Tag: bluegrass

BGS Class of 2020: The Albums and Songs That Inspired Us This Year

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

At BGS, we seek out roots music from all corners — for those readers encountering us for the first time, we’re not “just bluegrass.” With our annual year-end list, we’ve shaken off the “best of” title and instead gathered 20 recordings that inspired our staff and contributors. For many reasons (but especially the long-awaited return of live music and festivals), we look ahead to 2021, but first… here are the albums and songs that inspired us in 2020.

Courtney Marie Andrews – Old Flowers

Courtney Marie Andrews couldn’t touch my heart deeper. Her music has been the healing salve for the wounds of 2020. To me, she’s the true definition of an artist: A songwriter, a musician, a painter, a writer, a singer, a poet, an activist. My favorite song on her magical 2020 album is “Old Flowers.” It’s the perfect metaphor of resilience and rebirth after suffering, both in love and in life. Becoming whole again. If that ain’t a theme we could all grow from this year, I don’t know what is! – Beth Behrs

Anjimile – “Maker (Acoustic)”

Anjimile’s Giver Taker was the album I can’t stop (and won’t stop) telling people about in 2020. The full version of their single, “Maker” was a beautiful amalgamation of cultures and influences synthesized by an artist not constrained by cultural and creative preconceptions. To me, Anjimile’s acoustic version of the lead single distills the brilliance of their songwriting into its purest form. – Amy Reitnouer Jacobs

Danny Barnes – Man on Fire

Danny Barnes’ Man on Fire was a worthwhile gift to us all this year. Over the last couple of years, I’d heard chatter of a project in the works with names like Dave Matthews, John Paul Jones, and Bill Frisell involved. I am constantly in awe of what Barnes can create using the banjo as a pencil. This record was no exception, combining his unique style and songwriting with an electrified crew. – Thomas Cassell

Bonny Light Horseman – “The Roving”

There’s an odd bit of sorcery in the first measures of “The Roving,” a new version of an old folk tune on this supergroup’s debut. It opens tentatively, the instruments falling into the song like autumn leaves: First an acoustic guitar, then cymbals, then piano, all coalescing into a windblown arrangement that’s both understated and sublime. – Stephen Deusner

Bob Dylan – Rough and Rowdy Ways

Packed with jumbles of historic/cultural references and tall tales, bluesy swagger and prayerful romance, and climaxing with the shattered-mirror JFK assassination epic “Murder Most Foul,” Dylan’s first set of originals in a decade is breathtakingly masterful. It’s also, often, hilarious. Nearing 80, the Bard’s as playful as ever. And as poignant. And, justifiably, as cocky. – Steve Hochman

To me, Bob Dylan’s best era started in 1989 with his 26th studio album, Oh Mercy, and continues to this day with his 39th, Rough and Rowdy Ways. “Murder Most Foul” shows us that the master of his generation is as much in control of his folktale troubadour craft as he’s ever been. – Chris Jacobs

Justin Farren – Pretty Free

Knowing nothing about Justin Farren, I was immediately sucked into his evocatively detailed story-songs that involved returning diapers to Costco, getting a “two-paycheck ticket” while trying to impress a girl, and (in the all-too-appropriately-titled for-2020, “Last Year Was The Best Year”) a wild Disneyland adventure. Full of humor, sorrow, regrets and hope, Pretty Free was a musical world I visited often this year. – Michael Berick

Mickey Guyton – “Black Like Me”

Mickey Guyton’s lyrics illuminate the individuality and dilemma of any non-white vocalist in country music, and in particular the difficult journey of Black women in the field. Her performance is gripping and memorable, paying homage to many others who’ve faced ridicule and questions about why they’re daring to perform in an idiom many still feel isn’t suited for their musical style. – Ron Wynn

Sarah Jarosz – “Pay It No Mind”

Atop a Fleetwood Mac-style groove, Sarah Jarosz imagines the advice a distant bird might offer. But her songbird is no sweet, shallow lover. She comes with the weight and wisdom of something more timeless. Jarosz lets her fly via mandolin-fiddle interplay that personifies the tension between the endless sky and the “world on the ground.” – Kim Ruehl

Lydia Loveless – Daughter

“I’m not a liberated woman,” Lydia Loveless declares on her fifth album, “just a country bumpkin dilettante.” Don’t you believe it. Written in the shadow of her 2016 divorce and beautifully sung in a voice both epic and straightforward, Daughter finds this Americana siren at the height of her formidable powers. – David Menconi

