Erin Harpe & the Delta Swingers return to NH
After months of livestreams, it felt good for Erin Harpe to finally see some real people from the stage of the Midway Café, a music club located a few blocks away from her Boston apartment. True, Harpe and her bass player/husband Jim Countryman stood behind sheets of plastic glass hung at face level — he called it “chicken wire for Covid-19” — but there was an actual crowd.
The late August set also played on her Facebook page.
“Even though the audience was small, it was really fun to play for them,” Harpe said recently by phone. “Even the people watching it streaming told me they enjoyed seeing them just hearing it.”
On Friday, Sept. 11, a four-piece version of her band Erin Harpe & the Delta Swingers will perform an electric set at Zinger’s, as the Milford venue returns to live music and comedy. Joining Harpe and Countryman are drummer Shawn Meehan and harmonica player Jason Novak.
Inspired by artists like Memphis Minnie and Sippie Wallace, along with modern contemporaries Bonnie Raitt and Rory Block, Harpe and her mates serve up some of the region’s most authentic blues, singing and playing guitar. 2020 marks their tenth anniversary as a band. They began playing sit-down acoustic blues before ultimately plugging in.
They won a New England Music Award in 2019 for Blues Artist of the Year and are multiple Boston Music Award nominees, taking the blues trophy in 2012, and five-time Boston Blues Challenge champs.
Harpe just completed a new album, Meet Me In The Middle, her first all-acoustic effort in a dozen years. The LP was born out of a duo tour she and Countryman did in the U.K. last year. She explained that the material on it reflects a challenging period for the couple.
“It covers everything from loneliness to love, to getting along better,” Harpe said. “The last couple of years actually have been kind of tough for me and Jim. We’ve lost some family members and some fur baby family members, gone through different band members.”
There are a couple of gospel songs, including one she sang at a family funeral, along with “fun, upbeat stuff” like the rollicking “Women Be Wise,” with Harpe accompanying herself on kazoo. The record is slated for release in October.
Harpe grew up steeped in blues music; her father is also a performer, and the two have recorded together. But it wasn’t a given that child would follow parent. Harpe only began performing in earnest after college, when she moved to Boston at a friend’s behest and found a burgeoning open mic scene.
Meeting Countryman led to the formation of Lovewhip, a world music band quite different from what she grew up with. Harpe allows it was a rebellious act, though her dad “really doesn’t want to say that word out loud.” Harpe became a fan of African music while studying in Kenya.
“Lovewhip is just a rock dance band,” she said. “We’ve done everything from reggae and dancehall and Afropop to disco and funk and EDM.”
The group gained a quick following, including two famous fans who helped spotlight world music in the United States near the end of the 1970s: Chris Franz and Tina Weymouth, of Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club.
“I grew up in the ’80s, I love the music and I love those guys,” Harpe said. “We actually wanted to meet them … and we ended up, well, not stalking them, but kind of trying to manifest a meeting. We ended up opening for them in Portland, Maine, and have become great friends.”
The Delta Swingers came about almost accidentally, when Lovewhip went to Austin to play a SXSW showcase in 2008. Harpe was approached by someone who’d heard her first album of solo acoustic blues recorded on a Minidisc player in 2000, and asked her to play an event called Not South By Southwest.
“It turned out that the blues was more popular than Lovewhip in Austin, Texas,” Harpe said. “We got up with this whole scene down there … country and bluegrass and rockabilly. They really embraced us. We got all this European radio play out of the couple performances we did there. After a couple of years of that, we said, ‘Let’s do a band around this.’”
Harpe looks forward to playing New Hampshire again, their first appearance in the state since Manchester’s Strange Brew a few weeks before the pandemic hit. Last fall they did one of the final shows at Riverwalk Café in nearby Nashua.
“We love Milford,” she said. “I think we have quite a few fans in the area, so hopefully we’ll see a lot of friends we haven’t seen in a while.”
Erin Harpe & The Delta Swingers
When: Friday, Sept. 11, 8 p.m.
Where: Zinger’s, 29 Mont Vernon St., Milford
Tickets: $22 at growtix.com
