When meeting local musicians in Tuscaloosa, many students are surprised to find that these artists are in the same age range as they are. The guy who wrote “Sassprilluh Champagne” is barely out of college, the buzz band in town has a vocalist barely born in the 1980s and gigs can even be headlined by people that can’t legally drink at the bar they’re playing in. Tuscaloosa, for lack of a better term, is a place of youth.
This makes Ham Bagby, leader of Ham Bagby and the Siege and all-around Tuscaloosa music maven, a rare exception. Bagby is 33, a parent to a little boy named Milo and is ubiquitous in Tuscaloosa, which seems awfully time-consuming.
“You get into a groove when you have a job and have a family,” Bagby said, “And at the same time, having to play gigs, too, with not much time for practice. You have to just get comfortable enough with the music that you can play with whoever.”
Bagby is extremely comfortable. He got on stage for an unplanned two-song jam session on Oct. 22 with the amazing Birmingham rap group The Green Seed. With no prior knowledge, Bagby figured out how to play the textured vinyl cuts by ear, the type of ability that obviously comes with years of experience.
“When I was much younger, I moved away from here and moved back to Montevallo, where I went to college when I was 19,” Bagby said. “I lived in a log cabin and had power and a refrigerator and stuff, and I had nothing but a clock radio. I studied and played guitar to radio stations that I could pick up. A lot of it was [Birmingham-based] 95.7 Jamz.”
Bagby chose this lifestyle on purpose to, in a way, give him a musical tutorship. It sounds pretentious, but it is true that taking away the elements of our daily life on purpose can create focus, and in Bagby’s case, this is when he made a realization.
“It was at that point that I realized that contemporary music is essentially the same thing from early country and blues stuff through jazz to now,” Bagby said. “It’s more stylized than it is musically different. The beats are the same, the notes are the same, the keys are the same.”
Bagby listed Run-DMC’s “Raising Hell,” which had the rap-rock collaboration “Walk This Way,” a penultimate track of the 1980s and the first true test of altering the forms of rock and rap.
This makes it all the more jarring but somehow sensible when Bagby’s new record has a country ballad that is an ode to “dropping the soap.” The record, entitled “’S***’s Crucial’ is Track Ten,” will be released soon, with a mix of crudely funny songs and “more soulful stuff.”
“I haven’t done a record in five years, and I know that I’m older than a lot of the bar room guys right now who are doing what I do,” Bagby said. “I haven’t had new products – I just play gigs. For a while, I haven’t even thought about a new record. I just kind of write songs every once in a while, and I look five years later and realize that I have these songs and haven’t recorded them.”
It’s crucial to get songs recorded, guys.
