Polly Archer held fish frys every Sunday. He and a friend, the only two “white guys,” would go out there to play. “I never felt unwelcome,” he adds, stressing that occurrences like fish frys and blues festivals had a tendency to bring people together. “I felt just as home sitting out there playing the blues and eating fried fish, just as I was sitting at home with my own white family.”

Barger explains that some things can’t be intellectualized, especially his pull to the blues. “It’s really hard to separate your experience from your identity,” he says. The music of the Delta saturated his upbringing. “It was everywhere. Of course, it was there because I was looking for it. It was something that lit a fire under my ass. It was something that I had to be a part of and something that had to be a part of me.” Later adding juke-style music and experimenting with the psychedelic grooves of the sixties and seventies, he extended his sound and his network. Finding his way into the local festival circuit by way of The Fool’s Ball and The Fall Ball, he ended up linking up with one of his music influences, David Burchfield, the late songwriter for The Electric Mudd, sharing the stage a few times with the six-piece blues band. When he first started playing with Burchfield, he was more of a “troubadour type,” really into folksy, Dylan-esque writing, playing a lot of John Hurt and refining his finger-picking. He admits wanting to touch people’s hearts with his songs until Birchfield remarked, “Touching hearts is good, but melting faces is better.” Barger took the brutally honest advice and began exploring more “big tone,” heavy rhythm sections. “The guitar is great; that’s the crown chakra side of things, but you’re getting into the root chakra with the bass and the drums.” Still driven by the impulse to melt faces, his upcoming album, which is still in the works, is a return to raunchy juke joint blues, rich in psychedelic sounds, and reliant on the rock and roll power trio format.

Though blues has a history of utilizing double entendres, Barger’s approach to the “raunchy” concerns heavily distorted, hard hitting riffs versus suggestive lyrics. His ample stomping grounds dictate most of his song content. “I found it kind of difficult to plant my roots for a long time,” he says, not knowing what he wanted to do with himself besides play music. A lot of that uncertainty made its way into his songs, which touched on baffling dichotomies, like loss and discovery. An improvisationist at heart, he writes his best songs on the fly, letting his emotions and thoughts grapple with his inspiration organically, noting that, “When a song takes shape, you know it.” As a metaphysical thinker, he’s a firm believer that consciousness isn’t located in the brain and that artists receive their work, more so than create it: “Songs already exist. It’s a matter of you reaching out there and putting them together.”

Heavily influenced by people like Freddie King and his time playing with Electric Mudd and former band Solar Porch, his upcoming record is a mix of new and “retooled” originals. “I don’t believe that my songs or any art is fixed in time and space, that it’s dogmatically untouchable, beyond reproach or rearrangement,” he affirms. The first song on the ten-track record falls into that category. Though Barger has kept the original arrangement to “Before the Breaking,” the lyrics have been altered to fit who he is seven years after its composition: “Wisdom waits ‘round / Every corner / Knowing resides / ‘Neath each stone.” With a “droning low end,” the melody is what carries the song. One of his more metaphysical compositions, it touches on themes of death, learning, and understanding. “Little more waxing philosophical in that song than in some of the other songs that I’ve written,” he says. Another revision is a song originally written for the duo with Marlow. “Swamp Fever,” recorded in a former record titled Yazoo Rising (2012), received a new musical track for his current project. “It kinda reminds me a little more of the rock and roll side of things, but it’s still hard hitting blues,” he says. The third tracked song, “Ran Out of Reasons,” is a new original based on a relationship he should have walked away from a lot earlier than he did. Though holding a firm vision for the LP, its title is still to be determined. “I’m kinda leaving that up in the air. It’s kind of like a dog. You don’t want to name a dog before you get it. Let it come into its own and then let it name itself.”

In 2017, Barger moved to Monroe with his wife Ashley to be closer to her parents. The first place to give him a stage was Enoch’s Irish Pub & Cafe. “The town I grew up in, we had to scrap tooth and nail…If you wanted a good show you might have to drive an hour to get to some good music or play a jam,” he says, appreciating that on any given night you’re liable to find a good show in the Monroe area. It didn’t take long for Barger to regularly make rounds with local musicians, establishing a few collaborative projects including a monthly Juke Joint Jam with a rotating stage of different local acts like DJ Grissom, Brindan Eisler, Josh Love, and Mark Taylor. Barger also established Dead Reckoning, a “fresh off the farm, Louisiana-grown roots music” string band, featuring Tyler Schweinefus on “doghouse bass,” Kirby Rambin on fiddle, and Mason Howard playing guitar and mandolin.

Though Barger has spent a lot of hours sitting on his childhood porch emulating the greats of Delta blues, he’s become a better musician and songwriter by being true to how he sees the world and reflecting that honestly in his songs: “Not everybody is going to see your music the way you see your music. Ultimately, you’re laying yourself vulnerable to people.” There’s always a risk of failure, especially when you’re a creator, but Barger has discovered that truth in the rallying cry of the Delta, confessing, “If I spend long enough not playing gigs or at least playing a guitar or writing something, I feel like I don’t know myself anymore.” That’s part of what the blues is about–getting outside of your troubles in order to get inside of who you really are.

Follow Ira S. Barger on Facebook to learn more about his local performances and to stay tuned for his record drop.