Walking with Ghosts: Preacher Boy Redefines the Blues on His Own Terms

Preacher Boy doesn’t just play the blues—he inhabits it. Gravel-voiced and ghost-haunted, he’s spent decades walking the crooked line between tradition and innovation, wielding a slide guitar like a switchblade and penning lyrics that read like torn-out pages from some long-lost American gospel. With the arrival of Ghost Notes, an 18-track tour de force of grit, poetry, and unflinching honesty, Preacher Boy cements his legacy as one of roots music’s most iconoclastic and compelling voices.

A pioneer of the so-called "alt blues" movement—alongside artists like Chris Whitley, G. Love, and The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion—Preacher Boy emerged in the mid-’90s with a sound that nodded to Blind Willie Johnson and Lead Belly while whispering secrets to Nick Cave and Tom Waits. Critics took note: MOJO hailed him as “a songwriter of startling originality,” while Melody Maker likened his music to “country blues that marry Nick Cave, Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, and Tom Waits.” That Devil Music gave Ghost Notes a rare A+, proclaiming, “Preacher Boy has never been more compelling or intriguing.”

His journey to Ghost Notes spans continents and eras—beginning with early records for Blind Pig, including Gutters and Pews, followed by years in Europe crafting haunted, elegant albums that threaded blues traditions through a post-punk filter. Later, in Brooklyn, he teamed up with Rick Rubin and Eagle-Eye Cherry, and released the starkly mesmerizing Demanding to be Next, an acoustic statement piece that Sing Out! praised for its “keening, propulsive” storytelling.

After taking time to focus on writing poetry—while living in Jack Kerouac’s former house, no less—Preacher Boy returned with a trilogy of albums that reasserted his storytelling power. Sputnik Music observed that “his musical tales of desperation and loneliness would do a Springsteen or a Neil Young proud.”

But Ghost Notes is something more—a culmination. It’s a seasoned, deeply human, and sonically rich record that doesn’t just honor the roots of the blues; it extends them. These aren’t just songs—they’re dispatches from the edge, sermons from the underworld, and affirmations that even the most haunted voices still have stories worth telling.

In the conversation that follows, we dive deep with Preacher Boy on the making of Ghost Notes, the lifelong push-pull between tradition and reinvention, and why the blues remains, in his words, “not just a sound—but a way of telling the truth.”

"Ghost Notes" feels like a culmination — a kind of personal mythology in 18 tracks. What ghosts did you find yourself communing with most while writing this record?

I like the idea of the album being understood as a personal mythology. Thank you for saying that. As to whether it's a culmination, I'm not sure yet. It may well prove to be, but for now, it feels more like continuation rather than culmination.

As to the ghosts? I'd say the ghost I commune with the most is my own.

I actually think Ghost Notes is an album that is as much about place as it is people—a kind of linked short story collection focused on ghost towns that aren't really ghost towns. Because this is, of course, the curse of self-reflection—we consign a town to the ghosts because we ourselves have left, but of course, the towns continue on without us.

I suppose, ultimately, the album is permeated in equal measure by the ghosts of who I've been, am, and will be, and the ghosts of where I've been, am, and will go.

You've been called everything from the 'godfather of alt-blues' to the 'Charlie Musselwhite for the Lollapalooza Generation'—do you embrace these labels, or do they feel like someone else's shorthand for something much harder to define?

Well, first things first, being called the godfather of a genre is pretty special, right? I mean, I’m more than happy to embrace that.

And I do like the idea of “alt-blues” as a genre. But the term probably does bear some scrutiny and clarification.

For a little context, I’ve certainly never thought of myself as a “blues” musician. However, country blues has always had a tremendous hold on my imagination, and artists such as Charley Patton, Bukka White, Son House, Robert Pete Williams, Sleepy John Estes, and so many more, are still some of my most important influences.

However, at the time I was coming up as a young musician, these artists didn’t seem to be very much in vogue in conventional blues circles. The folk revival of the 60’s had given way to the age of the electric guitar hero; the era of blues as arena music. The Johnsons (Robert, Tommy, and Blind Willie) had been supplanted by the Kings (Albert, B.B., and Freddie). Where were the artists who were carrying forward the peculiar magic of Skip James, Fred McDowell, and Robert Pete Wilkins?

