Two summers ago, when people were oohing and arghing about Johnny Depp doing Keith Richards as Captain Jack Sparrow again, Depp and Pirates director Gore Verbinski also presented Rogues Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, & Chanteys, a two-CD set produced by Hal Willner (the tribute album guy). Okay, so pirate-mania didn’t exactly extend to the revival of sea-faring songs, but among the upshots of the Rogues project was that it brought the name Baby Gramps into the homes of those who bought the collection for its rare and one-off Bono, Sting, Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, and Tom Waits-doing-pirate tracks. (Waits’ fans may already know Gramps, and if not, you might appreciate his gravelly, old-time warble and barbed humor with a whole lotta heart.)

And yet, with all that star power (Richard Thompson, Bryan Ferry, and Lucinda Williams were also on board—yarr!), it was the Gramps track, “Cape Cod Girls” (recorded with Akron/Family, Bill Frisell, and Phillip Morgan from the Cutters), that got top billing (side one, cut one) on Rogues Gallery; he’s also the artist they sent to Letterman to plug it. Is it really any wonder? The pirate’s life was made for Baby Gramps.

Singer, songwriter, guitarist, and teller of tall tales, Gramps has spent a lifetime plundering the treasures of the old world, told and untold, ever since he was a young man—probably the youngest person on the planet to have ever gone by the sobriquet Gramps (that’s where the Baby comes in). These days, as back then, he keeps alive early 20th century standards like “Teddy Bears’ Picnic”, “St. James Infirmary”, and “Big Rock Candy Mountain” along with lesser-known chestnuts like “Go Wash an Elephant (If You Want to Do Something Big)” and his own creations in the same spirit, like his live, showboat number, “Palindromes” (“Tarzan raised a Desi Arnaz rat”; “Ho hum, a hymn is in my ham. Uh oh”; etc.)

He plays his songbook of old-timey songs with the dexterity of an, erm, old-timer (he plays what he calls “stunt guitar” and what others have termed “extraordinary”). No longer “knee-high to a tootsie-wootsie” (as he would say), he’s officially grown into his geezer status. Some date Gramps’ beginnings on the Seattle music scene as far back as the early ’60s. “Before that, I was in Texas by way of Arkansas by way of Alabama,” he told Patrick Ferris in an interview reprinted on Gramps’ website. And though you might be inclined to file Gramps under roots—blues and folk in particular—he’s also found a niche among the rock crowd as a street performer and opening act. I recollect seeing him on every trip I’ve ever taken to Seattle that involved entering a nightclub. I asked my friend, Seattle-based author and journalist Charles R. Cross, for the hometown perspective on Baby Gramps: “He is a Seattle institution, along the lines of the Space Needle, Pioneer Square, and the Pike Place Market.”

Like his music, Gramps hasn’t changed much over the years (though his beard’s finally gone grey). Cross described Gramps’ outer appearance as “pre-War.” Yes, and there is also something about this particular bearded and be-hatted look that is indigenous to the Pacific Northwest. I’ve always called it the “Miner 49er”, though a recently departed old-timer I know nailed it when she called the style “Sourdough.” I think I’ll stick with that from now on (though I didn’t run it by Baby Gramps).

Scribbling (his word for playing) his tunes on a beat up National steel guitar, Gramps claims to have a collection of over 200 oddball instruments, from cigar box fiddles to musical saws—things he picks up while junking, one of his favorite pastimes—and things that I’ve only ever seen in vintage cartoons. That old animation has been one of Gramps’ sources of inspiration, ever since he discovered he could sing like Popeye, you know, back when he was “knee high from a tootsie-wootsie.” Indeed, he can replicate the sound of the spinach-fancying sailor, but it’s been said his voice also bears shades of Uncle Dave Macon, the throat singers of Tuva, and art rock’s own Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart). In the liner notes to the Gramps disc Same Ol’ Timeously—Vocalisthenics and Stunt Guitar, the recording he resisted making for 35 years (”I did record on 78 RPM records, I even made cylinder recordings. I still have not made a commercial studio album,” he says), Baby Gramps champion Glenn Howard explains, “Gramps does amazing tricks with timing, timbre, tempo, and pitch that no one can hope to imitate, and reinvents himself nightly, never performing a song the same way twice.” Howard calls it jazz “because that’s what it is.”

But even after all of my listening, research, and probing, I can’t say I know what to call his style. Nor do I feel like I know that much more about the cagey-codger Baby Gramps than when I started, though I was definitely entertained and educated by his answers to my questions about the things that have inspired him as an artist. (Okay, so maybe I do know a little more than when I started.) The following is a transcript of an email exchange that occurred between the middle of May and June of this year. I edited a few bits for brevity and have occasionally bracketed material to clarify some of Gramps’ old world references.