Just as Bob Dylan (ne Robert Zimmerman) took his name from the poet Dylan Thomas, John Wesley Harding (ne Wesley Harding Stace) appropriated his from the canon of folk music's quintessential performer. And though Harding credits Dylan, and particularly his namesake album, with delivering him down the guy-with-guitar road, he occasionally looks further back in history to discover his musical ancestry.

"The music I really first listened to was stuff like Bob Dylan and John Prine. They were white guys singing songs with words that told stories, more or less, and very simple guitar," recalls Harding from his newly adopted home of Seattle. "Not being a great music revolutionary, you know, I decided that the best way to progress in music was to concentrate on the words." That was back in Hastings, England, in the late Eighties, when Harding had given up his Ph.D. in Social and Political Science to pursue a career in what would be coined "gangsta-folk." (Says Harding, "You don't need a Ph.D. to be pissed off.") Culling an intimate and loyal following, Harding subsequently released six albums over ten years. During that time, he moved to San Francisco, opened for Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed, Prine and Joan Baez, packed up his guitars and moved on up to Seattle.

That brings us to last year, when the ex-pat found himself on tour with Steve Wynn, riding around in a van, listening to tapes of traditional folk songs arranged by underground hero Nic Jones. "Sometimes -- and really the most valuable times -- you find something by chance that you think is fantastic. It's really difficult to track down, and all the stuff is great, and no one is shouting in your ear that this is the thing to like," Wes says of his stumbling upon Jones' albums. "And through the Internet I cobbled together a collection of Nic Jones cassettes and battered vinyl, and we just became obsessed."

In a series of coincidences, Wes found himself sharing tea and scones at Jones' home while staying with friends in Yorkshire. "We had a very nice time, we talked about folk music and we played a little and I told him about the germ of the idea of this album, and we took some photos, and I've been in touch with him ever since," gushes Harding. "I mean, really only people deeply into traditional folk music are into Nic Jones, and he hasn't been around since he had an accident in 1982. And only one of his albums, Penguin Egg is available on CD. So I just thought, wow, there's a whole load of stories here and they're stories I want to tell."

Many of the stories which appear on Trad Arr Jones date back to the sixteenth century, but sung in Harding's rich and direct baritone, with Jones' arrangements, they sound decidedly modern. "These songs are going to live on whether I made this album or not. You know they're strong enough to stand up on their own, because they have so many times," explains Harding. "So it's very nice and relaxing compared to when I record one of my songs, which I basically want to be the definitive version because no one else is going to record them."

Harding intends to "get back to the singer/songwriter stuff toward the end of the year," but for now he's "exploring the roots of gangsta-folk" and tossing around the soccer ball with his buddies up in Washington. "My kind of music has been hard to sell all along, the whole forty years of rock music," he jokes, so it's nice to take a little time to kick Mike Musburger's (Posies, Love Battery) or Eddie Spaghetti's (Supersuckers) butts at a nice game of football now and again. "It's what my life's been missing for the last few years."

That, and his name on the list of singing/songwriting greats.

HEIDI SHERMAN
(March 4, 1999)