Beth Garner

With a musical pedigree that includes performing over a thousand shows, touring the US and Europe, and working as an arranger, producer, and songwriter, it comes as no surprise Texas native Beth Garner is one accomplished lady. The fact that’s she’s also a badass slide guitar player only adds to her allure.

Garner’s innate musical abilities were nurtured beginning in 1992, at the performing arts school in Dallas and clubs and college in Austin, Denton and around Texas, and subsequently spit- shined during the thousands of shows she has played in Nashville since 2008. But Garner was raised on the blues, and by 2015, after playing on Nashville’s Lower Broadway country circuit for 7 years she went back into the blues, basically to hide. Garner frequented Carol Ann's, a famous club in Nashville known for keeping the blues and history of soul music alive, where Carol Ann once told the young artist she could call up BB King on his cell. It was here Garner was inspired to return to the blues, but this time, she had paid her dues.

Garner elaborates. “I spent a number of years playing in the Austin music scene before relocating to Algood, Tennessee in 2007, not originally to play music initially, but to help my uncle in his business of building dirigibles. In March, 2007, I began a three-month US tour with Russian band The Red Elvises, where we played small sold-out venues from coast to coast. I gained a lot of fans and learned about our great country from the back of a van full of Russians.”

After the tour, Garner returned to Algood, Tennessee, and played the biker bars that dotted the byways around the middle Tennessee area for the remainder of 2007.

“By September of that year, I started to hear about Lower Broadway in downtown Nashville, which I soon moved to and started hanging out there, learning the ways of that small stretch downtown that housed a dozen or so bars, and bands that were top-quality, and some not so top quality,” Garner admits.

Garner soon picked up a gig with Broadway icon Shelly Bush and Broadband, based solely on the fact she was a female lead guitar picker because “I didn’t have that much hard-core country experience.” From there, she started playing the Full Moon Saloon almost every day in various country bands, eventually getting her own shift. There and at the Wheel (now AJ’s Goodtime Bar), she honed her musical chops and showmanship, and also picked up the slide guitar. All the time, she continued “paying her dues” as a musician and performer, and attempting to properly learn the ways of the music business to continue working.

“Since I've moved to Nashville, all I have done is play on Broadway. I did get a call in late 2014 to audition for Little Big Town as their guitarist, but I never made the audition because I had just quit drinking and I just felt very sick all the time.

“Once, while I was playing with my band the TN Twisters (my original band a la TX Tornados), Robin Zander from Cheap Trick came in, sat at the front bar and watched us for about two hours,” Garner recalls. “He introduced himself and went on and on about how much he loved the band, he even called me the female Jeff Beck. Later on that night, we dropped Robin off at his hotel and he sat there in my jeep, telling us how great we were. It was four in the morning and I had another gig at 2pm that next day and really needed to get some sleep, but it was very difficult to ask Robin Zander of Cheap Trick to get out of your car, while he tells you how much he loved your band.”

In October, 2015, Garner recorded seven songs, mostly live, in a little home studio basement painted purple, called Slack Key Studios. “With musician and engineer Randy Kohrs at the helm, we produced these songs,” she says, “all with these rules: it has to be all heart and soul, no more than three or four chords, only A and B sections, and long guitar solos. I wanted to keep the album in line for the purists, but my age and experience let me put my own stamp on what the blues is to me. Muddy Waters says ‘Blues is the roots and music is the fruit.’ The blues to me is summed up in Snake Farm. I can't describe it. You just have to listen to it, and hopefully feel something.”

Beth Garner’s music on the new album showcases her soulful singing, with its roots firmly in blues, gospel and soul with rock ‘n roll flourishes, as well as her scintillating axe work that alternately smokes and sizzles on standard and slide guitar.

Snake Farm features mostly original songs written or co-written by Beth Garner, with the exception of the title track, authored by Texas country legend Ray Wylie Hubbard.