Reed Turchi: The Blues Before and After

Since his teens, Reed Turchi has been enamored with the distinctive style of blues coming out of the North Mississippi Hill Country.

And following four years of personal unrest that included divorce, a relocation across the country and a battle with Crohn’s disease, the former Ardent Records A&R man returns with a phenomenal new album of deep blues covers he learned in his youth.

“I’ve known how to play these tunes for a long time now,” Turchi explains, “but I didn’t know how to sing them until I lived them. I had to find my voice.”

Recorded live over two nights without any edits or overdubs, World On Fire falls somewhere between John Lee Hooker’s House of the Blues and Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska in terms of its intimate urgency. It’s an album that could only come from that dark place from which only the truly great bluesmen can emerge.

Rock & Roll Globe had the privilege of talking with Mr. Turchi about his time at Ardent, the influence behind the album’s title and the state of the blues in 2025.

World On Fire is out now on Xenon Records.

 

When you were doing A&R, what did you look for in an artist you were thinking of signing to Ardent?

When John Fry, the owner/founder of Ardent, hired me to revive the Ardent Music label, my qualifications were “suspect,” at best. I had spent the previous few years driving around North Mississippi, recording albums out of the back of my car field-recording style for my Devil Down Records label.

The other connection that’s important to mention, though, is that I was working with Mary Lindsay Dickinson to help solidify/organize the estate of her late husband — Jim Dickinson — who was a legendary producer and Memphian, and spent most of his career at Ardent. Perhaps you recognize the Dickinson name — Luther and Cody, known for their band the North Mississippi Allstars, are Jim and Mary Lindsay’s sons.

All of which is to say, I was very much learning as I went, suddenly thrust into the Label Director + head of A&R + producer role for the label.

My vision, seeing that Ardent was about to turn 50 years old, was to find artists who had a roots/soul/blues style (to mesh with Ardent’s legacy), and that were also interested in linking themselves to Ardent / Memphis’s history as an iconic home of legendary music.

Did I mention I was figuring it out as I went along?

 

Was there a specific event over these last 10 years that prompted you to title the album World On Fire?

In the sense of the world — sure, you could pick a dozen specific events every day that speak to the title.

But I choseit that title because it’s a line in the song “Lay My Burden Down” — in which world on fire is presented in a question: “Watchya gonna do when the world’s on fire?”

I think this is the question that, for me, is at the root of the album. Whether it’s personal catastrophe, or political, or a natural disaster, or all of the above…for me the question isn’t which event is it about, but, how does one respond to such events in general, regardless of scope or specific context.

We recorded this album in November, 2024, in the nights immediately after the election, and in late September 2024 my hometown of Swannanoa, North Carolina, was devastated by Hurricane Helene. Then, when this album was being mastered, the fires in Los Angeles took place.

Unfortunately, part of the human experience is to witness a torrent of atrocities, so again, what I go back to is thinking about how we respond — how we conduct ourselves and communicate when, to borrow a title, the world is on fire.

 

 

How did you go about choosing these songs for the album?

I sat down in my apartment with my voice memos app open and my acoustic guitar — an acoustic guitar I had spent years searching for, and only found a few springs ago (it’s a 1957 Gibson LG-1, for those of you wondering).

I sat there, and I played all of the songs that came to mind first, and that resonated with me in that moment and in that room in that moment with that guitar.

In 2017 I released a solo acoustic album called Tallahatchie, so I knew I wanted to avoid songs I had recorded on that album, but I also knew I wanted to return to the kind of slide-guitar open-tuning North Mississippi sound that led me to first play guitar at all.

Moving from the I-40 path (Asheville, Chapel Hill NC, Memphis, Nashville — where I’ve spent all of my life) to New York City has been an enormous shift. Playing indoors, for example, not having that familiar NC/TN landscape, not having those highway drives to empty out my thoughts. I was struggling to figure out what my next musical direction was, because I felt lost, sonically.

So I found these songs on this guitar in this room, and knew that’s what I needed to go back to.

 

I remember first hearing “When You’ve Got A Good Friend” after picking up the Robert Johnson box set in high school, which was my first introduction to early blues. What is your relationship with the music of Robert Johnson?

Well, I always feel like I’m going to get in trouble for this, but I have listened to very little Robert Johnson, and very little of the classic British rock that I feel many people had as their blues discovery pipeline (for example, Eric Clapton → B.B. King → Robert Johnson).

My first and foremost blues influence is Mississippi Fred McDowell, thanks to my obsessive work on recordings of him that Bill Ferris made in 1967 (and allowed me to edit and release). Everything I know about guitar has grown out of that initial point of obsession.