Lori McKenna – The Balladeer

Lori McKenna‘s singular talent for capturing the joy in everyday details is on full display, from the church parking lots and hometown haunts of “This Town Is a Woman” to the stubborn tiffs and make-up kisses on “Good Fight.” But The Balladeer acknowledges the hard-as-hell times, too. With gentle accompaniment, commanding melodies, and McKenna’s signature lyrical wit, The Balladeer showcases a modern songwriting master. – Dacey Orr Sivewright

Jeff Picker – With the Bass in Mind

I love “new acoustic music,” but am often afraid I’ll be disappointed by it. Jeff Picker’s With the Bass in Mind immediately eases those worries by offering music that is creative, thoughtful, unexpected, and virtuosic while still feeling grounded and musical. All while effortlessly answering the once-rhetorical question: “What would a solo bluegrass bass album even sound like?” – Tristan Scroggins

William Prince – Reliever

William Prince‘s Reliever feels like the best pep talk I’ve ever had. In particular, “The Spark” finds him astonished with loving a partner who loves him back, no matter his own perceived flaws. As a whole, the album explores complicated emotions with a comforting arrangement (with duties shared by Dave Cobb and Scott Nolan). Sung with assurance by Prince, almost like he’s confiding in you, Reliever is both encouraging and excellent. – Craig Shelburne

Scott Prouty – Shaking Down the Acorns

We’d be remiss in our jobs as procurers of roots music culture to not include this stoically beautiful record on our year-end list of the very best. A hearty collection of 24 (mostly solo) old-time fiddle and banjo songs, there is something ever-present, comforting, and timeless about Prouty’s playing, and I have no doubt this is a record I’ll be revisiting like an old friend for years to come. – Amy Reitnouer Jacobs

Emily Rockarts – Little Flower

Montreal-based songwriter Emily Rockarts’ debut album Little Flower is one to remember. Produced by Franky Rousseau (Goat Rodeo Sessions), the album features lilting cinematic ballads punctuated with dance-in-your-room indie anthems. Rockarts’ musicianship is undeniable; her stunning melodies and refreshingly earnest lyrics make for a remarkable combination that is unlike anything else I’ve heard. Run, listen to Little Flower now! – Kaia Kater

Sarah Siskind – Modern Appalachia

Sarah Siskind brought her luminous, Nashville-honed songwriting back home to North Carolina a few years ago and let the mountains speak through her. Leading an all-star Asheville band live off the floor at iconic Echo Mountain studio, she’s made a heart-swelling set of songs that gather her special melodic signature, her meticulous craft, and her insight into how a rich musical region is evolving. – Craig Havighurst

Emma Swift – Blonde on the Tracks

Emma Swift reminded the music world of the power that artists have to control their work when she self-released Blonde on the Tracks, an eight-song collection of Bob Dylan covers. Her interpretations are as powerful and innovative as her methodical and thoughtful initial distribution sans streaming services. – Erin McAnally

Julian Taylor – The Ridge

Mohawk singer-songwriter Julian Taylor resides in what is now referred to as Toronto, but his masterful country-folk record, The Ridge, hits your ear as if plucked directly from Taylor’s childhood summers spent on his grandparents’ farm in rural British Columbia. Refracted through Taylor’s crisp, modern arrangements and undiluted emotion, The Ridge seamlessly bridges the elephant-in-the-2020-room chasm between rural and urban — musically, familially, lyrically, and spiritually. – Justin Hiltner

Molly Tuttle, “Standing on the Moon”

2020 has handed us its fair share of cover albums, with stay-at-home orders urging many to reach for the familiar — but none have meshed a variety of musical sources so creatively as Molly Tuttle’s whimsical …but i’d rather be with you. Her version of “Standing on the Moon” is the nostalgic and homesick, Earth-loving galactic trip of my pedal steel-obsessed, Deadhead dreams. – Shelby Williamson

Cory Wong – Trail Songs (Dawn)

A record that I didn’t know I needed came in early August when Vulfpeck guitarist Cory Wong released Trail Songs (Dawn). A change of pace for Wong, it features predominantly acoustic instrumentation and organic sounds. The album kicks off with “Trailhead,” which sounds like a Dan Crary instrumental until the groove drops in the second verse. BGS standbys Chris Thile and Sierra Hull make appearances as an added bonus. – Jonny Therrien

