Dege Legg is a ghost.

His bones rattle like tin cans tied to the tail of an alley cat and he haunts all the darkest parts of your mind, the parts that moan and wail in the middle of the night when the moon bleeds. As a ghost, he’s one of America’s best kept songwriting (and writing) secrets. He’s lived a few lifetimes in the spooky, isolated backwoods of Louisiana where he cultivates his genius on words and music under endless starry skies as the distant static of radio transmitters buzz like mosquitoes skimming the surface of the swamp.

He’s also an inspiration for endless rock n’ roll rhetoric, and the gonzo nonsense I spin here takes on a dignified, romantic air when I’m talking about Dege (pronounced “Deej” in case you’re having trouble). I’ve always admired Dege’s accomplishments as a writer (he’s a prolific blogger, author of the novel, Battle Hymn of the Good Ole Hillbilly Zatan Boys, and writer/music and calendar editor for The Independent Weekly) and as the main man behind psyouthern rock bands Santeria and Black Bayou Construktion, he’s created some incredible, moving, and magical rock n’ blues records. In fact, Santeria’s 2003 record, House of the Dying Sun, is a masterpiece and shines like a beautiful, rare gem in America’s rock n’ roll history. I truly believe that.

And now the tradition continues as Dege Legg, as Brother Dege, sheds his skin to let his soul shine on his latest solo album, Folk Songs of the American Longhair. This album has been burning a hole in my blog as I’ve been waiting to write about it, but the only way I was going to do it was if it was accompanied by a conversation with the man himself. But first, the album. Folk Songs is an iconic, bare bones Delta blues record, just Dege and a Dobro, and the steel on every song echoes like falling tears in a mausoleum. It’s a chilling portrait of death and redemption, an ode to the long road, and each and every slide draws you down into the earth’s waiting dirt.

Now it’s time to get to know the ghost, to run with the journeyman. Dege and I riff about his new record, hurricane Katrina, Art Bell, bathroom reading, how he almost got shot in the head, and, of course, beards. It’s good, deep stuff.

Ok, Dege, tell me…why folk songs? Why the American longhair?

I wanted the title and cover to look like an old Alan Lomax recording or a long lost anthropological study of remote longhaired people who grew up on Black Sabbath and punk rock, but played the Delta blues, like Son House, Robert Johnson, etc. Almost like a time machine in reverse on spin cycle or a weird strain of Appalachian hillbilly music that someone discovered in a cut-out bin and repackaged. Delta blues is the raddest shit ever — it is the Big Bang that birthed it all. No music has as much emotional impact with the least amount of fuss. Doing this kind of Delta blues is tricky though because white people have historically ruined a lot of the blues with mid-life crisis cheese, fedora hats, and just bad, bad playing and singing. It’s atrocious. I cringe when I hear it. But I grew up down here in the deep South and still live here. And I woodshedded for a decade learning how to play the country Delta slide shit, so I don’t feel so bad about making a folk-blues record. It’s my own twisted version of it at least.

Woodshedded? Sounds evil. Deliverance evil. Is it?

Le me rephrase. I practiced my ass off for a decade.

Gotcha. So, do you think you could have made this record if you didn’t live where you live?

I doubt it. If I grew up elsewhere, the tunes would probably sound a little hokey. There’s something in the water down here. No bullshit. Certain minerals that feed musical creativity. Consider this: Within a 300 square mile area you have the invention of blues, Dixieland jazz, Cajun, Zydeco, New Orleans funk, early rock n’ roll, and who knows what else. That is insane. Where else in the world has that many types of music been invented? There’s a species of energy you pick up off of the land and surroundings, like a coded frequency transmitting from the trees and saturating your brain. It’s weird. I would’ve never guessed I’d be able to play this type of music. I grew up on KISS, Sonic Youth, metal, punk, and hardcore. I rebelled against all the roots music around me, which was omnipresent. And yet, these are some of songs that surface when I write? Trippy. As I matured I became more at peace with it. I was always drawn to raw country acoustic blues stuff, but it was more like a hobby that I did to entertain myself. Learning to play slide, finger-pick, and singing over it was like learning to mountain climb. Like, “Badass! This is fun!”

