Peter Cooper On Music: Sleepy LaBeef ‘Rides Again’

Dave Pomeroy was 21 years old in October of 1977, and he’d been in Nashville fewer than three weeks.

Nashville didn’t notice.

“I put up a business card at Hewgley’s Music downtown, in hopes someone might hire me,” says Pomeroy, now an accomplished session musician and the president of the Nashville Musicians Association. “The next day, I got a call from the drummer for a guy named Sleepy LaBeef. He asked three questions:

‘Can you play the bass?’

Yes.

‘Can you sing?’

Yes.

‘Can you leave tomorrow?’

Yes.

I forgot to ask when we were coming back.”

Thus, Pomeroy was welcomed to the world of Sleepy LaBeef, the time-stretchingest of American roots musicians.

Pomeroy didn’t get back to Nashville for the next 10 months, as LaBeef (born Thomas Paulsley LaBeff, called “Sleepy” because his eyes droop and “LaBeef” because it’s the greatest of last names, bar none) and his band hunkered down in New England and played places like Alan’s Fifth Wheel Lounge in Amesbury, Mass., and a submarine base in Groton, Conn.

During a two-week stint in Port Huron, Mich., the band slept in a gas-heated trailer behind a motor home, in top bunks near the heater that were unbearably hot and bottom bunks away from the heater that would freeze.

And, just like the touring stretched through winter, spring and summer, LaBeef would sometimes stretch what could have been three-minute rockabilly, soul, R&B, blues and country songs into winding, 30-minute medleys.

“We get up there and jam,” says LaBeef, now 77 and the subject of a Pomeroy-produced film called “Sleepy LaBeef Rides Again,” which will make its world premiere Sunday, April 21 as part of the Nashville Film Festival.

“That’s much more fun than doing long rehearsals.”

At a Sleepy LaBeef show, a rollicking take on Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s “I Ain’t Got No Home” can morph into Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” and then into gospel pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Strange Things Happening Every Day,” all delivered in a voice that Peter Guralnick — America’s greatest chronicler of musicians and Sleepy’s dear friend — calls “basso-profundo.”

“Certainly in my own pantheon, Sleepy is right up there with such incandescent spirits as James Brown, Howlin’ Wolf and Jerry Lee Lewis in his pure ability to tear up the stage,” Guralnick wrote in liner notes to LaBeef’s “Nothin’ But the Truth” album.
‘Follow or die’

For Pomeroy, time on and off stage with LaBeef provided myriad lessons and delivered a musical education that would set him up for success in Nashville, where each recording session may call for differing tones and styles.

“There’s no one else on earth who knows what he knows about American roots music. He’s the personification of Americana. Folk, country, blues, gospel, even polka stuff and a little jazz and lots of boogie: All these things he’s conversant with, and combines them in ways no one else knows how to do.”



‘Follow or die’

For Pomeroy, time on and off stage with LaBeef provided myriad lessons and delivered a musical education that would set him up for success in Nashville, where each recording session may call for differing tones and styles.

“There’s no one else on earth who knows what he knows about American roots music. He’s the personification of Americana. Folk, country, blues, gospel, even polka stuff and a little jazz and lots of boogie: All these things he’s conversant with, and combines them in ways no one else knows how to do.”






Peter Cooper On Music: Sleepy LaBeef ‘Rides Again’
Posted on April 19, 2013 by Peter Cooper
Sleepy LaBeef (photo: Ariel Ellis)

Sleepy LaBeef (photo: Ariel Ellis)

Dave Pomeroy was 21 years old in October of 1977, and he’d been in Nashville fewer than three weeks.

Nashville didn’t notice.

“I put up a business card at Hewgley’s Music downtown, in hopes someone might hire me,” says Pomeroy, now an accomplished session musician and the president of the Nashville Musicians Association. “The next day, I got a call from the drummer for a guy named Sleepy LaBeef. He asked three questions:

‘Can you play the bass?’

Yes.

‘Can you sing?’

Yes.

‘Can you leave tomorrow?’

Yes.

I forgot to ask when we were coming back.”

Thus, Pomeroy was welcomed to the world of Sleepy LaBeef, the time-stretchingest of American roots musicians.