Donovan Woods – “Seeing Other People”

We may seem unsentimental, stoic, unemotional — especially when faced with something like a partner moving on, or a breakup, when it may be easier to seem fine, have a pint, and download Tinder. Donovan’s gift in this song is to show those complicated “yes, and” internal thoughts and emotions. It is beautiful. – Tom Power

Bluegrass Memoirs: Old-time, Ragtime, & Mrs. Etta Baker

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

On October 3, 2020, during IBMA’s Virtual World of Bluegrass, I watched the Bluegrass Situation‘s presentation of Shout & Shine Online, the fifth annual showcase celebrating equity and inclusion in bluegrass and roots music. This year it featured Black performers, including Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton, the blues, folk, bluegrass, and jazz multi-instrumentalist and vocalist from South Los Angeles. Not only do I enjoy his music, I also relish his asides and introductions. He knows a lot about musical sources, histories and meanings.  

Introducing his music, Paxton explained that “ragtime” was the word people in his home community used to describe what others might call “old-time” or “traditional” — music that rekindled a shared past. At neighborhood and family social gatherings, he said, people would ask for his music by saying, “Play some of that ragtime music!” 

For many people ragtime evokes the aural image of a piano played in the style of early 20th century composer Scott Joplin, an African American whose “Maple Leaf Rag” starred in the soundtrack of the 1973 hit film The Sting. (Paxton performed an arrangement of “Maple Leaf Rag” on five-string banjo for his Shout & Shine Online set.) The basic structure of this solo piano music involves the left hand keeping the rhythm often with large leaps in the bass register — often referred to as “stride” — while the right hand plays syncopated melody on the upper register. 

In this form, ragtime is thought of as an urban phenomenon, straddling the border between popular and classical, and as the musical precursor of jazz. Joplin, for instance, composed an opera in 1911, and Julliard piano professor Joshua Rifkin’s 1971 LP of Joplin’s works earned a Grammy nomination. Pioneer jazz pianists like Jelly Roll Morton included ragtime in their repertoires.

Ragtime had another manifestation in the southeast, where Black musicians adapted it to the guitar in a fingerpicking style. Here, the right hand did all the work: the thumb picking the rhythm on the bass strings while the index and middle fingers ragged the tune on the higher strings.

The guitar was more affordable and portable than the piano. Ragtime guitar was featured by early 20th century itinerant musicians like Arnold Shultz in western Kentucky and Blind Boy Fuller in North Carolina. But it was not just the music of popular entertainment, it was also, as Paxton explained, social community music, performed for friends and neighbors. 

In 1957, ragtime fingerpicking was a “new thing” within the folk music world that I was becoming acquainted with as a college student. I switched from nylon- to steel-string guitar and started wearing picks on my right hand. One of the recordings popular with us at Oberlin College was a track Peggy Seeger fingerpicked and sang on her 1955 Folkways LP, Songs of Courting and Complaint: “Freight Train.” She’d learned the song and its guitar accompaniment from the Black woman who worked as her family’s maid, North Carolinian Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten, its composer.

In 1958 Peggy’s brother Mike Seeger produced Cotten’s first album for Folkways. “Freight Train,” already her best-known song, was on it:

Another tune we were trying to fingerpick in our dorm rooms and dining hall jam sessions was “Railroad Bill.” That song had been recorded by Virginia multi-instrumentalist and virtuoso Hobart Smith back in the ’40s. 

“Discovered” at the White Top (Virginia) folk festival in 1936, Smith and his sister, singer Texas Gladden, subsequently performed at the White House and were recorded for the Library of Congress by Alan Lomax in 1942. In 1946, Lomax introduced Hobart to New York record company owner Moses Asch. One of Asch’s new Disc label 78s launched Smith’s version of “Railroad Bill” into aural tradition among ’50s fingerpickers. Lomax recorded Smith again in 1959:

Smith had studied and learned fiddle and banjo with African American musician neighbors at a time when the realities of segregation forced him and his friends to visit them surreptitiously. He was inspired to take up the guitar when he saw an itinerant Black bluesman, whom he identified as Blind Lemon Jefferson. 