 

VIDEO: Willie Dixon “Back Door Man”

Do you have a favorite version of Willie Dixon’s “Back Door Man”? 

Again, I most profess my ignorance as not being well versed in Dixon’s version (which I’m guessing is the root of the Howlin Wolf version?).

The version I play is the version I learned/observed first hand from Kenny Brown (R.L. Burnside’s longtime sideman), when I was recording Kenny Brown albums for the Devil Down label. I’m sure I’ve picked up bits and pieces of other versions along the way (and I’m guessing Kenny’s version owes a debt to Willie Dixon’s), but those threads get complicated fast.

 

Who was your favorite OG Fat Possum blues artist and why?

My first roots-blues guitar love was Mississippi Fred McDowell, as mentioned, and then (more contemporarily) the North Mississippi Allstars. Interestingly, those two artists you could think of as a “bookend” of the “OG Fat Possum” crew — McDowell pre-dates R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough slightly, and of course Luther and Cody grew up while those men were in the later stages of life.

But, in terms of pillars of the Hill Country Blues genre — definitely R.L. Burnside for his open-G songs and styles (of course also going down south and jumper on the line), and Junior Kimbrough for his mesmerizing droning-in-standard-tuning style. Robert Belfour, though less well-known and not as prolific, has some incredible idiosyncratic moves I admire, too.

 

All those recordings that you’ve made in the Hill Country, what is the status of them now?

They are all out there floating in the ether for now. When I recorded and released those albums it was before streaming took over music listening in the U.S., and so those were all CDs first and foremost. Someday I hope they will show up on streaming, or go out on vinyl, so more people can enjoy them.

I was 18/19 when I started making those albums. The music business is an awful place, and it’s an easy place to have your heart broken — especially when you’re a teenager recording artists you idolize.

 

Are there any young cats in Hill Country keeping the spirit of that region’s blues scene alive? What is the state of the Hill Country blues movement in 2025?

As a resident of Kings County, New York, I don’t think I can really speak to that. I do see more and more “tribute nights” in Nashville that are a blend of younger generation Hill Country guys and also lovers of the music. And I’m glad to see the North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic going strong. Music is a river — it’s out there, and the descendents (literally and figuratively) are out there, too.

Do you ever think we are going to see another movement in rock that is blues-based, like in the 60s and 70s? Why or why not?

This is a complicated question!

In terms of pop culture, I think the answer to that revolves a lot around technology related to instruments and also listening habits. If the tools are available, people will find a way. If guitars are brutally unaffordable, and if there aren’t places to play music, and if there aren’t spaces to collaborate (see: garage music!), then maybe not. Unfortunately this question also has so much to do with what is “profitable” for the people selling music — by which I mean labels, publishing, etc. Right now those are all being horribly managed by giant tech / private equity firms, and it’s all crashing and burning. I hope it crashes and burns as fast as possible, not because I wish anyone harm, but because I think as soon as some of these awful, short-sighted models are proved to be failures, we can move onto something new.

And that’s what makes me most hopeful, ironically — the worse the “music business” and “media companies” get, the more people I see turning towards what is REAL — in-person experiences, high-quality listening, interactive moments, HUMAN MADE MUSIC, that kind of thing.

What’s the stat — it takes 3% of the population in the street to create political change?

Similarly, I think if 3% of streaming music listeners abandoned that, or, in conjunction with that, bought records from their favorite indie artists…that would be a seismic shift, and would enable all sorts of careers to take off.

I don’t expect that everyone will care that much about music — people have other things to worry about. But if even this small sliver of the population shifts their spending habits and intentions…well, it would change the world.

 

Most importantly, how are you feeling? How has your battle with Crohn’s informed these performances on World On Fire?

I am feeling simultaneously overwhelmed and enthusiastic, which is more or less my standard operating model. I am so excited to have this music (World on Fire) out in the world, and have been pretty relentless over the last six months trying to do a good job to give it a chance to get out in the world.

But, just like any form of energy, human-expended energy is always transferred — right now I’ve been putting energy out and out and out and out, and I am looking forward to performing this music to audiences and for people to discover it, which feels more like energy “coming back in.”

As far as Crohn’s, I feel fortunate — after years of truly crushing pain and fear, I am on what feels like a stable medical regiment, and am certainly faring much better than many people who suffer from the same disease.

Crohn’s is just one of a whole bevy of auto-immune issues that are plaguing our population, and that we don’t really have sufficient answers for right now. It’s also a disease that didn’t exist a century ago, so, it’s environmental. We need to take care of the world around us if we’re going to take care of ourselves. And yeah, right now, I’d say the world is on fire — though in a sense we’re always burning, just like the stars.