GemsOnVhs: Behind The Camera

Inside The Mind of a 21st Century Folk Archivist

Words by Daniel Joey Oakley / Photos by Achilles Lawless and Justin Dye

Grazing YouTube, you were once unlikely to find the channel (and now DIY label) GemsOnVHS unless you were specifically searching out its ‘field recordings’ of street-worthy Americana, folk punk, or roots music. And founder Anthony Simpkins liked it that way. But now that those ‘Gems’ have been viewed nearly fifty-million times, Simpkins finds himself in the wild west of a new kind of music industry, fighting for the integrity of song.

Sounding a little windblown, as if from chasing muses, Simpkins settles into our studio here in New Orleans, the city where Simpkins first came to bottle the lightning of Sister Street alum Casper Allen (resulting in ‘The New Orleans Tapes’). Discovering a bevy of talent in the lower 9th ward, and beyond, Simpkins returns periodically to spread it.

In the beginning of YouTube, Simpkins laughs, “No one knew what to put up there.” He was watching a lot of Cinéma vérité, Vincent Moon, and Alan Lomax, whose monumental recordings of folk musicians in their own environment made the man his hero. “Folk music,” Simpkins says, “Is much bigger than a genre on Spotify with a fedora. Everybody likes folk music, they just don’t know it. Rap music is folk music. [Folk music] is just the people’s music. ‘Folk’ means people.” Simpkins says that like many others he listened to how the Avett Brothers were fusing punk and folk, and of course Nirvana’s Unplugged, which you can quickly follow down the rabbit hole to Lead Belly and the vein.

GemsOnVhs founder and director, Anthony Simpkins at Third Coast Studios in New Orleans.

“Everybody likes folk music, they just don’t know it. Rap music is folk music. [Folk music] is just the people’s music. ‘Folk’ means people.”

There’s a lot of volume--not necessarily decibels--to this twenty-something man, light of stature but big on lungs. His NPR-voice so present in our audio capture that it recalls a hip, nose-hair breathing Garrison Keillor, or rather, his ‘Prairie Home’ successor, Chris Thile: a bluegrass picker and singer-songwriter. 

A songwriter himself, we were able to turn the camera on Anthony for a listen of his original song, “Luke”.

Anthony Simpkins, however, full of presence, has usually put others’ music ahead of his own.

When asked about the highlight of his young and varied career? “That’s easy,” he says. “It’s meeting Alan Lomax’s nephew and his daughter.” In continuing the work that originally inspired him, they are, Simpkins remembers fondly, “As amazing as I imagined.” Like them, Simpkins’ goal is not, “Just to state that desire to entertain or share,” he says. “We’re all just trying to help each other.”

GemsOnVHS’s two most-viewed videos are of Lost Dog Street Band: ‘I Went Down to Georgia’ written by songwriter Nicholas Ridout, who passed away at 24, and one of Tod in a blank room singing his original confessional ‘Using Again’. 

“I love hearing that people are quitting drugs because of some song they hear,” Simpkins says. “That’s why we focus on real life songs about struggles. That’s what folk music’s all about. Right now you’ve got the opioid epidemic everywhere, and I get messages all day from people getting out of recovery.”

That crisis is not the only battle he wishes to spur on. “My buddy Josh O’Keefe wrote a song about ‘Thoughts and Prayers’,” Simpkins says, “Which is very controversial. But that’s what makes folk music great: It can reach out and touch people and make them reconsider what they’re doing!” Laughing, he adds, “Anybody with an inkling of talent has usually got something wrong with them. What we’re doing is like a family.”

Helping heal that family is, “A lot of work, a lot of stress, a lot of long nights editing--and a lot of painful stuff--but that’s what makes great songs,” Simpkins admits. “But we’ve got the support of the whole community, so it can’t drag you too far down.” The direction the family seems to be heading, however, is straight up.

Gems has launched careers. Fan-favorite Sierra Farrell signed this fall to Rounder records, with management and booking agent deals. Simpkins also partners with those whose star is currently rising, debuting shoots with newly Grammy-nominated Che Apalache. And GemsOnVHS has done what the business world might call ‘Netflixed’ itself: successfully gone from channel to record label, funding, producing, and distributing--to acclaim--its first full-length studio album, with longtime collaborator The Hill Country Devil and his ‘Nicotine and China White.’

“PR agents still hate us,” Simpkins says, “Because they’ll say: We want to do a GemsOnVHS session. And I’ll say: Well, ok, slow down on calling it a session, but alright, we’ll do a GemsOnVHS thing. And then they say: Where do we send the artist? And I have no idea! The location is completely just: Don’t care at all.”

