Tag: Banjo

WATCH: Midnight Skyracer, “Average Faces”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Midnight Skyracer
Hometown: Stroud, UK
Song: “Average Faces”
Album: Shadows on the Moon
Release Date: June 5, 2020
Label: Island Records

In Their Words: “I got the seed of inspiration for this song after overhearing a conversation outside a pub: a man’s futile attempts to chat up a woman starting with ‘I’m sure I know you from somewhere,’ with her response being ‘I don’t think so, I’ve just got one of those average faces.’ A couple of days later I wrote a rough outline of a chorus and a first verse and then roped in my twin sister (and guitarist in the band), Charlotte to help form it into a full song before sending it to the rest of the band.

“This one really came together in the studio when we added the drum track, the only part on the album not played by a band member. It was actually one of the very last things we did. We were in our final couple of hours at Real World Studios and had packed down all the mics and dividers we’d had set up for the week so that our brilliant engineer, Josh Clark, could get his drum kit set up. He was just about to go in for his first take when he smacked his head hard on one of the heavy counterweights used to balance the overhead mics. Josh may have been slightly concussed, but he nailed the part all the same!

“For the video for this song we had initially booked in to use quite a different venue, but having waited outside that one for an hour or so (eventually it turned out that the owner had had a family emergency and left their phone at home) Eleanor and Leanne started wandering about town asking in every pub, bar, and restaurant, if we could use their space to film a music video. The wonderful people at Cru Wines, Bradford on Avon, very kindly obliged and let us use their upstairs room for the day. We were all very good and held off drinking the delicious glasses of wine we used as props until we’d finished filming!” — Laura Carrivick (fiddle and dobro), Midnight Skyracer

Photo credit: Elly Lucas

WATCH: Clem Snide & Scott Avett, “The Stuff of Us” (Live From Just Beyond)

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Clem Snide & Scott Avett
Song: “The Stuff of Us” (Live From Just Beyond)
Album: Forever Just Beyond
Release Date: March 27, 2020
Label: Ramseur Records

In Their Words: “‘The Stuff of Us’ for me is a gleeful advocation of spirit over body. As my dying friend once said, ‘Death is not a wall but a doorway….’ I was raised by atheists so I’m hardly a qualified defender of any faith, but it seems to me that the ‘scientific’ framing is just as magical in its attempts to explain why there’s something instead of nothing. I mention dark matter/dark energy in the lyrics because, as I understand it at least, something like 95 percent of the universe is actually held together by this mysterious force or energy that is completely invisible and impossible to detect. Maybe Richard Dawkins would disagree but that sounds an awful lot like God to me. And for something to be truly real it would also have to be eternal…and free.” — Clem Snide

Photo credit: Crackerfarm

LISTEN: The Gina Furtado Project, “The Things I Saw”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Gina Furtado Project
Hometown: Winchester, Virginia
Song: “The Things I Saw”
Release Date: April 24, 2020 (single)
Label: Mountain Home Music Company

In Their Words: “‘The Things I Saw’ is just a song about my experiences of growing up on the Shenandoah River. All throughout my childhood I went to the river when I needed comfort of any kind. No matter what happened in my life, good or bad, the river stayed the same. The plants and critters and smells and sounds became like old friends; always welcoming and beautiful in every way, and utterly unstoppable.” — Gina Furtado

Photo credit: Sandlin Gaither

Béla Fleck – Toy Heart: A Podcast About Bluegrass

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

On this episode of Toy Heart, Béla Fleck talks to host Tom Power from his home studio and for the first time, he tells his story in bluegrass.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3


Fleck started out in New York hearing Earl Scruggs for the first time, learning from Tony Trischka, and then making the decision to go (new) south to learn from J.D. Crowe. He auditioned for Bill Monroe, but eventually found ‘his people’ and joined New Grass Revival. He tells of mistakes the band made along the way, the hard decision to leave that band and start the Flecktones, recording with his hero Earl Scruggs, and how he found his way back to bluegrass after all. He also unveils the one change he thinks anyone can make to their practicing to become a better musician.

