There are few who can just sing and play without the bells and whistles and just knock you out. With Colt Prather, it’s the internal fire that ignites the audience. An understated showmanship that’s as natural and real as his native southwestern sky about which songs and books and poems are written. Growing up on a 40,000 acre cattle and sheep ranch in southern New Mexico, in a large, extended musical family set the stage for his reality, for his real-ness. A descendent of the Prathers and Lewises, two of the major pioneer families of the West Texas and New Mexico prairies, it was the music that settled the dust, that provided art and creativity when you live 20 miles from the nearest pavement. His great-great grandfather was a fiddle player and maker, and that was the instrument on which each child and grandchild began the music. By 16, Colt Prather was earning a living playing in a honky tonk in Alamogordo, NM, 80 miles from his home and 50 miles from high school, where he’d leave after basketball practice every Wednesday to do his midweek gig. After high school, he had a band that played clubs from coast to coast. After moving to Nashville in the late ’90s, he won a gig at the famed Stockyard, and got invited into the player’s circle in Music City. And in a town filled to the brim with great guitar players, he started getting known. Became a favorite pick-up man, had plenty of his own gigs, got called for demo sessions to play that axe, or sing, or play the fiddle, which he jokes (listen: it’s one of the few he’ll make) he plays with, instead of plays. He got a call to come play the Fiddle and Steel Guitar Bar in Printers Alley, where he became “a piece of the furniture there for a year and a half.†And then the clichés start: He gets discovered by a major label executive just as he’d finished an indie album. They get it. They sign him. Cut a great record. Regime change at the label, and he, a big ol’ bright and blooming flora, becomes one of those New Mexico tumbleweeds that gets blown around the 16th Avenue prairie. But this is a talent so complete, so powerful, that the winds of grace (yours and mine) just blow him right back in. He’s a stunning guitar player who swears his daddy is better; as good as Roy Clark, he says, and you know he’s not one given to hyperbole. Prather’s voice fills a room; his guitar, an arena; his stage presence, a stadium. “I’m totally comfortable with it,†he says. “I feel completely at home on stage. I’m not a big jokester, I just love to be personable with my audience through the music and let it do the talking. I totally leave it to speaking to them just through what I’m singing and playing.†With diverse musical tastes, Prather has somehow taken the strains of the familial Celtic fiddle, melded it with old country, young contemporary sensibilities and West Texas blues in a soulful, edgy fusion that could only emanate from Colt Prather. Like in the straight-time, straight country rocker, “Not a Brick Out of Place.†It’s a pun, believe it or not, about good lookin’ women. You figure out the unstated twist of phrase. Or the high energy party song, “All I’m Riskin’.†Or the instrumental “Whiplash,†that goes just a little ways to show those dazzling, diverse guitar chops. Or one of those on-your-knees power ballads. His music-speak is as clear as his words. Colt Prather is not a star. He’s a superstar!!!
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