August 9, 2009

• Kevin Skinner - One Man One Guitar

  I've made it through 66 years without watching much prime time TV and no day time TV, ever.  I thought I was home free until  Susan Boyle appeared.  Now, there's Kevin Skinner, singing and picking  his guitar (I've always loved a good guitar man), and I'm now working with the owner of a fan site, at www.mykevinskinner.com

  
  

  She asked me if I wanted to write a bio.  So I did.  Before I do a final edit and commit it to the google spider crawl, I would appreciate hearing anything any of you has to say..  Thanks.

  Meanwhile, this is now published on the website www.mykevinskinner.com. Come on over and show  your appreciation for this talented man.  It's a great fansite with the beginnings of a photograph section for  pictures not previously published.  

  
  

                               Kevin Skinner - One Man, One Guitar

  Kekvin Skinner, a 35 year old singer, songwriter and guitar player, hails from Dublin Kentucky, a tiny settlement of some 200 people in western Kentucky, far away from the hills of Applachia. Dublin is some 10 miles away from Fancy Farm, Kentucky which was settled in the 1820's by Catholics from Maryland and has both kinship and religious ties with Fancy Farm, with its 600 residents. Mayfield, the county seat, with 10,300 people at the last census, is 12 miles away.   

  
  

  Skinner auditioned for America’s Got Talent on June 23, 2009, singing “If Tomorrow Never Comes” by Garth Brooks and Kent Blazy.  With his unadorned evocation of the elusive high lonesome sound (you know it when you hear it, think James Taylor's "Sweet Baby James"), he achieved almost instant fame, as new fans from around the world raced to Youtube to watch his audition video. 

  
  

  Carrying his sunburst Tacoma guitar, Skinner walked on stage and positioned himself in the middle of the big red X. The judges and the audience laughed when he answered questions in a heavy western Kentucky accent.  More raucous, jeering laughter erupted when he said he had worked as a chicken catcher, a difficult and tiring farm labor job that many thought amusing, although, in fact, the work exposes catchers to gases that cause nausea, dizziness, severe skin problems and long-term, disabling lung complications.  Piers Morgan, perhaps with Susan Boyle in mind, stopped those making fun at his expense with the request that he perform.

  
  

  Perched on a tall stool, alone, no backing tracks, only him and his guitar, America listening, Skinner began to pick and then to sing.  Hearing the bell-clear opening notes falling from the guitar, the restive audience was almost instantly quiet.  He sang from the tradition of old style country music, the man and his guitar, sitting on the back porch of an evening, intimate with each other, the voice riding along on the beautifully finger-picked no-flash guitar line, the "high lonesome" sound, pure and simple. 

  
  

  The studio audience was mesmerized, quiet, respectful, erupting in a standing ovation as the last notes faded into the background noise.  Seldom can a performer tame an audience to total quiet, especially almost instantly.  It is a rare gift, and one that I suspect brought Skinner to the attention of Nashville hardly before the song ended, although we won't know that until after the contest and any Las Vegas performance are finished.  

  
  

  Adding other instruments works for many singers.  It didn't work for Skinner on this song to his advantage. He seemed to be stretching his higher range with this arrangement although this might have been from evident tension. Perhaps a lower key would have worked better, where he didn't have to reach so much and which would show off his lovely lower register more. Whatever the case, with this arrangement, Skinner had to sing against his best qualities. Still, it had the elements of beauty, especially in the first verse before the backing track took over. 

  
  

  Skinner reaches deep inside himself for his music.  He isn’t afraid to face deep emotions, transform them into song.  He has a good voice, plays a good guitar, but it is this capacity to move himself into the depths of grief or love and sing it back to us that raises him above other singers.  He needs arrangements that enhance this ability, not completely cover it up.

  
  

  On both appearances, the audience laughed every time the judges or host found a way to say "chicken catcher," always imitating his drawl.  In his apparent sincerity and decency, in less than two minutes, singing his song, Skinner stripped away the "country bumpkin" image the judges and audience eagerly dropped on his shoulders when he first began to speak, showing us a man whose humanity, humiility and music simply blew the stereotype into oblivion. 

  
  

  Skinner claims his roots.  Several times in interviews during the lead-ins to his appearance on stage, he tells us that he's a “country boy,” coming from a place where things happen slower than in the city, where he hunts, fishes and goes truck mudding.  According to an early myspace page, he also hunts arrowheads and counts “all the great Apache and Cherokee chiefs’ among his heroes. 

  
  

  He lives only two and a half hours by car from Nashville, but drives there to gig and to play open  mikes.  Though Nashville is a big city compared to Dublin, his sister says, "Nashville didn't really seem to be a big city though, actually.  When we where there, we felt at home.  I believe it was because the whole city centered around music and we feel instantly akin." When asked in an interview about his experiences in Nashville, Skinner replied that after appearing on open mikes on weekends, he often had someone grabbing  him by the collar as he was leaving, asking if he could come back the following Thursday and Friday to be featured.  But, he said, he had a job, a family to support and just didn't have the time. 

