Murder Ballads
By Mark Sanders
Seattle never sounded so good.
A couple of years ago, Ruby Dee and the Snakehandlers toured through Alaska, where they played a five-day stint at a well-known venue called Kito’s Cave in Petersburg (pop. 3,000). During that time one
of the locals fell in—and very quickly out of—love with the band.
“The club was notorious for fights,” Ruby Dee Philippa, frontwoman for the Seattle quartet, recalls. “We got there, made enough money for the rest of the tour and at some point this guy comes up, telling us how great we were. By the end of the week, he said he was gonna kill us.”
The ex-fan had just run out of meds. “Everyone knows him there,” Philippa says in a sweet country drawl. “They told me that he does this every year.”
Not that the Snakehandlers play particularly murderous songs. The guy at Kito’s Cave is possibly the only audience member to ever threaten the six-year-old band with anything more than a heckle or a bad dance move. To get an idea of how absurd the situation was, consider the various genres this band fits into: rockabilly, old-style swing and stripped-down country. If Ruby Dee’s singing inspires others to kill, it can hardly have anything to do with the music.
Nowhere is that more evident than on the Snakehandlers’ debut album, North of Bakersfield. The record’s title reveals something of the band’s style. Aside from the fact that it is literally from north of Bakersfield, Wash., the quartet resembles—to an extent—Bakersfield musicians of the 1950s and ’60s, who played stripped-down countrymusic with heavy reverb and lots of twang. Merle Haggard wasundoubtedly an influence and so were Buck Owens and Patsy Cline. Yetthere are also punk and modern rockabilly elements too, which savesthe quartet from sounding like any other ’50s throwback.
The group arrives in Santa Fe after a five-day stint in Austin,Texas. Unlike most other bands, the Snakehandlers isn’t playing theannual South by Southwest music fest. “We’d never get in there anyway,” Philippa says. Never mind thatTexas is well-known for its contributions to country and Americana.In her experience, that’s hardly what the fest is about anymore.
“We’re not emotional shoegazers,” she says sarcastically, beforeadding that at past fests “we saw bands carrying around their gearand nobody was smiling. Everybody was trying to get signed, get noticed. It’s not fun.”
“So we go to Austin and hang out with friends and play on the edges,”she says.
Philippa knows that the Snakehandlers’ chances of finding fortune andfame in Austin would be better if the band played more commerciallyviable music. Rockabilly isn’t exactly MTV material and it’s a toughtime in the music industry overall, with labels consolidating orfolding entirely. No Depression, the de facto bible of alternativecountry music, recently ceased publication. The country’s in arecession. Times are tough. Being an artist sucks if the measure ofsuccess is the size of a bank account.
So if a band like Ruby Dee and the Snakehandlers can’t find successat a festival called South by Southwest, then where does it find it? Judging by Philippa’s past, just about anywhere there’s a long, open highway.
The band’s sound was cultivated by the singer’s childhood on a 27-acre farm in the northeastern California desert, a place she says isall “ranches and prisons.” She grew up listening to her mom’sboyfriend and his brother play country songs on the banjo and fiddle.That invariably led Philippa toward straight-ahead country music,though she also sang in her opera-singing grandmother’s choir andlater toiled in cover bands and punk rock groups.
There are other influences as well. Philippa’s mother was a journalist who wrote about dogs and traveled to dog shows all overthe US and in Canada and Mexico.
“You ever seen Best in Show?” Philippa asks. “People are just likethat.” She later spent a year living in Central America, then fiveyears working on Alaskan fishing boats, an experience that made herwant to tour the 49th state. She eventually landed in Seattle.
If there’s any doubt to the effect geography had on Philippa’ssongwriting, look no further than the name of the band’s currenttour: “Miles From Home.”
“I love wondering what’s around the next corner,” she says. As achild traveling through the Texas Panhandle, she and her mom wouldsee little roadside honky-tonks where bands played for anyone who’dshow up. “I thought that it was cool that bands cared about peopleout in the middle of nowhere,” she says.
The Snakehandlers’ stop in Santa Fe is as much out of curiosity asanything else. But another factor, Philippa says, is that the band’sbiggest fans come from the most unexpected places. When North ofBakersfield came out, it got the most radio airplay in El Paso,Texas, and Grand Junction, Colo. Not exactly musical hotspots.
But as the would-be Alaskan assassin proves, fans can come from anywhere.
