Magazine: Local man is
 ‘real deal’ musician

By Michael Corrigan,  local author and Idaho State University professor.

    Perhaps Fred Anderson got his best blues lesson in 1991 traveling through the Mississippi Delta to a concert in Florida. He stopped in a small Mississippi town and felt the ambiance of the South were Faulkner once argued, “The past isn’t even the past.”  Says Fred,  “I thought about Robert Johnson or Mississippi John Hurt walking by with a guitar on their back,” says Anderson. “I walked through a cemetery next to a run-down church reading the grave stones. One stone read, ‘died by lynching.’ 

The reverend Gary Davis song, ‘Death Don’t Know No Mercy in This Land,’ came into my mind. Mississippi is a paradox that spawned the blues.”  This quote reveals much about Fred Anderson, for he is also something of a paradox.

    Anderson is a pleasant, soft-spoken, articulate man with silver hair and mustache. He has a modest professionalism that comes from his day job as an elementary teacher on the Fort Hall Reservation. On stage, with his cowboy hat, mandolin and Martin guitar, the audience might  assume Anderson is a country singer, but he reveals a wilder soul when he plays slide guitar and connects to those legendary blues men.

    Anderson’s first attempts at music weren’t promising. “My mother wanted me to learn piano. For me it was like going to the dentist once a week; I hated it.” The school’s band teacher wasn’t impressed, either. “He sent a note telling my parents that I had no musical talent, so, at 14 years old when I came home and asked for a guitar, my father was not enamored with the idea.” What changed Anderson’s attitude toward music was a chance occurrence at a friend’s house. “He played a T-Bone Walker song on his guitar,” Anderson says. “I had to learn to play.” After this musical epiphany, Anderson’s mother finally “caved” and bought him a used Harmony guitar and amp for 75 dollars. “I couldn’t put it down. I was on fire!"

    "When I was 23, I started touring professionally. My travels took me to Alaska during the pipeline boom and to the deep south where I explored the blues even further.” Anderson found Memphis “a magical place” but Nashville was “too fast and commercial.” He met great players but he knew Memphis wasn’t his town. “I will be honest — I have never had dreams of being a star, anyway.”

    Fred is certainly a potential “star” in Pocatello, a city with some exceptional local musicians and songwriters, including Uncle Bob Merle, Dan Hillebrant and Angier Wills. Anderson’s strength is not just his technique. He seems connected to a higher power when he performs, a quality few musicians have.

    Anderson does a dramatic version of the Jimi Hendrix song, “The Wind Cries Mary. ” The “High Desert Bluesman” conjures Robert Johnson’s spirit when he plays his versions of Johnson’s “Come in My Kitchen” and “Crossroads.” Anderson insists his purpose is not about being rich or famous. “I play music for the love of it,” he says.

    Anderson has an encyclopedic knowledge of not only blues but popular and jazz standards from “Ain’t Misbehavin” to Bob Dylan and James Taylor songs. He demonstrates a broad range of guitar styles from jazz chords to folk-styled finger picking. Anderson also mixes in a few comic numbers. “I don’t Look Good Naked Anymore” is a crowd-pleaser. Another song is about an old man warning his son to stay away from local beauties because he probably fathered them, but the young man’s mother reveals his father isn’t really his father.

    Over the years, he has gathered considerable praise from other working musicians and national critics.

    Blues Notes Magazine considers him “the real deal.” According to Wayne Waits, a booking agent, “He can twist and bend a note at just the right time, and sing like he means it … a great picker and haunting voice in all.” Mary Flower, female acoustic guitarist of the year, says “Fred Anderson is a fine performer and a great guitarist.” 

Warren Mason, who taught Kurt Cobain, considers Anderson “an articulate player.” Angier Wills, local singer and songwriter for Elvis Has Left The Building, has this observation: “He’s technically one of the most precise slide players I’ve seen.”

    Angier Wills also performs Anderson’s original song, “Coyote,” about the “guides”who exploit Mexican Nationals trying to enter the United States illegally. Anderson’s song dramatizes the tragedy of these disposed. 

One stanza is particularly poignant: 

“The morning leads the border guards to your body in the desert 
they find you there without your boots and an empty pack 
your family they will cry for you and go on without knowing
the coyote took your pesos then shot you in your back.”

 The chorus is particularly sinister: 

“Oh the coyotes never cry at night down South along the border
They glide amongst the cactus with the moonlight on their back
Life is cheaper to them than the muddy Rio Grande water 
and if the saints aren’t with you, you just might lose your life.” 

Anderson’s rich baritone evokes an eerie yearning when he sings this song.

     Pocatello marked not an ending but another beginning. 
“One night I stepped into the Back Stage Bar in Old Town and I heard Dan Hillebrant and the bar owner Pammy singing a duet. That bar rejuvenated my songwriting,” he says. “I thank the songwriters here like Anger Wills and many others. They were inspiring to me.”

    He had this comment about songwriting: “I could never write commercially because I write what is in my heart.”

    He was recently invited to join a small label in Oregon two years ago. 
His CD is a folk/western collection of originals.
    “I write about wild horses, mining towns, things that happened, and some that didn’t.”

    Fred Anderson has a strong message for any potential artist: “I stay in music because I am always learning. To stop learning as a musician or songwriter is a bad sign.”

    Bob Dylan would agree. In the recent documentary, No Direction Home, Dylan suggested that “an artist is always becoming. Once they have arrived, they are no longer artists.”