Selwyn Birchwood Has an Advanced Degree in the Blues

Selwyn Birchwood MBA ’12 knew his destiny wasn’t to work at an AT&T store. He was born to sing the blues and he knew it. But several years and a couple of hundred gigs after getting an undergraduate degree in marketing from UCF, he was still selling cellphones by day. “I felt trapped,” recalls Birchwood, 37, of his travails from a decade ago. “I had no idea if a career in music would work out for me, but I knew that I hated my job. I had bills to pay, so I decided to go back to school.”

The long, sometimes lonesome road from obscurity to resounding success in the music business started with a fateful show in Orlando and was kickstarted by a fruitful detour into UT’s MBA program that provided invaluable training for about 95% of his job duties as a modern-day bluesman. Along the way, a global pandemic put him out of business and then forced him to reinvent himself.

Long before there were bills to pay or a pandemic to worry about, Birchwood was just a curious kid who liked Jimi Hendrix and irritated his high school friends with his eclectic musical tastes. The summer he turned 17, he went to Orlando’s House of Blues to see Buddy Guy play to investigate why Hendrix listed Guy as one of his influences.

Birchwood had been playing guitar for four years at that point and had been to plenty of concerts, but Guy’s energy and soulful delivery were unlike anything he’d heard before. “I knew that was what I wanted to do,” he says of the show. “It was weird because I saw what my life plan was at that moment.”

Fast forward two years to 2004, when a neighbor gave Birchwood an album, Blue Diamond, by Sonny Rhodes, a well-regarded blues performer the neighbor knew. On the album, Rhodes crooned, “the blues is my religion, seven days a week,” and soon it was too for young Birchwood. It took him six months to get an audition with Rhodes that lasted half a song. Rhodes interrupted him to ask if he had a passport and when he replied that he did, Birchwood was hired to go on tour with him and his band.

“My parents were anxious about where we were traveling, but they also knew they weren’t going to be able to steer me away from it because that’s what I wanted to do,” he says.

The first show with Rhodes’ band was in Calgary, a mere 86-hour drive roundtrip. But Rhodes didn’t have to ask twice. “That (drive) shows the determination I have to make it in this career,” Birchwood recalls. One show led to the next and the next. He was slowly building a name for himself, playing gigs while continuing his education. But the money wasn’t enough to quit the cellphone job he hated in his early post-collegiate years. The move to get an MBA in January 2012 was a Hail Mary, but he wasn’t abandoning his dreams; he was taking an unorthodox path to the big stage.

“I was living pretty poor and having to support myself by getting more shows because that was my only source of income,” he says. “I was living very lean in those (UT) days, living on a dream of music.”

Working to complete 18 months’ worth of coursework in a year while crisscrossing the country to play gigs was exhausting but also great training for what was to come. “It was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done,” he says. “I had to learn how to get organized and compartmentalize my work because there’s always something that needs to be done.”

Birchwood says that performing on stage is just 5% of his job. The MBA helped him with the other 95%, which includes functioning as a band manager, tour manager, accountant, merchandiser, social media person and “everything else you can imagine.” He’s proud of his degree and has the letters “MBA” listed after his name on his email signature line.

“People will take you as far as they can if they think they can get over on you,” he explains. “I put it in my emails because I want people to know they’re not dealing with a dummy.”

Is he the only noteworthy blues artist with an MBA? That’s a question the Orlando native gets often and doesn’t particularly like. “It’s definitely not the norm,” he concedes. “Every interview I do, that seems to be the first question, and its taken a while for me not to take it personally. People are surprised that I can read.”

The day Birchwood graduated from UT started with a hair malfunction, but it turned out to be one of the most important days of his life. He couldn’t fit his signature afro under his graduation cap and had to get corn rows for the occasion. Then in the evening, he played a gig that was a regional qualifier for a competition called the International Blues Challenge. He won, and three months later, at the finals in Tennessee, he placed first out of more than 200 bands from around the world and also earned the Albert King Guitarist of the Year award.

