Lucinda Williams were also on board—yarr!), it was the Gramps track, “Cape Cod Girls” (recorded with Akron/Family, Bill Frisell, and Phillip Morgan from the Cutters), that got top billing (side one, cut one) on Rogues Gallery; he’s also the artist they sent to Letterman to plug it. Is it really any wonder? The pirate’s life was made for Baby Gramps.
Singer, songwriter, guitarist, and teller of tall tales, Gramps has spent a lifetime plundering the treasures of the old world, told and untold, ever since he was a young man—probably the youngest person on the planet to have ever gone by the sobriquet Gramps (that’s where the Baby comes in). These days, as back then, he keeps alive early 20th century standards like “Teddy Bears’ Picnic”, “St. James Infirmary”, and “Big Rock Candy Mountain” along with lesser-known chestnuts like “Go Wash an Elephant (If You Want to Do Something Big)” and his own creations in the same spirit, like his live, showboat number, “Palindromes” (“Tarzan raised a Desi Arnaz rat”; “Ho hum, a hymn is in my ham. Uh oh”; etc.)