Willy Gantrim:
A Man with No Name, A Man with No Land
Abraham Gavia-Frausto gave himself a new name around the time he was 18. Being really into 1920s-30s blues and folk music in his teenage years, and trying to get away from himself—and the inherited religious weight of a name like Abraham—he borrowed one from his favorite singer, Blind Willie McTell. He has been Willy Gantrim since.
At the end of last year, I received a personal message from Little Death, inviting me to a show at Bar Redux, featuring Big Leather, Ronnie, and Little Death; with band members Zachary Thomas on guitar, Liam Joyce on drums, and Willy on vocals and acoustic guitar.
The invitation came on a night I felt particularly dispossessed, sitting with the heavy reality that it was New Orleans’ turn to be terrorized by Bovino and his ICE Brown Shirts. Every day was urgent—I would wake up hypervigilant and scroll the latest news, who’s been captured, how far the heretical right has taken abduction, harm, and death to brown people and their allies, and the goings-on at ICE detentions. The beginning of Kristi Noem’s ICE raids felt surreal and was somehow culturally overshadowed by the death of Charlie Kirk.
A night out to see a new band at a venue I haven’t been to seemed like the right move for my nervous system, and to alchemize helplessness into creativity. It wasn’t radical, but aside from throwing bricks and going to jail, it was all I had. I found solace in another Latino, who felt the same devastation and urgency in the war launched against immigrants. His microphone stand sported a Palestinian flag alongside a Mexican one. His voice was laced with the fatigue of a revolutionary-minded artist who continues to show up even when it feels like things don’t seem to change.
Little Death echoes the spirit of rock‘n’roll, which acts as a vessel for Willy’s woeful ballads—songs of Texas (his home), New Orleans, the 12 years he spent surviving in New York, and the love he had and lost in the times between.
In 2004, Willy moved to New York after reading Bob Dylan’s autobiography. He hopped on a Greyhound bus with $500 in his pocket and the desire to become a folk musician. At the time, there weren’t any smartphones. He had printed out maps from AOL and found a hostel while he figured out how he would make this new city his home. It was a time when there were telephone booths on most street corners with illegal apartment listings renting out rooms of families looking to make extra income.
He called a number in one of those booths, and on the other side of the line was a Dominican cab driver and his family with a room available in Washington Heights. From there, he regularly went to Washington Square with his guitar, remembering it was a folk hot spot in the 1960s, and played. Eventually, he found another like-minded folk singer, Farrell Foster, and started a show on MacDougal Street in the Thai restaurant Village Ma, which they called Roots n’ Ruckus, named as a nod to Robert Johnson’s “Roots ’n’ Blues.” Though Willy is here in New Orleans, Roots n’ Ruckus lives on, two decades strong.
With any cool metropolitan city comes the wave of gentrification that outprices people who make the city worth going to in the first place. Willy was forced to move and ended up back in New Orleans—not quite home, but with enough familiar faces to find himself amongst again.
While he has people he knows and cares for in the New Orleans music scene, Gantrim still feels estranged in the city, and in his origins. He tries not to be, but feels the social aspect of the music scene here has a shallow side to it. He also feels cultural tension as a Mexican American in a predominantly white music scene: “There are definitely not a lot of Mexican Americans here, and I’ve come to accept that whoever I end up meeting will probably not understand my perspective fully—but then again, we’re all human. We all have our struggles.”
He’s thought about going back to Abraham after a period of feeling “phony,” and wanted to honor his heritage. But neither seems capable of holding who he is. Willy belongs to the musician, Abraham to the family and culture that made him. Caught somewhere between the two he describes himself as “a man with no land.”
Being Honduran American, I recognized the tension not only in identity but also in the way I was taught to move in the world. Raised by people from another country, family and social values feel much more interpersonal (if not a little co-dependent), but also richly enmeshed because community was the home and family. When your ancestral survival has relied on collective bravery through political destabilization, it is incredibly hard to adjust to the extreme individualism of American culture—especially when that same cold detachment is mirrored in our local scene.
We agreed that depth is hard to find in an environment where coolness and detachment are socially rewarded. “It’s hard to break past the surface music scene conversation,” he said. “I feel like the second you mention Palestine, people get a scared look in their eyes.”
Perhaps what Willy senses as political hesitation might actually be a deeper anxiety about vulnerability. New Orleans communities have frequently shown fierce solidarity with Palestine, but in a localized creative space built on social capital, the real terror is misalignment. People fear that revealing the wrong part of themselves, or stepping even slightly outside of the accepted social circle, will cost them their hard-won belonging.
Willy may never answer the question of home—not in a city or in a name—but he never stops asking it in his songs. The only thing more powerful than belonging is exile, whether cast or chosen. Something nutritionally rich can be found in isolation in the life of a wanderer. Unheard songs have to travel until they find the right ears and create a new home that is neither here nor there.
For more info, check out littledeathsounds.bandcamp.com/ and willygantrim.bandcamp.com/album/alone-adrift.
Photo by John Stephens