“Luckily, I never had to apply for any jobs after that,” Birchwood recalls. “People noticed me.”

The Selwyn Birchwood Band, first established in 2010, hit the road full force in 2013, routinely driving 15 hours a day and sleeping in their Sprinter van between gigs. Birchwood gets carsick unless he’s driving, so he’s not only the band’s frontman but also its chauffeur, once driving the band to 23 gigs in 25 days. “They say you have to pay your dues; well, I paid my dues and more,” Birchwood says with a laugh.

The hard work and long miles on the road paid off. Bruce Iglauer, the founder of Alligator Records, one of the world’s most prestigious blues record labels, “discovered” Birchwood and offered him a record deal.  “If I wasn’t such a believer, I would say it was luck,” Birchwood says.

The band’s first record on Alligator (Birchwood’s first album, FL Boy , was self-released in 2011) Don’t Call No Ambulance (2014) earned rave reviews in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal and other publications, and won the Living Blues Award and the Blues Music Award for Best New Artist Debut. The band’s follow-up album, Pick Your Poison (2017), was another critically acclaimed effort. A Blues Rock Review critic gushed, “extraordinary Selwyn Birchwood is among the new young stars of the modern blues…Selwyn has the skills to keep the blues genre alive.”

Birchwood says what he calls his “electric swamp funkin blues” are “not your grandfather’s sort of blues” where the themes focus mostly on straying girlfriends and such. He sometimes tackles heavy topics like substance abuse, religion and police brutality, but mixes it up with irreverent tracks like “I Got Drunk, Laid and Stoned,” “My Whiskey Loves My Ex” and “Corporate Drone,” among others.

“You won’t fall asleep or be bored at our shows,” he says. “It’s gonna be loud, it’s gonna be in your face and it’s gonna move you.”

Nearly 20 years to the day after that fateful show at the House of Blues in Orlando when he first saw Buddy Guy, Birchwood returned to the venue to play with his hero in August. “It was crazy, it felt like things came full circle,” he says.

Birchwood says that for a kid who played music no one wanted to hear in high school, he’s already achieved more than he dreamed was possible.  He now must “change his goalposts to come up with different dreams.” The blues MBA says he wants to keep writing music, playing live shows and improving his craft. “Every day I get to do this is a blessing, so I’m not sure where to go from here. If I was a Make a Wish Foundation kid, I don’t know what I’d ask for because I’m already doing exactly what I want to be doing.”

THE PANDEMIC BLUES

Keeping the blues alive in the streaming era has long been a challenge, but the pandemic and its resulting restrictions wreaked havoc on working musicians who rely upon live shows for nearly all of their income. “I was pretty much put out of a job for 18 months,” Birchwood recalls. “But I’m not the type of person to sit around and feel sorry for myself and not hustle. I had nothing but time to figure things out.”

And figure things out he did, learning new software and editing tools that allowed him to livestream performances from his home for tips. Did it work? “Success was a very different thing in 2020 compared to any other time,” he says. “I didn’t get COVID, I’m still here and my bills were paid.”

Birchwood says Floridians may have been more likely to attend live performances than people in other parts of the country, but it still wasn’t easy. Nevertheless, things started to pick up in 2021, particularly after the release of the band’s most recent album, Living in a Burning House. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard and iTunes blues music charts, and the single, “I’d Climb Mountains,” earned him his second Blues Music Award for Song of the Year.

Returning to the touring lifestyle he lived before the pandemic has mostly been a blessing. But the nomadic lifestyle can be exhausting and hard on relationships, he says. Birchwood lives in Seminole Heights with his dog, Gibson, a Yorkshire terrier he sometimes takes on tour and jokingly calls his manager. Despite the rigors of the road, he’s proud that his music has taken him to 19 countries, including memorable gigs in Nice, France, where he played in a century-old amphitheater in front of 15,000 fans, and at the Koktebel Jazz Festival in Odesa, Ukraine, before the pandemic and the war.