Jesse James: From Small-Town Roots to Seattle's Blues Scene
Photos provided by Jesse James
By Emma Schwichtenberg
Jesse James' musical journey began in the quiet, small town of Eastern Washington, where he grew up. His mother, who had moved from California, was always searching for something new to engage with, and she found her passion in live music. Local bands would occasionally pass through town, touring from Seattle to BOMA, and his mom started attending these shows. Before long, she began taking young James along, and from the moment he set foot in a live music venue, something clicked. By the age of five or six, he was already fixated on one idea: he was going to be a musician, and the guitar would be his instrument.
As James got older, his commitment to music only intensified. At eight years old, he received his first guitar for Christmas, and from then on, he was consumed by the dream of performing live. Watching musicians on stage ignited a fire in him—he didn’t just want to play music, he wanted to be the one commanding the spotlight. However, growing up in a small town with little access to formal music training, James had to figure it out on his own. Without a guitar teacher or anyone to guide him, he became a self-taught musician, relying on books and trial and error. Despite struggling to learn songs note for note, he found a unique way forward—by writing his own music. By the end of his first year of playing, he was already composing his own songs, a creative path born out of necessity, since he couldn’t quite get the hang of memorizing others’ tunes. It was this raw determination and self-reliance that laid the foundation for his future in music.
Converge Music spoke with James about his musical journey, influences, creative process, and upcoming projects, including the long-awaited release of his new album Checkin the Mic.
How did you teach yourself music?
I didn’t really have a teacher, except off and on. I grew up in Eastern Washington, so every now and then, someone in town would offer lessons. I would do that for a couple of months, but it never really lined up with what I was trying to do. For example, I would take a few months of classical guitar lessons and think, “No, I watch blues bands and write blues songs. I have no idea what this is.” I also took lessons from a jazz guitarist for a few months, but I wish I had paid more attention. At the time, I was 12 or 13, in middle school, and just wasn’t interested. Now, the more music I play, the more I wish I had paid attention. This guy was trying to teach me music theory and fancy chords, and now I’m like, "Why wasn’t I paying attention back then?"
When you were younger, you mentioned that blues and similar music really inspired you, especially seeing bands live. What kind of music did you listen to when you were just hanging out at home?
A lot of it comes from your parents, right? So my mom was a huge classic rock fan, and my dad was more into country and bands like The Eagles. That’s the kind of music I grew up listening to, but especially in the '90s and early 2000s in Washington, and particularly in Seattle and Tacoma. There’s still a huge blues community there, and a lot of the same artists I saw when I was a kid are still playing today. I’m still friends with many of them, and after I moved to Seattle, I’m still playing with them or getting to know them. So they were part of a group back then that was traveling around, touring through small towns. I think both my mom and I just kind of stumbled upon the blues, not because it was something we heard on the radio, but because it was the live music that kept coming through our area and moving around, rather than something we’d hear on the radio or whatever.
And it's more personal that way, too.
Yeah, it was live music. I mean, I think if there had been touring country bands always coming through our town, I could have started with that, or jazz bands, or whatever, but it just happened to be blues bands. But blues is definitely a style of music that really draws you in. It's historically significant and has always had that tradition of forming a community and bringing people together, and I think that's really important.
When you first started learning guitar, did you immediately try to play blues music, or did you start with something else before transitioning into that?
No, I definitely just started out trying to play blues. I think that was a great way to start, especially for songwriting, because it’s really basic and formulaic. When you’re eight or nine years old, you can kind of build up from there. You start with songs like "I woke up this morning" or "My baby left me," and then you can experiment from there. Instead of diving into some avant-garde, experimental phase, you practice the basics first. At least in my personal experience, as I got older, I just started going off in my own direction.
Who were some of the artists you listened to that were from Seattle or the area, and that you’ve met now? Who impacted you when you were younger?
So, like, the biggest one and the first band I ever saw was a band called Junkyard Jane, from Tacoma. The main leaders of that band, Billy Stoops and Leanne Trevalyan, are still in Tacoma and still performing. I met with Billy just last week. He was literally the first guitar player I ever saw, and now we’re good friends. He also runs a couple of festivals in Eastern Washington and books bands for them. He’s had my band perform there, so that’s been a really cool experience—not just from a nostalgic point of view, but also getting to be friends with someone I met and saw perform. But yeah, they’re definitely one of the big ones. Junkyard James was always touring around the state.
