Charlie with jillybones and the Curmudgeon at Cedar Lounge January 11, 2023.

By the time you read this, our Minnesota-grown musician, friend and folk icon Charlie Parr will be performing with his buddy, percussionist Mikkel Beckman, at the Rawa (River) Blues Festival in Katowice, Poland, on Oct. 5. 

Pretty impressive. We won’t be seeing him back in these parts for a while since they are on a six-week tour of Europe. 

Parr was virtually the first local singer-songwriter I heard tell of when I moved back to Duluth in 2020. When I got to hear him at a private backyard concert in June of 2021 I was immediately hooked. 

He’d been around for a while, known to folks far and wide (including Australia, where he has also toured) and had an entry on Wikipedia. He has released 26 albums since his first in 2001 (Down in the Valley, together with Greg Brown). All those accomplishments rather intimidated me so it was only recently that I got up the nerve to approach Charlie for a conversation. 

I wanted to find out a bit more about him and where all that talent originated. He kindly spent an hour speaking with me at the Dubliner Pub in St. Paul on August 15 before his gig there.

One of the first questions I ask when I sit down to talk with a musician is whether they grew up in a musical family. Usually the answer is yes but not so much in this case. 

Charlie described his parents as working class and having been raised in a union family. They lived in a part of Austin, Minnesota, where the rank and file lived – all of his friends and neighbors worked at the Hormel meat-packing plant. He said the union was a big deal, that the whole neighborhood celebrated May Day, that it was a bigger deal than Easter. He told of being forced to make May baskets and deliver them around to the neighbors with his wagon, only to arrive home to find the front stoop of his own house covered with May baskets! 

Charlie said his grandparents, parents, sister, aunts and uncles all worked at the plant and were members of the P-9 Meatpacker’s Union. However, he never stepped inside the plant, avoiding it like the plague.

Charlie’s first jobs involved farm labor from a young age where he started out picking rocks, then planting potatoes, then beans and onions, followed by detasseling corn and finally harvesting potatoes. 

Charlie Parr at Sacred Heart Music Center March 2, 2024. (Photo by Jill Fisher.)

It was hard work that he did every summer of his youth. It may well be it was this experience that made him sensitive and sympathetic to struggles of the laboring class. 

With regard to music, he said his father was a music lover who, upon arriving home from his shift every night, would load a stack of LP records on the console stereo, filling the house with music to sooth his weariness. 

Charlie recalled that his dad sang a lot and was a member of a local male chorus for a time. He said many of the songs his dad sang were racy and that the chorus was into more religious material. Charlie thought had it been union songs he might have gotten into it more.

So Charlie was actually saturated with music from an early age, which ignited a guitar obsession in him by age nine. But it wasn’t just one genre of music; rather it was a pretty random mix of folk, country western, Mitch Miller and many solo guitarists. 

What he heard was distinct from the popular music on the radio. He said his mom was a big fan of Woody Guthrie and Jimmy Rogers, while his older sister exposed him to the music of the Grateful Dead and Beatles. 

As for himself, he discovered that Folkways records could be borrowed from the library. These are just a few clues as to what influenced Charlie’s style and the lyrical sensibilities that underlie his compositions. 

Because Charlie was born and raised in Austin, I wondered how he came to be known as a Duluth musician. (He is currently based in St. Paul.) 

Charlie conversing with another musician at the Dubliner Pub in St. Paul. (Photo by Jill Fisher.)

Like many of us from small towns in Minnesota, he gravitated to the Twin Cities as soon as he was able in the early 1980s. He got an apartment behind the Mixed Blood Theater on the West Bank of Minneapolis, took temporary jobs, bussed at restaurants, etc. Because his rent was inexpensive, he didn’t need to work much to cover it, leaving the rest of his time for playing guitar and reading. 

At some point Charlie got a job as an outreach worker and over time was employed by several social service agencies in that role.

Getting back to why Charlie is associated with Duluth, he explained that, when he got married in the 1990s, Minneapolis was getting to be unaffordable. So when he and his wife Emily thought about having children they considered moving. 

As it turned out, Emily was offered a job with locations in either Winona or Duluth and they flipped a coin to decide which one to take. We won the toss! 

And so they moved to Duluth in late 1998, where he was again able to obtain work as an outreach worker. I observed that his work in this field seems to have infused his music and the songs he writes with a sensitivity to the people he met. His response was that it affected everything, saying that when you step into a new situation like that it changes your entire world view.

