Pokey LaFarge takes you back in time

He looks like he stepped out of Boardwalk Empire and sounds like he just arrived from 1943, but don’t dare call Pokey LaFarge an anachronism. “I hope my music is simply timeless.”

It’s not retro music. It’s American music that never died”: Andrew Heissler alias Pokey LaFarge does not consider his blend of ragtime, R&B, early jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and country to be a carbon copy of the music that was popular in the 1940s. “This is music we invented, I’m just passing it on,” the thirty-year-old musician with the southern drawl of a Midwesterner tells us, while watching the falling leaves in his hometown of St. Louis. “I am firmly rooted in musical tradition, but I think my music is just as current as it is traditional. My albums aren’t history lessons. I hope my music is simply timeless, just like the Irish are still playing folk songs that haven’t lost any of their relevance.”

“Most people fabricate their music out of a machine these days. We still play real instruments. We’re artisans, we actually craft our music. We are the real contemporary rebels. [Laughs] If you want to be punk or revolutionary these days, you have to play an acoustic instrument.”

Pokey LaFarge’s love of “timeless” music goes back a long way. His grandfather, who used to take him to bluegrass festivals, gave him a guitar when he was thirteen, and when he was seventeen he started playing the mandolin. The classic sixties rock he heard on the radio took him back to their sources of inspiration in the deep south of the USA. “When those old, raw blues songs penetrated my eardrums, I was amazed. People like Jimmie Rodgers, Big Bill Broonzy, and Lefty Frizzell deflowered me. I grew up in a small village between the cornfields, which was fun, but it didn’t make me worldly wise. Luckily it was only a two and a half-hour commute to Chicago and St. Louis, where that music gushes from every pore.”

At seventeen, LaFarge hitchhiked across the USA. “You get furthest by jumping in the deep end. I discovered how beautiful my country is, it sharpened my perspective, and I laid the foundations of my career while busking.”

LaFarge, always dressed in a fine suit with his acoustic 1946 Epiphone Spartan guitar under his arm, is the real deal. That did not escape the attention of Jack White, who invited him and his band The South City Three to record “I Guess I Should Go to Sleep” for his solo record Blunderbuss. And LaFarge’s untitled album has now been released on White’s label Third Man Records. “Jack has good taste, though I do say so myself. [Laughs] I hope to collaborate with him for a long time to come.”

Pokey Lafarge • 14/11, 20.00, €16/19, Ancienne Belgique, boulevard Anspachlaan 110, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-548.24.24, www.abconcerts.be