AMORY, Miss. (AP) - It’s about a 30-mile drive from the red clay hills above Smithville to the Black Prairie dirt alongside McAllister Road in Wren. For the most of their lives, that mileage separated bluesmen Vincent (Vinnie C) Cheney and Kevin Thornton, but since they met five years ago at an open mic night at a Tupelo club, the two have become fans of each other’s solo musical styles.
Seguing into a new year, the two share plans to live the lives of working musicians together as the blues duo, Two Troubadours, and strive to play 75 to 100 shows as the group.
“We’ve been playing on and off for five years together and joked around about starting a band, and it’s like a bomb went off,” Thornton said in a three-way telephone interview from his home at Pickwick. Cheney linked in just outside of Vicksburg on his drive to a solo gig.
Thornton describes Two Troubadours shows as being like two solo shows rolled into one.
“We can show up for the dinner crowd at 6 and swap it up til 1 in the morning and get just as rowdy as they want to get,” Thornton said.
Thornton and Cheney have each spent time juking the blues circuit and stacking accolades like playing with the house band on the Mississippi Queen riverboat, performing the International Blues Challenge and lending rhythm guitar talent for a bluesman who grew play with Muddy Waters.
Playing the blues is their way of carrying a long-lit musical torch burning for Mississippi.
“Down in the southeast, there’s hardly any money in it, so you have to pack your bags to take Mississippi’s music abroad. I think we take it for granted,” said Cheney, a 1994 Smithville High School graduate who was introduced to playing music with his father.
Thornton and Cheney’s parents actually attended school together in Okolona.
“A lot of creativity comes from isolation, and Lord knows Monroe County has plenty of that,” said Thornton, a 1992 Oak Hill Academy graduate.
“I used to live in the hills, and my mind goes back to being closed up in my bedroom. Nobody can describe those red dirt hills above Smithville and nobody knows it like me,” Cheney said about his rural upbringing’s influence on his music.
Growing up in an era when teenagers their age were getting electric guitars to emulate the likes of Metallica and Nirvana, Thornton and Cheney’s love for performing music traced to modern music’s gritty influences in the Mississippi Delta.
“When you grow up on cornbread, it’s just going to grow on your,” Thornton said. “I was playing a Hank Williams Sr. song for a crowd once and I said he was the only white boy to have sang the blues. Somebody yelled out, ’What about Eric Clapton?,’ and I laughed and said he grew up in England and asked how much cornbread he had eaten over there.”
Thornton and Cheney agree southern dialects’ corruption of the English language makes for better music.
“In the south, we don’t have to pronounce words properly, and it helps make the words rhyme,” Cheney said.
You can catch Two Troubadours live on New Year’s Eve with back-to-back Tupelo shows. The group plays the Thirsty Devil from 6 until 9 p.m. and the Stables from 9 p.m. until close.
As far as plans for the new year, Thornton and Vinnie C plan to continue their solo own gigs, Two Troubadours gigs and to record a debut album. They’ve been in touch with Muscle Shoals’ FAME Studios while shopping around for the right place to record.
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Information from: Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, https://djournal.com
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