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Noah Wotherspoon returns to Ohio

Noah Wotherspoon

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By Don Thrasher, Contributing Writer 4:22 PM Thursday, January 21, 2010

If you want to succeed in music, you often have to leave the safety of land to test the sometimes choppy waters. For Noah Wotherspoon, time in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island taught him that Ohio is actually a strategic spot for a musician interested in taking his music on the road.

“This region, Dayton-Cincinnati, is a really good central location,” Wotherspoon said. “Louisville is near, and Indianapolis. Chicago is not even that far. It’s a good central location for a musician.”

After several years away, Wotherspoon has returned to Ohio to display his musical skills. The former teen blues prodigy is now based in Cincinnati and divides his focus between playing raw Chicago-style blues and adventurous rock music that melds ’60s-era psychedelia, Americana and modern alternative rock.

“I moved to Cincinnati a few months ago,” Wotherspoon said. “I really liked living up in New England. It’s a really diverse music scene around Providence, but there’s just not as many places to play as there are down here. I met my girlfriend in Pennsylvania, and she’s a musician as well, and we were figuring out where would be best, as far as having plenty of places to play.”

Wotherspoon’s girlfriend, Jessi Bair, is a singer-songwriter and he thought Cincinnati was a good fit for them.

“There are a lot of coffee shops and acoustic venues down here for her to play,” he said. “She grew up in the country listening to Patty Griffin, so that’s kind of her style. I loved Cincinnati growing up. When I was younger, some of the first blues jams I ever went to were down in Cincinnati and Newport. A lot of those characters are still here, so it still feels like home.”

Now that he’s back in the area, Wotherspoon is performing more frequently around the area. He returns to Peach’s Grill in Yellow Springs on Saturday, Jan. 23.

“I do different things depending on the show,” Wotherspoon said. “I play a lot of blues shows for the most part, but at venues like Peach’s, which is a pretty open-minded audience, we’ll do some juke house rock and then we’ll stretch out and do more original music and improv and some experimental stuff.”

Wotherspoon is currently compiling material for a new live blues album and working on material for his next rock album.

“I really like doing both,” he said. “I want to simultaneously keep paying homage to all my blues heroes and continue writing rock songs and experimenting with songwriting and composing.”

CONTACT contributing arts and music writer Don Thrasher at donaldthrasher8@aol.com.

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