The Walker Roaders Start Off New Year with a Howlin’ Wolf Tribute of “Smokestack Lightning”

When members of Flogging Molly, Dropkick Murphys and The Pogues came together for a new project, one thing remained blatantly apparent, their devotion to storytelling through a folk-rock lens.

“We want to play Celtic music that breathes with open pentatonic themes from lungs of passion, supported by ribs of conviction,” vocalist and accordonist James Fearnley told American Songwriter about forming The Walker Roaders. “It’s a dialectical synthesis of all we picked up from our previous experiences in the genre of music of which we were all practitioners. I try to pull rank with being a founding member of the mothership of the genre which spawned Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys, but the mothership of The Pogues itself was a mere satellite of the Dubliners and the Clancy Brothers.”

The Walker Roaders, whose complete lineup consists of vocalist and accordionist James Fearnley (The Pogues), guitarist Ted Hutt (Flogging Molly), banjo player Marc Orrell (Dropkick Murphys), drummer Bryan Head and bassist Brad Wood, released their self-titled debut in 2019, featuring songs like “Here Comes The Ice,” “Will You Go Lassie Go,” and “Lord Randall’s Bastard Son,” along with six other tracks that Billboard described as “…full bodied Celtic anthemry.” Since quarantine, The Walker Roaders have been working on material for their second album, and today, they are premiering a superb rendition of Howlin’ Wolf’s 1956 classic “Smokestack Lightning” with American Songwriter. Sandy Roberton, head of Ginger Man/Beverly Martel label group, propelled the idea for the song after having a dream about The Walker Roaders recording their own version.   

“We went about recording it from a few angles—like dogs in a bear-baiting it occurs to me” Fearnley said. “Ted and I talked about how the rhythm of ‘Smokestack Lightning,’ actually how a lot of blues’ rhythms, allows you to superimpose a jig time. The word ‘allow’ is going to have to do. Otherwise, maybe I should say ‘blues rhythms can be made to suffer superimposing a jig time’. I took the idea home and went at it from the angle that I’ve practiced a lot of the music I’ve played in my career, with a propulsive, whizzing 6/8 time acoustic guitar. Then I took a few liberties with the harmonic structure, thinking that we as a band ultimately wouldn’t be able to pull off something that didn’t have a chord structure to it.”

However, it was Hutt who reigned in the structure of the song to resemble something easier to sing along to, based off a basic blues scale—both Irish and blues music are based off similar modes. With The Walker Roaders’ background, adhering to a mutual scale seemed like the easiest way to make the song their own, while also honoring the original composition.

“It was Ted Hutt who rightly teased me for the whizzing 6/8 jig-time guitar thing with chord changes. He brought it back to the inimitable ‘Smokestack Lightning’ guitar figure—one of the Ur-blues guitar figures based on the root, blue-note, root, minor seventh that sort of thing,” Fearnley explained. “It’s pentatonic, so at the danger of sounding a bit facile, it’s not much of a jump to Irish music, which is what Ted has been producing and playing for much of his career, and what I’ve played for pretty much all of mine, and Marc Orrell who plays mandolin, was the guitarist with Dropkick Murphys—so what the fuck else were we going to do?”

In regard to the lyrical and vocal genesis of the song, it was an against the current journey for Fearnley, who came from a choir background, and a stretch from the sultry, blues vocals of Howlin’ Wolf or any blues singer for that matter. But Fearnley found his own meaning in the song’s lyrics and added new emphasis, allowing his own unique passion and force to peak through the vocals. But before finding his own connotation, he analyzed the words and imagined where Howlin’ Wolf may have found his inspiration from. He looked at other 1930’s blues recordings for insight, one of which was “Stop and Listen Blues,” by The Mississippi Sheiks.  The song even had a reference to ‘Smokestack Lightning’ in the line ‘smokestack lightning/that bell shine just like gold.’

 “I listened to the words for ‘Stop and Listen Blues,’ knowing that as a singer, accordion player, white guy, European, one of the Pogues, I was going to want a story,” Fearnley said. “What came in my steamer trunk can’t express itself in the free vocal release of suffering, desire and loss. I have to put it in a story. For me, the words were both a matter of watching steam trains and all that they meant for me as a boy. But the words and imagery of ‘Stop and Listen Blues’ could so easily have been about the death and cremation of my mum who died suddenly in 1991—the train standing in for the crematorium.

“You have to make these things your own—and pay respect to those for whom the song was their own before The Walker Roaders came to have a go at it,” Fearnley added. “It’s what—I hope —Howlin’ Wolf would have wanted…”

Looking ahead to the new material for their sophomore album, Fearnley explains it’s pinned with the same passion and conviction as their debut, but the band is imagining something at least somewhat different.

“We’re in the early days of this,” Fearnley said about their new material. “At the minute, it sounds like continuing where we left off, in many respects, except that there seems to be something beatier about it. I wouldn’t say angry necessarily. There’s a scene in A Close Shave (one of the Wallace and Gromit films) in which Preston the robot dog is trapped in Wallace’s Knit-o-Matic machine and tries to punch his way out of it. That’s the closest I can get image-wise. But when Preston does come out dressed in a sweater knitted from his own fur—well, I’m hoping our resulting LP won’t be its equivalent.”

Check out the premiere and video of “Smokestack Lightning” here today or listen on your favorite DSP here.