As he relayed this work history I noticed he did not use the word “homeless” and he responded: “I don’t know if I like that word very much. Nowadays it’s popular to say ‘unhoused,’ which is a little more descriptive…a lot of people make a lot of assumptions about people who are forced to live outside.” 

Charlie elaborated: “When you say ‘people forced to live outside’ you are driving a point home that needs to be driven. I meet people who say that these people are choosing this lifestyle. As someone who worked intimately in that world…first of all this isn’t a lifestyle and this isn’t a choice. I’ve never met anybody in like 10 years of doing that who ever told me they chose it. So I think the problem with the term ‘homeless’ is that it designates a whole group of people into one easy category and I don’t like easy categories, putting people in boxes.”

He feels this way about musical genres as well, that it is too easy to say someone is just a folk singer, or a blues guitarist or a rock and roll guy – it’s fake. 

I reminded Charlie that the Wikipedia entry about him stated he plays in the Piedmont blues style. Charlie thought that was a strange style description since the term Piedmont refers to a huge geographical area – a triangle extending from south Florida, north into the Appalachian mountains and all the way down to east Texas – in which any number of guitar styles are played. But he did concede that the term is associated primarily with Mel Travis’s picking style, where the thumb plays rhythm while fingers play melody, which he said describes much of his own playing. 

After moving to Duluth, Charlie explored the city for a while, continuing to play his guitar and by the end of 2000 he had a regular Friday night gig at Sir Ben’s. He remained doing that for quite a while and subsequently had a Wednesday night residency at the Brewhouse in Fitger’s. 

Soon after that music gigs started keeping him very busy so he quit his day job. You might say the rest is history.

When I mentioned being surprised to see Alan Sparhawk play with him at the Cedar Lounge this past January (reviewed in the January 16 Reader issue), Charlie told me Alan was the first musician he met here in Duluth. He described him as being so kind and welcoming and said how fun it’s been making music with him. He declared that Alan is a musical genius and that they have become a good friends. 

Delving into this further, he said Alan is a super intuitive musician, an extremely deep songwriter and guitar player who is a privilege to play with.

Charlie has met musicians who play all different kinds of music – heavy metal or bluegrass or whatever – and believes that when they have that certain “shine” about them, it doesn’t matter what kind of music they play. Because they are in that flow there’s a vital connection you don’t often feel. He explained that there are people who play music for “nefarious reasons,” meaning playing music to make money or get a girlfriend or get a Cadillac or something. Charlie said you can sense that too, because the conversation is different then, it isn’t about music anymore, it’s about how many people you have at your show, which he doesn’t relate to. 

He said that when he and Alan Sparhawk talk they don’t talk about the show, the people or records or any of that kind of stuff, they talk about music but in a kind of ethereal way. He says this is because they both realize language doesn’t reach the level music does, that language only goes so far then drops away and that music goes a lot further. 

Charlie said talking to Alan about music is amazing because he is so smart and when he sits down and plays you are compelled to listen. It seems that his friendship with Sparhawk was important to his musical development. And that brought up the late Spider John Koerner, his music and influence.

Charlie told of the first time he heard John back in 1983 playing at the Viking Bar on the West Bank. He said his life changed in that moment, that it “changed everything” for him musically. Every Sunday he’d go to hear Koerner play and he also went to hear Willie Murphy play piano solo sets at the 400 Bar every Friday night. That was his whole life for several years.

Charlie claims to be very much an introvert. When I questioned him about how he is able to get up on stage in front of a crowd of people, he replied that it doesn’t involve personal interaction, that it’s a performance. Because he doesn’t get interrupted, it allows him to be in his comfort zone of playing the guitar and so it doesn’t matter how many people are there. 

He also explained that music for him is something that can’t be externally directed which is why he doesn’t care for open jams in which many others are directing the flow.

This was a wide-ranging conversation with far more background and information than can be relayed here making it hard to stop writing about Charlie’s observations. 

Instead, I suggest listening to Parr’s latest Little Sun album (along with his earlier releases) and reading his book Last of the Better Days Ahead, published in 2022. Although he claims it isn’t autobiographical, I think you will find bits of his life experiences sprinkled amongst the stories he tells and will make you appreciate his soulful way with words, whether written or in song.