Lloyd Buchanan: That Gospel Groove
Like most Georgia-grown musical geniuses, Lloyd Buchanan’s roots run deep in the church.
Raised in a house where secular music was forbidden by strict motherly decree, his first exposure came from watching his grandfather, Ernest Childs, Sr., wow crowds as part of gospel vocal quartets. “I grew up with a bunch of guys in a gospel quartet that was a younger version of what my grandad was doing,” Buchanan explains over coffee. “We would spend weekends going from church program to church program.”
A veteran of such gigs as East Highlands tent revivals and Peggy Jenkins’ backing band in his 20s, Buchanan’s now an in-demand producer, arranger, session player, bandleader, multi-instrumentalist and globe-trotting artist as keyboardist/vocalist with the Alabama Shakes. Yet, his calling card long been his wizardry on the B3 organ, the instrument lifting the divine melodies and pounding the holy rhythms of gospel music since the sacred music’s inception. Today 34, Buchanan was introduced to the B3 when his church, House of Living God in his native Manchester in Talbot County, was gifted one. He was already playing piano, often in tandem with a drummer and sometimes also with a guitarist, so “it was a smooth acclimation” to the legendary Hammond B3 organ suddenly at his 15-year-old fingertips.
“Because my mom was real strict about NO secular music,” Buchanan recalls, “I wasn’t 18 or 19 until I saw Billy Preston playing the B3. Then it was, ‘Oh snap! This is what that can do.’”
A similar lightning flash of inspiration came during his first rehearsal with the Alabama Shakes in 2014. “I sent them some samples after I got the call,” Buchanan says from when the band sought out a fuller touring-ensemble sound with keys and vocals to back the brilliant Brittany Howard in the Grammy-winning rock band from Athens, Alabama. “I go up there and after the first rehearsal, we were all like, ‘Oh yeah! This will work. This will be good.’”
Melbourne, Australia is his favorite place touring with the Shakes has taken him—“beautiful people, beautiful place right there on the ocean”—but Buchanan continues to credit his upbringing in the church and at Christian Way Academy in Manchester (pop: 3,700), which has also produced Alicia Keys’ musical director and a rising R&B producer among his peers. This is a region heralded for its peaches but also home to a proud history as a cradle of African-American gospel music, as reportedly the first publications achieved by blacks in American history history came in the 1830s was that of hard-bound sheet music of sacred music, done as part of the efforts of slave-holding Presbyterian clergyman and missionary Dr. Rev. Charles Colcock, who printed The Religious Instructions of Negroes in 1842.
After high school, Buchanan enrolled at LaGrange College, where he earned a political science degree (with a minor in music) in plans for becoming an entertainment lawyer. “But performance was always pulling me back in,” he says of his draw toward becoming a professional musician. For the last seven years, he has served in rotation as guest artist in residence at CSU’s Schwob School of Music, playing concerts and mentoring students through programs from war-period songs—“lots of Janis Joplin” Buchanan says with smile in perfect time with the counter-culture icon’s classic “Cry Baby” wailing its way through the coffee house speakers around him—to Beatles songs to a study, selected by Dr. Matt McCabe, of the music of Muscle Shoals, Alabama: home to hit records produced with black and white working on songs together. from the back-up vocals on “Sweet Home Alabama” to Aretha Franklin’s duets with Duane Allman. And, Buchanan’s good friend David Hood (father to Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers, who are “killer!” in his words) work as bassist with a gospel group come Civil Rights leaders in the Staples Singers (dig their fantastic “Respect Yourself”).
“Because of being with the Shakes I became good friends with David Hood,” he says, “and so I was able to take the group of students in the popular music ensemble to Muscle Shoals and really get the insider’s look into all that incredible history. I took them to Fame Studios, Sun Drop Studios, and we got a behind-the-scenes tour of the renovation of Muscle Shoals Studios.
Buchanan credits such fruits of relationship building as key to his success. A father, he knows he’s made it in the music world now, and exudes positive energy even with a work/life balance now including caretaker role for a father battling cancer and a sister who moved in with him as she recovers from a car wreck that, hopefully temporarily, has left virtually paralyzed from the waist down.
“I like being challenged, I like being creative,” he explains. “I get up, wake up everyday and think about music. ‘What am we going to record today?’ What am we going to write today?’ What am I going to learn today?’ That’s what we do.”
Lloyd Buchanan’s Cubed Roots play the Uptown Concert Series, 1000 block of Broadway stage, 7 p.m. Friday, April 14.
By Frank Etheridge