Cover photo © 2024 Marilyn Stringer

A multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter, Nathan James is one of those artists who flies under the radar for many blues listeners. That is a shame, as he is a superb guitar player as evidenced by his efforts on his own albums and releases by his friend, the late James Harman. While his music covers a broad range, it is all steeped in the blues traditions.

Born in a small town in rural California, James started working in the family business as a teenager, selling plants out of several greenhouses. The money he earned went to good use.

“Where I grew up, there wasn’t much to do, so teenagers would either got in trouble or they would get creative, going to work right away, which I did, and that’s the only other job besides music I’ve ever had. I was always into art, and music kind of came natural when I got my first guitar at 13 years old. I quickly learned what blues was from the guitar teacher that I had for about six months. I’d heard blues before, but I didn’t know what it was. Basically I was fortunate to get into something productive instead of getting in trouble like some other kids that grew up where I was.

“I worked there for a little while up until I graduated, as I was motivated to earn money, and some of that money went into buying a guitar here or there. The rest went towards getting my first vehicle so I could get out of town and go see music at clubs, even though I wasn’t old enough to get into them. That little grown up job at the family business enabled me to do that while teaching me something that I think all kids should learn, what it means to work for something you want, and I applied that to my own music business. Once I started playing music, I had already learned you the value of working for something, and you sure got to work for every little piece of the crumbs you get in the music business. Some people get it handed to them, but not me.”

Both of his grandmothers played piano. One of them had a career as a country singer in the 1960s. There was a uncle who played guitar, but initially, James was thinking of heading in a different direction.

“I actually wanted a bass before guitar. I asked my parents for one at Christmas time one year, but they got me a guitar instead. But I’m glad they did because bass was pretty easy to pick up after I learned guitar. I was just kind of drawn to the rhythmic aspect of guitar. I’m a real rhythmic player more than anything. I don’t really care for much lead guitar shredding kind of stuff whatsoever. I’ll take a solo, but I’m more of a rhythmic guy, and I think that I kind of connected with the country blues because of that.

Once he graduated high school, James was ready to embark on a music career. His parents had college in mind.

“There was no question of whether to go to college or anything like that. My parents were very supportive, and I was pretty much on my own by the age of 18 anyway. I was very focused on knowing what I wanted to do for a living, playing out in public with professional or semi-professional musicians right when I was 16 years old. There was a plan in my head. I didn’t have any other distractions, no girlfriends or anything like that at the time. My grades in school started to fall pretty badly once I knew that I wanted to play guitar for a living, but at least I still graduated, just barely.

“Right out of high school I was playing with some local harmonica players, particularly Billy Watson, the first guy to hire me. Almost immediately after that I got asked to play with the Jamie Wood Band, with Johnny Rover on harmonica. Also, the great Johnny Dyer hired me to be his guitar player. It all just happened real quickly. And then while I was playing with Johnny Dyer, I think James Harman saw me.

“I already knew about him because one of his old guitar players, Robbie Eason, I went to high school with. Robbie put in a good word for me to play with James after he quit, so he gets a lot of credit for getting me hooked up with Harman. It was just kind of a firestorm of everything. If there’s ever any luck in music, I guess mine was just being at the right place at the right time when I first started, which led to joining Harman’s band when I was 19 years old. Playing with harmonica players kind of became my specialty.

After a couple of years on the road, James decided to leave Harman’s band. He was ready to pursue a solo career, and Harman was winding down his days of being on tour much of the time.

“I wanted to play country blues. By that time, I had learned the whole depth of the American music by traveling around with Harman. We’d listen to all these records on the road. I really heavily got interested in the real old timey stuff, acoustic finger picking stuff.

“When Harman switched to doing mostly just local shows, I was asked to play with him again, from then on up until he passed away. So to be completely technical, I did quit the band for a little while there to get my solo career started, which was the wise decision, because that’s pretty much what’s helped me make a living, perform solo and also lead a group. There’s like 20 something years we had together. Harman took me to a lot of great places around the world. It helped my career tremendously and stylistically, he was a huge influence on me trying to be a songwriter.

“I say “try to be” because I don’t consider myself a natural songwriter compared to somebody like Harman. That’s what he lived for, writing songs. And up until he died, he was writing, numerous songs a day, lyrics. We did a little bit of recording, not as much as I would have liked to, looking back. We started to get a little stockpile of recordings here and there.

“When the pandemic hit, we started doing these live streams from my house, which I was able to record the audio and the video at the same time with real high quality audio recording that could be mixed later on if he wanted to make a record out of it. But then James got sick with cancer. He wasn’t able to perform. He lost his voice. We started planning his next album release before he died. But he went pretty quickly. At least I had a somewhat of a framework of an album that he wanted to put out, which is the last album on Electro-Fi Records, Didn’t We Have Some Fun Sometime. A lot of that is basically just live recordings from my garage, live stream recordings, mixed in with various studio things throughout the years, most of which I recorded. The album is nominated for a 2024 Blues Blast Music award in the Historical or Vintage Recording category.”

