Country Pickers & City Slickers

Three years ago, the Brooklyn country musician and festival organizer Alexander Battles decided to don a cowboy hat while walking the streets of Manhattan.“I was walking around New York and I might as well have been wearing a pink tutu,” he said. “People stared at me like, ‘What is this weirdo doing?’ I kind of got into it.”PODCAST: A Conversation With Alexander BattlesIt was part of the gradual invention of a stage personality — a Johnny Cash-inspired, Brylcreem-slicked entertainer who is the host of regular events for the growing cast of country musicians settled in Brooklyn.In 2004, Mr. Battles, 35, founded the Johnny Cash Birthday Bash (the fifth edition of which will celebrate what would have been Cash’s 76th birthday Saturday night at Southpaw, in Park Slope), the Brooklyn Country Music Festival, the monthly jam session CasHank Hootenanny, and a less frequent performance series called Jugfest. By his and others’ estimates, there are as many as 40 bands playing country music in the city.“I had this idea when I was starting up the first festival,” Mr. Battles said recently while sitting on a worn sofa in the living room of his two-bedroom apartment overlooking the Prospect Expressway. “If we all got together, we could bring all the fans together, create a base. When I was playing solo, no one would come and see me. They would hear ‘country music,’ and leave between sets.”Three years later, the city’s country music scene is fragmented but growing, and largely centered in Brooklyn, according to band members. In addition to Mr. Battles’s events, one can attend the Kings County Opry, the Brooklyn County Fair, and regular country music get-togethers at several bars sympathetic to the distinctive twang, like Hank’s Saloon on Atlantic Avenue and Freddy’s Back Room on Dean Street. In Manhattan, there are shows at the recently opened barbecue restaurant Hill Country, a regular Honky Tonk Happy Hour at the Living Room, and bluegrass and country jams at the Baggot Inn.“We are really trying to encourage people to write original country,” the lead singer and songwriter for the group Larune, Kamara Thomas, said. She and her band members started the Honky Tonk Happy Hour at the Living Room. “We have something going on in New York. We just aren’t sure what it is yet.”The bands play everything from bluegrass to old-time to honky-tonk to rockabilly, but there is one thread of unity stitched through most of the country music being made in the city: It’s nothing like the smooth, country-pop that has made artists like Clint Black and Faith Hill household names nationwide, and is more in the tradition of country music deities like Cash, Hank Williams, and Ralph Stanley.“Here it’s rougher, simpler,” an accordion and guitar player in Brooklyn, Andrew Schmidt, said. “It’s back to that early era of country, the 1950s through the 1970s.” Mr. Schmidt, a native of Texas, said that Southerners usually react with alarm when they walk into a Brooklyn country show. “They are expecting something like the modern country that is on the radio back home,” he said.Where the songs of “rural” country music have rolling hills and tin roofs, “Brooklyn has the ‘G’ train and tiny apartments and the Red Hook docks,” said Rebecca Birmingham, host of WNYU’s “Honky Tonk Radio Girl,” one of the only country radio shows in the city. “It’s everyday life.”New York life, that is. Music writers searching for new terminology though the years have described the genre as “countrypolitan” and “cow punk.” One of Mr. Battles’s songs is called “Please Mr. Landlord, Turn Up the Heat.” Another describes an employee in a Manhattan cubicle: “She ain’t got a co-op or a 401(k) / but she’s thinking about starting a band.” “A lot, of course, is autobiographical,” Mr. Battles said.Though he was raised on a dairy and Christmas tree farm in the town of Chesterland, just outside of Cleveland, he moved to New York after college to take a paralegal job, hauling along one of his grandfather’s old banjos. He now works at a music publishing office.Ms. Birmingham, 22, a senior at New York University and Mr. Battles’s girlfriend, first started listening to country music when she arrived at college. It prompted a musical awakening, and a slight name change.“It never occurred to me to call myself Becky until I started hanging around country music people,” she said.The two met at Mr. Battles’s CasHank Hootenany, which is a conflation of the names of country stars Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. It takes place at a bar called Buttermilk, two blocks from Mr. Battles’s home.The night usually begins when the bartender, Willy, passes a bottle of Jim Beam and a metal shot glass over the scuffed wooden counter to Mr. Battles, who emcees the event, sings, and plies anyone willing to come onstage and sing with liquor. On a recent Thursday evening, the bar filled up quickly, and Mr. Battles was joined by a man playing a bass made from a sink, a subway motorman with an electric guitar, a transvestite slide guitar player, an accordion player, and a bearded fiddler.“This ain’t my band,” Mr. Battles said, squinting into the crowd and dipping his head so that his cowboy hat shaded his eyes. “They just showed up one day.”Sitting in his living room later, Mr. Battles reflected on his banjo-playing grandfather.“He was a steel worker and wrote his own songs, and grandma sang on the radio,” he said. “When I was younger, he told me I was ‘going to Hollywood.’ I guess I ended up in Brooklyn.”

Country Pickers & City Slickers

Country Pickers & City Slickers

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