by Frank Matheis 2020
In a strange coincidence, and with testimony that we live in a small world after all, it would be no wonder that two people from the same tiny German state of Saarland, with a population of less than a million people, should meet for the first time through a common love of blues. One is a musician, Rainer Wöffler, who now lives in Rüti, near Zürich, Switzerland; the other is this writer, now in New York. Our original hometowns are only 11 miles apart, and now we are 3,892 miles away. Somehow fate had brought two Saarlanders, who speak the same notoriously difficult to understand provincial German dialect, to conduct an interview in English for this publication. For anyone who wants to believe that this is just a favor of one Saarlander to another, think again. Wöffler is the real deal, a superb musician who truly understands the essence or roots & blues. He deserves a profile on his own merit because he is, well, plain out damned good.
Wöffler is a versatile and virtuosic roots & blues guitarist and mandolinist, also pulls out the ukulele. He is in a regular duo with singer/multi-instrumentalist Tanja Wirz and the ensemble the Red Hot Serenaders. thecountryblues connected with the musico via phone on May 17, 2020, smack in the middle of the pandemic lockdown, to get him to tell his own story:
Rainer Wöffler: “I started to play guitar when I was 13 –in ’77. A friend of mine was a big fan of Rory Gallagher. In between his blues-rock sets Rory played the real, old-time country blues acoustically mostly on his Resonator National guitar. He played Blind Boy Fuller, Lead Belly songs and Big Bill Broonzy. That is how I got into it. Since I heard that stuff, I’m was caught.
I started playing professionally in the early ‘90s when I went to Munich to work in a music store, because of my hometown where I come from that’s near Luxembourg there was nobody interested in blues or country blues. In Munich, I was very lucky to work in a music store and there I’d be with old vintage instruments, old Martin guitars, Gibson guitars, National guitars. I worked for this music store for 13 years I got to know the whole scene in Munich that was playing that kind of music, and that’s how I got into it. By’91, ’92 I started to play professionally.
I met a lot of musicians were getting started that at the time, on the streets and we would jam. Some of them are by now professionals, but that was a long time ago.
I don’t play blues exclusively. When I started, the first 15 years I would say, I played blues exclusively, but when I started in this music shop, they had mandolins and lap steel guitars and I got to know all the Yazoo and the Blue Goose recordings. They had the old vinyl records in the shop. I got to know, for example, Hawaiian stuff and the Cheap Suit Serenaders with Robert Crumb was playing. I have a pretty wide range of what I like, especially string band music, just like Howard Armstrong, Louie Bluie – that was one of my favorites because he played all this kind of stuff from all over the world. He played Geman songs and Polish songs and I liked that very much.
We teach a few workshops with students for one week to France or Italy to teach them blues songs and technique and blues songs. I like the combination of both – not just touring and playing my own stuff but also to teach it.
I used to play alone before I met Tanja Wirz, but our stuff fits like a glove. We call the band – the duo actually, the Red Hot Serenaders. We also have a bit of an orchestra with a brass section and a washboard player. It’s a bit like a New Orleans style street band just like Tuba Skinny
I see it as very important to keep this music alive, to keep the blues alive is to play it also locally. I don’t expect myself to be on big stages and to make a huge success on international touring. I just love to be invited for weddings, for garden parties, for barbecues and to be locally respected as a musician, who is around and who is called for to deliver music, just like you described Archie Edwards in your Washington, DC, scene. I like to be somebody like this, who is able to ignite the flame among young people and let them know about what is so powerful about the blues, and even to play for people that never heard about blues. I think that’s an important thing for me.
I never had this feeling that blues and jazz are a strange or foreign music for me. It grabbed my heart from the first time I heard it, and that is why I decided I wanted to play it, and I still do. Some people ask me why do you play the blues – it’s not a part of life where you come from. But it always touched me and it was never a question for me if I want to play it or not. It was in my heart from the beginning when I heard it, so I still play it.
What we like about the blues is the funny part about it – it’s not only sad, and people always have the picture of blues as being always a minor tune, a slow tune, and a very sad song. We play the hokum stuff from Tampa Red and people get to dancing, and they’re very surprised that blues actually sounds like this. It works everywhere over the world. It doesn’t matter where you play it.
We have two CDs from the Red Hot Serenaders. I have one solo CD that I did in the ‘90s. In between I had a band in Munich, the Sons of the Desert, and we did also a mixture of folk and blues and early jazz and Hawaiian, but also Italian mandolin waltzes or Russian waltz – we didn’t care. We just played everything we liked, mostly from the ‘20s, from the 78 records I like so much.
I’m very thankful for meeting Phil Wiggins and John Cephas when I started out in the early ‘80s. They played in Luxembourg. That was the first time I saw them – it must have been the early ‘80s I guess. I was still in my hometown then. So that influenced me a lot and I also bought this record of Axel Küstner that he did for the German label. Living Country Blues series was one of my first records that I owned. He did fantastic recordings and that impressed me and really did a lot for me when I started. I learned a lot of songs from those 11 or 12 – I think 11 records that is the Living Country Blues series.
A long time ago we started to do house concerts, that we organize for traveling musicians. For example, we had David Evans in the house, Eleanor Ellis, Toby Walker, we had Lightnin’ Wells. It is important for me to help those people when here they are on the road – so we try to fix them house concerts.”
