Jim White, Packway Handle Band take it like men

Alt-folk meets bluegrass on acclaimed new album

At 57 years old, Jim White’s wildly creative mind is more fruitful than ever. Within the last two years the Athens-based musician, writer, and visual artist released his seventh solo album, Where It Hits You, and produced records for a handful of other bands. He has exhibited his found-object folk art in New Orleans and won the Pushcart Prize, a prestigious literary award, for his short story “Superwhite!”

When he lists the next batch of albums he wants to finish, they include one with a classical guitar player, one he describes as “kinda post-punk,” and one built around marimba and drums. “I’m like LaGuardia Airport on a rainy day, project planes backed up everywhere,” White says.

This has been standard operating procedure for White (born Michael Davis Pratt) since before the release of his 1997 debut Wrong-Eyed Jesus (The Mysterious Tale of How I Shouted), a collection of gothic country-folk that introduced him to alt-twang circles. White is a multifaceted artist with a sharp eye for cool, who is happy to follow his muse wherever it wanders.

Recently, it led him to the Packway Handle Band, a young, adventurous bluegrass group from Athens. The two entities met in 2013 when White was producing Athens folk duo the Skipperdees’ Some Bright Mourning. He needed some bluegrass players, and called the Packway guys. Later, the band asked White to produce its next record.

White, who’s been stockpiling bluegrass tunes for decades, proposed something more collaborative. The result: Take It Like A Man was released January 27, via Yep Roc as Jim White vs. the Packway Handle Band. “They knew they were talented and that they were probably going to spend their life touring the Southern circuit unless something dramatic happened,” White says. “They’re now known in the U.K. and that’s a good market to break into.”

Indeed, leading British music magazine Mojo praised the record as “haunting and literate, almost unbearably beautiful.”

“I’ve always wanted to make a bluegrass record, so I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just do this for fun.’ But it’s helping me, too,” White continues.

Take It Like A Man, then, is an exercise in musical symbiosis, alternating between White and Packway songs and drawing out each side’s strengths while shoring up their shortcomings. “Breathing Room” and “Not A Song” show off Packway’s effervescent pop-grass that teems with sparkling banjo, back porch harmonies and softly glowing horns. Meanwhile, White’s “Jim 3:16,” “Paranormal Girlfriend,” and “Sorrow’s Shine” unfold slowly, revolving around bar stools and back roads, heartache, calamity, and sin.

White says he hasn’t been writing much lately as he’s been focused on producing, but he’s been “digging up more songs that I forgot about,” while preparing the Packway project for the road. Whether this leads to a follow-up to Take It Like A Man is anyone’s guess — including White’s. “I never look before I leap,” he says. “I just say, ‘Oh, that looks like an inviting pool of water. Let me dive into it.’”