Harman gave his friend a hard drive full of his recordings and songs. Andrew Galloway, the head of Electro-Fi, gave James complete creative control for the album for song selection, mixing and mastering.

“On some of it you can tell Harman’s voice was starting to go. But they are some of the last recordings that he made, so I thought if the feeling and the story he was singing about were so good, that was more important than his actual vocal abilities. One of the biggest things I learned from Harman is just to stay true to yourself artistically. He was just a true artist, inside and out, for better or worse, In all honesty, James was financially not that well off, just getting by. Art was the true joy and meaning in his life. It was the only thing that mattered to him.

“I’ve learned to be more financially secure. Maybe my art would be better if I was more stressed out in certain ways. Recently I’ve had my fair share of big life changes, probably some of the hardest times in my life just in the last eight months. Lost my mother and then went through a divorce. I’m just now recovering from that. It was some pretty heavy stuff to have back to back. And that was a year or so after Harman passed away. It seems like quite a few people just kind of come and leave your life all of a sudden. The music is the one thing that keeps me sane. It’s quite literally all I have.”

In 2007, James entered the International Blues Challenge in Memphis, sponsored by the Blues Foundation. Along with Ben Hernandez on harmonica and other instruments, they ended up winning the Solo/Duo category.

“That did a lot for us, even though we didn’t even take that whole competition seriously. Wee just did it because our blues society in San Diego strongly encouraged us to, and they raised funds to pay our airfare out to Memphis. Otherwise we would have had zero interest in doing a competition. First place got us a slot on the Legendary Rhythm & Blues cruise, along with this big festival in Italy. Then we played a blues festival in Taiwan, Taipei of all places, that was the biggest highlight. And it helped us a little bit with the local gigs. Eventually, Ben wanted to settle down and have his family, so he moved back east and quit playing music for a living. It certainly was a shock at the time, but it also pushed me to get my band going, for me to get my singing and songwriting together.“

James recorded hree albums as a duo with Hernandez. He also has nine under his own name, most of them self-released., available at his website: www.nathandjames.com

“I may even be forgetting one. I don’t really put out albums every year, but for a period there I was doing almost every year. Now it’s a little slower because there’s less motivation to sell them. But I am currently working on a new one that’s kind of getting the gears turning after all the crap I had in the last year. So I’m refocusing on music, and hopefully, by the end of the year, I’ll have something released. The goal is to try to have something ready when I go to Europe for a tour in late October.

“My latest one is I May Crawl, released last year. It has several songs that I had written some time ago. The theme of that album was to release something that was 100 percent me, just solo by myself. After the pandemic, I focused on that as my first priority, my one man band with my foot percussion thing. When I play solo, that’s predominantly what I sound with the all original songs on there.

“Before that, in 2021, I released Soul Count, which was the all instrumental album, totally a pandemic thing. A lot of that was taken from my solo live streams, as I was performing solo almost every day of the week in my house. I was actually highly creative during the pandemic. I was just improvising these loop-based things with this loop pedal that I had. Then I took a lot of those recordings and edited them down to three and a half minute songs. That was the theme of that record, which is quite different than any others, probably the most non traditional thing I’ve released.

“Another one I did in 2012 for the Delta Groove label, entitled What You Make Of It. That was the time period that I was the most musically active in my own career with my band, the Rhythm Scratchers, which included Troy Sandow on bass & harmonica plus Marty Dodson on drums. We were touring all the time in the States and then to Europe a couple times a year. It was mostly original, some covers on it as well, with some rhythm and blues influence along with my country blues influence here and there. That’s when I really was starting to consider more roots in Americana stuff, I guess.

“I knew this DJ, Jeff Scott Fleenor, who was one of the main guys at Delta Groove. He was always a big supporter of what I did from way back from when I first started playing solo, always would promote my stuff. So I kind of had a personal connection with him as a friend all along, even before Delta Groove was a label. They hired me to play on some Mannish Boy’s recordings. We just talked about it for several years before the album happened. They saw that I was touring a lot. It was logical choice, as we sold quite a few CDs. That’s probably the most CDs I’ve sold, on that record. It was right before CDs took a nosedive and everything went to streaming. We’ll focus on pressing some LPs for the next one, but even that format doesn’t sell a lot. Just when LPs get real popular again, the older crowd don’t have their record players anymore.”