Meanwhile, over in the realm of rock and roll, the music had traded in the street corner for the stadium. Rock music had become a bloated, capitalistic, misogynistic, cliche-addled parade of pomposity and excess. So “alternative” rock emerged as a kind of counterweight—a pivot to something rawer, more primal, more lyrical, more inclusive of the excluded, and perhaps most importantly, more idiosyncratic. And what was especially fascinating, was that this “alternative” succeeded. Speaking of Lollapalooza, for example, those first few festivals were wild circuses of multi-genre solidarity that ran totally counter to mainstream expectations. And yet, the events managed to be viable and successful.

So I guess that’s what I like to believe “alt blues” is all about—the emergence of a viable counterweight.

But to be clear, it’s not about disrespecting the origins of the genre, or somehow saving it from itself. If anything, it’s about honoring the legacy even more deeply. When I think of some of the other artists who were beginning to be referred to as “alt blues” at that time—I’m talking about folks like Chris Whitley, Alvin Youngblood Hart, and Kelly Joe Phelps—I think about their intense devotion to their influences, and their intense commitment to their craft. They weren’t spurning the blues anymore than Nirvana was spurning rock and roll. They were reinterpreting, reimagining, and reigniting it.

There's a deep literary thread in your lyrics — how did your time living and writing in Jack Kerouac's house reshape your songwriting, if at all?

I’ve long been fascinated with—and influenced by—Kerouac’s approach to improvisational composition. In the prologue to his poetry collection “Mexico City Blues,” Kerouac wrote about how he considered the dimensions of his pocket notebook pages to be constraints similar to the bar counts of a jazz solo; i.e. you get X amount of lines on a page—in the same way you get 96 bars worth of a chord progression—to say what it is you want to say, and to express it as creatively and memorably as you can. And that’s it.

And Kerouac would hold himself to that, trying to be as present in the moment as he could, in order to bring the full measure of his creativity to bear upon every finite moment of creation.

For me, this approach feels very similar to how haiku masters approach poetry, or how Sumi-e artists approach visual art. It’s an approach that also seemingly undergirds everything from Pollock’s drip paintings to the modal era of Miles Davis.

So I was really into exploring these approaches, and my time in the Kerouac House afforded me a really concentrated and focused opportunity to delve into how mindset and process can come together to vibrate the tuning fork of creativity in new ways.

It was also a great lesson about the tools of creation. I’ve always written in Moleskine notebooks, and I also have a handful of very old typewriters, and while at the Kerouac House—in the spirit of his legacy—I constrained myself solely to these “manual” mechanisms of composition, and it really forced me to write and revise in a different way. It’s not unlike an electric guitarist forcing themselves to write on an acoustic. Take away the amps, the effects, the pedals, the sustain, the distortion, the Floyd Rose tremolo—take it all away, and what’s left? Just you, a few feet of wood and metal, and the song you’re trying to bring to life. You’re just naked and exposed.

Slide guitar is almost a character in your songs. If your National or Martin guitars could speak, what stories do you think they'd tell from the making of Ghost Notes?

Oh, they’d probably talk about how they wish I was a better guitar player so the album wouldn’t have taken so long to complete.

Honestly, I’d rather hear them tell stories about their own lives anyhow—not mine. I mean, my two Nationals are from 1936, and my “old” Martin is a 1938. And even my “new” Martin is from 2003. Think about all that’s changed in the music industry since then. In 1936, a new record meant shellac and sheet music. In 2003, it was CDs and MySpace.

I do like to think the guitars would have reasonably nice things to say about Ghost Notes if they were asked. After all, the whole album was really meant to be a guitar album from the start, and all the guitars on the album were recorded very organically—good mics, good amps, good rooms. Nothing more.

Hopefully, the guitars feel appropriately honored.

