Greg Garing is an old-school real-deal country guy that most folks, country music fans included, have never heard of. He has the quiet bearing of a Zen monk with a personal intensity that brings to mind Townes Van Zandt. He has played with many country and bluegrass superstars including Bill Monroe, John Hartford and Jimmy Martin.
He now lives in Galena, Illinois, and set for an intimate unplugged performance this coming Sunday, Oct. 11 at the Deanery School of Music across the river in Davenport.
Pre-Galena Garing was instrumental in the establishment of the “New Nashville” scene, resurrecting the spirit of Hank Williams at such legendary clubs as Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge (with Paul Burch) and Robert’s, where Lucinda Williams regularly joined him.
In 1997, after his first solo album Alone (Paladin Records), Garing moved to New York City, where the current Director of Musical Activities for the Deanery Joe Chonto first caught him.
“He was playing at this club in downtown Manhattan’s West Village,” Chonto said in a recent interview, “and he had the Harlem All-Stars as his backing band. Al Casey, Tootsie Bean and Bubba Brooks on tenor saxophone. A country singer with these really great jazz players. It was counter-intuitive, but man did it work.”
“I found him to be a very compelling performer, his voice is so rich with nuance and depth of feeling. I can only compare him to people like Billie Holiday or Edith Piaf, Johnny Cash, Otis Redding, Hank Williams, Ray Charles, you know, people like that. Just as a vocalist he’s on that level, but he’s also a great songwriter.”
“With popular music of all types having been taken over by image and spectacle, a lot of people, especially younger, don’t know what great singing is,” he continued. “There are a lot of vocal athletes out there, but they’re soulless and meaningless. Greg is the antithesis of that — zero spectacle, just straight from the heart soulfulness, the truth and nothing but.”
Garing’s songs (stretched over four albums and various EPs/singles) are gems of straight-no-chaser real life, which have been covered by numerous artists, including Wanda Jackson, who recorded two on her 2012 album Unfinished Business. His new single “Far Over the Sea” is currently available to stream on Bandcamp.
To say the least, Greg Garing has had an exceptionally mercurial musical career.
“There’s always mistakes in every article that’s been written about me, no matter how thorough I try to be,” Garing said with a laugh in a recent telephone interview. He went on to say, for example, that he did not specifically play with Hank Snow, as is commonly reported, but that “his band came to play with me a lot and so did Roy Acuff’s band, The Smokey Mountain Boys.”
Garing reflected on some of the things that actually did happen throughout his musical journey. It’s easy to see how articles could conflate fact with fiction. “I really have had a crazy career, even for me. I’ve set the standards in Nashville, I’ve set standards in New York, trends that are still going on.”
“There was a six-month period you couldn’t pick up a magazine I wasn’t in. Rick Rubin heard about me and he’s going around running his mouth at this party ‘There’s this guy in Nashville, he’s the next Hank Williams and I’m gonna sign him. I played his stuff for Johnny [Cash] he said, “He’s the best country singer he heard in 30 years.”‘ Somebody from the Warner Bros. A&R department got a hold of my demos, played ’em … and behind my back I got signed to Warner Bros.”
Those demos became Garing’s debut 1997 album, Alone.
“It was the number six record of the year in the New York Times [The Pop Life], which is the big press of the year. Radiohead’s OK Computer was seventh.”
“Every project I do I try to expand and do something different. [Where that] came from, I can’t even say. I just thought of music as music. I said this is me, this is what I want to do this time in history. I want to create my own version of it. Everybody said it’s ahead of its time at the time. A lot of people copied it. Chris Cornell, God rest his soul, got ahold of it, passed it around L.A. Before you knew it, everybody was hearing my sound.”
Greg Garing will be appearing at the Deanery School of Music. It will be an intimate acoustic setting, limited to 40 attendees, no PA — just the pure sound of guitar, piano and voice, with music and stories from an exceptionally mercurial life.
