Tag: Appalachia

This Music Festival’s Goal Is Healing Appalachia, From the Inside Out (Part 2 of 2)

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

This weekend, September 21, 22, and 23, at the West Virginia State Fairgrounds in Lewisburg, West Virginia, ascendant, down home country star Tyler Childers and his cohort will gather for an event begun in 2018 called Healing Appalachia. The benefit festival, put on by West Virginia based non-profit Hope in the Hills, will include performances by some of the biggest and buzziest names in American roots music: Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit, Trey Anastasio Band, Marcus King, Umphrey’s McGee, Amythyst Kiah and many more.

Healing Appalachia is just one of many such community-led, collective efforts born from within the region in recent years that is working towards effecting positive change while offering local, ground-up solutions to big, systemic problems. Their social media and website put it elegantly and succinctly: Their vision is a prosperous Appalachia, free from addiction. The opioid crisis has hit Appalachia, especially West Virginia and Childers’ home state of Kentucky, incredibly hard. When 26 people overdosed on one day in Huntington, West Virginia, in 2016, the mission for Hope in the Hills and Healing Appalachia was born.

At the time, Childers and his hardscrabble team were still climbing the music industry ladder, building connections and community that would eventually grow and blossom into the multi-day event Healing Appalachia has become today. Childers’ friend and manager, Ian Thornton – who founded WhizzbangBAM, the booking and management company that represents Childers – together with festival program director Charlie Hatcher, Hope in the Hills board president Dave Lavender, and others took that tragic day in Huntington and turned it into an accretion point, around which they gathered and took action. Now, the festival has a local, annual economic impact approaching $3 million while raising thousands of dollars to be distributed to local, on-the-ground organizations and non-profits that specialize in addiction programs, recovery, support, and healing for this long-oppressed region of the world.

We spoke to Ian Thornton and Dave Lavender for a two-part interview preview of Healing Appalachia, that dives into the work of Hope in the Hills and explores this grassroots music event’s community-first mission, that hopes to heal these music-steeped, underestimated communities in Appalachia from the inside out. Read our conversation with Dave Lavender below, read our conversation with Ian Thornton here.

Unable to attend the festival this weekend? You can donate to support the cause here.

Can you talk a bit about the impetus or inspirations for Healing Appalachia?

Dave Lavender: Hope in the Hills, our non-profit, was started in 2017, and then the first Healing Appalachia was held in 2018 as it took a minute for Ian Thornton, Keebie Gilkerson and Charlie Hatcher, and the other OG board members to get the all-volunteer non-profit going.

The birth of the group is rooted in the events of 2016 – two historic things happened that year. In June 2016, central West Virginia got record flooding that killed 23 people. Shortly thereafter, the Huntington music scene, which was really getting built-up in a mighty way with touring bands, came together and raised more money in one night at the V Club than some big corporate fundraisers had in a couple weeks. I think all of us there saw a ragtag bunch of musicians could really make a difference banding together. Interestingly, Tyler Childers and the Food Stamps’ first New York City trip was that August as well, for a West Virginia flood fundraiser organized by our friend, Michael Cerveris, the two-time Tony winner from Huntington.

As that was happening in August 2016, Huntington, West Virginia, hit the world’s headline news with 26 overdose calls within four hours. It might have been a shock to the world, but we were all living around it in West Virginia so Ian, Tyler and Charlie Hatcher, Healing’s co-founder and show producer, knew how bad it was, and knew it was time to project the “bat signal” in the air, and unite their super friends in music to gather again and put on a show to help out the boots-on-the-ground folks overwhelmed and trying to assist in this opioid crisis.

One thing that struck me about the organization and the event is how y’all are from the region and building support systems, resources and pathways for folks from within the region – can you talk about the importance of mutual aid and community to the org and also the event?

DL: Everyone in the world knows the West Virginia theme song is “Country Roads,” but I would say the West Virginia and Appalachian motto is a song from Slab Fork, West Virginia-native Bill Withers. He wrote “Lean on Me” about being raised in the coal camp where you rely on your neighbors. Being from Appalachia, we know help is not on the way and that we are also better and stronger together.

For Hope in the Hills as a granting organization, we try to stay acutely aware of the ever-changing recovery ecosystem and fill the gaps where we can. For instance, I think the general public thinks of the opioid crisis as, “That’s the guy with the backpack at the recovery house.” Yes, true. But, the opioid crisis has created deep and wide fall-out – from historic numbers of kids in foster care (addressed by Barbara Kingsolver in her latest Pulitzer-Prize winning book, Demon Copperhead), to an overloaded prison system with non-violent drug offenders to many governments not wanting to fund harm reduction – even though they know through countless studies that it saves lives. Without harm reduction, communities are likely to get horrific spikes in hepatitis and HIV.

We try to put what funds we have into the gaps to provide a little help, but to also let folks know through our socials about some of these amazing programs happening across the region with things like camps for kids in trauma, and innovative recovery-work programs.

As for the event, I think that “Lean on Me” spirit is really palpable everywhere you look at Healing Appalachia. We’ve modeled ourselves in the spirit of using music to create social change, after Farm Aid. Healing is shining a light on a crisis that many choose to ignore. We’re highlighting amazing people who help daily to deal with that crisis. We’re inspiring attendees through the music, testimonials from the stage, and the dozens of service providers there, to go forth and be the change when they get home from the concert, wherever home is. And that home is widespread – last year we had folks from 38 states and 3 countries.

The message I hope the casual music fan receives in their heart and acts upon from Healing Appalachia is that the opioid crisis is not “us and them,” it’s just us. Last year, we lost more than 109,000 in the United States to overdose. Music is a powerful vehicle for conveying with love that message of empathy. Even if you haven’t lost someone personally to overdose, we lost Prince, Tom Petty, Whitney Houston, and a long list of beloved musicians to opioid overdoses. So I hope that at the very least the casual music fan who comes just to see some amazing bands, goes back home with an improved empathy muscle that allows them to lay down the proverbial stones and jokes and judgment they were set to throw at someone suffering from Substance Use Disorder and in active addiction.

For the recovery service groups coming to Healing – and this year we will have more than 40 from 13 states – I want them to know, that as Mavis Staples sings, “You’re Not Alone.”

That they hopefully will meet folks from organizations like them who are in the trenches everyday, doing the hard, tedious and often-unsung work of helping someone along their journey, and that they may pick up some best practices, some group to ally with, and some friends from across Appalachia who know their struggles and can be an encourager.

Do you have a favorite anecdote or story about a partner organization or individual or program that was particularly impactful, or a perfect representation of why you do what you do?

DL: At Healing Appalachia last year, Kenney Matthews, the ONEBox coordinator for Drug Intervention Institute was one of our main speakers. I’m typically running around taking care of a lot of back-end stuff at the fest, but I was out there with him before he went out. He was really nervous, but I hugged him and told him he was going to crush it. He did, and threw down this beautiful line about “the opposite of addiction is connection.” It really was electric, so real and so true. I was talking with my wife, Toril, after Healing and Kenney – who spent 15 years in prison – told her about running into a prison guard who knew him on the inside at the festival. The guard tells Kenney he never did think he would change and that he was really proud of him, and they both had a moment of healing at Healing. We’ve had LOTS of moments in doing this work and the fest is full of them, but I loved hearing both sides of Kenney’s story and its impact to spread hope.

How do you – either individually or as a group – see music and the arts (especially arts with regional ties, like folk and country music and folk arts) as part of these regional solutions to regional problems?

DL: In Appalachia, storytelling and music are so grapevine-wrapped in who we are, how we think, what we do, so connecting and teaming up with those artists who are using their music with intent and purpose is what we want to do.

