[Harp-L] Article on Rishell & Raines

["M. N." <mnessmith@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Duo's long road always leads home

By Daniel Gewertz/ Folk/Blues
Friday, October 8, 2004

Guitarist Paul Rishell and harmonica player Annie Raines arrive at a deeper 
and wider understanding of country blues on their new Tone-Cool album, 
``Goin' Home.'' Yet no blues song ever written describes the unique course 
their relationship has traveled in the past 10 years.

    By the mid-'90s, Rishell and Raines, now 55 and 35, had played together 
but were not yet a formal musical duo. Their first CD as equal partners was 
``I Want You To Know.''

    ``I was married, and my wife was my manager. She got cancer and died in 
1996. She died the week that our first collaborative record came out,'' 
Rishell said last week in his Cambridge home.

    ``Annie helped my wife and daughter while my wife was sick. My daughter 
was 9 when my wife died. Annie slept in the living room after our gigs, and 
then kind of moved in.

    ``We still miss my wife,'' he said with a rueful smile. ``She was a 
great person and an enormous help to Annie and me as a musical duo. But 
things change.''

    They surely do.

    Some years after the death of Leslie Rishell, Paul and Annie became a 
romantic couple. They now live together, and are raising Paul's teenage 
daughter. ``Since we were business partners and friends long before we were 
a couple, we still work with each other in the same respectful way we always 
did. We don't presume,'' he said.

    Raines agrees. ``We set priorities. We're like war veterans now. We've 
been through the mill long before we wereromantically involved. We went 
through it backward. Now we're trying to date,'' she said with a giggle.

    Even before they knew each other so well, their musical rapport was 
rich and theirapproach had a delicate way of serving the songs. The duo 
played with John Sebastian's J Band, including a gig on Conan O'Brien's 
late-night show. Their ``Moving to the Country'' won a W.C. Handy Award for 
acoustic bluesalbum of 2000.

    On Tuesday, the duo plays a CD release gig at Scullers, with a full 
band. ``Goin' Home,'' their third Tone-Cool CD as a duo, combines a glorious 
ease of purpose with a hearty depth of style. Rishell and Raines 
areindistinguishable from themusic, even though most of the songs come from 
a time, place and background distant from Rishell's youth in 1960s Brooklyn 
or Raines' teen years in 1980s Newton.

     ``When I was 10 in 1960, I saw the Southern race riots on TV. It was 
so upsetting to me. When I heard Charlie Patton and Son House music in 1963, 
I realized that back when they first made their music, they didn't have any 
civil rights. The only thing they could do to be free was make their 
beautiful music. So, I can say blues was a deep part of my childhood,'' he 
said.

    Raines has her own deep connections. ``When I was 17, I went to a store 
called Goods in Quincy Market to buy a book called `Juggling For the 
Complete Klutz.' Instead, I found the book `Harmonica for the Musically 
Helpless.' This is embarrassing, but I think it was just an oral fixation at 
first. But then I discovered blues. I never thought I'd find anything that 
would make me feel the way playing blues made me feel. I had thought I was 
destined for a middle-class mediocre lifestyle,'' she said.

    Raines quit college to become a blues harmonica player. ``Suddenly, I 
felt a sense of destiny. It was an epiphany. I realized blues addressed an 
aching I had in my soul for a long time,'' she said with a small grin.

    Oddly, it was Rishell's wife, Leslie, who first suggested the duo get 
together musically. In 1987, when Raines was 18, she sat in with Rishell's 
band one night at O'Brien's Pub. Rishell barely remembered her. But his wife 
told him, over and over, that they had great chemistry, and that he should 
pair up with Raines.

    ``Five years later, we finally played together again,'' Rishell said. 
``Leslie was way ahead of everybody. She could tell you where you were 
heading,'' Raines said.

> From the Boston Herald
<http://theedge.bostonherald.com/musicNews/view.bg?articleid=48004>