When did you first meet Billy? How did that happen?
Um, that was probably around the first time I saw him. My mom, at some point, transitioned from just hiring a babysitter and going out to see bands to taking me and my sister to shows with her. She’s a really friendly, social person, so by the time I first saw that band when I was six, my mom was already friends with the members. They’d kind of know me through her. I’m more on the antisocial side—I don’t normally approach people, but if someone approaches me, I’m happy to talk to them.
It's funny having that dynamic, like they knew you when you were so young and then watched you become a musician next to them.
Yeah, I don’t know. I feel like that’s always crazy. I’ve kind of experienced that myself. I’m not even that old, but there are definitely people I met 10 or 11 years ago when I first moved to Seattle—people who were still in high school or middle school—who are now just leaps and bounds ahead in music, with great careers. It’s crazy to watch that over, like, a 10-year span, let alone 20 or 30 years.
Can you tell me a little bit about your photography?
Yeah, it started—so, just to back up a little bit—I come from a family of farmers. My dad and my grandpa were both farmers, and in a small town, especially with farming, it’s always like you just do everything yourself. You don’t take your car to someone to get it fixed; you fix it yourself. If the roof needs fixing, you do it yourself. So, when I approach something, I often try to do it myself first and see if I can. Of course, sometimes I give up and realize I need to hire a professional, but that’s how I approached photography and videography too. I thought, "Well, I need band photos and promo shots, so instead of hiring someone, what if I get a camera and try to take the photos myself?" Then I thought, "I’d love to make YouTube videos for my band, so I’ll get a video camera and start making videos." That’s where it all started.
And then, once you do that for a while, especially in music, which is always community-oriented, it’s only a matter of time before your buddy in a band says, "Hey, can you take photos for my band?" or "Can you do this or that?" So, it expanded from doing DIY photos for my own band to doing it for other people.
I’m curious how being behind the lens has influenced your music journey, because performing on stage and working behind the camera are two different things, but they seem to play off each other. Has it opened any new doors for you or introduced you to new people?
It has. It's hard to say specifically, but yeah, it definitely has been fun to expand in that way. The truth is, I’m just a total nerd. Whether it's guitars, amps, pedal boards, or cameras, I’m a very technical person, and I really enjoy doing technical stuff like that. The more I do, the more fun it becomes for me.
Okay, so we know about your start in music, but where are you now? What are you currently working on?
I’m very busy right now. I decided to go to U-Dub and move to Seattle because when I was looking at different universities after graduating, I realized Seattle would be the best place for me to pursue music. So, I moved here and gave it a shot. At first, I didn’t really know what I was doing, and it kind of petered off after a couple of years. There was a time when I was doing very little music, maybe playing a couple of shows a year. Then, around 2016 or 2017, things started picking up, and suddenly I was playing all the time—two or three shows a week, sometimes 100 shows a year, right up until COVID hit. After that, I went back to not playing for a while.
The last couple of years have been tough, but this year has been better. I’ve been doing more shows with my bands, and I was recommended to play in a couple of country bands. So now I’ve been super busy. I have my own project and band, which I’ve had for 13 years now. I also became the main guitar player for a guy from Tacoma, Cody Bartels, just playing lead guitar for him. I also joined a band called Saltwater Sky, another country artist from the South End. It’s been crazy, and I think I’ll end up doing more than 100 shows this year again.
Tell me about your band. I always like to start with how the name came to be.
Yeah, um, I tried to have a band for a few years when I was in high school, and we had some pretty weird names. One of the names that a guy and I came up with in middle school was “That’s Unfortunate.” We thought it would be funny, like, "Oh, what band is playing tonight?" "Oh, that’s unfortunate." But that went nowhere. Then I met some friends here in Seattle, and we’d commute back and forth to do shows. I’d come over to Seattle, or they’d come to Eastern Washington to do shows with me. This was back when we were in high school, so I’d even take the Greyhound bus over here to do shows because we weren’t exactly thriving.