As a group, Hope in the Hills, we’ve been building out a Music Is Healing program that has active music therapy programs in East Tennessee with Cecilia Wright (who plays cello with Senora May and who has her own band), and in Eastern Kentucky at ARC and West Virginia with Huntington-based music therapist Margaret Moore (a multi-instrumentalist folk artist who also teaches the Wernick Method bluegrass jams). She also happens to be an expert in forward facing trauma.

The inspiring thing is we are bringing folks like Cecilia and Margaret – with that intersectionality of professional musicianship and therapy – to team up with other regional artists of all genres and do sessions not only at drop-in centers and recovery houses but also at regular music festivals to spread the fact that music is therapy and can be tapped into to get on a higher spiritual plateau.

At Addiction Recovery Care (ARC) Centers in Eastern Kentucky, Margaret gets to work with world-class bluegrass artists Don and John Rigsby, long-time nationally-touring bluegrass artists who are sharing their music to inspire folks on their recovery journey. Through ARC, Don’s built out a studio in Lawrence County, Kentucky, where he is teaching some of the ARC guys the recording industry. Along those career pathway lines, at Recovery Points in West Virginia, Hope in the Hills (Dave Johnson and Charlie Hatcher) have been working with folks there who have in years past helped build Healing’s stages and do stage-hand and festival security work, get paid for additional festival work as a career pathway build-out as an employment option.

Hope in the Hills is also helping fund the WVU School of Medicine’s music therapy program at the opioid unit. We’re also contributing to the inspiring Troublesome Creek Stringed Instruments program with Doug Naselrod in Eastern Kentucky, where Doug is doing music therapy while also carving out recovery-to-work opportunities for his world-class luthier shop making traditional music instruments.

Specifically for Healing, we’ve leveraged the fact that we have a large audience to help train them on using Naloxone. Last year (the first year back after two years off because of COVID), we teamed up with the WV Drug Intervention Institute to have a Naloxone training tent that really broke down the stigmas of Naloxone with a festival spirit. Our buddy Joe Murphy got Gibson Gives involved and we loaded up swag bags with Tyler CDs, water bottles from Healing, and then additional swag from other artists.

Are there particular bands/artists/acts on the lineup this year you’re especially excited about?

DL: Gotta give crazy props to Charlie Hatcher and Ian Thornton for pulling aces and connections to reel in an insanely good lineup that includes 24 national acts. This is only our fourth Healing Appalachia, so to have Marcus King, Umphrey’s McGee, and Warren Haynes and Gov’t Mule back-to-back-to-back – would be the envy of jam band festival in the world! Truly a guitar lover’s feast on Friday. And opening act Joslyn and the Sweet Compression is one of my favorite R&B bands out there.

I’m really knocked out that 49 Winchester (who’s up for Americana Group of the Year) are throwing down for two nights in a row hosting our Late Night Jam with some killer bands and songwriters on those bills.

As far as really impactful musicians and people in that recovery space, we feel beyond blessed to have Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit on Thursday as the headliner and then Trey Anastasio and Classic TAB on Saturday headlining with festival co-founder Tyler Childers and The Food Stamps. Isbell, who was on a recovery panel at SXSW 2022 with our good friend Jan Rader, has put in the hard work to become increasingly more comfortable and sure-footed in that space and has Weather Vanes fresh out — the album to prove it. That’s been inspiring to watch.

We’re over the moon to have Trey (who is 15 years in recovery) with us and bringing Classic TAB, after a full summer of Phish shows, and with the great news that his 40-bed recovery center Divided Sky Foundation is on the way to opening in Ludlow, Vermont.

As a West Virginian, I’m super stoked to get Charles Wesley Godwin back on home turf to do something so real. I think he could grow into the biggest thing out of West Virginia since Brad Paisley. His new 19-song album, “Family Ties,” drops the day after he plays Healing on Thursday.

Margo Price performs at Healing Appalachia 2022.

What does a healed Appalachia look like to you?

DL: The problems are many, but the power of collective hope is growing and change is in the air all over Appalachia.

A healed Appalachia spends its riches and resources on mental health and particularly on children, making sure they are loved, nurtured, yet independent, and have all of the coping skills needed. We are now in an era of record kids in foster care and, as we know, childhood trauma is a thread that runs through folks who suffer with Substance Use Disorder. So first order for a healed Appalachia would be a widespread movement and budget shift to help kids in trauma now.

A healed Appalachia is one that has abundant opportunities within a clear line of sight for everyone in the community. A healed Appalachia gives everyone a seat at the table regardless of their past.

I’m a big fan of Brad Smith, who along with John Chambers and others, helping launch and rebrand West Virginia as the start-up state, where we create a really robust small business economy that allows folks here to dream big and launch those dreams here, like Ian, Tyler and the WhizzbangBAM team have done in Huntington, building out a business that builds spiderwebs of creative economy supporting regional musicians and artists.

A healed Appalachia has ample and good-paying sustainable green-energy jobs that pay a living wage and that brings wealth and health and that are not destructive to our beautiful Appalachian Mountains and to the workers.

A healed Appalachia is one with nature, gardening, exercise and healthy lifestyles that bind us to our beloved mountains and valleys.

A healed Appalachia talks less about politics and more about community and being a good neighbor – as the wonderful new Tim O’Brien song, “Cup of Sugar,” suggests we should do.

A healed Appalachia is full of true forgiveness, grace and second chances for folks, making forgiveness not just an often-trotted out word in a book but something real and necessary to heal our communities.

I think that’s probably enough healing or I’ll have to send you a doctor’s bill… [Laughs]

(Editor’s Note: Read part one, our conversation with Hope in the Hills board vice president and WhizzbangBAM founder Ian Thornton, here.)

Photos by Hunter Way / Impact Media

One to Watch: Sarah Kate Morgan’s Appalachian Echoes

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Sarah Kate Morgan is a talent to behold. Hailing from Sharps Chapel, Tennessee, and currently nested in Hindman, Kentucky, Morgan is deeply rooted in Appalachian soil. She stands as a revered singer-songwriter and preeminent authority on the mountain dulcimer, alchemizing all the beauty, richness and sorrows of those blue, grassy hills into music.

With her resonant voice and grounded lyrics, Morgan’s music breathes new life into the histories of Appalachian music. She has performed and/or recorded with other lauded contemporaries, including Tyler Childers, Alice Gerrard and Erynn Marshall & Carl Jones. Additionally, she has a full life beyond performing; Morgan presently serves as the Hindman Settlement School’s Traditional Arts Education Director, where she preserves and teaches Appalachian folk traditions for local youth and community members.

Her latest album, Old Tunes & Sad Songs, perfectly encapsulates what Morgan does best — weaving together a tapestry of traditional roots music with her own original, breathtaking spins. Every listener will emerge edified by Sarah Kate Morgan’s masterful blending of hope, history, and heart.

The bio on your website mentions that your grandfather built your first dulcimer; I would love to hear more about that. Do you come from a lineage of musicians or music makers?

SKM: My great grandfather was named Jolly Morgan — I love that name. The Morgans were from North Carolina, Transylvania County, and the Sylva area. Jolly played the banjo and owned a general store. My grandfather on my dad’s side built a dulcimer when he retired after working most of his life at the ALCOA steel plant in Maryville, Tennessee. When he retired, he picked up oil painting and played the harmonica a little bit. Another one of the things he dabbled in was woodworking, and he built a dulcimer. It ended up not being the best instrument ever. He actually put it together backwards, so like, the headstock was on the opposite end of the instrument.

So you learned how to play on a backwards dulcimer?

