BIO AND PRESS
Time For This
Ry Cavanaugh was 22 when his father - a country and honky-tonk singer in the late 1970’s - died of heart failure after several years of struggle with chronic depression and prescription opiate addiction. A big-hearted and hard-dreaming man, George Cavanaugh had created a vibrant, often chaotic home life in which music and community were the twin, magical threads. In 2019, having reached the age at which his father died, Ry carved out time in the midst of recording and touring with his band Session Americana to cut his first solo album in 20 years. The result, Time For This, is the realization of a long-ripening desire to recover and document the songs his father had written four decades prior. A singular departure for an artist who has made his career within the fabric of community, Time For This shifts the focus squarely on his own voice, offering up stark and intimate renditions of the songs that framed his childhood: resurrected, re-worked, and recorded knee-to-knee with Duke Levine, with Jennifer Kimball adding exceptionally delicate harmonies.
In Ry’s own words
When I was growing up, music composition and performance were part of my home life. Dad always had a song he was working on, a band he was rehearsing in the little houses we rented all over New England, a new record he would listen to over and over. He was self-taught, and learned to play the guitar mostly by listening to folk and blues records in the early ‘60s. He liked to play Dave Van Ronk's arrangement of Come Back Baby, and wrote a few songs in that style. My parents named me after Ry Cooder, whose first solo album had come out just before I was born.
My parents drifted around when I was a baby, living first in Southern Connecticut, and then Granby, Marthas Vineyard, and Provincetown, Massachusetts. Wherever we lived, my parents hosted whatever traveling musicians were playing the local room. My dad played around the New England folk scene, but mostly he worked some kind of trade while he was writing his songs and poems, and he didn't play out much. But there were always mandolins, basses, drums, dobros, every kind of folk instrument around the house, and people to play them. There's no point in dropping names here but there were a lot of good musicians, engineers, and artists floating through my childhood homes. I even used to play little harmonica on Orange Blossom Special in jams.
By the late 70s, we had settled near my dad's home town of Stamford, Connecticut, and a Country and Western Band coalesced to play in the burgeoning Honky Tonk scene around New York. Dad adapted some of his folk songs to the new band, wrote some other ones, and made up a stage character called Bobby Pedd. His band was The Bobby Pedd Band, and between 1978 and 1982, when I was between the ages of 7 and 11, there was always a band in our house - a big, wild one. Some of those guys were like family to me, and they had kids of their own who came to hang with us during rehearsals. We always had a few guys living with us in the big house we rented in downtown New Canaan. I have his diary from 1981, and there are quite a few Bobby Pedd Band shows at the Lone Star Cafe in Manhattan, sometimes opening, sometimes headlining. They were definitely working, and they were a pretty cracking band based on some live recordings I have on cassette.
A series of hard things happened, and seemingly all at once in the early ’80’s, for my family and for the various friends in the band, and that whole world just disappeared. Time works that way sometimes, everything all one way, and then, suddenly, all another. There's an old family story about Dad visiting a fortune-teller when he was young. There was a lot of good there in his palms, a lot of adventure and creativity, but the mystic couldn’t see anything beyond the age of 40.
Ry Cavanaugh
Ry Cavanaugh has produced, co-produced, performed, and written songs for nine albums by Boston’s Session Americana, the band that he co-founded and continues to manage. A moveable feast, as much a collective and as a band, Session American tours across the United States and Europe with a revolving cast of top-shelf players, centered on a stable core. "Session Americana has developed into a traveling medicine show which eschews snake oil in favor of an ongoing grail quest for the perfect collaborative experience" (Hot Press Ireland). But organizing, producing, and championing other artists - nurturing all kinds of collaborative work within the Boston scene - has always been the center of Ry Cavanaugh’s artistic life. From producing projects like One Night in Cambridge - an album of emerging artists including Faith Soloway, and Mary Gauthier - to his years with the cult favorite Vinal Avenue String Band (with Kris Delmhorst and Sean Staples), to his seventeen years at the helm of Session Americana, he has always worked in company, contributing songs and connecting players. In all that time, his most constant collaborator has been his wife, Jennifer Kimball (The Story), with whom he released an album under the moniker Maybe Baby in 2003. In 2009, the family lived in Donegal, Ireland, where Ry ran a weekly session and performed regularly with Finbarr Doherty, Kate O'Callaghan and The Henry Girls. After meeting Mary Black at a session, she released his song ‘Lighthouse Light’ on her album Songs for the Steeples, as a duet with Janis Ian.
Beat Surrender UK: “Ry’s charm and wit, not to mention endless supply of great songs (both his and other people’s) was there for everyone to see and provided a real different approach to the standard singer-songwriter live show."
Americana UK: “(Great Shakes) opens up with the little gem that is “One Skinner”, a languid, gorgeously melodic song that slides into your consciousness and never leaves."
Twangville: “Cavanaugh’s gentle “Raking Through The Ashes” has a brilliant musical conceit, describing the quest to rekindle a failed love with the ashes left in an extinguished fire."
Boston Business Journal: “The Marvel's Avengers of Boston's burgeoning Americana music scene... have finally put out an album that meets or exceeds the promise of their engaging, inspiring live performances. There's plenty of folk, some rock thrown in for good measure, and a little bit of the blues. It's just the right recipe to make this the city's newest timeless album.”
About Session Americana - Session Americana (Boston) is a rock band in a tea cup, or possibly a folk band in a whiskey bottle. This band/collective of talented musicians craft a musical experience unlike any other. On stage is a collapsible bar table wired with microphones, a vintage suitcase recast as a kick drum, an old Estey field organ, a pre-war parlor guitar, a mandocello and all of its smaller siblings, a harmonica case fire damaged when Jack's bar went up in flames and graffitied by Depeche Mode roadies, and an assortment of other instruments that get passed around in this freewheeling modern hootenanny. The anything-could-happen feel of a Session show depends on craft that's not accidental or easilywon; they bring a kind of ease and genuineness to this timeless music, sometimes presenting the latest batch of original songs, sometimes reaching back into depths of the American "song bag".
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