[Swamptooth. Photo stolen from the website swamptooth.com/home]
Cory Chambers anxiously puts away his guitar, afraid to roll up the nest of cords at his feet. Surfaces are now contaminated with virus. On this warm June night in 2020, he looks out from the corner stage over the 1000-square-foot taproom of Service Brewing, nestled 50 yards from the Savannah River and the passing freighters. Patrons wait in line at a steel riveted bar resembling the skin of a WWII bomber. The bar protrudes out from two stacked 40-foot containers with a giant American flag centered in the ribs of the top one. Outside, most of the world lives inside now.
The low hum of laughter and conversation reverberates under the house music. Cory’s bandmates mill around the stage, cleaning up their gear after a two-set gig. A novel virus rages outside. On any other night, Cory would mingle with the crowd, take in compliments on the set, shake hands with strangers and hug friends. Tonight, he’s glazed over with anxiety.
Under his Atlanta Braves ball cap, Cory watches the crowd as the summer heat of a Savannah June drifts in through the open door. Swamptooth might be one of a dozen bands or less in the entire country playing live right now. Every week, another historic live music venue in America dies. American musicians are losing their lives and their lively hood at a quickening pace.
Cory moved to Savannah, Georgia in 2011, part of a mass migration of artists and musicians that year. He enrolled at Armstrong University as an English major. With a fondness for folk, jazz and bluegrass, and a skill set on mandolin and guitar, he fell in with Aaron Zimmer, Jay Rudd and Anthony Texeria, forming City Hotel.
By 2014, City Hotel is the city’s premiere bluegrass band. In September of that year, they crowd around a single microphone at Service Brewing, before the stage was built, before the PA system was installed, and open the taproom for a crowd of locals as owners and life partners Kevin Ryan and Meredith Sutton pour the first beers from their new venture.
A few more years pass. In 2017, City Hotel pitches Kevin on the idea of a weekly bluegrass show. Friday night’s Bluegrass By The Pint at Service Brewing becomes a staple of the city’s vibrant live music offerings.
City Hotel’s weekly gig becomes coupled with offshoots—a Bluegrass Brunch on Sunday’s on Tybee Island and solo shows for Cory, Jay, and Aaron at the myriad of bars doubling as live music venues on River Street and Congress Street, and coffee houses the city over. Cory carves a living out of live music, supporting nearly all of his monthly bills. Cory, Jay and bassist Eric Dunn put together an outfit to fill an empty Bluegrass Brunch gig. Cory steals a name from a list of band names Aaron has penned: Swamptooth.
For five years, both Swamptooth and City Hotel appear on bills, as one incarnation or another with a rotating cast of members pulled from a deep well of local talent—the vehicle of both bands centered around perpetuating the gospel of bluegrass filtered through a youthful, modern lens. Evolutionarily, City Hotel cuts three albums of original material as Swamptooth becomes a bar band focused on covers.
But inside the taproom, tonight, the crowd seems unbothered by the constant barrage of bad news outside. Following years of playing three to four times a week, Cory hasn’t played music in three months. Tonight is his first show back since the world shut down in March.
He’s been on this stage hundreds of times, but something is unsettled in him. It feels too soon. Tonight, a Friday in the summer of 2020, he wonders, “Are we doing something wrong? Are we all going to get sick and kill our grandmothers because of this show?”
***
Aaron and Cory look down at the jar of tips after finishing a set as City Hotel. It’s March 13, 2020. Neither wants to touch the money. Surfaces were just declared dangerous. So is breathing. The pandemic reached Savannah earlier in the week. Aaron, a middle school English teacher with a newborn baby, feels the weight of responsibility sink in and wonders what he’s doing here and how long live shows can last.
The World Health Organization declared the pandemic two days ago and Savannah cancelled the St. Patrick’s Day parade for only the seventh time since 1824. The U.S. Stock Market drops 10% and 4,000 people have died as the virus creeps into 114 countries. Tomorrow, the city of Savannah will shut down bars. Newly elected Mayor Van Johnson soon orders the entire city to shelter in place.
