With laid-back attitudes and down-to-earth personas, the casual Casa Cantina or Jackie O’s patron probably wouldn’t think Duke Junior & The Smokey Boots recently flirted with some serious national attention through a contest sponsored by Billboard Magazine. While the band did not advance as far as they would have liked, they all agreed the experience was unforgettable. Combined with the new-found and pleasantly unanticipated attention and excitement brought on by the expected release of sophomore album sometime this summer, The Boots are ready to rock.
Only a few years ago, vocalist and bass guitarist Kyle Martin decided to strip away everything the music industry now promoted from his act. The flashing lights, fog machines, and pyrotechnic shows started to command too much attention, and the music suffered. He wanted to return to how country and folk music humbly started a hundred or so years ago.
“I just wanted to play as minimal music as I could. It was like ‘Let’s just make folk music. Bare-bones folk music,’” Martin says.
Martin started jamming with Casey Davis, a guitarist and friend, and the two tried to create a folky, soulful sound. Soon, the duo turned into a trio when Jess Kaufmann, a friend of Martin and Davis and singer-songwriter and guitarist sat in on a jam session. At the time, Kaufmann was playing solo shows around Athens, but after only a short while, she, along with Martin and Davis, realized they had something that might work.
“Before I met the guys, I played by myself for a couple years,” Kaufmann says, “It started very minimal and then we built it up from there. Martin was kind of coming in from something totally different and I was just really starting up, but we kind of met in the middle with what we were going for.”
“It was nothing too methodical, really, just personal,” Martin adds, noting the band formed primarily out of friendships and common interests both musically and personally.
The next step for the trio was writing a full album of original songs and finding a name for the band so they could start promoting themselves. The story of exactly how Duke Junior & The Smokey Boots settled on their unique name involved a lot of brainstorming, quite a few duds, and some generally off-the-wall combinations. A cat who crashed at the band’s practice house inspired the first half of the band’s name. The band nicknamed the feline Duke Tuna because of the house pet’s cravings for a fresh can of tuna fish. “The Smokey Boots” just seemed to roll off the tongue. After a few weeks of deliberation, Duke Tuna & the Smokey Boots were born. Eventually, the band agreed to replace “Tuna” with “Junior” hoping it would sound a little less silly but still catchy and easily recognizable.
The freshly christened trio wasted little time finalizing their songs and recording and releasing their first studio album, Bag of Bones, in late 2009. They started playing shows at local bars and cafés, getting their name out, and turning first-time listeners into new fans almost every weekend. The band also asked their friend Aaron Lemely to play drums for the band. Lemeley had recently rediscovered his passion for music and was extremely excited for the chance to play with the up-and-coming group.
“I went abroad my junior year and hadn’t played a drum set since I went to college,” Lemley says. “I started playing the drum set again at the place I stayed in Denmark, and when I came back, I was like, ‘I have to start a band in Athens.’ And fortunately, Kyle (Martin), Casey (Davis), and Jess (Kaufmann) had already started recording,” recollected Aaron.
Shortly after Lemley came on board, Duke Junior & The Smokey Boots added the drummer’s friend, Matt Horne, on the fiddle. With their current lineup in place, Duke Junior & The Smokey Boots began to command more and more attention throughout Athens and the surrounding area. They even earned a little national attention.
“Billboard Magazine sent us an email, and it said something like ‘You’ve been selected!’ We get that stuff all the time and most of it is crap, so I didn’t think it was legitimate, but there’s a girl we know that used to live in Athens who works at Billboard now. She contacted (Lemley) and said ‘This is legitimate, you guys should do this,’” Kaufmann says.
The contest was basically a nationwide battle of the bands, and the winner performed at the Billboard Music Awards Show at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Duke Junior & The Smokey Boots pulled everything together in less than a weekend, but it was by no means easy. Lemley sent the contract to his older sister, a law student at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, to try and figure out what exactly they were getting into. The band stopped at a Kinko’s on the way to Thomas, West Virginia to print out flyers and informational slips. Lemley’s sister approved the contract and the band signed the document in his parent’s hotel room in Thomas, forging Davis’ signature, because the lead guitarist had left Athens a little later than the rest of the band. The band even managed to get a hold of their producer, Eddie Ashworth, an Audio Production professor at Ohio University, while he was in Austin, Texas attending the South by Southwest concert. Luckily, Professor Ashworth had the hard drive containing the band’s songs with him over 1,400 miles away. He was able to remix the band’s song “Penny” and send it to the band, who managed to pull all of this together on the road and play a gig in a little less than 48 hours.