Kinda sorta, it really didn’t affect that much — it just had to be tuned at the opposite end of the instrument.

That’s pretty unique! A lot of your work is about honoring the lineage and all the history of Appalachia. What does that feel like? To be connecting with the people of the mountains or even your own ancestry?

I don’t know. I think I struggle with impostor syndrome a lot. When people ask me, “Oh my gosh, how does it feel to be part of Appalachia?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I’ve just been making music.” There have been so many people who’ve come before me and will come after me that we all are just one little branch of the tree that tells the story of living in this region. And if I can write a couple songs that add to that story in my lifetime, I would consider that an honor.

Do you ever feel like it’s a spiritual undertaking?

I grew up playing music and singing in church — that was sort of my first musical experience, which I think is a pretty common thing if you grew up in the South and you grew up musical… you always got to sing in church. And so, music and my faith and my religion growing up were always very deeply tied together. Now, that kind of shows up in my songwriting, like the form of hymns and old-time gospel music is branded into my musicality. I write songs that often end up feeling like hymns, just the structure of them, even if the content is different. One of my songs on my most recent album, “Heaven In My Mind” speaks to that. I think it feels like a sort of traditional gospel [song], but has a different sort of message.

 I would love to hear more about your songwriting. What’s your creative process like?

Lord if I know! I think the songs just sort of end up. I don’t start with a verse. It’s always all or nothing. I just sit down, and it all kind of dumps out into a finished song. I find that the times I’ve been most inspired to write are often when I’m most busy and most surrounded by people. I wish I could be a pensive, loner musician that floats off into the wilderness and then comes back and writes all these songs. But because a lot of my songs are written about people, I think being around people is what inspires me the most.

One of my favorite songwriters, Matthew Sidney Parsons — he’s from Eastern Kentucky in Carter County. Something that he said years ago that I really took to heart was that as a songwriter, one of the best things you can do is have a career that’s not music related at all, especially if you want to write this kind of music, folk music. It’s people music, music about experiences, the regular folks, you know — just working and existing in the world and living your life can often be the most inspiring thing because then you come home and write about the people that you are with every day.

Yeah, it’s in community. It’s not in a vacuum. So you work in a school, right?

Yeah, well, I work at Hindman Settlement School, which is a nonprofit in Knott County, Kentucky, and I’m the Folk Arts Education Director. But essentially I’m just a traveling music teacher. In Knott County, as with a lot of rural school districts, there’s barely any budget for music or art. So one thing that the Settlement School does is to try and fill that gap. I do an after school music education program teaching acoustic instruments — banjo, guitar, mandolin, those things. And then I go into mostly kindergarten through third-grade classrooms and give short general music education sessions. I often try to incorporate Appalachian music and traditional music from around the world as much as possible. For so many of them, this is their first time seeing live music, period.

That’s so special. They must love seeing you play and learning! What’s it like teaching the dulcimer?

I love the instrument because it’s probably one of the most accessible instruments to play. It’s got three strings, and it’s diatonically fretted, which means it’s not chromatic. It has whole musical steps from the major scale with a few accidentals, so like the white keys of a piano without black keys. And what that allows for people with relatively little musical experience to sit down with the instrument and just run their finger up and down the fretboard. From there, they can pick out tunes that are already in their head and in their heart. And it’s easy for people to sound good on the instrument. I love that. It’s a great first instrument for kids; it was my first instrument when I was seven. And it’s a great first instrument for older folks who have never played music in their life.

It’s incredibly empowering to be able to sit down with an instrument and be like, “Oh, I can really do that.” When I teach, I can get people playing a simple tune within five minutes. I personally love instant gratification like that. It’s the least gatekeep-y instrument in traditional music, which I’m a big fan of. On the flip side of that, because it’s so simple, people don’t give the dulcimer the same amount of intensive musical study as others, but this instrument is just as complex as guitar or fiddle or banjo, in terms of tunings, chord shapes, modes, and keys. You can take the dulcimer as far as you want. While it’s accessible and easy, I love that you can still do surprising innovative things with it.

And you do! Speaking of which, do you have anything exciting coming up?

The first weekend of September my friend Tatiana Hargraves and I are going to do a string of duo shows in East Tennessee and Eastern Kentucky. We’re excited about that. I love playing with Tatiana. This weekend I’ll be performing at a festival called Holler Girl. I’m not performing on my own, but I’ll actually be sitting in with a local Eastern Kentucky punk band called Slut Pill. I’ll be playing dulcimer, but I have a pickup that allows me to plug into a pedal board and play with some cool effects. It’ll be my first time performing with them, so I’m looking forward to seeing how dulcimer can fit in with a punk band!

Do you have any other collaborators you want to shout out? You’re One to Watch, but who are you watching? Are there any artists you’re appreciating especially right now?

Gosh, so many! My dear friends Linda Jean Stokely and Montana Hobbs make up the duo the Local Honeys. They’re really, really great. They’re dear friends. They were the first two women to graduate from Morehead State University with degrees in traditional music, and I was in the next generation behind them. And oh my gosh, I just love their writing — they tell incredibly complex and beautiful stories with just a few simple words. They’re really making great strides in traditional music, and I love listening to them.

Also, friend Ben Fugate is a local Perry County songwriter, and he has his band Ben Fugate and the Burning Trash Band. Ben is a great local songwriter, and he writes in a more traditional country style. I’m also really enjoying listening to the artist Amanda Fields. She’s a Nashville-based country music songwriter and she just put out this beautiful album, What, When, & Without. Her whole album is moody and effervescent — kind of far away. It’s this kind of slow and introspective country music. Yeah, and it’s just really pretty. And Momma Molasses out of Bristol, Tennessee, is an amazing classic country and Western swing style singer and writer.

I also do a radio show on Sundays! You can tune in all over the world. It’s from 4-6 p.m. [ET] and the show is called She’s Gone Country on station WMMT 88.7. It’s a show featuring all female country music, from past and present. Country music is loosely defined, so I feature a lot of small artists and big artists and a lot of local Eastern Kentucky writers.

Photo Credit: Jared Hamilton

Bluegrass & Roots Songs to Strike To

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Hot. Strike. Summer!!

It was just announced that hundreds of thousands of Teamsters driving for shipping and logistics company UPS will avert a strike after their negotiations came through, but even so, dozens of strike authorization votes are happening all across the U.S. as workers the world over watch WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, Amazon and Starbucks unionization drives, and smaller pickets like that at dinner theater Medieval Times. Union membership and public opinions toward unions are at highs not seen since the ’60s, and millennial and Gen-Z workers are joining unions, striking, and picketing at astronomical rates.

It’s important to remember that, although bluegrass in its modern iteration can often feel staunchly conservative, militantly patriotic, and delusionally nostalgic for “old-fashioned values,” it’s a genre that was born from the creativity of working class and impoverished Southerners, Appalachians, and immigrants – and it has always had a pro-worker, leftward bent. Singers, pickers, songwriters, and performers like Hazel Dickens, Ola Belle Reed, the Country Gentlemen, the Johnson Mountain Boys, Mac Wiseman, Earl Scruggs, and so many more were ardent supporters of the working class and hostile towards corporations, mines, and management. There are truly countless, never ending pro-worker, pro-labor songs to choose from in the bluegrass, old-time, and roots-music canon.