It’s part of the company’s ethos, and its definition of ‘folk’. Some of Gems’ earliest videos feature Nashville rappers, like Trinidad James, Ante Successful, and Team Highgrade. And though Simpkins embraces the music video side of the business, he has gravitated more toward the high lonesome sound. He has, however, managed to find even the taboo within bluegrass, and achieve representation there. Che Apalache, whose haunting harmonies are featured in videos like “The Dreamer,” have members who are both latino and openly gay--in a traditionally unsafe genre of music. The power of that lens is amplified by album production from genre-defying banjo emperor Béla Fleck.

And of Anthony, the human, separate from GemsOnVHS? “I forget that he exists sometimes,” Simpkins laughs. “I have a hard time going on ‘vacation’...cause the world is kind of the canvas.” He searches: “Personal, what’s personal? I got a lot of good friends in Nashville, I lived there a long time, I love Nashville. All my friends live there…” Somewhere behind his spectacles, Simpkins has slipped into a reverie that tingles the hairs on the back of the neck. For someone who’s always putting others’ voices out there, he has a rare one: that whole-animal circulation that speaks to a unity of body, mind, and spirit--the kind that sounds deep without actually registering in the lower frequencies.

“I never left because the city grew around us,” he says of the country music headquarters. “The city doubled in population. A lot of people move away from their hometown town to meet new people and I just never had to. I’m gonna be there a long time. It’s a safe place. It’s a sanctuary for me.”

He--through Gems--has brought others closer to sanctuary too. His friend Hayden Karchmer, who performs as the Hill Country Devil, “Had a lot of run-ins with drugs and poverty,” Simpkins says. “So I saw it as an opportunity to get his music out there and make him some money. He just bought a car with it, so that helps.” The opening missive that the ‘Scumbag Troubadour’ gives in his video ‘Glory’ eschews self-pity, whereupon an arresting voice rings out from a lamplit curb, corner of anywhere U.S.A., the attack on the strings cutting the night. 

“Everybody wanted him to put out a record, and he was never gonna be able to do it by himself. So we got him out to Nashville, got him in a studio, got it recorded. Benjamin Tod paid for the physicals to get made. And as a community we just pulled together. Everybody loved it and everybody bought it so it was a good first sign.”

When asked if this makes Gems a ‘label,’ Simpkins is unequivocal: “That’s the future, definitely. We’re releasing music by the artists we work with that deserve it.” Which serves as a chance to ask about etymology--just what the hell does ‘GemsOnVHS’ mean, anyway?

“Gems are things you find in the rough, right?,” Simpkins says. “And VHS was the first time that you could bring recordings home en masse and watch them. Diamonds in the rough that you can watch without any corporation trying to push some major label.” Unlike them, he says, “I want when people see GemsOnVHS on the package or our site that they know it’s going to be something that they like. Kind of like it used to be in the old times when you used to go to a record store you’d look for the label. That’s what ‘label’ meant! ‘Oh this is put out by Folkways, I’m gonna love it.’ And they take it home without having even listened to it at the store, and didn’t even know what was gonna be on it.” Simpkins reflects, then decides, yes. “I want to achieve that. I think that’s cool. I want to be the new one of that.”

All told, for Simpkins, a traveler, the world seems to come down to how wide it is. “I really love nature, I love getting outdoors,” he says. “Anything that reminds me of how beautiful the earth is, reminds me of why I stay on it for so long.” That same beauty he finds in the musicians for whom his curation of content has meant legs in a notoriously difficult industry. Sierra Farrell, whose murder ballad ‘Rosemary’ has been seen over a million times, has the astonishing lyric flutter of a voice of purity, yet the aesthetic of a train-hopping Annie Oakley. Her register recalls New Orleans’ own (by way of Haiti) Sabine McCalla: songstress, sister of decorated cellist Leyla, Offbeat-nominated best emerging artist, and seen two-steppin’ in Gems’ ‘tape’ of banjoist Camden Pugh.

Simpkins finds beauty in the whole shining spectrum of musically precious stones. He finds it in Kendrick Lamar, promising to slowly educate his Gems audience on rap, and in the same breath disparaging the page ‘We Hate Pop Country,’ saying, “If somebody wants to listen to Florida-Georgia Line, go for it! Music is music. We’re all dying--entropy!”

For now though, Simpkins’ priorities are crystal in clarity: “I can’t wait to do another album,” he starts, but finishes, “A different way.” Future Gems albums may be live albums, both pleasing followers and removing costly studio time from the sustainability equation. “It’s the Wild West, everybody’s changing hats,” Simpkins says of the downfall of major label dominance. And with that: “I do gotta get going here in a minute. To go meet up with Esther, wherever the hell she is.”

Esther Rose, “Is an angel sent from heaven, or in this case New Orleans,” Simpkins once captioned a recording of Rose at the famous Honky Tonk Tuesday at the American Legion in Nashville. Now, like the wind through the poppies or the migrant fields, Simpkins hits the road again camera in hand, to capture--and to shine out--that next elusive bloom.

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Daniel Joey Oakley is an author and total space cadet. He is the founder of roving Hip-Hopera DOJO KEEN.