On “The Complete Recordings of Hezekiah Procter”

by Li’l Andy

Everything about this album is fake.

The songs were written by me, but as a fictional old-time musician I created by the name of “Hezekiah Procter”. Starting in 1925, when he began playing in medicine shows and vaudeville, Procter became one of the early legends of stringband music.

He was there when companies like The Victor Talking Machine Co. began making money selling “hillbilly” music. By the time of his disappearance in 1930, he had done much to define what country music is. Cantankerous, God-fearing, and self-destructive, he is Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, and Charlie Poole all rolled into one.

 After I wrote his songs, I recorded them with the two best old-time bands in existence today: Sheesham & Lotus ‘n Son and The Ever Lovin’ Jug Band.

I was Hezekiah while I sang and played. And each musician became the characters that appear in Hezekiah’s life story. The recording sessions were as much acting as they were playing music.

To create Hezekiah Procter’s complete recordings, we captured these performances on recording technology from the 1930s. Specifically, a Webster-Chicago wire recorder—a reel-to-reel machine that uses a single microphone to record onto a razor-thin band of steel wire. As far as we can tell, the one we used was made in 1937.

The machine often overheated, and the 90-year-old wire sometimes snapped in half in the middle of a take, but the wire recorder was an extra member of the band, giving us the colour and sound of old-time records and allowing us to travel back in time.

While we recorded to wire, we simultaneously tracked these songs to something a bit more “modern”: a Tascam 38 half-inch reel-to-reel tape machine. Record 1 is the songs recorded on the wire recorder. Record 2 is those same takes captured on the tape machine. The digital versions of this fictional compilation also include the songs as recorded on wire and analog tape.

While I was writing Hezekiah’s songs, I also wrote a novel that tells his life story. The novel takes the form of liner notes accompanying the box set of his entire recordings.

In it, I tried to relate who Hezekiah Procter was, where he came from, how his career started with such promise and fell into such obscurity. You can buy it on its own and read it on its own. You can ignore it and just listen to the songs. You can take them together and try to figure out which parts are true and which parts are lies in the life story of Hezekiah Procter.

Buy the deluxe box set—including the novel, two 180-gram LPs, digital downloads, and autographed postcard. Limited edition of 200

 Buy the novel — Signed by the author. Including downloads in mp3, WAV and FLAC formats

 Buy the digital album on Bandcamp

 Stream the album on the platform of your choice