BWW Interviews: PA Duo STRANGE FOKE Making a New Kind of Noise

The two men are of different generations, but the duo that makes up the York, PA based Strange Foke link up in ways that go beyond music.

Ryan Jeffrey Graffius and Parker James Hooker bring experience and different styles.

They met as musicians often do, at an open mic in downtown York. "I was looking for a guitar play for a young country act," Hooker explains. "Ryan was the only one that really took it seriously, so that's the direction we went for a while."

That particular project didn't work out, but their attraction remained. "Jim and I felt we both had a connection," he says. "We just continued to play open mics together, and started playing some of the venues that I myself had already been connected through. And we've been doing that the last 2-1/2 years now."

Jim explains the sound of Strange Foke. "The flavor that we have with his guitar playing and vocals and my harmonica," he says, "there's a unique sound that I don't hear anyplace else. You hear harmonica different times with different bands, but I play it as a voice. I'm singing along, so it's just another voice."

"I think it's also interesting that our music features the harmonica as a primary instrument," Ryan adds. "You might hear it in the song styles of Bob Dylan or Tom Petty, but those parts that you hear, they're complimentary to the song whereas Jim will play harmonica, voicing though the majority of the song while I sing."

"We have a sort of a unique humor about what we do," Jim adds. "We don't take anything real serious, and with a name like Strange Foke you can't get all high and mighty you know, it keeps us humble. We're not the strangest folks we usually play to, but we are strange..." (Laughs)

The union has yielded a solid duo that can carry a full sound, with just voices, guitar and harmonica. Their first recording, a six-track EP includes five originals and a cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."

"I started playing music when I was about 14," Ryan says, "we lived up a really long dirt driveway up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Didn't have much to do out there, so I started to grab my mom's guitar out of the bedroom. They were in a band, and so I got a lot of my influences there."

Jim's style comes from, "the church. My mom was a church pianist so I grew up in the church," he recalls. "I sang, but I picked up the harmonica when I was 15 and I just never put it down. Mostly it's out of a gospel-bluegrass background. Our families' came form the mountains of Tennessee and Pennsylvania. I wouldn't want to be boxed into being a blues harmonica player, but I love the blues, it influenced me."

"I think the fact that we utilize our instruments the way we do allows us to cross genres in an interesting way," Ryan continues. "We can go from blues to country to playing a Queen song acoustically and not ever deviate from the basic element the fundamental of what we are. And it's just the two of us, and we have a great time."

A typical show from Strange Foke will include covers from blues, country and popular music (though this writer did not catch what they do with Queen!). The duo's current residency is the Vineyard at Hershey. "They booked us all summer long," Ryan says.

"It's been a good place to work out these songs that we do every Saturday from 1 to 4," Jim adds. "They pay us but we practice, and we've got pretty good at these songs."

How do vineyard gigs differ from bars? "Every venue is different, but it's the groups of people were able to get here," Ryan admits. "We're able to cultivate a very intimate environment where we can hone our craft for a song actively and interact with the audience on a level that's very comfortable, but we're also able to relax."

"Wine drinkers are different than beer drinkers," Hooker notes, "and the people just seems to be you seem more couples and single ladies...just one of those things we have to deal with."

"Lennon said we got into music for the money and the women," Ryan asks rhetorically, "is that what we're in it for?"

Jim replies, "It's one of the perks."

From the start of the recording, the driving rhythm of the guitar asserts itself in "Light of Day," and clues you into Ryan's songwriting, which goes deeper than your typical three-minute piece.

"I wrote the song in the back of my Ford station wagon," Ryan explains, "I was 19 or 20 years old. I was going through a rough patch in my life. It 's one of those songs you write in about five minutes. Everything comes out and it falls in place. Right about that time period, the "Man of Constant Sorrow" track came out (from the O Brother, Where Art Thou? Soundtrack). I was really loving that style of music, you can hear some of the same harmonies. I was inspired, and at that point in time.