Bluegrass and old-time music, though entangled in a dense constellation of roots music and occupying space adjacent to folk music and the folk revival, were anti-corporate greed since before they had names, before Pete Seeger, before the folk revival itself. That legacy is important to place at the very center of bluegrass, a genre of music that was born out of industrialization (see also: Industrial Strength Bluegrass) as mountain folk, Appalachians, and Southerners migrated out of their rural homeplaces to urban industrial centers. Bluegrass was born from radio stations, railroads, from company towns and workers’ barracks. Whether rubber or auto plants in Ohio and Michigan, factories in Chicago, cotton mills and tobacco warehouses in North Carolina, or anywhere else in the region, as poor folks bled out of their ancestral homes to find work and upward mobility, they brought their music and their community mindsets. As bell hooks puts it in Belonging: A Culture of Place, the mountains and rural spaces are where mutual aid and anarchy are concrete, everyday practices, not just philosophies or concepts.

With those people and their music came a penchant for workers’ and labor rights, suspicion of management and company stores and towns, and a vehement, righteous anger at the injustices suffered by working class Southerners no matter where they migrated. It’s easy to find pro-Union songs, songs in support of workers’ health and agency, lyrics that espouse conservation and environmentalism in old-time, bluegrass, and string-band traditions. So easy, in fact, we quickly amassed a 4+ hour playlist featuring some of our favorite songs (bluegrass and beyond) for marching the picket line, raising a fist, and redistributing the power – and wealth – back to the world’s 99%.

Scroll to find the full playlist of Bluegrass & Roots Songs to Strike To. Below, enjoy a few selections from the list.

“In Tall Buildings” – John Hartford

John Hartford describes the doldrums of daily work as almost no one else can. (John Prine gets close with, “How the hell can a person/ Go to work in the mornin’/ And come home in the evenin’/ And have nothing to say?”) At the end of our 30-some years working, what will we have to show for ourselves besides a suit, haircut, and no more life left to give to our “retirement?” Plus, as any career musician can tell you, planning a life around retirement isn’t exactly a good option to begin with.

“Ain’t Gonna Work Tomorrow” – Wilma Lee Cooper

Ain’t gonna work tomorrow, cause it’s STRIKING day! Wilma Lee Cooper will, at long last, join the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame this September. A bluegrass forebear who saw broad commercial success before the genre had a name or an understood identity, she regularly landed tracks with decidedly bluegrass aesthetics on Billboard‘s early country charts.

“Lazy John” – Bruce Molsky

Under capitalism, laziness is a radical act! Be like Lazy John! If you’re working all week in the noon-day sun just for 16 cents, yes, it’s strike time.

“Cotton Mill Man” – Jim & Jesse

As we remember the life and legacy of Jesse McReynolds, who recently passed, it’s striking that although he and his brother Jim performed largely cover songs and tracks written by others, they were still able to express with great subtlety their own points of view through the material they chose. Like “Cotton Mill Man” and Prine’s “Paradise,” which was a hit for the duo, their catalog of recorded and performed material is dense with class awareness.

“Black Waters” – Jean Ritchie

A truly timeless classic that remains as relevant today as in the time of its writing, as clean water protections across the U.S. have been repeatedly gutted since 2016 – and before. Our country continues to show where its priorities are, beating down protests and demonstrations even as popular and supported as Standing Rock, in order to force us to acquiesce and give up protection of our waters. The lyrical hook is even more poignant to someone, like myself, living in Tennessee Valley Authority territory in the Tennessee River Valley – where coal ash and pollutants are still regularly dumped into our waterways. These tales, these experiences, are best told directly from their sources, as in Ritchie singing this song.

“Carpal Tunnel” – Tristan Scroggins

One can find many a recording of “Carpal Tunnel” from across the years, but mandolinist Tristan Scroggins, in his mid-twenties, pointedly places this track in the present, delivering the lament in stark a capella accompanied only by body percussion. He deftly ties the lyric to embodiment and agency and reminds all of us – especially in an age governed by devices causing carpal tunnel writ large – we’re all merely one injury away from bankruptcy. Musicians know this fear intimately, as many a livelihood has been threatened by tendonitis and carpal tunnel.

“Tear Down the Fences” – Ola Belle Reed

A perfect encapsulation of solidarity across our differences – differences constructed by the ruling class to keep us quibbling amongst ourselves while they amass their wealth. This sort of community awareness often feels like a pure byproduct of the internet’s version of globalization, but even a woman banjo player from a tiny town in rural Western North Carolina understood that “all we have is each other,” way back before the worldwide web. It feels obvious to state. It shouldn’t seem remarkable, except that we’ve accepted the narrative that such compassion and ideas couldn’t possibly be born from rural spaces or the South.

“Blue Collar Blues” – Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers

From the shop steward of Industrial Strength Bluegrass himself, Joe Mullins, a classic working-man-blues-style bluegrass number about that paycheck to paycheck life. An all-too-common reality for so many pickers! Though that might be more accurately described as blueGRASS collar blues.

“Dark as a Dungeon” – The Country Gentlemen

Bluegrass mining songs are just as iconic in the bluegrass songbook as train songs, cheatin’ songs, murder ballads, and singing about moonshine. This version of “Dark as a Dungeon” by the Country Gentlemen is one of the best examples of the form – many of which made it onto our full playlist.

There are so many more bluegrass, old-time, string band, folk, and Americana songs for striking. Check out our full playlist below and let us know: What is your favorite pro-worker roots song?

Playlist selections by Justin Hiltner, Shelby Williamson, Jon Weisberger, and Amy Reitnouer Jacobs.

Photo Credit: By John Vachon in 1938. “Untitled photo, possibly related to picket line at the King Farm strike. Near Morrisville, Pennsylvania.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

WATCH: Larry & Joe, “Linda Barinas”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Larry & Joe
Hometown: Durham, North Carolina
Song: “Linda Barinas”

In Their Words: “’Linda Barinas’ is a song so well known that most Venezuelans can sing along.

“Eladio Ramón Tarife composed ‘Linda Barinas’ to honor his homeland, Barinas. It’s part of the Llano region and where this style of music, llanera, originated.

“The typical música llanera rendition would include harp, cuatro, maracas, bass and vocals, which makes our harp and banjo version quite unorthodox. Nonetheless, many Venezuelan traditional musicians have taken note of how seamlessly the five-string banjo melds with their instrumentation.

“Though Venezuela and Appalachia are thousands of miles apart, our folk traditions aren’t so different, and the sounds of our strings come together like old friends. Who would’ve thought?” – Joe Troop

Photo Credit: Billie Wheeler

Alison Brown: Record Label Founder and Bluegrass “Lifer”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

When a craftsman pauses to reflect, students of all skill levels benefit from the lesson. Alison Brown’s latest album, On Banjo, released May 5 on Compass Records and is a masterclass; it’s also a study on where the instrument has been and where it’s going.

Brown is a Compass co-founder and a GRAMMY Award-winning artist and producer. A self-described “lifer” in the bluegrass community and an IBMA “First Lady of Bluegrass,” she eagerly explores what the five-stringed instrument can do outside typical genre parameters. The new record is packed with star-studded duets with comedian Steve Martin, mandolin player and fellow First Lady of Bluegrass Sierra Hull, and fiddle legend Stuart Duncan.

The result is a varied, rich track list we couldn’t wait to ask Brown about.

BGS: Let’s walk through some of the tracks and collaborations on On Banjo. What kind of music inspired the duet with Anat Cohen?

AB: Anat Cohen is a clarinetist; she was born in Israel and lives in New York, but she’s well-known in jazz circles for Brazilian choro. I actually watched lots of videos of Anat on YouTube.

I reached out. I said “I know we don’t know each other, but would you consider doing this?”

What’s it like working with a famous comedian like Steve Martin in a musical context?

I’ve had the good fortune to go out and do some shows with him and Martin Short. There’s inevitably some time to jam in the dressing room, so it’s fun to play with Steve in that context, too.

