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Army of onE
Mikey Pruitt lifts up Twenty Thousand Strongmen.
By
N ata l ie G a l l a Ghe r
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That was the first instrument I learned, and ikey Pruitt has spent the past three years in North Bend, Nebraska, building a farm that just kind of evolved.” Around 2006, he answered the call of the from the ground up with a friend, and he looks the part: blue flannel shirt, tan corduroy over- open road and started traveling. There was no alls, dark-brown corduroy blazer. He wears an agenda and little money. Busking earned him enough change to get from town to town — and Abe Lincoln beard and a haircut that could be lent him the sound you hear on Be Strong. the product of jagged kitchen scissors. His When I ask Pruitt how he became Twenty brown eyes crinkle at the corners when he Thousand Strongmen, he grins and warns me smiles, which is often. It’s off-season now, so Pruitt has rolled back that this is where his story turns a little morbid. He sliced the knuckle of his left index finger a into his native Kansas City on what he calls his “vacation time.” He’s here only a few weeks, few years ago — he was drunk at a Halloween house party, he says, trying to carve a bow out and he’s keeping a busy schedule. of wood to play a saw. Earlier this year, under the name Twenty He holds up the digit — now a pale, knobby Thousand Strongmen, Pruitt released Be thing — and explains how he “forced” the Strong, Little Brother, a bluesy, banjo-intensive knuckle to heal. Pruitt says he has no feeling record filled with mountain-and-prairie folk songs that sound like they were raked together left there. “I went traveling by myself, down to on a back porch. He’s here doing a handful of local shows, then it’s on to St. Louis on a short Georgia, and I had to still busk because I had to make money, but I couldn’t bend my main tour before he heads back to the farm. finger that I use for the banjo,” Pruitt says. A couple of other players are on Be Strong, but Twenty Thousand Strongmen is really “So I made a drum kit out of trash. I was sitting on a suitcase with a backwards bass just Pruitt, who has made music as a onepedal and a tambourine man-band since he left taped to my shoe. That’s Kansas City six years ago. Twenty Thousand how that started, and then Drinking a $2 Hamm’s at Strongmen once my knuckle healed Davey’s Uptown Ramblers Friday, November 29, and I could play banjo, I Club, Pruitt, 28, recounts at Westport Saloon was like, ‘Well, maybe I patches of his saga. should just try doing what “I’ve been playing music my whole life, for the most part,” he says. “I people in New Orleans do.’ That’s where the started off when I was, like, 7 or 8. My mom one-man-band thing comes from.” Thanks to Pruitt’s tumbleweed travels, tried to teach me piano and cello, and that though, he can now draft from an army of didn’t work out for me at all. But Jim Curley — he used to run the Mountain Music Shoppe musician friends in various states, ready to — he went to our church, and my mom got parachute into Twenty Thousand Strongmen him to give me free lap-dulcimer lessons. on short notice.
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Pruitt: Living like a tramp. “Originally, I was putting out an album where I was recording all the instruments, all the vocals, everything by myself,” he says. “I wanted to come up with something that sounded like it was a whole bunch of people. I wanted to come up with something kind of cheeky, and I thought of [the name] Twenty Thousand Strongmen — because I’m not strong. I’m puny, and there’s one of me. But it’s grown into the name. Now it’s at the point where, when I travel, I pick up members. Most towns I go to, I have people that’ll back me up, and we can play shows.” Pruitt takes another sip of his beer and traces the edge of the wide-brim hat that he has set on the bar. He says he picked up the fur-trimmed felt piece on trade for one of his CDs in Lincoln. I tell Pruitt that he seems to be leading the gypsy life, and he laughs. “Yeah, I suppose I’ve been called that,” he says. “But I like tramp better. Tramp is a good term for me.” It’s a good word for Be Strong, too, which comes off as scrappy and determined. But under its rollicking roughness is an old-fashioned folk record on which Pruitt’s canyon-rich voice stretches wide over banjo and harmonica. “It’s language,” he says of his music. “I just want to speak to the universal collective. I’ve always said that once I write a song, it’s mine, but once I play it for someone, it’s not mine anymore. That’s it. It’s out there now. You’ve released that energy, and now it’s out there. You can’t go out there and collect it back.”
E-mail natalie.gallagher@pitch.com