Woody Pines

“Woody sounds like Willie Nelson singing a Johnny Cash song in a 1930’s Alabama juke joint! Wildly addicting!” (No Depression)

If you’re wondering where the music of Nashville troubadour Woody Pines comes from, then look to the streets! It was on the streets as a professional busker that Woody first cut his teeth, drawing liberally from the lost back alley anthems and scratchy old 78’s of American roots music, whether country blues, jugband, hokum or hillbilly. Heavy, rollicking street performances are the key to some of todays best roots bands, like Old Crow Medicine Show (Woody and OCMS’ Gill Landry used to tour the country in their own jugband), and they’re the key to Woody’s intensely catchy rhythms, jumpy lyrics, and wildly delirious sense of fun. Woody travelled all over the streets of the States road testing his songs, drawing from the catchiest elements of the music he loved and adding in a hopped-up vintage electrification to get that old country dancehall sound down right.

“Woody Pines is the best band I ever heard in my life, I swear! I’m their biggest fan now!” (Billy Joe Shaver)

This is gonzo folk music, the kind of raise-the-rafters, boot-shakin’ jump blues that used to be banging out of juke joints all over the South in the late 40’s. It’s tempting to call his newest music rockabilly, but it might be more accurate to call his new songs “hillbilly boogie”, a rarely remembered genre of American music made famous by the Delmore Brothers. Hillbilly boogie sits at the exact moment when the buzzed-out, electrified hillbilly country music of Appalachia first hit the sawdust-floored honky tonks of old Nashville and Memphis. It was the moment exactly before the birth of rock ’n’ roll.

When Woody Pines sings “when the train rolls by, I get a faceful of rain”, this isn’t some hipster dilettante twisting a faux-handlebar moustache and singing about old-time railroads, this is a dedicated student of Woody Guthrie who used to hop freight trains to get from town to town.

This is serious roots music that’s as much a way of life as an aesthetic choice. This music isn’t for dabblers, you gotta feel it in your bones. Let Woody Pines help!

More information at www.squarerootspromotions.co.uk