Living in a little mountain town in Southern California with a burgeoning music scene, James has been performing a lot, as it is his main source of income. He is bringing the band back, with Marty and Troy, while also making music with a neighbor who plays Hammond organ.

“He’s a pretty renowned professional musician that tours and plays a lot. His name is Ross Garren. Tomorrow I have an organ trio gig with him, just keyboard, not a real Hammond organ. He doesn’t bring that out. But it’s that sound. Ross also is a fine harmonica player who gets a lot of session work for artists like Keb’ Mo’ to Beyonce, but he is a blues guy at heart. In my eyes, Ross is a legit musician who can read music and does big Hollywood movie session work.

“I’m playing with Rod Piazza and, as you may have heard, Rod’s guitar player, Henry Carvajal just passed away. It’s a tragic thing. The last year and a half, I’ve been filling in for Henry with Rod’s band, because he was ill. Nobody knew exactly what he had until he passed away, which was cancer. We kept hoping that he would get well and be able to play again.

“So I’m learning Rob Piazza’s songs to play this weekend, and then in the fall there’s a show, a harmonica show I’ll be playing with Rod and Kim Wilson. My band, the Rhythm Scratchers, are basically Kim Wilson’s band when he plays in Southern California. It’s always fun, but it’s only a few times a year that we do that. I recorded the Kim Wilson album that came out quite awhile ago now, Blues and Boogie, Vol. One, recorded mostly at my home studio.

In his spare time, James has another hobby that helps him unwind.

“I make my own guitars that I play, the washboard guitars. Currently, I made a guitar out of a tree that I had felled up here in the forest. I don’t sell them or anything, just for my own use to perform with. I construct them myself, so that’s my unique thing. I probably have between five and ten, but I use at least three or four on a regular basis, like almost every gig. I go between my acoustic guitars when I perform solos, sometimes to my electric guitars, which are the ones that I make, the washboards and then this current one from the tree that’s kind of modeled after a Stratotone guitar. That’s currently my favorite, the last one that I made. I always have a resonator guitar on the solo gigs for playing slide guitar.

Like a lot of guitar players, James was fascinated with B.B. King and T-Bone Walker when he first started playing with Harman. But as he worked his way backwards from them, he eventually found a different artist to emulate.

“I got into Big Bill Broonzy, who played electric and played with bands, but his early stuff was him by himself on acoustic guitar. There’s a couple videos of him out there, and when I saw those, it kind of blew my mind, and made me switch all directions. It was more of a challenge for me to play that kind of stuff, play all by yourself and keep the rhythm and bass going all at once. It was a lot harder for me to do that than to play B.B. King lead guitar stuff. Then I branched out from there to all of his contemporaries.

“That was the fun thing of traveling with the Harman Band, because all the guys in the band were huge music aficionados and historians, and they would bring music from each region that we would travel into. We played CDs at the time, so someone put on Blind Willie McTell when we’d go into Atlanta, Georgia, Blind Lemon Jefferson, when we would go into Dallas, Texas. So that’s always at the core of my playing. I don’t strive to just play that stuff now, and haven’t for many years, having moved on to my own music. I guess Big Bill is one of the main guys, Tampa Red too. That’s what I studied heavily in my college years, instead of going to college.

“I’m learning more and more, because most blues that’s out there these days, I don’t consider blues. I almost would rather disassociate from it. I don’t know – folk music, blues, Americana. I just like to call it, consider what I do, roots music. Some songs that I write definitely could fall in the Americana style, even country influenced. But it’s so hard to really pinpoint one genre that I would be under. My preference would be that it not be thought of as just blues,

“Even the old blues was not just blues, as there was gospel influences. I guess I’m striving to be more of a songwriter whose songs are always going to have a very bluesy influence, because that’s where my biggest background is. Words don’t always flow for me. So I have to really exercise my brain to get them going. Then they’ll start to just come out of nowhere. When I compare myself to someone like Harman or another real singer & songwriter, I guess I am discrediting myself to some degree, but you can’t be a perfectionist, yet I try real hard to not have things that sound like something that has been done before.

“It’s so easy to have predictable patterns in the way the words flow. Especially in modern blues, it’s like they don’t even try to write songs, in my opinion. I hate to say it, but a lot of lyrics just seem to be cheesy. The lyrics Harman would come up with had such a poetic flow to them without sounding too sophisticated. He still would throw in slang and make a lot of fairly simple lines to keep your ear engaged. I don’t like songs that are too wordy, just something simple enough to keep you interested, but something that’s creative to kind of stick in your head!

“Harman used to say this about songwriting, and I always try to remember it the right way, but basically it was something like “You want the song to be like a woman’s dress. It’s got to be long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to keep you interested, intrigued, and spark your imagination. I think that is a pretty good goal.”