Cory reclines on his front porch as the weather edges into the three most beautiful months in the coastal city. With the quarantine in place, his part-time job working at a fulfillment center is the only thing on his schedule. He opens a beer and thinks about how he will make up the 50% of his income he will lose this month. As a working musician, he lives on the margins. Not having a gig for a couple of weeks will hurt. A few months will devastate him. He’s hoping this quarantine only lasts for a few weeks. That's the rumor floating around anyways. He’s just released a solo album but has lost his vehicle of promotion. Lucrative private gigs are gone, too. Bluegrass By The Pint and Bluegrass Brunch are dead.
The typically exuberant and vibrant city, with the second largest St. Patrick’s Day celebration in the nation, sits still, eerily, unusually quiet around him. Cory lights a joint.
As he contemplates his own choices ahead, his heart is also with his friends, many of whom make their full living off live shows. His first action, he’s got to stop bleeding money. His habits are expensive. As a backup plan, he knows he can move in with his parents or his brother, but he doesn’t want to do that. Morning Joe, his daily digest of news, has been rattling off numbers and opinions adding to Cory’s fears.
His roommate, who works at the hospital, will be home later. Cory will follow him around the house, cleaning surfaces behind him, terrified he has brought the virus to their home.
He picks up his phone and texts an ex-girlfriend. He gathers his things and heads out to the house where she’s a nanny. He knows it’s a mistake. The relationship ended and should stay that way. But in this moment, afraid and alone, he reaches out for comfort. After some begging, he is obliged.
Across town, Aaron watches his six-month-old son play under the shade of a tent and teaches his eighth grade English class via Zoom. Missing the connections he makes with his students in person, the reason he became a teacher, Aaron makes the best of the situation. His wife, Mary, is home too, teaching her class online as well. He has nothing on his schedule but time with his family and virtual teaching.
Mary and Aaron decide to lockdown at home as news of the virus’ malicious reactions with older people becomes clear. They want their son to be around their parents as much as possible in these early days of his life. There will be no more Friday night shows and no more after-work beers and music with his friends.
Aaron, looking at black squares on his computer, finishes the day’s lesson and closes his laptop. He pulls out his guitar and plays “Baby Shark” for his young son who’s a pretty good dancer.
The taproom at Service Brewing is empty.
Several days into the shutdown, Kevin is there with a handful of employees. Using a tape measure to find six feet, he draws lines on the stage marking where each musician will stand.
On the eve of celebrating three years of Bluegrass By The Pint, Kevin wants to keep the music going, however he can. Like most venues, musicians, and bands the world over, he opts for a virtual concert.
A West Point graduate, Kevin is imbued with military discipline. Before attempting a live show, he reaches out to Mayor Johnson for permission. The federal government is floundering and Georgia is too. It’s a bit unclear what the rules are.
In Savannah, the mayor is listening to the experts and following their guidance. Kevin, a retired U.S. Army officer who led soldiers in combat, understands the importance of orders, of adhering to the rules. Mayor Johnson gives Kevin a green light for a virtual show and he calls up his house band to fill the slot.
Cory and Jay are eager to play. They call Aaron who declines the invitation. Too much risk. Anthony bows out as well. They invite fiddle player Ricardo Ocha, second chair violin for the Savannah Philharmonic, Dunn and mandolin player Evan Rose to join them for the virtual show.
City Hotel, with its truncated lineup, plays a single virtual show in late March, live streamed through Facebook. Kevin realizes the loss of taproom revenue won’t sustain the cost of hosting live bands.
City Hotel goes on hiatus, where they remain, occasionally staging a revival.
Service Brewing, within the downtown to-go cup zone, keeps churning out beer in the distillery behind the taproom, sustaining a profit. The large glass-plated garage door that opens the taproom to the outside world shuts and a small window is created for serving the public at a safe distance. The taproom itself goes quiet, the center of life on the weekends for the brewery.
Months pass in the Hostess City. Three beautiful, quiet months pass, normally filled with hordes of visitors, musters of drunken bachelorettes, picnics in the park, and late night parties. Downtown becomes a ghost town, occupied mostly by the homeless and emergency services.
***
One day, during the quarantine, Cory is invited to a jam session with a Jay and few other musicians. He declines, opting to stay away from people, afraid he might get someone sick.
Avoiding people, Cory sits in his car and pours two beers into a large yellow Dixie cup. The weather is perfect and he needs to get outside. The woods have always provided refuge. He gets out of his car and finds the trail head. He’s been totally freaked out for months, finding relief in alcohol and cannabis. Wandering under the canopy of giant oaks, shading a trail that snakes through several miles of Whitemarsh Island, he takes long sips of his trail beer, hoping to quiet his mind.