I have no idea who came up with the name "Jesse James and the Mob," but it was originally supposed to be MOB, as an acronym for "Men of Black." We’d always wear black suits and try to pull off a Blues Brothers kind of vibe, like, "Yeah, we’re dressed in black, and we do blues music." So, MOB stood for "Men of Black." But then that started to feel kind of weird, so we decided to drop the acronym and just go with "Jesse James and the Mob." It didn’t have to mean anything.
Do you still do songwriting? What's your process?
Songwriting always starts with one thing, and then everything else builds from there. But what it starts with is always completely random. For me, it's always obvious which part started the song. Some songs begin with a melody or a guitar riff that sounds awesome, and then the rest of the song—the chord changes, the lyrics, everything—builds from that. Other songs start with cool chord changes, and then I work out lyrics to fit. The third option is when I have a good idea for lyrics, and then I have to figure out what chords and melody go with it.
I think it’s interesting—I'm not sure if it’s obvious to anyone else, but I think you can listen to the song and tell which element came first. For example, if the chord changes are the standout feature of the song, it probably started with the music, and if it's really lyric-heavy, it was probably lyrics first, with everything else as the background.
I think it's interesting how the artist's or musician's ear picks up on things that other people wouldn't know to look out for, and sometimes people don't even know to listen for them at all. But I love hearing about other people's creative processes.
We have a bunch of songs that we used to do a lot, where we would just improvise them on stage. It's funny because the blues music scene, and to some extent the country scene too, has this built-in dynamic of dive bars with long, four-hour shows. You’re playing from, like, 9 p.m. to 1 a.m., which used to be the standard before COVID. Now, it’s more like 8 p.m. to midnight, but you're still there for four hours. And they don’t care if you play originals or covers, it’s just 45 minutes, take a break, 45 minutes, take another break, and you’re there for the long haul.
Some of my friends used to make fun of me because I would always take the gigs that no one else wanted. They’d say, “You’re the king of these dive bar gigs.” But I just wanted to be playing, so I’d take the shows that nobody else wanted. People would complain, like, "That place sucks, nobody ever shows up, the food’s bad," but I was like, "Give it to me. I’ll take it."
We’d play from 9 to 1, and by 10 or 11, there would be almost no one there—just a couple of regulars at the bar and the bartender. At that point, it was just me and my friends having a jam session or goofing off. It kind of sucks to admit, because we were getting paid, but when the crowd leaves and you have to keep playing, what else can you do?
So, we’d just start jamming, and I’d step up to the mic and make stuff up. If it worked, we’d keep going; if it didn’t, we’d forget about it by the next day. But if it sounded good, we’d try to iron out the details, like adding a bridge or working on the lyrics. Some of those songs were totally improvised on stage.
Those are usually everyone's favorites.
What do you do outside of music?
I work as an automotive mechanic. That's my day job.
It kind of goes back to what you said about growing up—if something’s broken, you have to learn to fix it.
Yeah, exactly. It started as a summer job in college, and then I graduated from UW in 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic. I decided to just stick with the job I already had, and I’m still doing that.
Can you share any upcoming projects that you're really excited about and want us to feature at the end of the article?
Yeah, definitely. So we have a bunch of original music. We went into the studio in December of 2019 and recorded a bunch of songs for an album. Then in the spring of 2020, COVID hit, and everything stopped. We lost touch with the guy at the studio, and he ended up losing the hard drive with all the music on it. But he finally found it again. So this summer, almost five years later, we actually got around to having it mixed and mastered. It’s all the same songs we recorded back then, but we’re really proud of it because it sounds great, and it’s all original music.
We’re doing an album release at the Central Saloon in Pioneer Square on January 16. It’s going to be available on vinyl, CD, or whatever format you prefer. The opener is Mason Turner, also from Seattle, from Fremont. He’s one of the kids I mentioned earlier that I met when I first moved to Seattle when he was 13 and playing in a band with his friends. It’s cool to see him grow and have a full career in music. So it’s like bringing things full circle, with him opening the release show. The album is called Checkin the Mic, which is the name of one of the songs. It’s the most iconic song for us.
For more, find James on Instagram @jessejamesmob.
