Review of Baby Gramps and the CD, “Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys”

Baby Gramps is an attic crammed with curiosities from another era. The floor boards groan and dust swirls about as he rummages through vintage jazz, sea chanteys, nonsense songs, poetry, Delta blues, Tin Pan Alley, world music and forgotten folk tunes. He bangs them out on an old National Steel guitar, the words tumbling from his voluminous gray beard in a creepy blend of what sounds like human didgeridoo and Popeye.

“A lot of these musics came to their death in the ’30s,” says Baby Gramps, “killed by commercial music. What I’m doing is pursuing all these dead ends.”