  
  

  Small towns, traditionally the essence of the American heartland, like Dublin, Kentucky, Skinner's home, with its population of some 200 people, live more in our imagination than in reality.  They are disappearing, now holding only some 10 percent of the nation's population and many are in decline or just on hold, loosing young men to urban centers with more prospects of employment.  Mayfield is no different.  Some of its young men also leave in search of city jobs.  Those who stay face a difficult labor market.  

  
  

  Americans often idealize small town and country life and people, believing them to be the locus of much that is good and true about America.  There are good and bad people, lying ones and honest ones, mean-spirited and kind people everywhere.  But Skinner, in his non-city ways, his open face, shining smile,  his transparent honesty and heart, draw us in, remind us of the very best of what Americans have admired about the small town and rural folk who, greatly diminished in numbers since WWII, live on more and more in our collective memory rather than just off Main Street in tiny towns. 

  
  

  When Skinner appears on the TV or monitor, we are brough face to face with a man sincere and humble. We can remember for a moment the kindness and decency of the best of rural and small town life, a life that now belongs more to our grandparents than to our grandchildren.  

  
  

  Calling again on his country roots, hinting at the differences in time and landscape, at the passion, emotion and poetry he would evoke in his singing, Skinner told Nick Cannon, the show host, that there is time in the country to sit on the front porch of an evening, “gathering my thoughts” and “counting stars.”  Counting stars.  A man who feels life in all its pleasure and pain counts stars.  That was the first signal to me that we were about to hear from a very special man.

  
  

  An interview with a local TV station reveals more of Kevin’s heart.  At the preliminary screening auditions for America’s Got Talent, he sang a song of his own, “Her Stone,” written after the death of his beloved grandmother, Ethel Clapp, four years ago.  This was the time he really began to write, saying that the music and words just poured out of him, that he believed that the music “was the way to release the sadness I was feeling at the time.”

  
  

  Music is in his family's blood.  Kevin's sister, Jennifer, remembers evenings with Kevin and her other brothers, Michael and Rodney, listening to their father, Joe, take out  his guitar and play and sing Hank Williams, a musician whose work is at the center of the rich tradition of American country music.  It was Joe who got them into music, according to Jennifer.  

  
  

  It was Rodney, the second eldest brother, who taught Kevin to play the guitar and pioneered the first family band.  Jennifer, who sings, has performed at various times with Rodney and Kevin. Rodney continues to play both acoustic and electric guitar in what is now Kevin's band.  Skinner's eldest brother, Michael, has a master's degree in classical piano from Notre Dame and has served as music director of St Jerome's church in Fancy Farm.        

  
  

  Now, Kevin Skinner is a long, long way from the front porch of the modest house where he sat and picked his guitar and sang, wondering if that front porch would be the limit of his dreams.  Despite pressures to conform, to "get a day job," which he did, working as a laborer most of his adult life, taking whatever was available to support his children and wife, he didn't give up his dream.  There is something in Skinner that gave him the faith in himself and the faith that he deserved more than he was getting from chicken barns and gigs at Hill's Bar-be-que that allowed him to file an application for America's Got Talent.  Despite the social pressurees to conform, to not dream big dreams, he found the courage to break away from the pack. 

                       

  Now, over three million people have watched his audition performance and almost all of the more than 13,000 comments on his Youtube video of that audition contain words like “wow” and “amazing,” often saying that they have returned to listen over and over.  Caught in the deep emotion of Kevin’s singing, many write that they finish the song in tears.  Many wrote that they had never listened to country music, never liked country music, even hated country music, but were so taken by Skinner’s singing that they wanted to buy his CD’s, no questions asked, even if they were full of country songs.

  
  

  Skinner has been presented as a one-dimensional performer of country music by the producers of America's Got Talent.   He is not just a country artist, but plays and composes rock, under the name BentLemon. They have also failed to provide arrangements that showcase his guitar.  He plays very well, both acoustic and electric guitar.  Sometime down the line he may choose rock and country.  For now, his presentation as a country artist and his ability to bring in fans who have never listend to country before or profess not to even like country music, leaves Kevin Skinner uniquely placed to bring American country music to a new audience.   In his choice of the Blazy/Brooks song, Skinner plays something new to many of us, drawing on the finest of the older tradition of the country genre for his inspiration and style, taking his listeners back in time to hear the heart and soul of American country music, without today's overlay of  rock and roll. 

    

  Kevin Skinner musical style does not lend itself to being commercialized.  One hopes the producers and music directors of America's Got Talent grasp this and don't try further to prettify his music, try to make him another Britney Spears.  Even more fervently, one hopes that he will find a producer who understands his gift and will work with it, nourish it, help grow it.  He deserves nothing less and I wish him godspeed on his musical and life journey.  

  
  

  Lily 

  copyright August 2009

  • 7:09 am
  • 13 Comments