Joe Topping

Sensing it may have been taken facetiously, I thought it best not to ask Joe if he had any connection to our favourite book emporium, Topping & Co. up in ye ‘big town’, St Andrews. I suspect he doesn’t; he didn’t mention it, but then again, he probably wouldn’t… or would he? Hmmm.

With that out of the way, back to reality… Joe fetches up with three instruments, a gorgeous steel resonator delta blues guitar; a ‘normal’ acoustic and a banjo.

Kicking off we hear a phenomenal voice accompanied by deft slide on the resonator. He was on TV show ‘The Voice’ in 2021 wherein Sir Tom Jones… yes, that very one… dubbed Joe as a ‘weaver of dreams’. He wasn’t wrong.

Tune two is Dylan’s ‘Buckets of Rain’ countering the fact that it is actually scorchio outside in Crail.

‘Huckleberry Wind’ explores the notion of what freedom is. Inspired by an imaginary conversation between a cat and a dog, Joe has the dog bound by innumerable fences and the cat completely free to climb anything in its way.

Unaccompanied, Joe sings a haunting air to his father, prosaically entitled ‘Father’, the man who is handy with tools, the man who has a good business head, the man who can beguile with jokes and tales, the son who can barely put up a shelf.

We’re told of his adventures on the road in the USA, raising money for a Hurricane Katrina musicians’ charity. Joe walked 1400 miles from Chicago to New Orleans with a guitar on his back, sleeping by the side of the road, hitching the odd lift. And none odder than his hitch hike encounter with Cleetus. Joining Cleetus in his pickup truck he notices his sticky-out ears. He notices his barely serviceable teeth, but most of all he notices that Cleetus is covered in blood. Shades of ‘Deliverance‘, duelling banjos etcetera. ‘You probably wondrin’ wha ahm covered in blood’ says Cleetus in a country drawl. ‘Ah bin at the chicken fightin’. Needless to say, at the next stop, Joe made his excuses and left. This takes us straight to Willie Dixon’s ‘Litle Red Rooster’… you can almost taste the roadside dust and feel the heat on your reddening neck.

Speaking of banjos, it finally features on ‘Between the Darkness and the Light’, a song about the passing of his mother. It’s moving and beautiful, the moment in the show where we hold our breaths and stare into the real depths of the artist. Joe is new to the banjo, a learner. He wrote this song on that instrument and it really shines a light on the creative process, stepping away from well-trodden paths of a familiar instrument, the guitar, and see what happens when faced with unfamiliar tools. Well, magic happened here!

OK, rounding off, Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ finished the evening and really kicked up the dust. As encore we have ‘When You Were Sweet Sixteen’, the beautiful Irish ballad made famous by The Fureys.

No folk club night is complete, of course, without its floor spots. There were five; all excellent but let’s make special note of two of them... Rene, growing more confident by the week had us all singing along with Ewan McVicar’s ‘Shift and Spin’, a fine song celebrating the workers in the Paisley thread mills. And Sir Peter gave us a quite extraordinary performance of Blind Blake’s (via Dave Van Ronk) ‘That'll Never Happen No More’.

Words by Callum MacLeod, photos by Peter Salkeld