A week after the first invitation, Jay again reaches out and invites him to a jam session. In need of musical and human connection, in a low place, Cory accepts.
Forty-five minutes outside Savannah proper, on Old Louisville Road, Cory pulls his car through twin white picket fences that sandwich the old dirt road leading into Mossy Oak Music Park.
Inside the park, Cory gathers with Jay, Jimmy Wallin and Evan under an expansive awning that fans out from the covered main stage of the music park. Built specifically for bluegrass shows on the Rose family farm, for over 20 years Mossy Oak Music Park has hosted acts from around the country.
Evan’s mother Rebecca was the lifeblood of the park for years, booking shows and festivals, before she passed several years back. Evan now lives on the property and runs the park, his own little musical oasis.
Before Evan hit puberty, he was playing the bluegrass circuit with his family act, The Lonesome Whistle Band. Momma Rose played bass and booked the shows. In a sepia-toned photo from those days, Jimmy, the family band’s hired gun, young, tall and slender with a head full of hair, stands over 12-year-old Evan. A bright mandolin player with a wonderful singing voice, Evan has been picking partners with his family friend Jimmy, the tall banjo master with a love of sitar, for more than two decades now.
Evan and Jimmy, who double their time as hired musicians, also played in a bluegrass outfit together pre-pandemic. Into quarantine, they faced the same issue as City Hotel when two members bowed out of playing.
Distressed from the loss of their gigs and in-need of a creative output, Jimmy and Evan start jam sessions at Mossy Oak, forming their own musical bubble, inviting Cory and Jay to join them. The four start gathering weekly at the park and at Jimmy’s place in Metter, Ga., playing covers together, chatting away about what they want of a band and a life. Soon they start writing music.
Cory quickly finds himself with friends who are not completely of the same political mind, in a time in which politics are center-stage. He claims himself to be “Team Blue,” and speaks of the rest of the guys as “rugged individualist who don’t trust what they hear from the media or the government.” Despite sitting only near each other on our country’s divided political boundaries, the four become close friends, playing every week together.
Late May, 2020 rolls around. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp announces bars can reopen on June 1. Sixteen days before his announcement, Mayor Johnson began seeking legal avenues to requires citizens to wear masks in public. A growing divide between local and state governments plays out on the national stage. In a press conference, Mayor Johnson says, “Folks are walking around like we’re not living in the middle of a pandemic.”
Cory watches the crowd mingle, looking down at the cords. At 35% capacity, the room isn’t completely filled, but there is a large crowd of “people who apparently don’t give a shit,” Cory recalls. Mask wearing hasn’t become popular. Kevin comes to the stage and hands Jay an envelope. The crowd was exuberant. Bar owners the city over are excited to reopen their establishments. Even with limited capacity, some business is better than none. The Governor thinks it’s a good move. The Mayor isn’t convinced.
Kevin’s young staff, excited to get back to work, ignore safety measures in the first week. Several test positive for COVID-19 in the days following Swamptooth’s first June show. Kevin shuts down the taproom for two weeks, and reevaluates his approach.
Over the following weeks, it becomes clear the reopening of bars was premature. Between June 11, 2020 and June 21, Savannah explodes from under 20 cases a week to nearly 150 a week. Deaths spike as well.
Swamptooth continues to gather in their bubble at Mossy Oak, talking about life, politics, and music. They write original songs for the first time in the band’s life. Cory becomes influenced by his new bandmates opinions, that sometimes are quite stark from his own. While they don’t agree on everything, the exchange of different ideas and opinions becomes mortar in their growing friendships. Cory needs this human connection in a time when making human connections can be dangerous.
“We couldn’t take it,” Evan recalled. “We had to keep getting together, no matter what. If gas goes $4 a gallon, let’s just do it. Everyone told us not to gather, but we gathered anyways.”
“We gathered and didn’t become sick,” Jimmy added. “We became a band.”
Kevin reopens Service Brewing in July with new rules in place. He invites Swamptooth to reestablish Bluegrass By The Pint, every Friday night, replacing stalwarts City Hotel. They accept.
***
Sunny skies and near 80-degree temperatures have broken winter’s spell as the first signs of spring sneak into the Southern coastal city, just before they disappear and then reappear for a permanent stay. It’s the final Friday night in February of 2021. A trickle of live music has begun to dot the quiet city.