As to slide guitar, I love that idea of it being a character. It’s so true. Slide players are like knuckleball pitchers. Knuckleballers are a subculture with their own rituals and superstitions. And just like with slide players, no good knuckleballer can tell you exactly where their pitch is going to go.

Your career has spanned continents and eras of the blues. Was there a single moment during the recording of Ghost Notes where you felt all of it — your early days, your European chapters, the Magic Shop years — converged in one song?

One song? I don’t think so, but only because I’ve always thought of Ghost Notes as more of a single entity. The songs are closer to being the chapters of a novel than they are standalone stories.

I do think Ghost Notes has a bit of the summary statement about it, in that I absolutely couldn’t have made it at any earlier point in my career. Whatever I’ve learned, whatever experiences I’ve had, all the places I’ve been—I had to have it all in my back pocket before I could undertake this thing.

With decades worth of hindsight to benefit from now, I can definitely see that my musical trajectory has been that of someone who was both an early starter and a late bloomer. I had a lot of ambition early on, but I think my ambitions outstripped my abilities for quite a long time. So on the one hand, I’m proud and even a bit amazed by all the things I attempted, all the cliffs I jumped off, and all the milestones I reached. But on the other hand, I also can look back and see many failures and a whole host of unrealized dreams.

But that’s the journey, right? We strive, we fail, we try again, and from our failures emerge the scaffolding upon which we hope to hang our future successes upon.

These days, with Ghost Notes finally out in the world, I am at peace. I think this is the album I’ve been working toward my whole life, and I’m glad I made it.

You've often been compared to storytellers like Tom Waits, Dylan, and Nick Cave. Who are some unlikely influences people wouldn't expect that actually shaped Ghost Notes?

Joe Strummer? Thelonious Monk? Lemmy? Al Jourgenson? John Coltrane? Do those count as unlikely?

Your lyrics walk the line between sermon and confession. Are you channeling the Preacher or the Boy more these days?

Ha! That’s a great question … I’m not sure how to answer this, because I don’t think I’ve ever actually considered the idea of Preacher and Boy as a binary … but I think perhaps the best way to approach it is with a sprinkle of the Zen. Which is to say, I think I’m trying to transcend both.

In a dualistic world, we have right and wrong, black and white, life and death, and so forth. Similarly, you have the sermon and the confession—redemption and sin, the rise to goodness, the descent to badness. In a folkloric sense, you have God’s music, and you have the Devil’s music. And many a person has been ruined through the pursuit of reconciliation. But transcendence is another thing altogether—a state where good and bad both are and aren’t. Or, in this case, where the Preacher and the Boy are both one and the same and neither. I think that’s where I’m trying to be. A place where I’m channeling both and neither simultaneously.

There's a certain kind of loneliness threaded throughout Ghost Notes — not self-pitying, but haunted and watchful. Is solitude a tool or a consequence in your creative process?

Well, that’s a bit tricky, because of course loneliness and solitude aren’t actually the same thing.

Loneliness, I think, is neither a tool nor a consequence, but rather, a condition—one often thrust upon you against your will. Solitude, on the other hand, is something you can seek out and achieve.

As such, solitude can absolutely be a creative tool. I certainly had an abundance of it over the course of writing and recording Ghost Notes, and that was very much by design.

As to any loneliness threading through the album, I think haunted and watchful are pretty good descriptors. Thank you for those. I do feel a bit haunted, and watchfulness is an appropriate response to that. Call it a coping mechanism. When you’re on the lam, you’ve got to keep a sharp eye out.

If you had to write liner notes for Ghost Notes as a letter to your younger self at the time of your Blind Pig debut, what would the first and last lines be?

Dear Preacher Boy,

Don’t trust Blind Pig.

Sincerely,

Preacher Boy

You've said before that blues is both tradition and revolution. Where do you think Ghost Notes fits into that tension — and where do you want it to push the genre next?

Well, my heroes have always been those with one foot in the past and one in the future—artists who have a deep reverence for their creative ancestors, but who recognize that to honor their legacy is not to imitate, but to extend.

I hope people will understand Ghost Notes in this way. Old boots, new roads.

Connect with Preacher Boy https://preacherboy.com/