LAVA Presents + North Shore Point House Concerts Presents:Friday, December 5, 2025 at The Annex
Swamp Dogg
Doors 7pm // Music 8pm
ALL AGES
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Swamp Dogg’s remarkable new album, Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St., is no history lesson, though. Produced by Ryan Olson (Bon Iver, Poliça) and recorded with an all-star band including Noam Pikelny, Sierra Hull, Jerry Douglas, Chris Scruggs, Billy Contreras, and Kenny Vaughan, the collection is a riotous blend of past and present, mixing the sacred and the profane in typical Swamp Dogg fashion as it blurs the lines between folk, roots, country, blues, and soul. The tracklist is an eclectic one—brand new originals and vintage Swamp Dogg classics sit side by side with reimaginings of ’70s R&B hits and timeless ’50s pop tunes—but the performances here are thoroughly cohesive, filtering everything through a progressive Appalachian lens that nods to tradition without ever being bound by it. Special guests like Margo Price, Vernon Reid, Jenny Lewis, Justin Vernon, and The Cactus Blossoms all add to the excitement, but it’s ultimately the 81-year-old Swamp Dogg’s delivery—sly and playful and full of genuine joy and ache—that steals the show. The result is a record that’s as reverent as it is raunchy, a collection that challenges conventional notions of genre and race while at the same time celebrating the music that helped make Swamp Dogg the beloved iconoclast he’s known as today.
“I’m trying to touch on every kind of music I grew up loving and listening to,” he explains. “This is my way of letting people know that I’m not just a soul singer or whatever they think I am. I’m so much more.”
Born Jerry Williams, Jr., Swamp Dogg first encountered bluegrass music on the radio growing up in Portsmouth, VA, in the 1940s. Though he would go on to spend much of the ’50’s and ’60s immersed in the world of soul, funk, and R&B—both as an artist and as a A&R man/producer working with the likes of Patti LaBelle, The Commodores, and The Drifters—roots music would remain an important fixture in his life.
By that time, Williams had already traded in his birth name for the Swamp Dogg moniker, partly as an act of rebellion against the confining racial and commercial politics of the music industry, and partly as an embrace of his natural inclination towards irreverence and eccentricity. "I needed an alter ego because I wanted to say some things," he would later tell NPR. "I wanted to be able to talk about sex, religion, politics; I wanted to sing about everything." And sing about everything he did. Beginning with 1970’s Total Destruction To Your Mind, Swamp Dogg would go on to release a string of more than two dozen albums ranging from the radically subversive to the downright ridiculous, developing an underground following in the process that would make fans of everyone from DMX to John Prine. Though most of his records (with their oddball titles and even more bizarre artwork) would go woefully underappreciated in their own time, critics and audiences alike would eventually come to see Swamp Dogg for the visionary he was: The New York Times praised his “salty, earthy Southern-soul storytelling;” Rolling Stone hailed his catalog full of “classics that have influenced generations of younger musicians;” The Independent dubbed him a “psychedelic soul original;” The Fader declared him a “legend;” Pitchfork called him “one of pop’s great cult acts;” and Vice crowned him “the unsung king of soul music.”
But, as the SXSW-premiered documentary Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted reveals, there’s always been more to Swamp Dogg than just soul music. As far back as the early 1970s, he was covering tunes like Prine’s “Sam Stone,” an act of veneration that Prine would later return by appearing on Swamp Dogg’s widely acclaimed 2020 record, Sorry You Couldn’t Make It. Those performances turned out to be some of Prine’s final recordings before his death, making Blackgrass’s release on Prine’s Oh Boy label all the more poignant.
It means a hell of a lot to put this record out on the label that John started,” Swamp Dogg reflects. “He wrote some of the greatest songs of all time, songs that could make you dance inside. He was like a pastor on Sunday, getting you to think about what’s going on in the world and how we should be coping with it. I always want to give thanks to John.”
“Black music has had so many different labels put on it over the years that sometimes I’m onstage and I don’t know what the Hell it is that I’m singing,” Swamp Dogg says with a laugh. “The only thing I know how to do is be myself.”
And nobody does that better than Swamp Dogg.
Event Venue
2500 Church Street, Unit A, Norfolk, VA, United States, Virginia 23504
Tickets
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