The contest put Duke Junior & The Smokey Boots against two other bands from the Midwest region, all competing to advance to the next round of the contest and hit the road to face-off against the five other regional winners. The winner from each region was flown to Los Angeles the day after the announcement, where they received an already paid-for rental car from Chevrolet and conduct a mini-tour across the United States, playing shows every night. The five bands’ tour ended in Las Vegas where they battled for the ultimate prize: playing live at the Billboard Music Awards Show and on a live broadcast by ABC.
“Each band that won their region got to fly to L.A. and get a photo shoot, so we sort of skewed that into how we viewed it, like ‘Yeah, they’re going to give us haircuts!’ We were like, ‘We want to go to L.A. tomorrow, no, we want to get flown to L.A. tomorrow to get a haircut!’ Davis remembered with a few laughs. “Matt (Horne) was letting his hair grow out just in case Billboard Magazine would cut his hair for him,” Kaufmann adds with a smile.
If nothing else, the band was happy to book some more gigs and add, relatively substantially, to their fan base. They even received an e-mail from one of their Midwest competitors after the contest ended for both bands. He congratulated the band, wished them well, and added he was “a new fan.” Duke Junior & The Smokey Boots happily welcomed the new listeners and was thankful for their help and support during and after the Billboard contest.
“We have people in other towns that are pulling for us and that are trying to get us into places where they can hear us. People saying, ‘Oh, they were picked for that Billboard thing,’ helps us out and makes people take us pretty seriously,” said Kaufmann. Martin added, “The fact that we can give people words about our band that are tied to Billboard Magazine, that’s some credibility.”
With the contest and memories both good and bad now behind them, the next step for Duke Junior & The Smokey Boots is the release sophomore album. Right now, it remains untitled, but the band is referring to it as a “Self-Titled” release. This album differs from Bag of Bones, the band’s first album, in several ways. Lemley and Horne are making their studio album debut on Duke Junior & The Smokey Boots’ second release. Martin, Davis, and Kaufmann also agreed after playing 200-plus shows since the release of their first album, the band has evolved tremendously.
“Those 200-plus shows are what the listener is going to hear. Everything that is our band is coming out in this album. And we’re just trying to see what happens with it. We’re just going to see how many people like it and how many people don’t like it, and then from there we’ll do what we have to do,” explained Martin.
The band is extremely excited for the album, expected to be released in June, which falls in nicely with the band’s recent billing for the mid-September Bristol Rhythm and Roots Festival, a country and folk music festival that takes place in Bristol, a mountain town on the Tennessee/Virginia border, considered by many to be the birthplace of country music. Despite the bill being almost completely full, Duke Junior & The Smokey Boots snuck on through the recommendation of a friend.
Duke Junior & The Smokey Boots fondly remembers where it all started, though. They agreed a lot of their success was from the backing of Tim Peacock, the executive director of Stuart’s Opera House in Nelsonville, Ohio, who first gave the band a chance to play at the Nelsonville Music Festival two years ago. This year, Duke Junior & The Smokey Boots played on the main stage and opened for country music legend, George Jones. They also agreed the help of Tim Haller could not go unnoticed. Haller lets them use his house as a place to practice and the loyal fan attends almost every concert, recording many of them. He then uploads the live concerts to Archive.com where anyone with an IP address can listen to the bootlegged shows. The band noted many people have become fans of Duke Junior & The Smokey Boots just because they heard them on this website.
For now, the band is focused on their sophomore release and playing a rising number of gigs this summer.
Martin ended with a smile and a final thought, saying, “Ask anyone who does this, whether they’re just starting out or famous, they just kind of want to just keep riding the wave for as long as they can. Right now, and the past two years, we’ve been lucky enough that people want to come see us play. So as long as people want to come see us, we’ll be doing it in some fashion, but if people don’t come anymore, that’s when I’m going to hang ‘em up.”
Originally published in The Essay Magazine.
Jacob Betzner 