Like the mad lovechild of Robert Johnson and Jim Morrison, Dege Legg (aka Brother Dege), the Cajun-born and Louisiana-raised leader of the band Santeria, releases his "slide/Dobro record" entitled Folk Songs Of The American Longhair, produced by 4x Grammy-winner Tony Daigle (Dr. John, Sonny Landreth, Gatemouth Brown, Bobby Charles), Legg and Primo (also from Santeria). This is Delta Blues for the 21st Century, raging out of the swamplands of Louisiana. Dripping with atmosphere and backwoods noir. The real dealdeath-obsessed, god-fearing, foot stomping acoustic blues steeped in the devilish myths and haunted ambience that permeates every inch of Louisiana. Factor in some Historic longhaired rock & roll influences from Sabbath to Black Flag and you've got an art project and anthropological study wrapped in one time traveling package.
Folk Songs of the American Longhair takes the listener on a mind-bending, soul-crushing slide guitar journey into the backroads of the Deep South. Legg composed ten original tunes in the Delta-slide tradition, paying tribute to the old masters while pushing into the apocalyptic future. Much like the field recordings of Alan Lomax, the record tunnels into the ancient mysteries of pre-war blues, recorded in sheds, old houses and open fields. It's like Son House at a surrealist convention. Slide players from the U.S. to Europe are already covering the tunes - via a series of live Brother Dege YouTube videos which have garnered over 150,000 plays with no promotional hype or jive.
Dege Legg is one of the best-kept secrets in the Deep South: an award-winning writer & musician from Lafayette, Louisiana. In 1994, he founded the underground southern-psych rock band, Santeria, which toured and gigged for 10 years in relative obscurity, pounding out a strange variety of "southern rock" that relied less on chest-thumping and beer guzzling, and more with concentrating their creative energies on expressing the isolation and loneliness of the modern south - at times loud and overbearing and alternately quiet, subdued and withdrawn. Over the years, he's explored nearly every corner of weirdness imaginable in the Deep South from jails to homeless camps to driving a taxicab to being a staff writer for the alt-weekly The Independent Weekly.
Dege will be kicking-off his U.S. tour with two record release shows in support of Folk Songs Of The American Longhair (April 7th in Lafayette and April 29th in New Orleans) before heading through the South, East and Midwest
04.29 New Orleans, La (Folk Songs Of The American Longhair Cd Release Show!)
04.30 Birmingham, Al
05.01 Atlanta, Ga
05.02 Charlotte, Nc
05.03 Greenville, Nc
05.04 Winston-Salem, Nc
05.05 Leesburg, Va
05.06 Philadelphia, Pa
05.07 New York, Ny
05.08 Brooklyn, Ny
05.09 New York, Ny
05.10 Providence, Ri
05.11 Somerville, Ma
05.12 Jamaica Plain, Ma
05.14 Cleveland, Oh
05.15 Newport, Ky
05.16 Chicago, Il
05.18 St. Louis, Mo
05.19 Kansas City (Blue Springs), Mo
05.20 Dallas, Tx