Pomeroy didn’t get back to Nashville for the next 10 months, as LaBeef (born Thomas Paulsley LaBeff, called “Sleepy” because his eyes droop and “LaBeef” because it’s the greatest of last names, bar none) and his band hunkered down in New England and played places like Alan’s Fifth Wheel Lounge in Amesbury, Mass., and a submarine base in Groton, Conn.

During a two-week stint in Port Huron, Mich., the band slept in a gas-heated trailer behind a motor home, in top bunks near the heater that were unbearably hot and bottom bunks away from the heater that would freeze.

And, just like the touring stretched through winter, spring and summer, LaBeef would sometimes stretch what could have been three-minute rockabilly, soul, R&B, blues and country songs into winding, 30-minute medleys.

“We get up there and jam,” says LaBeef, now 77 and the subject of a Pomeroy-produced film called “Sleepy LaBeef Rides Again,” which will make its world premiere Sunday, April 21 as part of the Nashville Film Festival.

“That’s much more fun than doing long rehearsals.”

At a Sleepy LaBeef show, a rollicking take on Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s “I Ain’t Got No Home” can morph into Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” and then into gospel pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Strange Things Happening Every Day,” all delivered in a voice that Peter Guralnick — America’s greatest chronicler of musicians and Sleepy’s dear friend — calls “basso-profundo.”

“Certainly in my own pantheon, Sleepy is right up there with such incandescent spirits as James Brown, Howlin’ Wolf and Jerry Lee Lewis in his pure ability to tear up the stage,” Guralnick wrote in liner notes to LaBeef’s “Nothin’ But the Truth” album.
‘Follow or die’

For Pomeroy, time on and off stage with LaBeef provided myriad lessons and delivered a musical education that would set him up for success in Nashville, where each recording session may call for differing tones and styles.

“There’s no one else on earth who knows what he knows about American roots music. He’s the personification of Americana. Folk, country, blues, gospel, even polka stuff and a little jazz and lots of boogie: All these things he’s conversant with, and combines them in ways no one else knows how to do.”

Born in Smackover, Ark. (friends, we do not make this stuff up), LaBeef migrated to Houston and started playing professionally in 1954. He moved to Nashville in the mid-1960s and stayed here until leaving for Pomeroy’s first tour: Turns out New England is nice, and also the tour bus burned up and people seemed to like his brand of roots music in the high northeast.

“I recorded in Nashville on Sun Records, when Shelby Singleton revived that label, and I did a few records on Plantation, and I was with Columbia for about four years,” LaBeef says. “At Columbia, they said, ‘We don’t know how to market you. We don’t know whether you’re country or rock ’n’ roll.’ ”

He was, of course, both of those, and a million other things.

In his nearly 60 years in the business, LaBeef has never had a major hit. (His 1971 version of Frankie Miller’s “Black Land Farmer charted at No. 67). He has developed a more-than-solid audience in Europe, but his critically well-received albums (particularly his ’80s and ’90s efforts on Rounder Records) haven’t sparked a major American revival.

Last year, Pomeroy and a crew of ace musicians — Kenny Vaughan, Gene Dunlap and Rick Lonow — joined LaBeef at historic RCA Studio B and recorded some tracks, and then they recorded a joyful show at Douglas Corner that provided the bulk of the material for “Sleepy LaBeef Rides Again.”

“He’s got something to say,” Pomeroy says. “I would think he could have a renaissance, the way (blues man) John Lee Hooker did.”

On Tuesday, April 23 at Douglas Corner, LaBeef and his Nashville players will play a DVD release party, but don’t expect him to be handing out set lists to the band.

“No charts, and it’s never the same,” Pomeroy says. “With Sleepy, it was always, ‘Follow or die.’ ”

That’s OK. Turns out “Follow or die” is more fun than rehearsing. Anyway, it’s not as if LaBeef is above helpful hinting.

“Sometimes,” Pomeroy admits, “he’ll tell you what key he’s in.”
If you go

What: Sleepy LaBeef DVD release celebration

When: 6 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Douglas Corner, 2106-A Eighth Ave. S.

Tickets: free
Film premiere

What: “Sleepy LaBeef Rides Again” film premiere

When: 7:30 p.m. today

Where: Regal Green Hills Cinema, theater 15

Tickets: $12, available via www.nashvillefilmfestival.org or at the box office
Reach Peter Cooper at 615-259-8220 or pcooper@tennessean.com.



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