Self-taught guitar and banjo master Charlie Parr hales from Austin, Minnesota. Growing up without a TV, he listened to his father’s collection of classic recordings by America’s musical founding fathers, including Charley Patton and Lightnin’ Hopkins, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. The first time he heard Dock Boggs play banjo, Charlie went out and bought an 1890 model. He also plays two National guitars, a twelve-string and a Resonator, which he tunes to suit his musical moods. With those three instruments, he’s recorded 12 albums presenting his own unique take on American roots, blues, folk, and country.
 
Saving Country Music says of his latest album, Hollandale, “It is an act of both faith and improvisation, but bound and directed by the unspoken communion between a master musician and his instrument, immersed in the inspirational atmosphere that permeates an artist as he submits himself wholly to the musical experience and allows it to breathe through him.” The album, according to the reviewer, delivers “an in-depth exploration into what it means to be alive, to be human, to feel pain and to yearn and reflect.” If you listen to Charlie’s music, you quickly come to understand that he is an artist who pushes himself and his music to the limit, honoring the past and exploring the possibilities of the present moment. The usual topics he gravitates toward, he said in an interview in The American Soundtrack, are “death, god, grief, and cars.” Catch an American roots original tonight at the Freight!

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Photo by Peter Lee