Larry Campbell

The guitarist’s quest for elusive American purity has led him to play alongside Bob Dylan, Doug Sahm, Marie Knight and Levon Helm

In an era of instant American Idol-style stardom, it’s salutary to remember the best musicians have always paid their dues. If a democratic form such as rock ‘n’ roll has unwittingly engendered the horrible notion everyone should open his mouth to sing, the career of guitarist and producer Larry Campbell, a native New Yorker born in 1955, reminds us self-expression arises from discipline, not self-indulgence. There’s such a thing as musical culture, and Campbell has immersed himself in it. In fact, his recent work with Levon Helm and the gospel singer Marie Knight proves blues culture isn’t dead — it’s just hiding.

Campbell has had a hot couple of years.  As part of Levon Helm’s band, he played Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium last July. The date marked the first road-show appearance of Helm’s Midnight Ramble, which began as a modified version of what used to be called rent parties, limited to Helm’s Woodstock, N.Y., home. Nashville’s Americana Music Association lured the Ramble to Music City, and Campbell’s stunning electric-guitar interpretation of Garth Hudson’s famed organ introduction to the Band’s 1968 “Chest Fever” brought down the house. 

“Levon was a huge influence on me,” Campbell says from West Tennessee, where he was spending Easter weekend with his wife, the singer Teresa Williams, and her family. “The Band was a phenomenal group, but Levon was the heart and soul of that thing.  Anything that was pure American music, Levon could sing and pull off and perform to you with complete authority.”

Campbell’s search for that elusive American purity — and impurity — began early.  Like most musically inclined people of his generation, he was stunned by the Beatles’ 1964 conquest of America.

“I started guitar in 1966, I guess it was,” Campbell says. “Back then, for me, it was all about the Beatles, basically. That was what opened the door for me, like 20 million other people. That Ed Sullivan Show [appearance] — the next day the world was a different place. And then I started finding out where these British guys had gotten this stuff from all these American people, and then where the American acts had gotten their thing from originally.”

That led to the blues, gospel and country music — forms for which Campbell shows a remarkable feeling on Helm’s Dirt Farmer and Knight’s equally superb Let Us Get Together: A Tribute to Reverend Gary Davis. The year 2007 might have been for Carrie Underwood and other American Idol pop-up stars, but here were two collections that proved old-fashioned virtues such as respect, historical awareness and humility could still hang in there amid mass culture’s obsession with celebrity and unearned privilege. 

“On the country side, it went back to the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers and all the way up through Hank Williams,” Campbell says of his early explorations of what is now called Americana or roots music. “Then on the blues side, it’s back to people like Blind Blake and Robert Johnson and that whole thing. I became immersed in that stuff — and, of course, in Gary Davis.”

In the early 1970s, Campbell played in a New York band called Cottonmouth. A roots-rock ensemble before its time, they went nowhere, and Campbell scooted out to California. There he hooked up with a singer named Ben Marney (“He was on Playboy Records at the time,” Campbell remembers), with whom Campbell went on tour. “It was sort of a country hotel-lounge band. For me, at the time, it was a wonderful gig — weekly paycheck, and I was on the road.”

Honing his chops on a variety of instruments, including mandolin, guitar and pedal steel, Campbell made a stop in Jackson, Miss., for a year, and then went back to New York to pursue his career in earnest. “I started working with John Herald,” Campbell says. A Manhattan-born bluegrass and folk musician, Herald influenced everyone from Campbell to Bob Dylan.