“Railroad Bill” was a well-known song in the southeast. Another song with a similar melody was “The Cannon Ball,” which Maybelle Carter of the famous Carter Family learned from Burnsville, North Carolina, native Lesley Riddle. In the late twenties and early thirties Riddle, an African American, accompanied A.P. Carter on song collecting trips and taught the family several songs they later recorded. Here’s a 1936 radio transcription of Maybelle singing and picking “The Cannon Ball”:

Mike Seeger recorded Riddle several times between 1965 and 1978; in 1993 Rounder issued a CD with 14 performances, including “The Cannon Ball”:

Riddle’s version, with its C to E chord change, is even closer to “Railroad Bill” than Maybelle’s. But in the mid-’50s, when I first became interested in this tune, no LP recordings of it were available. 

That changed in 1956, when a new version of “Railroad Bill” was released on an album, Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians. The first piece on the “B” side, it was fingerpicked by Mrs. Etta Baker: 

By the time I arrived at Oberlin College in 1957 it was an underground favorite; the hip older students spoke about trying to play like Mrs. Etta Baker. Copies of the album were passed around.

This album was on the new folk music label Tradition. Based in New York, Tradition hit the ground running in 1956 with at least 14 albums representing Greenwich Village trends in the mid-’50s folk revival: lots of ballads, plenty of Irish and English singers, popular radio performers, folklore collectors, flamenco artists, new concert sensations, and two albums of field recordings in the style of Folkways — one from Ireland, and this one from Appalachia. The recordings for Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians were made by Tradition owner Diane Hamilton along with Liam Clancy and Paul Clayton in the summer of 1956. 

Diane Hamilton was the pseudonym of Diane Guggenheim (1924–1991), an American mining heiress with a lifelong interest in traditional music, particularly Irish. At the time of the recording, Liam Clancy, soon to become part of the famous Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, had just arrived in New York, following an attachment with Hamilton. His brother Paddy was president of her new company.

New Englander Paul Clayton had studied folklore at the University of Virginia while pursuing a career as a folksinger. He recorded many albums from the mid-’50s until his troubled life ended in 1967 at the age of 36. Today he’s perhaps best known as a songwriter. His “Gotta Travel On” was a country hit in 1958, and his friend Bob Dylan borrowed from one of his songs to compose “Don’t Think Twice.” In 1956 Tradition had just released Paul’s album, Whaling and Sailing Songs from the Days of Moby Dick.

In his notes for Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians, Clayton described the album as “the result of a folk-song collecting trip during the Summer of 1956.” Hamilton and Clancy had recently arrived in New York from Ireland; Clancy was keen on collecting southern folk songs, and Clayton, who’d done a lot of that, was the obvious choice for expert guide. 

The three met in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and headed west for a collecting trip to Appalachia. Their exact itinerary is unknown, but they went as far west as Beech Mountain, the highest point in the eastern U.S., well-known for its folk traditions. There they recorded folktale collector and performer Richard Chase doing three old-time dance tunes on the harmonica. In nearby Banner Elk, Mrs. Edd Presnell played three old-time tunes on her Appalachian dulcimer — an instrument then rarely heard on recordings that Clayton had studied and used in his performances. 

The trio also visited Hobart Smith in his Saltville, Virginia, home, seventy miles north of Beech Mountain, recording four fiddle tunes and one banjo piece. 

Their travel also took them to Blowing Rock, about a 25 mile drive from Beech Mountain, where they stopped in at the Moses H. Cone Mansion (also known as Flat Top Manor) a popular regional park on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Etta Baker, her father Boone Reid, and other family members were vacationing in the area, visiting the mansion. Reid, a musician himself, noticed Clayton was toting a guitar. He told Clayton of Baker’s musical talent and asked him to listen to Etta play her signature, “One Dime Blues.” According to Baker, “Paul was amazed. He got directions to our home and he was over the next day with his tape-recorder along with Liam Clancy and Diane Hamilton.”

They recorded five pieces. “Later,” says Clayton, “We met more of… a very talented family living in Morganton or Gamewell,” and they recorded two banjo pieces each by Boone Reid, then 79 years old, and Etta’s brother-in-law, her sister Cora Phillips’ husband Lacey. 

Clayton’s notes indicate that they recorded “considerable instrumental material,” from which they chose “typical and best-performed” examples. This considerable material subsequently disappeared, leaving us today with only the album’s 20 tracks. 