Steve’s a great banjo player with a really beautiful touch and a delicate, sweet tone. He loves playing in double C tuning. Banjo players usually tune to a G, but you can drop the fourth string to a C and tune the second [string] up to a C. It’s an old tuning that clawhammer guys use a lot.

The way “Foggy Mountain Breaking,” came about is I wrote the A section. It was during the pandemic. I asked Steve, “Do you wanna write a B part?” He sent me a perfect B section 24 hours later. We figured out a bridge together. It’s named after a lyric in a John Hartford song and is obviously a riff on “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”

How does it feel to work with younger bluegrass talents like Sierra Hull? Is it gratifying to have a feminine duo on that track?

I wrote that tune hoping Sierra would be up for learning and recording it with me. I’m a huge fan of her mandolin playing; she’s another one with such a delicate touch. Her fingers just really dance over the fingerboard.

It required her to play every fret on the first string of the mandolin and she did it flawlessly. She said she’d never had a chance to work on such complicated music with another woman. So it’s a really special thing. It’s always a delight to play with Sierra, but to do a duet with her was like chocolate and more chocolate.

How do you balance two strong, independent main instruments like banjo and fiddle together, such as with Stuart Duncan?

Banjo and fiddle are just so complementary. They say a banjo and fiddle make a band, and they do.

I’ve known Stuart since he was 11 and I was 12. We go way back. And on this tune I want to give a tip of the hat to Byron Berline and John Hickman. Growing up in Southern California when we did in the ’70s, those two were the guys that everybody worshiped at the feet of. I wanted to try and capture some of that spirit, and I wanted to do it with Stuart.

Who is this album for, and what do you hope listeners take away from it?

That’s the existential question of the banjo player. And it is a bit of a challenge when you take the five-string banjo and go somewhere else with it. Earl Scruggs perpetuated a style and brought it to the masses that was just so electric. Most people think that’s all the banjo does and they don’t worry about its history before that. There’s a lot of voices inside the instrument; the bluegrass one has become the loudest one most recently.

It’s so interesting because at the beginning of the 1800s the banjo was found on plantations. Then white people appropriated that music in minstrel shows, performing in blackface. It’s deep in terms of what it says about our history and America’s original sin.
It went from being a Black instrument to being a white lady’s instrument. The Black voice of the instrument and the female voice of the instrument were both disenfranchised. There are gorgeous old photos of women in the 1890s holding banjos, and there were female banjo orchestras. I’m excited to see that re-emerging.

You started Compass Records with Garry West almost three decades ago. What’s on the horizon, and what are your goals?

All the labels were run by business people, not musicians. We said, “Why can’t musicians run a label for other artists?”

The other part is really wanting to build a label that can have a cultural impact and Garry and I are both invested in roots music. I’ve been a member of the bluegrass community since about 10 years old. I’m a lifer. The whole economy of the record business has been turned upside down and stirred and shaken eight times. We want to make sure this music not only survives but thrives into the future.

You mentioned growing up in SoCal. How is bluegrass there different from Appalachia?

There would be Eagles’ songs in set lists. It was wide open. When I first came east with Stuart and his dad, we drove around and did the festivals in 1978 or so, but it was rooted in the first generation bands’ repertoire.

On that trip we entered a band contest in Oklahoma and we played something we learned from a Richard Green record. It was a funky fiddle thing in E. I remember somebody coming up afterwards and saying “We don’t appreciate you knocking the music.”

What did you learn while making On Banjo?

The deep dive to find new melodies, and that process of discovery of the instrument, is the process of self-discovery. You get to the end and it teaches you something new about yourself.

Photo Credit: Russ Harrington

Tim Stafford & Thomm Jutz Excavate the Stories of Appalachia on ‘Lost Voices’

Posted on by Editor

Tim Stafford’s 97-year-old mother, Bernice, still saves newspapers—big stacks of yellowing back issues, should she ever need to retrieve some scrap of local intel. She will clip the occasional notice from those aging pages and dispatch them to her son Tim Stafford, too. The Blue Highway cofounder and former member of Alison Krauss & Union Station now lives 40 miles south of his Kingsport, Tenn., hometown.

Late in 2021, Bernice didn’t even need to cut and post. Instead, she simply handed him a recent series from the Kingsport Times News and pointed at Kinnie Wagner. An Appalachian outlaw, Wagner ran off with the circus, ran moonshine for a sheriff, and repeatedly ran away from jail after killing multiple cops nearly a century earlier. The saga might be a song, Stafford thought, but Bernice just wanted her son to know he was also a dashing folk legend.

“He was this self-styled ladies man. Have you seen pictures of him, that Harry Houdini haircut?” Stafford, 62, says, laughing from his home outside of Greeneville, Tenn. “She wanted to let me know that her grandmother thought he was the stuff. He was a local hero.”

Despite a master’s degree in history from nearby East Tennessee State University and a lifelong enthusiasm for Appalachian lore, Stafford had never heard of Wagner. As he began to ponder the renegade, complexities emerged—his deification by disenchanted locals as a Robin Hood acolyte whose funeral was allegedly attended by 10,000, his vilification by locals who had lost family members to a murderer, the gray area in between. “In the ’20s, before mass media, it was easy to build up this myth,” Stafford says. “But good or bad, it’s the sort of thing that needs to be preserved. His story was definitely a lost voice.”

“The Ballad of Kinnie Wagner” is now an early standout on Lost Voices, an absorbing debut LP written and recorded alongside Nashville songwriter Thomm Jutz. Above darting banjo and pensive fiddle, the pair relay a first-person synopsis of Wagner’s deeds and misadventures, ending on twin notes of resignation and redemption.

That sense of sympathetic storytelling indeed shapes most of Lost Voice’s 14 tales, from a barnstorming Black baseball team in the Appalachian foothills to the region’s amateur physicians and midwives who healed with home remedies passed among generations and neighbors. Lost Voices is a thematically sprawling bluegrass record, reaching across multiple decades, disparate traditions, and far-flung regions to offer cautionary and sometimes complicated accounts alongside songs of hopeful redemption. Think of it as Howard Zinn’s hidden American histories meets Wilma Dykeman’s ethnographic Appalachian books, bound by an unfailingly poised melodies.

“Bluegrass is all about sad stories, morbid stories—murder ballads, you know?” Stafford says. “But one thing I have learned is that there are very few topics that can’t be songs. And some of the ones we have written are pretty far out.”

Jutz may, at first glance, seem like an unlikely writing partner for these songs of the rural South. Born in 1969 in Germany’s southwest corner, not far from the Swiss and French borders amid the Black Forest, he is a classically trained guitarist. But a 1981 television performance by Bobby Bare captivated him, prompting an obdurate interest in country and its kin.

“The allure of this music is that it lives in the past and present at the same time, but it’s almost easier to learn about it if you look to the past,” says Jutz, 53, between classes at Nashville’s Belmont University, where he teaches songwriting. “But I didn’t live in an environment where that was around me, so I had to find it in literature and music. So I’ve always been interested in American history.”

In 2002, Jutz landed a “diversity visa” and emigrated to Nashville a year later, soon pulling triple duty as a producer, touring guitarist, and songwriter. The tunes seemed to pour out. After meeting The SteelDrivers’ Tammy Rogers at a Music City industry soiree in 2016, for instance, their regular writing sessions yielded an astonishing 140 songs before the pair finally released a dozen last year.