Also, being from the deep South, you kind of feel like you’re entitled to tweak and twist the tradition rather than simply pantomime it in robotic fashion, which in my case, frees me up to do whatever I want, try new shit, make the Dobro sound like a sitar or Chinese instrument or something. I still pay tribute to the tradition but definitely don’t cater to the purists or write for the tourists. I’m in my own world. However, every place on earth has its own sound, mystery, and transmittable signal that births music just as cool as what’s coming out of Louisiana. Better in some cases. That’s why everything sounding the same all over the world is not interesting. If I go to India, I don’t want to here an indie rock band that sounds like they’re from Brooklyn. I want to hear sitars and tablas. If I go to Iowa, I don’t want to hear a band that sounds like they’re from L.A. I want to hear something unique to that place.

Listen to “To Fill A Hole” from Folk Songs of the American Longhair!

Speaking of Louisiana, how devastating was it to watch the whole place drown when Katrina hit a few years ago? Tell us something about that tragedy that we don’t know.

I live in Lafayette, two hours west of New Orleans, so we didn’t get the full brunt of the madness, but you couldn’t get a hotel room in Louisiana or any of the bordering states for four or five months after Katrina. Most of New Orleans was living in them. Also, cops were spread so thin in the aftermath that they couldn’t enforce the speed limit on highways, so everyone sped around at 100 mph for the week. What else? Way more people died than was reported. I’d heard that certain mercenary and special-op tactical teams were given shoot-to-kill orders for anyone with gold teeth out after dark. Not sure if it’s true, but a lot weird stuff went on.

Yeah, I was reading your Anatomy of a Scream interview series around that time and you had a lot of weird but enlightening conversations with people who were right in the thick of it. How did talking to them change your perception of what was going on and how much of what you learned did you actually believe?

The whole experience was part moving, part grisly, part inspiring, and part let down. I believe most of what was printed in those interviews because I was looking them in the eyes and gauging the truth and raw emotion pouring off of them. A couple details with the forensic pathologist, I’d question, though. That was the interview people remember most from that Anatomy of Scream issue. But who knows? Maybe it happened. There were a few other post-publishing details that were left out — stuff like the facilities where the forensic pathologists worked and did DNA on the bodies. One to three of them supposedly got plowed. Whole buildings up and gone. Construction crews or somebody came, knocked them down, and put down a lawn like they were never there. For what reason? Who knows. Fill in the blanks. Weird shit. How’d it all change my attitude? I put less faith in government as an institution meant to serve people, now and more in the theory that at the higher levels it’s all racketeering, population control, firmly entrenched corruption of some kind or another…with a few exceptions to the rule.

Aside from the Anatomy interviews, you gained a lot of notoriety with your Cablog series. Now that was a riot to read. Are you still driving a cab? Is it still as adventurous as ever?

I no longer drive a cab but I miss the craziness of it and have been tempted to go back part-time when money is tight. I still might. Don’t know. Lot of my friends and family don’t want me to go back to driving a cab because I almost got shot in the head near the end of my run. I pushed it pretty hard for a while. Writing about it was great because people are nuts and it was a platform for me to rant about their inherent nuttiness…in addition to my own. It was like being in a yellow submarine — deep under the ocean  — for four years and sending dispatches back to the land dwellers above in the form of Cablog entries. Fun stuff to write, but harder to live through. Driving from one end of the night to the other, week after week, with all stripes of madness and lunacy in between…it’ll put some years on you. But the good news is I’m going to edit all the Cablogs into a manageable form and put it out as a book. It’s already written. I just need to cut the fat off of it. It was 800 pages when I last checked. That’s probably a little too long, unless some publisher magically appears and wants to put it out as is. But, who knows? Look for it. It’s coming. It’ll be the best bathroom reading ever.

Sweet, I need some good bathroom reading. What are you currently reading while you shit?