"(The lyric) 'liberated by the sun,' it really spoke to me, not only literally but also figuratively, because people can take it many ways. I like to find things in words, expressing those kinds of thoughts and feelings that can be taken many different ways and putting them into a song, making the words poetry. I'm an English major, so I get off on that kind of thing. I did a lot of study of Shakespeare literary texts, the beat artists. There's so much literature out there, that once you immerse yourself in it, you can hardly escape it."

"But all literature has a flow and a rhythm," Jim adds, "and so you have to sort of tie into that somehow."

"Absolutely," Ryan agrees. "Just like languages did in the Harlem Renaissance; it's the writing and the artistic quality that's coming up is a reflection of the tie the culture the scene. If there's going to be a scene it got to be created by musicians, those iconic figures they're connected to something bigger than just themselves.

"I guess if a critic wanted to sit down with my songs critique and analyze them," Ryan considers, "and look beyond the song itself, and they can escape the mediocrity of mainstream contemporary music. That's always been one of the driving forces in my life as songwriting goes, is to write songs and that are fun, that liberating, that have a deeper meaning for me and the audience as well."

"And with a beat you can dance to!" Jim adds.

Jim's contribution to the EP is "Hammer and Nails," a song by its presentation hearkens back to his days in the church, plus the roots of the music overall. It came out of an interview with a reporter who asked Jim to play something for him.

"I didn't know what to play, so I thought I'll make up something...it just came out. From the time he filmed me doing that song, it was 20 minutes from the time I thought of it, and the time he filmed it. And went back to his office and downloaded it on YouTube. So, 45 minutes after I first thought of that song it was on YouTube!

"('Hammer and Nails') hasn't' really changed any. I did it the first time in public at the Bluebird Café in Nashville, and I got a standing ovation. I thought this song must have some meat to it. I did it at my sister's church in Nashville; the response was unbelievable. Anyway it has sort of taken on a life of its own."

As many have done, Jim made the trip to Nashville on his own. He found the music community, "very accepting, very rich, rewarding. I walked away feeling like, I am somebody. In the Bible it says that a prophet is never accepted in his hometown; you have to go away to be accepted. In Nashville I got to play with some really fantastic artists down there; they just enveloped me with their spirit and welcomed it into their scene down. It sort of recharges your batteries, so that when I came back to York.

"It's sort of frustrating," he admits. "Down there people are dead serious about their music, up here it's real flighty, their approach to their music.

"I want to be dead serious about music that we do. We have fun, me and Ryan, we always leave a gig feeling filled up with this light that we stirred up. We've always had a good time, and we get along great.

"I want to do the best I can do, I want people when they come to see us I want them to leave going, 'Man that was a great time, let's go back'.

"If nobody else listens, we listen to each other, we build each other up and we feel good when we leave. That's what music is to me - it's light setting light into motion. I couldn't ask for a better partner. I need him, and I want to think he needs me to make this work. And we're two different generations. I'm 60 he's 34 -"

"-33," Ryan cuts in. "You wouldn't think it would work out, but it has worked out. The music has no age."

Jim doesn't mind telling you the future he sees for Strange Foke, either. "I've had this vision we're going to get a coach, and we're going to have Strange Foke across America, and connect groups of people through our music that are disconnected. This table doesn't communicate with this table over here. We're trying to get people to become Strange Foke family members.

"As far as what's next," Ryan adds, "Jim has always been forthright with his ideas. I'm more of a workhorse. I just want to write good songs. I like to play music and get caught up to where we go.

"That's what makes us work onstage and off. When it comes down to playing songs, I make it happen and when it comes to entertaining the crowds, he makes it happen. Our different personality traits are completely complimentary to one another."

Strange Foke is much more than a couple of guys standing up onstage and playing music. A wealth of musical experience, plus a deeper thought into what is being written, played and produced; you get an unlikely pair. Yet they not only get along, but they are balanced.

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