David Michael Moore - Umburkus Returns

A mile or so down the road from David Michael Moore’s dilapidated home in Rosedale, Mississippi lies The Actual Crossroads where Robert Johnson met with the African spirit Papa Legba (often wrongly identified as Satan by modern dorks). Of course, the location of this mythical meeting is disputed across the state by local tourism boards. But this rather unremarkable intersection of Highways 1 and 8 is The Real One, the spot where Johnson exchanged his eternal soul for a visionary-but-all-too-mortal musical talent. This is the place to where Umburkus returns to again and again. It’s a place where a portal between worlds opens and shuts, where he can worm his way between. Ol’ Umburkus likes the particular tickle of straddling the planes of existence, finds the tingle pleasing. And it’s where ULYSSA has set up our lawn chairs and cracked some Coors. This is our church. Benevolent Friends of the Church of the Blood of Umburkus Returns, we beg of your offerings this day. We’re slapping this masterpiece of True American Wildassery onto Double Vinyl for the first and probably last time ever. Vinyl is made of The Blood of Mother Earth and Her Blood ain’t cheap. There’ll be Hell to pay. So help us out, brothers and sisters. Umburkus Returns beckons you.

For the partitioners up there in the nosebleeds, David Michael Moore, 74, is a musician and woodworker from Rosedale, Mississippi. He creates elegant and unconventional woodcraft. Shaker chairs and birthing chairs. He weaves sycamore branches into benches, cradles, and canopy beds. He hews magnolia heartwood into massive bowls — each of their undersides pressed with his two-letter calling card: “UM.”

We’re gathered here today because David also makes his own instruments. Zithers, bass harps, wooden drums, buzz boxes, boing boxes and dog bone xylophones. He uses these “perverted,” hybrid instruments — along with more standard instruments like piano, synths and drums — to make ecstatic compositions twirling amid zydeco, Sufi mystical music, Moondog and the prepared piano pieces of John Cage.