Bootlegger’s Supper Club owner John Berends has seen a lot of musician’s in his day, so when he refers to a musician as a savant, it’s probably good reason to take notice.
A few weeks ago, Luther Cole traveled from his home in Pipestone and made his Bootlegger’s musical debut during a mid-February performance as a part of Berend's popular local musician Fridays. He will make his much anticipated return this Friday when he again claims the stage from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.
A lover of literature and song, like so many of the regional original talents, Cole has spent a lifetime fulfilling a passion by studying the intricacies of music.
An early student of Appalachian folk songs, Cole recalls the natural progression of his interest into the Carter Family and subsequently Bob Dylan.
“I fashioned a harmonica rack out of a coat hanger, fastened it to a dresser drawer, and started playing every Dylan and old mountain song I could figure out,” states Cole in his website biography.
The chronological evolution continues with references to Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young, Norman Blake and the great John Prine. And it is from such fertile soil, that Cole established his own identity as a musician while playing live venues wherever he is able to be booked for a show. Providing equal time to big-name covers as he does for his original material during performances, Cole says he has found a happy medium or “‘nice mix’ that seems to work for the audience and me both.”
One of the most telling aspects of the degree of talent exists in the fluidity of his set-list as it alternates between his own music and that of the ‘greats.’ Berends said that the quality of the sound and the lyrical content never waivers, even when Cole played a song that the Bootlegger’s owner was only later informed to have been composed within a week of the performance.
Aware of how long it takes a typical musician to get a song “performance-ready” was what inspired Berend’s use of the word, savant.
The Pipestone musician has recorded two albums and has another he expects to complete in May or June of this year. Both “Road to Freedomland” and “Searchers” were recorded last year and are available at his shows.
“I have been able to make a living performing, and to me there is nothing that compares to playing before a live audience,” Cole says. “Perhaps that is one reason for my good fortune, that the people see how much I enjoy it.”
The other reason, one might be justified to deduce, is because he’s just that good.
Not that you have to be a savant to figure that out.
Granite Falls, Minn. —