He found an even faster rhythm with Stafford, especially after most cowriting sessions reverted to Zoom during pandemic lockdowns. Stafford had played on Jutz’s sharp 2016 solo debut, Volunteer Trail, but their work together first trickled in, with maybe five songs finished during Stafford’s occasional sojourns west to Nashville. During the pandemic, Jutz used the break from touring to earn a graduate degree in Appalachian Studies from Stafford’s alma mater. They’d meet several times a week online and talk about stories they’d recently learned, two regional history buffs swapping new finds. They’ve now finished more than 100 songs together, each an attempt to give volume to one of these so-called lost voices.

“We’d catch up a little bit first: What’s been happening since last week? What have you been reading? Guitars, whatever,” remembered Jutz. “But we had this running list of titles, concepts, and scenes we wanted to write about, all distinctly American. Our cowriting sessions are expensive—we always end up buying books because we talk so much about what we read.”

For his coursework, for instance, Jutz had to dive into The Dollmaker, the lauded 1954 novel by Kentucky writer Harriette Arnow, a tragic work that exposed the unstable underbelly of transitioning from tolerable rural penury to tempting urban prosperity. Stafford had already read it and even gotten to know the family, so discussions of its painful plot flowed. The pair reduced it into four graceful and heartsick minutes, a tender ballad for what’s left behind when you leave tradition in the rearview. On Lost Voices, Dale Ann Bradley delivers the resulting “Callie Lou” with lived-in sympathy, as if she too has shielded her eyes from bright city lights.

Stafford, on the other hand, recommended Where Dead Voices Gather, Nick Tosches’ fraught and freewheeling biography of Emmett Miller, a yodeling star of early 20th-century blackface minstrelsy. His commercial participation in that vile, racist system helped foster country music and all the pop that followed. How would Miller feel, they wonder aloud in “Vaudeville Blues,” to live on infamy and influence? He is neither a sympathetic figure nor abject villain here, just a person weighed down by his choices.

“He informed so many people, from Jimmie Rodgers to Hank Williams,” says Stafford. “But he’s this cat who was so misty that we don’t know much about him. I like that approach.”

Just then, Stafford brings up Jesus, zigging in a way that reflects not only his debut with Jutz but also the ecumenical approach to their partnership at large. As the world’s largest religion, Christianity doesn’t represent a lost voice, per se, but many of its core tenets—“turn the other cheek, do unto others, all very revolutionary stuff,” Stafford says—have been largely discarded in the commodified modern American iteration. The pair harmonizes sweetly during “Revolutionary Love,” more a non-denominational hymn of forgiveness and forbearance than some attempt to proselytize. It feels like a campfire hymn.

Lost Voices’ most disarming quality, though, might be how Stafford and Jutz sing about their subjects with the elan of students and not the stolid erudition of professors, which they have both been. There is a sense of delighted wonder as they deliver “The Blue Grays,” an admiring portrait of a Black baseball team in Elizabethton, Tenn., that proved a formidable foe for two decades. “Code Talker,” their ode to the indigenous Americans whose native languages became an indispensable cryptological tool during World War II, not only celebrates their accomplishments but lampoons their cross-generational oppression in the United States.

This isn’t a political record, Stafford says, but it’s hard not to feel its gentle push for inclusion, empathy, and appreciation, extended far beyond people who happen to look like you. “I know the bias against bluegrass, this music, and the region itself. Some of those stereotypes are based in reality,” offers Stafford. “But there is diversity here, mystery, and these stories are not that hard to find.”

Lost Voices is the public launch of the prolific Stafford-Jutz tandem, not at all the culmination. Jutz has already gone through his Civil War phase; the first song the pair wrote together was actually about it. He is now deeply invested in how the Roaring ’20s gave way to Whimpering ’30s and how those decades continue to shape culture a century later. Decades ago, Stafford gave up his doctoral pursuits (“the application of metaphor theory to the history of ideas,” he says with a bemused chuckle) to instead pursue bluegrass.

But he soon learned about the academic exploration of bluegrass, even getting to know the historian Neil V. Rosenberg. He’s now working on the follow-up to Rosenberg’s canonical Bluegrass: A History, trying to pull that epic forward 50 years. There will be, it seems, no dearth of new interests.

“Everything is interesting, and everything has to be interesting if you’re a writer of any kind—poets, novelists, songwriters, journalists, all first cousins,” Jutz says, his words rushing with excitement. “You look for meaning, living images, things that spark your creativity. That’s the job description.”

Photo Credit: Jefferson Ross

BGS 5+5: Michael Johnathon

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Michael Johnathon, host of Woodsongs Old-Time Radio Hour
Hometown: Upstate New York
Latest Album: Afterburn: Folk at Arena Level

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

To use music to help build a front porch around the world. We need that right now. To help music lovers find a new, defined direction for their music. Music doesn’t have to be your livelihood to be a powerful part of your life. To gather the global community of front porch-minded musicians and help them do good work, bring roots music education into schools free of charge, and enhance communities by redirecting the tremendous energies of local musicians.

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc. — inform your music?

All of it, really. I’ve written five books, a children’s book I illustrated myself, I had a published cartoon strip in 17 newspapers, written three movie scripts and, during the pandemic, took up oil painting. Obviously I have a syndicated radio and TV broadcast as well, so it is a tapestry of art. I’ve written plays and even an opera about the day Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land Is Your Land.”

As a musician and artist, what are some of the ways you like to give back to the community?

That’s hard to explain. And I offer this not in the spirit of boasting but to encourage other artists to look past their vision of “stardom” and see instead the value of doing good work with their music. It is better than a hit record. I created the SongFarmers community to help musicians the music business left behind; there are now 89 active chapters across America and Ireland. I created the WoodSongs Artist Gathering to help poets, painters, authors and songwriters find encouragement and feel like their efforts have value; so far 19 events have happened or are being organized. We have over 1,000 WoodSongs broadcasts that I consider an education into America’s front porch, so we attached lesson plans for classrooms and homeschool parents to introduce this rural heritage to their kids, all free.

I’ve performed hundreds of concerts for the homeless, the environment, farm families, battered women and children, concerts about the earth and nature as well as teenage suicide. This year tornados destroyed much of Western Kentucky and I used the WoodSongs community to collect nearly 1,000 instruments to give musicians in the region who lost everything, all for free. A few months later, floods destroyed much of Appalachia and again collected hundreds of guitars, banjos, flutes and more and gave them out free to musicians in the mountains. Recently I launched another volunteer-run project to welcome young musicians to our front porch world called WoodSongs Kids, sort of a Mr. Rogers meets the Grand Ole Opry.

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

I think without a doubt Pete Seeger. Perhaps not so much musically; my style is much different from his, but his vision for music, community, using song for a purpose other than “selling” things. He was my neighbor on the mountain along Rt. 9D by the Hudson River in New York, although I really didn’t understand who he was. Just a pleasant fellow who claimed to be a musician … but played the banjo. I gravitated to the musicians in his orbit as well, folks like Harry Chapin, Arlo Guthrie, Roger McGuinn, Odetta, Libby Cotton, Don McLean and others. I found his log cabin life, the rustic lifestyle, and organic thinking very close to my own. Certainly Henry David Thoreau and Vincent van Gogh have been major wellsprings of imagination for me.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

As I write this, we are in preproduction for my new Garden of Time album. I approached the project completely backwards. I knew what the album title would be; I even designed the album art. I had everything ready except writing the actual title song. “Garden of Time” was going to be about Vincent van Gogh’s final day in the summer of 1890. But I couldn’t grab the song, it was beyond me. So I got in my car and went to the Detroit Institute of Art to see the 26 original canvases of van Gogh. To stand in front of the actual paintings, in the same space he stood with his brush in hand, was very moving. I got back home to my log cabin, fired up the wood stove, and “Garden of Time” was born in 10 minutes.