WATCH: Mile Twelve, “Long Done Gone”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Mile Twelve
Hometown: Boston, Masschusetts
Song: “Long Done Gone”

In Their Words: “Back in February we had a few days off the road and decided to spend one of them in Brooklyn, New York, playing music and making videos with some friends. We called up Michael Daves, Jacob Jolliff, and Tony Trischka and ended up having this epic afternoon of arranging a few bluegrass standards for eight people to jam on. Things got pretty wacky, including this video, which is a mashup of the bluegrass song ‘Long Gone’ and the fiddle tune ‘Done Gone.’ We decided to try this medley at first because we thought it would be funny but it turned out they’re both in the key of Bb and it ended up working great. Hope you enjoy!” — Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, Mile Twelve

Photo credit: Kaitlyn Raitz

WATCH: The Slocan Ramblers, “New Morning”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Slocan Ramblers
Hometown: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Song: “New Morning”
Album: Queen City Jubilee
Label: SloMusic

In Their Words: “I wrote ‘New Morning’ right after our second album Coffee Creek came out, and it came to me pretty quick. There’s this funny period after you put out an album — a moment of calm and then the crashing realization that it’s on to the next one. It’s that push to get back to work that got me writing again, and this song came out first. I was listening to Béla Fleck’s Tales from the Acoustic Planet, Vol. 2 endlessly around that time, so maybe you can find some bits of inspiration in there. Big thanks to Trent Freeman (check out his awesome band The Fretless) for the videography.” — Adrian Gross, The Slocan Ramblers

Photo credit: Jen Squires

Jake Blount, “Goodbye, Honey, You Call That Gone”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

The title of banjoist, fiddler, and ethnomusicologist Jake Blount’s upcoming album, Spider Tales, is a reference to Anansi the Spider, a folklore character of the Akan people of West Africa. Says Blount, “The Anansi were tales that celebrated unseating the oppressor, and finding ways to undermine those in power even if you’re not in a position to initiate a direct conflict.” 

With such a deft, succinct mission, Blount takes a vibrant and dense, harlequin cultural tradition — which has lived on across the African diaspora, brought to the United States and colonies in this hemisphere by enslaved Africans — and applies it to a collection of old-time tunes in a way that’s intuitive and digestible. Without oversimplification or homogenization to achieve broader “appeal,” these songs and these instruments speak to much more important lessons and narratives than the average old-time record.

Take for instance “Goodbye, Honey, You Call That Gone.” A tastefully unadorned tune, performed by Blount on banjo and percussive dancer and scholar Nic Gareiss, it comes from Lucius Smith, a Black Mississippi banjoist recorded by Alan Lomax first in the ‘40s. “Smith played a steel-string banjo rather than a nylon-string one like mine,” Blount explains. “But tuned all the way down to the same pitch. The looseness of [his] strings causes the pitch of each note to waver as he plays it, imparting a ‘wandering’ quality to the melody.”

Wandering, a condition not uncommon among diasporic communities, or Appalachian musical traditions, or queer folks, or movers and dancers, is not only communicated here in the tune’s title, and its delightful, lazy half-tones and breaths of quarter-tones, but also in the syncopation, virtuosity and musicality of Gareiss’ feet playing off Blount’s clawhammer. 

Above all of these, the epitome of Blount’s Spider Tales may be the intention with which Blount and Gareiss approach creating and music-making together, providing an indelible benchmark by which we can better learn to queer old-time and string band music while telling its true, unabridged history, and centering Black, Indigenous, and non-white stories — all with the same treepling toes and fretting fingers.

Editor’s Note: Blount and Gareiss will be featured in the Bluegrass Situation Presents: A St. Patrick’s Day Festival at New York’s New Irish Arts Center, participating in an opening night jam session with clawhammer banjoist Allison de Groot and fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves on March 17 as well as a headlining performance on March 18.

WATCH: The Golden Age, “Weirdo”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Golden Age
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Weirdo”
Album: I’m Sure It’ll Be Fine
Release Date: February 21, 2020
Label: Poke the Bear Records

In Their Words: “This video was made by those wild guys from Neighborhoods Apart, Joshua Britt and Neilson Hubbard. Josh had this concept he’d always wanted to do that ‘Weirdo’ seemed to fit nicely. Ultimately the video/song is a quick prick to the balloon that suggests that in order to connect with other people we need to present these shiny-flawless images socially and hide our odd nuances under a bushel… But what all that green-screen, horse-hockey magic really does is make us feel isolated. And like little worms that don’t measure up. The video is a trumpet’s call to embrace the fact that, at our nitty gritty, we’re all just a couple of strange brained-lumpy bodies in skin-tight suits plucking on banjos and mandolins in front of someone’s garage in the middle of the afternoon. More or less.” — Bryan Simpson and Matt Menefee, The Golden Age

Alison Brown, “Poe’s Pickin’ Party”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Watching the movement for equity and inclusion in roots music grow and expand over the last decade or so, especially in the last few years, has been particularly gratifying in bluegrass. As a community, bluegrass is often stereotyped as backwards, hillbilly, conservative, evangelical, and so on. As the genre becomes more representative, and as musicians, artists, and scholars unpack the factors that have led to this cause gaming steam, it’s essential that we give credit where it’s due. Namely, to women.

