Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
Coming to Brown County Music Center
~ by Ryan Stacy
Like many of us, Brown County’ s got one foot in the present day and the other planted firmly in a bygone era. Which makes Brown County Music Center the ideal spot for Big Bad Voodoo Daddy to bring their“ Wild & Swingin’ Holiday Party” on December 7. Drawing upon the sounds of the big bands and jump blues acts of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, the California outfit would have been just as at home at a Nashville watering hole back in the day as they have been recording for Disney productions and performing at the Super Bowl.
One of the two original Daddies, drummer Kurt Sodergren, inherited his connection to music made before his time. His grandfather was a saxophonist in a touring swing band, he explains, and his dad had an arsenal of the greats on vinyl for Kurt to discover as a kid.“ I think it was Benny Goodman live at Carnegie Hall,” he recalls,“ and I heard [ legendary drummer ] Gene Krupa and I was like‘ Whoa, what is this?’” But like most music fans of his generation, Kurt gravitated mostly to rock, and didn’ t revisit swing and jump blues until his friend Scotty Morris told him in the late eighties that he was heading in that direction.“ I was actually kind of surprised that he wanted to [ play swing ], but it was a really good idea,” he says.
For two guys who had cut their musical teeth on the sounds of classic California punk rock, the transition to swing was eye-opening.“ It’ s a pretty demanding musical style, so I started taking lessons right away,” says Kurt. And though the earliest incarnation of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy was less polished— Scotty sported a Fender Stratocaster he liked to crank up onstage— their new project was booking more lucrative gigs than their old ones. Soon their sound evolved into what it is today: a polished, knockout blend of originals and old favorites that gets the blood pumping and the feet moving.
Around the holidays one year, the band threw a couple of Christmas songs into their live set just for fun. The response from the audience was
40 Our Brown County Nov./ Dec. 2022