Photo Credit: WoodSongs/Larry Neuzel

The Bristol Sessions Get Another Look on ‘We Shall All Be Reunited’ CD

Posted on by Editor

For Dr. Ted Olson, Appalachian music has always been much more than a collection of songs. It’s been nothing short of a passion. The Eastern Tennessee State University professor has spent much of his life writing, researching, and documenting the music that has played and recorded throughout the southeastern United States during the 1920s and 1930s. His respected work on Bear Family Records box sets covering sessions in Bristol, Johnson City, and Knoxville, Tennessee, have brought those long-ago recordings to new generations of listeners. For example, the single-disc set Tell It to Me: Revisiting the Johnson City Sessions, 1928-1929 was named Best Compilation Album of 2019 by the Independent Music Awards.

Now, Olson has teamed up again with Bear Family to release We Shall All Be Reunited: Revisiting the Bristol Sessions, 1927-1928, a single CD distillation of these legendary sessions. Commonly called “the big bang of country music,” the recordings in Bristol by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and others became unexpected bestsellers, positioning country music as a viable commercial format. Along with reams of new liner notes, the CD delivers not just those familiar names, but also Ernest Stoneman, Blind Alfred Reed, and more, reminding listeners of the diversity that crowded around producer Ralph Peer’s microphone.

BGS: What inspired you to revisit the music from the original Bristol sessions for this album?

Olson: I found that the story of the Bristol sessions had grown significantly, for me. I’ve changed my interpretation of the Bristol sessions, its historical significance, and how one interprets that legacy. This gave me the opportunity to set the record straight about how that story needed to be told. That new narrative is in the liner notes, which are 44 pages. That is the maximum that can fit in a jewel box. I was pretty adamant that this is the story that needed to be told and this is the length it should be.

We have new documents to learn from, new research that was unavailable to us before. New interviews and new artwork. To me, it’s revisionist history in the best sense of the term. When Sony released a single CD of the Bristol sessions in 2003, they focused solely on the 1927 sessions. To my mind, the 1928 sessions are equal to the sessions of the previous year. With this new CD, we celebrate both of those sessions. We have new masters for the songs as well. An engineer in Germany, Marcus Heumann, produced new masters for this release. They’re very exciting and they sound like they were recorded yesterday.

Dr. Ted Olson

What emerges from listening to both the Bristol and Johnson City collections is that they each demand your attention, albeit with different qualities.

The Johnson City sessions were an essential part of the rest of the story. They were echo sessions, just months after the Bristol sessions. They involved many of the same musicians, and yet the Johnson City sessions explored a different side of the Appalachian music that the Bristol sessions didn’t get to. The Bristol sessions accomplished certain things that are valuable and important, but they didn’t explore other facets that Johnson City was able to get more deeply into, because it had a different producer. It also was a different company, with different priorities and fortunes.

Some people prefer the Johnson City sessions to the Bristol sessions. They find the Johnson City recordings wilder, more exciting. Less controlled by the producer. Ralph Peer was a very controlling producer, very interactive in shaping the sounds, whereas Frank Walker of Columbia had the attitude of anything goes in this music. He was more documentarian, in a way. “What do you have? Let’s hear it.” Rather than shaping something into a package, which is what Ralph Peer’s modus operandi was at the Bristol sessions. I love them both. I’m not going to play favorites, but I’m also not going to acquiesce into the idea that Bristol sessions were more important because they were a year earlier.

How did you come to choose one song from each artist for the new Bristol Sessions album?

I knew that I wanted to match the length of the Johnson City CD, which had 26 recordings. I committed to 26 tracks, because that’s as much as we could fit on a CD, but there was also a licensing limitation. I also wanted a new template, where the ’28 Bristol sessions were as important as the ’27 sessions.

There were 28 artists that performed at the Bristol sessions, which meant that I could include one track from everyone except two. I had committed to including performances that in 2020 would be enjoyable by those who aren’t initiated into the sounds of the 1920s musical world. The stylistic approaches back then have changed over the years. We’ve listened to the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers through the years, so they sound familiar to us. Other artists from those sessions were such talented performers that we can still appreciate their recordings for talent alone.

How did you select the song from the Carter Family? All six of the songs that they recorded in Bristol are amazing.

I came to the conclusion that while “Single Girl, Married Girl” or “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow” had gotten a lot of attention from these sessions, it’s “The Poor Orphan Child” that, for me, is the one that has captured my ears as the definitive Carter Family debut performance. A.P. is part of it. He’s not on “Single Girl, Married Girl.” He was out fixing their car tires that morning. To my mind, his best singing at the Bristol sessions was on “The Poor Orphan Child.”

Jimmie Rodgers’ recordings in Bristol have always suggested to me a person with a distinctive musical identity that is still seeking a comfort level in front of the mic. His two songs seem a bit tentative, a little nervous. Rhythmically, he’s very loose, which was always part of his persona. I think those recordings show his great charisma. He didn’t invent the singing yodel, but he first demonstrated it on the track that’s on this CD, “Sleep Baby Sleep.” Several months later, he records “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T For Texas),” and that was his breakthrough record.

The Bear Family box set about the Bristol Sessions received two Grammy nominations in 2011. It should have been a high point for you. How did you come to realize that you had much more to do?

It was fascinating for me to watch the press reaction to the Grammy nominations as well as the box set itself. I found that the press reactions were a little bit uncertain of what the Bristol sessions were. It was as though they were all falling lockstep into rapt amazement at the mythic importance of this thing called the Bristol sessions. It was obvious to me that people were changed by a myth, which revolved around two notions. One was that the Bristol sessions were “the big bang of country music.” But what does that mean? It was where Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family made their first records, but there were many other artists there as well.

The other notion was that Bristol is the birthplace of country music, which has been promoted by both Bristol, and the state of Tennessee, but that statement has often left other important sessions to be overlooked. I came to see that critics didn’t know how to unravel the myth. So, there I was at the Grammys, and as a scholar I felt I had only cracked the surface of what these sessions really were. I, too, was under the spell of the myth. And I needed to get past that. It was quite clear to me that there was more to the story. I remember flying home from that event, thinking that this was a life’s work in front of me.

Photo of Dr. Ted Olson by Charlie Warden

LISTEN: Midnight North, “Silent Lonely Drifter”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Midnight North
Hometown: Bay Area, California
Song: “Silent Lonely Drifter”
Album: There’s Always a Story
Release Date: July 23, 2021
Label: Americana Vibes

In Their Words: “Here we have a folk melody reminiscent of the timeless string music heard in the Appalachian region. Lyrically simple, the tune gives thanks to the inevitable and natural balance that exists in this universe — no matter the day or the moon. I shared the tune with Grahame [Lesh] on a day off down south a few years back. It definitely still needed something on the lyrical side, and Grahame had the idea to identify each verse with different full moons in the yearly cycle. Each full moon carries a unique weight to those surviving down below — so we made a connection from each moment (verse) to each full moon.” — Nathan Graham, Midnight North

“Nathan would play us snippets of ‘Silent Lonely Drifter’ on tour whenever he would get ahold of a banjo, and once he showed me the full song I always hoped we’d get a chance to play and sing it with Midnight North. The song was close to fully formed when he brought it to the band, and the melody and chord progression were so intuitive that we latched onto it quickly when we finally started tracking it in the studio. It really came together when we made Nathan sing the melody as Elliott [Peck] and I wove harmonies around him. Now that we’ve played it live ‘Silent Lonely Drifter’ is one of my favorite of our songs to sing in harmony!” — Grahame Lesh, Midnight North

Photo courtesy of Midnight North

The Local Honeys: Rooted in Appalachian Folk, Communicating to the World

Posted on by Amy Reitnouer

In normal times, you might find Kentucky-hearted duet the Local Honeys touring the UK or out on the road with folks like Colter Wall and Tyler Childers. But, like so many, the past year has been a paused their movement, allowing space and time to experience life in a way that most busy artists rarely get to.

