The River Provides is a Rhode Island-based band that plays bluesy, alternative-funk and jam fusion style music.
Singer/guitarist Ben Drumm speaks about the band’s origins, its mission and recording efforts.
Drumm says the band was formed at Kenyon’s Grist Mill, which has been owned by his family since 1971. The current site of the grist mill dates to 1886, but the company has been grinding meals and flours continuously since 1696.
Here is a conversation with Drumm. The full interview can be found here.
The River Provides got its name after several conversations singer-songwriter Ben Drumm had with keyboardist Alex Agudelo.
“Alex had been telling me this story for years about his cousins who lived up in New Hampshire,” Drumm says. “And there was this old Native American man who came into town and he would order breakfast and they’d give him his bill and he would leave a gold nugget on the table.
“They would ask him, ‘Old Native American man, where do you get your gold?’ And he would just say, ‘The river provides.’”
The mill is located in Usquepaug Village. Drumm’s family runs the mill and grinds corn, and workers also sift, mix and package it. The site also has a retail store, where customers visit during the summer months.
Drumm says he finds the hum of activity at the mill and on the Queen River an inspiration.
“When I’m in here and all the machinery running and the waterfall is thundering outside, all those sort of like vibrations and rhythms, they all inspire me to, to write the music that I do and, and play guitar the way I do.,” he says.
Drumm says the band began practicing across the street from the mill in a little office trailer on a hill.
“Eventually we graduated up to the attic of our little outbuilding here that we called Charlie Wamsley’s House,” he says, before the group moved to a more permanent studio in West Warwick.
More control and space were a godsend.
“What that meant was we were able to be able to do videos for our own band, record our own band, and we started bringing our friends’ bands in and what that turned into was bringing in their friends’ bands,” Drumm says. “And slowly that became sort of a, a community place where people would come and we were doing everything we could to, to sort of build each other up and, and people were helping us and, and trading favors and, and we were just trying to make sure that everybody was able to use this beautiful spot and perform under the lights.
“There’s really nothing like that grassroots feeling of building something together and having it become bigger than yourself.”
