Barrelhouse says goodbye after 50 years, also in Groningen: ‘Playing good blues is often underestimated’

The North Holland sextet Barrelhouse, considered by many music lovers to be the best blues group in our country, has played for half a century with an almost unchanged line-up. An ‘indivisible unity’.

“We thought it would be a nice moment,” says pianist Han van Dam. Singer and figurehead of the group, Tineke Schoemaker, nods: “We are all still in top form now. We’ve felt it was coming for a while. When guitarist Guus Laporte announced that he wanted to give his life one more turn and planned to settle abroad, the decision was quickly made.”

Stage appearance

Continuing with another guitarist is not an option, says Guus’s younger brother Johnny, who also plays guitar: “Fifty years in this line-up has determined our sound. A newcomer may be able to hit the right notes, but will never have exactly our ‘timing’. I think our strength as a group also lies in our limitations and how we have dealt with them all these years. In addition, Guus has a stage appearance that cannot be replaced.”

Since the mid-1970s, Barrelhouse – with bassist Jan Willem Sligting and drummer Bob Dros in addition to Schoemaker, Van Dam and the Laporte brothers – has played a dozen studio albums plus a few live albums. But above all it is a group that comes to life on stage. “I think we always sounded too neat on the records,” says Van Dam. “Played it safe,” adds Laporte.

Oscar Benton Blues Band

The farewell tour started in early January at jazz club Mahogany Hall in Edam, the stage where Barrelhouse played the very first concert with Tineke Schoemaker in 1974. The group is actually the continuation of the Haarlem Oscar Benton Blues Band, after singer Oscar Benton opted for a career in chart pop in December 1973. The then 19-year-old Schoemaker, with a voice that expresses every conceivable heartache, fear of abandonment and lustful desire like no one else can between Delfzijl and Zierikzee, immediately makes Barrelhouse a hit on the Dutch music circuit.

When the debut album was released a year later, containing ten blues standards and one song written by Tineke together with Johnny, comparisons with Janis Joplin were common. “But I have never actually heard that similarity myself,” says the singer. “I still understood when people called Bonnie Raitt. But that was much later; she had her breakthrough in 1990 with the song I’m in the mood by John Lee Hooker, with which we had already opened our first album from 1975. Yet there were people who thought I got that from her… In those early days we were much more concerned with a band like Little Feat.”

Record label Ariola

The second plate, Who’s Missing from 1976, is filled with self-written songs; very unusual in the genre at the time. “The ‘blues police’ didn’t think it was great,” laughs Schoemaker. “It is not our favorite album either,” adds Laporte. “But that mainly had to do with the recording technique. It was important to us that we developed further.”

“The real turnaround came when we went to the Ariola record company,” says Han van Dam. He’s referring to the Barrelhouse album Beware..! from 1979 and especially the title song that was recorded a few years earlier by the American soul singer Ann Peebles. A pounding and steamy song with a lot of rock feeling and a ripping sax solo from Hans Dulfer. Barrelhouse has not been closer to a real hit in those fifty years.

„ Beware! was released as a single in a shortened version,” says pianist Van Dam. “Frits Spits picked it up in his well-listened to radio program. But that was it.”

Flying start

Not much later things start to rumble within the band. First Jan Willem Sligting leaves the group. One studio and live album later, Tineke Schoemaker decided to join the One Two project, with which she released the modest hit in 1984. No Song to Sing scores. The ones left behind tried for a while with another singer, but in 1987 Barrelhouse really seemed to be defunct.

Until Schoemaker was invited to a concert in Nijmegen in 1993. She takes Han van Dam with her and they get along so well that not much later the entire group is rehearsing again in the original line-up. “It was a flying start. We could suddenly play anywhere again.” Ideas for a new album bubble up naturally. “Country, folk, in short ‘roots music’, was given more and more space. I had actually been working on that for some time, before I sang with Barrelhouse. As a group we had become more confident. Dared more. And also that idea of ​​’breaking through’, which in the time of Beware! was still alive, had disappeared. We just wanted to make good music.”

Improvise

A blues song is never finished, Tineke Schoemaker said in an interview years ago. It is a repertoire that you can interpret and deepen endlessly. “Yes, playing good blues is often underestimated,” she agrees when reminded of her earlier statement. „ If You Really Wanna Leave Me from our first album from 1975, which I wrote together with Johnny, is perhaps our most played song in those fifty years. But it offers room for improvisation every time, also with regard to the text. That song is just a kind of coat rack that you as a musician can walk around and hang all kinds of things on…”

“It is also more than just entertainment, absolutely! Blues appeals directly to emotions; to universal themes such as celebration, sadness, longing and often everything together. In that respect it remains truly folk music.”