Many caught wind of the group after a viral New York Times article in late 2020 about our nation’s cultural depression. But like other defendants of Appalachian people and culture, Montana Hobbs and Linda Jean Stokley, who make up the pair, have been outspoken via their music for a long time. Their new double-sided single continues a demand of accountability from big industry. “It’s a modern anthem of the American working class,” said Stokley.

BGS caught up with the Local Honeys to talk about these two songs — “Dying To Make a Living” and “Octavia Triangle” — as well as the message in their music.

BGS: In the before times, you’ve led pretty busy schedules, including multiple international tours. What have you been up to since the pandemic began?

Montana Hobbs: Well, I can tell you what we’ve be into. We’ve been in our jammies a lot! But you know, we’ve experienced probably a similar story to anybody else that has been in the gig industry. We’ll all remember it as a point in our lives and a point in our careers that was kind of sedentary, if you will. I think our story is not much different, we’ve had more time at home to focus on things that we don’t get to do on the road – like exercise, cook at home, read. At the new year we both decided that we weren’t gonna think so much about what this past year has been, but think more about what this new year is going to be for us.

Linda Jean Stokley: In 2019 we went on about five separate concert tours. So the beginning of 2020 was our last tour, we were all over the UK as well as greater Europe, on our own headlining tour but also supporting Tyler Childers. That was a huge tour, and it really took a lot out of us, so it was kind of welcoming to have a little bit of a break after that. But over this past year, we have done a few cool things. We went on the Tyler tour, we got signed to La Honda Records — that’s a pretty big deal for us. We love everything that they do, and have been constantly inspired by them. Our management and being with a label have proven so helpful, even during this time, to have someone like our manager that is so good about keeping our spirits up. Another thing that we’ve done this past year is put out a Western AF video, and that was a highlight. We didn’t get to do much, but what we did was really welcomed.

In a time of so much uncertainty, what inspired this new release?

LJS: We recorded those in October of 2019, and we’d been working on trying to change up our sound a bit, to make our sound bigger but not non-traditional, kind of neo-traditional. So we were thinking in 2020, how are we gonna release these songs? Then in October 2020, our friend Jimmy McCowan, who’s on one of those tracks, suddenly passed away from a heart attack. So, we talked to La Honda and asked if we could finally get these out. That’s kind of what spawned the release of this A-side/B-side single.

These songs show two perspectives on life in the coal mines: working like hell to provide for your family, while enduring personal struggles both medical and mental. What are you trying to tell the rest of the world about these Appalachian issues?

LJS: In July of 2019, there was a blockade in Harlan County, [Kentucky], and over a thousand miners in central Appalachia were out of work, because of the Blackjewel mining company. They went bankrupt, and they didn’t tell anybody. They didn’t tell any of their workers until the day of. In the middle of the day, they said, “this is your last day.” That is completely illegal. It was strange that it had to happen in Harlan County, which is so synonymous with all these bloody labor wars. To have something like this happen with one of the largest coal companies in the nation just shows that they can get away with all kinds of unlawful behavior. These people, their checks bounced. Of course that’s going towards their mortgage or rent, but it’s also going towards their medical costs, because there are so many disabled miners. We started thinking about this song more and more. We sang it a little bit, but didn’t have a need to sing it necessarily because we didn’t have anything to say. When we were on tour a lot, we would tell the story of what was going on, and put song and emotion into what’s happening, to get people to listen.

MH: To add on that, the song became more relevant to us in this time frame. It was a song that we were familiar with, via the band Foddershock, but also Rick & the Po’ Folk, Rich Kirby and his traditional band, and Pierceton Hobbs [who released his own version in 2020]. Basically, we felt like when you’re given the stage to speak on things like this, you might as well take advantage of the time and the attention that you’ve been given. Make that time worth it, and get a message that you feel is important across. When we would go over to England, which is also a very post-coal society that we didn’t know much about, we had firsthand connections where they told us stories of tragedy, how their grandfathers were miners, and so on. It made the whole history of traditional music come full circle for us, to where we had the opportunity to sing a song, but we also had the opportunity to tell a story of where we’re from and what’s happening where we are. Which is what traditional music was in its first iteration. 

I know that you both, along with other musicians, visited the miner’s blockade. What was that like?

MH: We went and visited the miner’s blockade in August. We just went down there and hung out with these people, they had their entire families on the train tracks. They had little encampments set up. People like Brett Ratliff, Rich Kirby, Tanya Turner at the time worked for Appalshop, went down there with us. Son, it was so hot. It was very much like third world conditions in what’s supposed to be the greatest country.

The week before, we were at Cowan Creek Mountain Music School in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Jim McCowan has been a member of the faculty there probably as long as the school has been around. This guy in my class asked, “Have you heard the song that Jimmy’s mother wrote?” We were both very close to Jim, he was a very bright light. So I sat on a picnic table with him and said, “I heard that you do a song your mother wrote.” And I’m one of those people that’s a real sneaky recorder with my phone, and I have about a 10 or 15 minute clip of him playing this song called the “Octavia Triangle.” He had such a beautiful delivery of the song.

We were thinking of something that would pair well with “Dying To Make a Living,” which is economic hardship, being pushed under the rug. Even though this work is essential, they’re being treated less than they’re worth. So then I thought that “Octavia Triangle” completely highlighted what it is to actually live, and work, and die, and love, in the coalfields. This was a true story that happened in Pike County, Kentucky. Who’s to blame other than these harmful practices which we still practice today?

As a fellow musician from Central Appalachia, I feel like Foddershock (who wrote “Dying”) rarely get the attention or recognition they deserve. Do you have a favorite album, or a starter pack for those who have never heard the band?

LJS: I absolutely love Foddershock, I’m always trying to find their CDs. I’m waiting on WV [Hill] to send me some recordings. Obviously, I think “Dying to Make a Living” is one of the best places to start. I would also say “Eat Possum & Prosper” is one of my favorite tracks of theirs. And I really love “When Coal Was King.” There’s one that’s called “Live in a Trailer.” “Cahoots,” as well. 

Do you have any new goals or ideas to try for when things turn around and we can all get back on the road?

MH: Hmm… we are ready and willin’! Open for suggestions, open for bookings… But like I said before, this is a time that we will all remember as a pause in our lives and a pause in history, even though it’s been a hell of a lot of history put into one year. We’ve been granted this time to kind of work on things, we’ve been writing a lot. It’s always been something we’ve done and tried to practice, but now it seems like it’s at the forefront of our minds. We want to be seen as not just traditional musicians, not just old-time musicians, but we wanna be known as songwriters as well. Carrying on that storytelling, and showing how I feel about what’s going in the time and place I’m from. That’s one of the biggest connectors in music in general, it’s saying you’re not alone. Like when we went to Wales, even our song “Cigarette Trees,” which is about strip mining, people would come up to us and say, “They do that here too, and we don’t like it either.”

LJS: We’re finding so many relatable things to talk about when we tour in the UK specifically. Touring has really given us a way and a platform to connect with all these people around the world that are dealing with similar situations. Every time we go anywhere, we talk to people about the whole idea of ‘saving Appalachia,’ and trying to tell people that no, we have to pay attention to the causes of poverty and suppression that are happening within our state and within the entire southeast region. We don’t need saving, and we don’t need developing — we need somebody to actually understand what is going on in our area. We’re looking forward to reconnecting with people.

Photo credit: Zachary Martin