Donning his Atlanta Braves hat, Cory readies his acoustic guitar without a hint of anxiety. Jay moves for the electric bass. They chat for a second as Evan straps on his mandolin. Jimmy, relaxed and cool as a cucumber, picks up his banjo. Swamptooth’s newest member, Vito Gutilla runs his bow over the fiddle strings, checking the amplified sound. Swamptooth, comfortable and relaxed, open the second half of their set.
The airplane hanger door is wide open tonight, blending the taproom with an outdoor patio that extends through the sidewalk onto the street where empty kegs cordon off precious parking spaces in front of the brewery. Large beer garden tables are placed in the parking spaces. Tonight’s food truck is parked at the end of the cordoned off portion, nearly doubling the entire party area. Most of tonight’s crowd have taken up residency outside, the tables firmly occupied from 6 p.m. to after 9 p.m. Inside, high-top tables have been spaced nearly 10-feet from each other.
Kevin roams the taproom, as he usually does on Friday and Saturday nights, clearing tables, running drinks, managing, masked. He calls himself the “top cop of the mask police.” The City of Savannah requires masks indoors now and the rules are followed here. His bar staff, also masked, turn between the bar and the taps behind, pouring beer after beer after beer as the line, with six-foot markings on the floor, rarely dips below a few people.
Service Brewing signed the Savannah Safe Pledge, an initiative from the Mayor designed for businesses to reassure the public they were following proper COVID-19 protocols during the reopening phases. For months now, Friday nights at Service have been packed. People have missed live music and the environment Kevin creates feels safe. The taprooms’ wide open space and large open door become a logistical perk during the pandemic.
Swamptooth opens the second set of the night as the crowd chats away in a low hum, playing all original tunes they’ve crafted over the last year, testing them out each Friday night at Service Brewing since July, 2020.
Cory sings “I lost my soul when I started to scroll,” crooning about his unhealthy addiction to social media and its toxic influence on the social zeitgeist. Following the original tunes, Swamptooth break into an uptempo bluegrass version of Cher’s Life After Love, before heading into a grassy rendition of the most covered song in Savannah, The Zutons Valerie—made famous by Amy Winehouse. Cory changes the chorus to “Why don’t you come on over, Celery,” and now it’s a bluegrass song about a former lover leaving celery in the refrigerator.
Swamptooth’s pop-grass set is full of jams the band wrote and arranged during their quarantine days. Each influenced by myriad of modern and classic musical sources, the sets are filled with contemporary sensibilities on the foundation of traditional music. It’s something different and original. It’s music that can only come from Savannah, a place where the past and future have been colliding for decades and still heavily influence the art created here.
Cory makes his way off stage, clear minded, without a beer in his hand or a girlfriend to greet him. In December, he ended the toxic relationship he restarted in the early days of the pandemic. Once a week now, he seeks refuge with a therapist who also happens to be a musician. The Swamptooth bubble was a rescue from substance abuse. He’s set aside cannabis as well, opting for a simple CBD additive and no longer watches cable news, eliminating all the toxins from his life.
Aaron has been vaccinated and returned to teaching in person. After years of gigging every weekend, he can’t imagine going back to the nightlife. He can’t imagine spending time away from his son and wife now. A couple shows a month seem more appropriate. The months of quarantine aligned with some of the most pivotal moments of his young son’s life and he feels lucky to have had that time with him. City Hotel might return someday.
Aaron never stopping playing music, penning an entire album worth of original material over the last year. Aaron and Cory are set to trade weeks at a new weekly gig at Foxy Loxy Cafe, each playing their own solo material, promoting new solo albums.
Cory hasn’t been vaccinated. His bandmates are not planning on getting vaccinated. He’s never been tested for COVID-19, nor has any of his band members. No one’s been sick either, “not so much of a sniffle,” over the last year, so no one saw the point.
Promoters, venues, stage hands, and bands the world over are reeling from the loss of live music. The industry is slowing making its way back as new fall concerts and festivals are being announced every day.
Swamptooth feels fortunate. Fortunate to have the space to practice and to play, to have the relationship already in place with Kevin and Service Brewing. To have each other. Fortunate for the opportunity to keep doing what they love most. They have friends in California and other places that haven’t played a gig in a year.
They consider themselves the luckiest band in the world.