REVEREND PEYTON AND HIS BIG DAMN BAND
bigdamnband.com

“We come from the same tradition that Charley Patton and Furry Lewis came from; they just took off with their instruments and went out into the world to see what would stick,” Peyton elaborates. “They sang about what they were going through in their time and we’re doing the same thing in ours.”

Ironically, despite the fact that the Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band are influenced by country blues legends, they got a big break when the Irish rock act Flogging Molly decided to take them out on the road.

“We played with Flogging Molly at a festival and they liked our set and told us they wanted to take us out on tour. I thought, ‘Oh man, they’re probably just pulling our leg or being nice to us,’ but they ended up taking us out with them. They said that they do to Celtic roots music the same thing that we do to old country blues: Write songs about things that are happening now and people we know, but kind of kick it up a little bit, you know?”

Lyrically, The Reverend Peyton isn’t big on metaphor and symbolism, preferring to let people know exactly how he feels, whether he’s singing about being too poor to afford health insurance of just missing Mama Peyton’s fried potatoes.

“All the songs I write are 100 percent true, I don’t make stuff up and I never have,” Peyton explains.

(For instance, “Your Cousin’s On Cops” is about Breezy’s cousin being arrested near the Indianapolis 500.)

“I feel like I got to directly be involved in a song,” he adds. “Maybe if I played a different genre of music I’d feel like I could get away with [making stuff up], but this style of music is too honest; you can’t lie to people because they’ll see right through it.”

However above all, the stripped-down songs on The Whole Fam Damnily are meant to be performed live—and the band’s raucous shows have become the stuff of legend, with Breezy wearing clean through stainless steel washboards, the Reverend furiously picking like his strings are on fire and Jayme firing up the tempos with his kick and snare drum.

“We end up playing with a lot of punk rock bands and any kind of roots acts from bluegrass to alt-country to rockabilly to you name it,” the Reverend himself answers when asked what a typical Big Damn Band performance is like, “we’ll play with anyone, really.”

“When folks go to see a band perform, they want to come out to see a show and that’s nothing new,” Peyton explains. “Charley Patton was playing with his teeth and behind his head in 1930; now people say that’s punk rock, but they’ve been doing that for a hundred years,” he summarizes. “I think country blues was the first punk rock if you ask me.”