Gina Dalmas on stage. Photo by Nathan Levine

Gina Dalmas on stage. Photo by Nathan Levine

By Jim Morrison

 

Sitting around the island in the home of Gina Dalmas and Chris May in Winona, we’re going over the songs off the latest Gina Dalmas and the Cow Tippin’ Playboys album, “Trailer Swift.”

The honky tonk starts with Robbie Fulks’s “Love Ain’t Nothing,” then eases onto the barstool for the originals, “Six Days Drunk,” “Goddamn Alcohol,” and “Bottle of Jack.”

“There are a lot of fun songs on there. We picked a theme and stuck with it,” Dalmas cracks.

They picked a style and stuck with it as well, the honky tonk they started playing when the band started, covers and originals inspired by Johnny Horton, Marty Robbins, Loretta Lynn, Buck Owens, Johnny Cash, and Tammy Wynette.

“There’s a little bit of an homage to that,” she says. “Very simple, not pretentious.”

“Somebody left me (songs) and now I have to drink about it,” May adds, laughing.

The album, their first since 2010, mixes originals by Dalmas and the band, a Jay-Z inspired song by May, covers of Fulks, Jolie Holland and local songwriter Teddy Dean and a co-write with Kathy Fowler.

The disc was recorded at Dallas’s home by Shea Roebuck. The main tracks were put down a few years ago, but adding solos and harmonies pushed back the release date.  “We all currently are not full-time musicians so it took time,” Dalmas says. Greg Wikle, who has been with the band for five years, plays guitar and mandolin, and longtime drummer Gabriel Baesen mans the skins.

Out front is Dalmas and her voice, sly, knowing, and unfiltered. From the opener through May’s “Nine Steps” the music moves briskly. It’s straight-ahead, in-your-face fun, a rollicking time.

Music Gina Dalmas 2

The covers are well chosen with two by Fulks, including “Lies” and “Love Ain’t Nothing,” one of his more obscure cuts. “Why are you doing that one?” he asked them when he stopped by to see the band at Mojo Bones earlier this year after playing a house concert in Norfolk. The Holland cover is her jazzy song, “Old Fashioned Morphine,” given a rootsy acoustic arrangement with Wikle’s mandolin and gruff vocals by May playing off Dalmas’s soaring lines.

May wrote “Bottle of Jack,” a song where he sings of having 99 problems and only one bottle of Jack. The Rylo song, “Nine Steps,” continues with that theme.

“Out the Door” has a decided Bakersfield feel. “Rent Out My Heart” is a cry-in-your bourbon instant classic. “Sextet” was inspired by a particular night when the band was playing an Outer Banks bar. The van broke down on the way there, foreshadowing a night when the band outnumbered the patrons. It turned out there was a war going on between bar owners and they were caught in the country crossfire.

For the album, they gave themselves choices between versions of songs. “We did every song two different ways,” Dalmas says, “full band, full volume, fortissimo rock and roll. Then we did it all pared down with an upright bass. We picked which ones we thought were best suited.”

Wikle, who also plays in the bluegrass band, More Perfect Jones, joined the Playboys about five years ago while playing with Rodeo Clown. May, who finished his degree and earned his master’s at Old Dominion University after a college career that included tours of Vanderbilt, the University of South Carolina, and Christopher Newport, played in Rylo. He picked up “Mel Bay’s You Can Teach Yourself Electric Bass”

because his college buddies were seasoned guitarists and there was no room for a rookie.

Dalmas grew up in Raleigh and started college as a classical music major playing French horn but soon switched. She began traveling to the area working sound at The Boathouse and elsewhere when she was at North Carolina State. She left behind playing to sheet music, though. “I didn’t love practicing,” she cracks. She’s been in the area for 15 years and now works for Stage Right Lighting.

They all grew up listening to other kinds of music before their interest in country and roots took root. Wikle loved metal growing up. May listened to the usual Pink Floyd, Beatles, and Rolling Stones as well as Jane’s Addiction, The Pixies, and Depeche Mode in college. Dalmas had a father into honky tonk, but had an older brother who introduced her to Van Halen and Aerosmith. She also went through that unfortunate Def Leppard phase.

The band began playing covers, but obscure covers (Fulks is a fave). “I think that’s a time-honored tradition in country music,” Dalmas says. They finally succumbed to the pressure on a local musician to write originals. It’s still hard. “I’ll start writing and it makes me think of another (cover) song that’s better,” she says. “I don’t find songwriting to come naturally, but we’re getting better.”

The next album, they say, won’t take as long.

“It was a lot of fun,” she says. “I’m ready to do it again.”

IN CONCERT

Gina Dalmas & the Cowtippin’ Playboys

August 15 @ Belmont House of Smoke

September 12 @ Mojo Bones OV