Pickers like Alison Brown, truly one of the most adept and creative banjo players alive today — and holder of an MBA from Harvard — and women who went before her carved the paths by which so many other underrepresented or categorically excluded folks have found places for themselves in this music. Women, having much less to lose in bluegrass (by having much less access to gains in bluegrass), could actively advocate for inclusion in ways many men in the same spaces had never considered. Infrastructure and communities fashioned by these women exist still today, providing a point of coalescence around which these more broader, zoomed out missions can gather.

“Poe’s Pickin’ Party,” an instrumental penned by Brown, seems the perfect tune by which to tie together this legacy with Women’s History Month and Tunesday Tuesday. The bouncy, hornpipe-y number is a playful jab at an actual pickin’ party of the same name, which Brown stumbled upon advertised in a now vintage volume of Bluegrass Unlimited. In the ad, women were welcomed to attend Poe’s party, but not participate. It’s a humorous story, when told on stage to introduce the piece, but also a pointed reminder that active, overt exclusion of women in bluegrass happened so very recently (and persists today) and we have plenty of work to do in order to include so many others in this life-altering, enriching genre.

Lynn Morris: The National Banjo Champion Who Couldn’t Get an Audition

Posted on by Editor

If you’re in a jam with women over 50, it’s likely that you’ll hear at least one song learned from a Lynn Morris recording.

Her singing is as pure and sweet as a mountain spring. She brought every song alive and made every story real. And during most of her career, there simply weren’t a lot of women topping the bluegrass charts. So aspiring female singers naturally gravitated to her music – sung in their range and often, from their perspective. Although a stroke halted her career in 2003, her legacy endures through her fans.

Lynn was born in 1948 in Lamesa, Texas, where she rejected piano lessons at an early age, but fell in love with the guitar. At age 21, she had a banjo epiphany when she heard a bluegrass band in Colorado Springs. As she told author Murphy Hicks Henry, she was so taken with the banjo sound that she thought, “I will die if I don’t learn how to do this.”

And learn she did. Within five years, Lynn became the first woman to win the National Banjo Championship — and later became the first person to win it twice. She was slow to gain confidence in her singing, and in her earliest band affiliations she primarily played banjo and guitar, singing harmony and rarely taking vocal leads.

On a trip to her home state, she met Marshall Wilborn, who claims he could barely play the bass at the time. But within months, he joined Lynn in the Pennsylvania band Whetstone Run. They later moved to their present home in Winchester, Virginia.

In the 1980s, bluegrass was still very much a male business. Lynn’s success in banjo competitions were always in blind contests — where the judges couldn’t see the pickers. Apparently, banjo judges weren’t ready to acknowledge women. Similarly, after moving to Virginia, she couldn’t get an audition with any of the bands she wanted to play with.

So, in 1988, she started her own, believing, as she told Murphy, that her career depended on it. Lynn, with Marshall on bass and vocals, attracted stellar sidemen, with whom they recorded five successful Rounder albums. Lynn was IBMA Female Vocalist of the Year three times and won IBMA Song of the Year for her recording of Hazel Dickens’ powerful “Mama’s Hand.” She also was the first female IBMA board member.

Four years after winning her last IBMA award (in 1999), Lynn had a near-fatal stroke following knee surgery. While she recovered to a miraculous extent, some hand weakness and residual speech problems prevent her from performing. She remains active and vigorous. For several years, she handled sound for Bill Emerson’s band. One of her paintings hangs in Winchester’s best breakfast spot. An ardent animal advocate, she dedicates much of her time to roughly a dozen rescue cats.

Lynn Morris’ enthusiasm and gratitude for life are a continuing gift to any who get to meet her.

(Editor’s note: For more details about — and terrific quotes from — Lynn Morris, read Murphy Hicks Henry’s book, Pretty Good for a Girl: Women in Bluegrass.)

Photo credit: Rounder Records