“Music evolves, and we're very lucky to have the entire history of recorded music at our fingertips so we can actually see that evolution and we can think about what those names mean.”

Charlie Parr: Folk Blues Poetic Stories

Critically Acclaimed Acoustic Folk Blues musician Charlie Parr won top honors in the 21st Annual IAMA (International Acoustic Music Awards) with his song “Boombox.” He also won Best Folk/Americana/Roots Award as well. From Minnesota, Charlie spent part of his childhood in Hollandale before starting his music career in Duluth. His influences include Charlie Patton, Bukka White, Reverend Gary Davis, Dave Van Ronk, Mississippi John Hurt, and his self-professed "hero" "Spider" John Koerner. He plays a Mule resonator, National resonator guitar, a fretless open-back banjo, and a twelve-string guitar, often in the Piedmont blues style. Before his death in 2024, Minneapolis blues musician Spider John Koerner gave his 12-string Gretsch guitar to Parr, requesting that Parr continue using it on stage. Parr’s first album with Smithsonian Folkways, “Last of the Better Days Ahead” (2021), foregrounded his lyrical craftsmanship and sophisticated bluesman confidence, with spare production highlighting Parr’s mastery of guitar and elevating his poetry.                                              (Charlie Parr / Photo by Shelly Mosman)

Last of the Better Days Ahead is a portrait of how Parr saw the world in that moment, reflecting on time and memories that have past while holding an enduring desire to be present. In his 2024 release, “Little Sun“, Parr weaves together stories celebrating music, community, and communing with nature. Putting forth an ambitious and raw album that exemplifies the best of Parr's sound: a blend of the blues and folk traditions he continues to carry with him and the steadfast originality of a poet. Beloved folk songwriter and guitar virtuoso Charlie Parr has released his new collection of short stories, titled “Five” (2025). Parr’s palpably human, no-frills prose lures in a reader with refreshing unpretentiousness.

Interview by Michael Limnios                       Archive: Charlie Parr, 2012 interview

Special Thanks: Mark Gehring (Periscope Artist Management)

How has the music influenced your views of the world? What moment changed your music life the most? 

I listen to music every day, and I play guitar every day, and I've done that pretty much constantly since I was a kid. Music for me provides a context for the rest of the world, and I find it calming to have something essentially eternal accompanying me throughout the day. My life was changed at the age of eight when I heard Mance Lipscomb on a record from my dad's collection and all I wanted to do from then on was to play guitar.

How do you think that you have grown as an artist since you first started and what has remained the same? What's the balance in music between technique (skills) and soul/emotions?

My musical tastes have expanded consistently and through that I've expanded my interests on the guitar but the basics of the folk-blues are still primarily what I want to play and since I'm not a session musician or play with a band I'm free to indulge in the thing I love the best, so I think the evolution is all about deepening the folk-blues and adding in techniques that I'm picking up along the way. Music is not math, it's the expression of a soul, and even though it can look like math, that's merely a side-effect. Music theory is a response to a musical phenomena that's already happened, it's not a guide book to tell you where you should go next, it's extremely helpful and I'm glad I've studied it but there's a danger in thinking that it's necessary, and you might be tempted to ignore certain music because of a kind of elitist way of thinking. Soul comes first, I think, and everything else, while it's all important too, comes next. I want to know everything I can, I just want to play what I want.

“I'm still learning - it's all about mindfulness, being a receiver of music at all times, being a transmitter when it suits me, and hopefully finding that the point of this journey is the journey itself, that there can be no end of music, that I'm only a participant and that I need to keep being grateful every single day for another lung-full of air and another ear-full of sound.” (Charlie Parr / Photo by Shelly Mosman)

Recently released one more novel. How did your relationship with fiction writing come about? Where does your creative drive come from?

Song writing is story telling, I've always written songs out as though they're little stories and the next step was to keep writing until they got to be too long to sing. I'm grateful that I still have the creative urge, it hasn't faded at all throughout the years.

What do you miss most nowadays from the music of the past? What are your hopes and fears for the future of?

Music's past hasn't gone anywhere, it's all still here. There are plenty of musicians in my town who possess a lot of skill and write compelling songs. I think the new world of AI and the 30-second world of social media haven't helped music, but we also have the power to ignore those things and continue creating long, weird pieces of music and doing whatever we want with them. The future of music is just the future of all of us, and there will always be a large number of us who want our fingers on the strings and our pencils in our hands and are unwilling to give that up to computers no matter who hears what we create. I'll play until I can't play anymore, it doesn't matter.

What is the impact of music on the socio-cultural implications? How do you want the music to affect people?

That's a big question and I probably can't answer it - but I believe that music moves us, and that's important, but we have to be listening, and that's the crux.

Why is it important to we preserve and spread the blues? What keeps a musician passionate over the years in blues, roots music?       

Music evolves, and we're very lucky to have the entire history of recorded music at our fingertips so we can actually see that evolution and we can think about what those names mean. Music doesn't have genres, we do that - music isn't math, we do that - history is extremely important and I believe that musical history should be preserved and appreciated, but I also want to hear what comes next, so I'm excited when I hear new artists push and pull on the edges of these genres and end up in places where it's hard to describe what's going on with words and maybe we can learn to simply sit and appreciate the new sounds instead of analyzing them and attempting to fit them into our categories.

(Charlie Parr / Photo by Shelly Mosman)

What are some of the most important lessons you have learned from your experience in the music paths?

I'm still learning - it's all about mindfulness, being a receiver of music at all times, being a transmitter when it suits me, and hopefully finding that the point of this journey is the journey itself, that there can be no end of music, that I'm only a participant and that I need to keep being grateful every single day for another lung-full of air and another ear-full of sound.

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