Right now, Angels Don’t Play This HAARP by Nick Begich and RollingStone for the Matt Taibbi stuff on the bank bailouts. Good shit.

Pun intended, no doubt. Ok, you and I have always shared an affinity for the beard. Why is the beard important to you and give us some beard-keeping tips.

Pun intended, yes. RollingStone is mostly a turd. However, beards are not. They are great for winters. Colder climates. They keep your face warm. It’s like a haircut on your face. You don’t have to shave, so you save money on costly blades. With the time you save not shaving, you can stare into space at random intervals or just sit in a chair and make weird noises. Depending on how you are dressed, beards make you appear either grizzlier or sort of professorial. The only midway point is the “Kenny Rogers,” which is a highly manicured beard — best left to boat/car salesmen, riverboat gamblers, and narcotics officers. Overly kempt beards are pretty lame. Summertime is different. The beard becomes a liability and begins to feel like a wet, greasy rat attached to your face. It absorbs grease and grows stiffer as the day goes on. The temptation to shave is so great during hotter months in the deep South that it’s almost impossible to resist.

A manicured beard is an insult to beards, that’s for damn sure. But I have to say, I think the whole ‘beard is better in winter’ thing is a bit misleading because you have to deal with freezing around the mouth and the dreaded beardcicles. Not fun. However, it is definitely nice to have when I’m out and about in the great white North. So, do you have any beard idols?

Good point. Being that it rarely, if ever, gets cold enough in Louisiana to actually freeze a beard, that possibility never registered on my radar. But I trust that your research and field work into Ice Beard Syndrome is valid. Beard idols? Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw, Rasputin, late-era Morrison. DH Lawrence had a cool beard. So did Ezra Pound — kind of crazy-scraggly — interesting looking dude. A lot of writers, I guess. Also, mountain men; those guys are rad. Strangely enough, a lot of people that the government hates have interesting looking beards: Taliban guys, Castro, Karl Marx. Very odd. Not sure why.

I’ll tell you why: It’s because the beard has infinite power. It makes those without one feel impotent. The beard is the boner of the face, the raging rod the world sees. Those who don’t have one, who can’t grow one, fear it. A man with a great beard is capable of great things and so the government wants to keep him down. Ok, I think we might be drifting off into Art Bell territory here. You’re not participating in this interview from a remote trailer somewhere in the Rockies, are you? Or maybe a rusty shack deep in the bayou?

Art Bell territory is a good place to be in my book. I like it there and frequent it often — not so much for the old lady ghost stories, but for all the other weird stuff. I don’t believe much of what I hear on CNN, FOX, MSNBC, or any others. It’s all bought and sold mind conditioning  and manipulation at this point, meant to either lull or stimulate the population into buying into some sort of agenda they’re selling. Where am I? I’m writing to you from an alternate dimensional reality. Not sure if it is of a higher or lower vibration, but it’s out there, somewhere.

And that, my friend, is what I love about you and what you do. Ok, let’s wrap this up with some lightning bolts:

Acid Bath or Deadboy and the Elephantmen?

Both really rad bands.

Yeah, Dax Riggs is great. Ok, for some unknown reason, your face is put on a candle. What are you the patron saint of?

Cheap guitars or sleep talking.

I assume they’ve got some pretty harsh liquor down there in the swamps, likely made from snake oil and such. What’s the most dangerous drink you’ve ever consumed?

A weird batch of fruity moonshine that our old buddy Elron cooked up when he lived in a junkyard. It was like being mildly poisoned while drunk and high. It triggered a junkyard vision quest that made me realize I wasn’t evil.

Awesome. What’s the best thing to ask a gypsy?

How do you survive this world with your soul intact and not let the bastards get the best of you?

Finally, who dat? Who dat? Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?

To quote my buddy Spider, “Nobody beats us 40 years in a row!”

Now, do yourself a favour and check out this AMAZING rendition of “House of the Dying Sun” (it was supposed to be on the Santeria album of the same name, but ended up on their 2008 album, Year of the Knife, instead…and again on Folk Songs).