Music

The Bearded Baby

Go see Baby Gramps at Brooklyn’s Zebulon

by Josh Kurp   |   Jun 22, 2010

The Bearded Baby

Photo: Michelle Bates, via BabyGramps.com

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First, the name: Baby Gramps. Second: the voice. Patrick Ferris of HotBands.com describes it perfectly: “[It’s] a cross between Popeye the sailor and a Didgeridoo and the plinkity plink of his very worn National steel guitar, sounds like a wind up jack in the box.” No one has any idea how old he is (with a name like his, that’s the point). You could easily substitute Baby Gramps for Bob Dylan and the Band as an example of Greil Marcus’s “Old, Weird America.” Gramps has been playing his “hokum blues” since 1964, but only recorded his first album, Hossradish, in 2003. He’ll never become a household name, but did appear on Late Night with David Letterman in 2006 with Tony Garnier, Bob Dylan’s long-time bass player.

I first heard the Bearded Baby a few years ago, when my dad mailed me his copy of Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys. It’s a compilation album full of songs that would make Captain Jack smile by well-known artists like Richard Thompson, Nick Cave and Jarvis Cocker. The first track, though, is Gramps’s “Cape Cod Girls,” a cover song that’s been around for some time (probably since the time people still actually sung shanties). When Gramps sings, “They brush their hair with codfish bones/And we’re bound away for Australia,” I’m not sure whether to laugh at (with?) the singer or be frightened at the idea of taking a boat trip with him. He and Tiny Tim would have made good friends.

Baby Gramps is in town tonight, playing Brooklyn’s Zebulon (258 Wythe Ave.), along with Peter Stampfel and the Sour Mash Hug Band. The show begins at 9 p.m. It’s not every day you have the opportunity to hear someone completly original, so head out to Zebulon later this evening; just don’t try to mimic Gramps’s throat singing.