Eilen Jewell

Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #138 (October/November 2008).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Eilen Jewell

Restless Roots

by Tom Nelligan

A performance by Eilen Jewell is like a survey course in American roots music. There's a very modern edge to her wistful, thoughtful lyrics about roads, love, disillusionment, and hope, but her music effortlessly spans decades. There are moments onstage when she visits the 1920s to resurrect the spirit of Bessie Smith and face hard times with cool toughness, and in the next song she jumps forward 10 or 20 years to party with Bob Wills. She stops for a drink with Hank Williams and Patsy Cline, kicks back and dances with the rockabilly stars of the 1950s, and borrows songs from the 1960s folk revival. Drawing on all these sounds from country, blues, Western swing, and roadhouse rock, her music blends different eras as comfortably as it blends diverse styles.

A 29-year-old native of Boise, Idaho, who in recent years has been part of Boston's thriving roots music scene, Jewell (her first name is pronounced EE-len) is becoming a force in homestyle American music. She's a soft-spoken woman with a voice that can be smokey and sultry, charged with longing or gritty determination, or soulful and country-sweet. Her original songs introduce the listener to vivid characters and settings without recycling country music clichés, and her covers of writers as diverse as Bob Dylan and Charlie Rich add further flavor to her shows. Backed by a crisp, tight country/rockabilly trio, she alternates between the roles of honky-tonk party girl and vulnerable waif, restless seeker and swing-style crooner. It's American roots music for people who want to think as well as party.

Like quite a few other roots and tradition-oriented artists of her generation, Jewell discovered music through her parents, if somewhat indirectly. When she was seven, her tree-farmer father played tapes of Beethoven piano sonatas on a long family drive from Alaska to Idaho. The experience led her to ask for piano lessons. But her real epiphany came at age 14, when she immersed herself in her parents' record collection and discovered people like Bob Dylan, Howlin' Wolf, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, all of whom she counts as influences on her style.

[cover #138]