Album Notes

Steve Gardner

BIG DELTA CROSSING, is my second CD. It is a simple collection of songs about life, love and adventure tempered with hard times, tall tales and simple truths filtered through the wiser eyes of experience. Big Delta Crossing is the blues running forward and looking backward as we wander into this new century.
The blues remind me that we never really leave our troubles behind no matter how far we roam from home and that life is for living not wishing and waiting. An old man I met once on my travels took the time to tell me that he thought that, "life was like the best bottle of whiskey you would ever get...so drink it all and try not to waste a drop!"

If you've made it this far and haven't driven into the ditch, try out this site and check out what the Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan had to say before you bottle it up and go...

http://www.tokyo-blues.com/Steve_Gardner_interview.html

The Foreign Correspondent’s Club Of Japan wrote, “!Every once in a great while a performer comes along who not only perfects his musical genre, but becomes a walking personification of it as well. Steve Gardner not only sings Mississippi Delta Blues, he IS that musical art form, the real deal. Steve grew up in Mississippi and learned from many of the blues masters. He brings an authenticity to the Tokyo live music scene which is rare and historically accurate.
The blues, Mississippi blues from the American South, are personal stories of love, broken dreams, gambing, drinking, good and hard times and lives and life times spent working endless, hard jobs. Steve Gardner tells these stories while he plays a National steel guitar and runs a brass slider or glass bottleneck over the strings in order to get that traditional blues bottleneck sound. Incidentally the name his band is the Bottlenck Blues Band, taken from his style of blues. Steve Gardner is a focused purist and it is his greatist strength as a performer and blues man.
Steve Gardner is also an accomplished photographer as seen in his impressive coffee table book, Rambling Mind , a fine collection of revealing and candid B&W photographs of the blues and many of its pioneering players rambling from the Mississippi Delta to the southern piney woods.
Be sure an catch Steve Gardner live at the club or around town. He is the real blues from Mississippi.”

FCCJ Tokyo 2005- Saturday Night Live Music Committee




Steve Gardner-Tokyo 2006

I was born in Mississippi in 1956. Music came into my life by way of an old phonograph, my cousin's Japanese transistor radio, our black and white television set and church on Sundays. And especially those great times when Daddy would play rhythm on four kitchen knives while Uncle Amos Parker played and sang. I picked up the guitar and harmonica later on and have never looked back.

I met and made friends with Sam Chatmon, of the Mississippi Sheiks in the 70's as I worked on a degree in photojournalism from the University of Southern Mississippi. After a few photos and a meal of fried chicken or catfish Sam would let me blow the harp with him a while saying, "Steve, everybody needs a chance to be told to sit down!" I learned to take that chance when it was offered...you may not get another one anytime soon.

The music and photography became my pass way to friendships with so many fine musicians like Jack Owens, Jessie Mae Hemphill, James Son Thomas, Booba Barnes and more who opened their homes and hearts to me. They all pointed out that you must find your own road into the blues, play your own songs and play them your own way. Usually they would say something like, "Steve, you ain't me and I ain't you so just git on with it!" I did too.

In 1980 I left my photography job at the Jackson (MS) Daily News and moved to Japan where I freelanced for Japanese magazines as well as Time and Newsweek. I covered Asia and the US from here and still found time for the blues. This international interest in the blues led me to finish my best black and white picture book on Mississippi and the blues, Rambling Mind (1994). This book shows the Mississippi that I grew up and know with its-share croppers, good times and hard, its people and the musicians that treated me like both friend and family. My first CD, Rambling With The Blues (2002) is this books musical companion.

The music, the blues has continued to light my path as I ramble across the deep waters from Mississippi to Tokyo. The photography still counts but it has taken a back seat to the guitars and harmonicas. I travel to several Universities in Japan where I play blues and do programs on Mississippi and southern culture. I even do this part-time for Meiji University, a very fine institution indeed. My new CD is Big Delta Crossing (2005/12) it more or less sums up what I think about these turbulent and changing times. If life is like a bottle of whiskey, you better drink it all and not waste a drop...Remember, you can't be afraid and live free...after all, everybody gets the blues...sometime.