These include many familiar pieces from the local old-time repertoire. By following Harry Smith’s precedent in not identifying the color of performers’ skin, Clayton made the point that these musical traditions were regional, not racial. Perhaps since dulcimer player Mrs. Presnell’s first name was not given, all of the musicians were identified on the album notes as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” This lent an air of respect to the names of people often described elsewhere as “informants.” 

Because of her fine guitar playing Mrs. Etta Baker was, for us, the most memorable performer on the album. A word of explanation — Mr. Hobart Smith was a fine fiddler, but in 1956 the fiddle hadn’t caught on in the folk revival. That wouldn’t start to happen until a few years later when the New Lost City Ramblers appeared.

With the exception of Smith, who led a string band for a while, the folks on this album made music as part of their social life, playing for their own enjoyment and that of family and friends. Sometimes they provided music for dancing — square dancing, and solo step dancing.

Here’s a good example of ragtime guitar used for solo step dancing: Earl Scruggs playing “Georgia Buck” live in 1961. 

Another version was released in 1964 on the The Fabulous Sound of Flatt & Scruggs (Col CL 2255/CS 9055). The album notes say: “Georgia Buck, played by Scruggs on the guitar, represents the rhythmic beat of the old-time buck dancers.” 

According to NCPedia, “buck dancing is a folk dance that originated among African Americans during the era of slavery. It was largely associated with the North Carolina Piedmont and, later, with the blues. The original buck dance, or ‘buck and wing,’ referred to a specific step performed by solo dancers, usually men; today the term encompasses a broad variety of improvisational dance steps.” 

The Traditional Tune Archive describes “Georgia Buck” as “a black Southern banjo song,” so it’s interesting that Earl played it on the guitar in a style resembling that of Baker, Smith, Riddle and Carter. Where did he learn it that way? We don’t know, but Lester makes a point of describing his music as “hot” during the video and other musicians can be heard saying the same thing off-camera, seemingly endorsing the idea that this is good ragtime.

There are many stories of young white southern musicians learning from older black musicians in their hometown. One example: In 1972-73, Kenny Baker, then playing fiddle with Bill Monroe, did two albums with Buck Graves of guitar fingerpicking he’d learned from his brother, who’d taken lessons from “Earnest Johnson, a blind, black guitarist who sold peanuts in Jenkins, Kentucky during the thirties.” Rebel reissued them in 1989 as The Puritan Sessions (CD 1108).

Listening to Etta Baker on Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians was as close to taking lessons in that style of guitar as most of us undergrad folkies got. After the release of the album, she was not heard again on records for many years. Like Libba Cotten, Baker was a working woman with little time for making music. By the time she retired in 1973 from the Skyland Textile mill in Morganton, North Carolina, she’d endured family tragedies — the deaths of her husband and a son. After retirement she began accepting requests to perform and her music career developed. More about that next time…

Neil V. Rosenberg is an author, scholar, historian, banjo player, Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee, and co-chair of the IBMA Foundation’s Arnold Shultz Fund.

Photo of Neil V. Rosenberg: Terri Thomson Rosenberg

WATCH: The Arcadian Wild, “Fall: War”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Arcadian Wild
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Fall: War”
Album: Principium
Release Date: January 2021
Label: The Arcadian Wild/ONErpm

In Their Words: “I’m really excited about how the arrangement and recording of ‘Fall: War’ turned out. Isaac (guitarist/co-writer) and I pseudo-finished these songs that make up Principium and put a pin in them a few years ago, but they really came into their own when we dusted them off at the beginning of 2020. I think the time simmering on the back-burner served them well, and we were able to bring them to life in a way that wasn’t initially possible. Bailey and Erik (fiddle and bass, respectively) were wonderful collaborators, and they played irreplaceable roles in shaping and refining the music. We’re grateful to have had their artistic voices as a part of this process.

“‘Fall: War’ was actually the creative starting point of Principium, even though it’s the third of four movements. In some ways, it’s the heart of the work. It’s also the most physically intense song in the cycle, which gave us a fantastic opportunity to pretend to be a rock band, so my high school pop-punk dreams have all come true. Moreover, I’m totally blown away by the short-film installment for ‘Fall.’ Greyson Welch has done an incredible job of telling this story visually, and I am so proud to work with such a gifted team of artists as we realize a little passion project that’s years in the making. It’s great to finally get to share it.” — Lincoln Mick, The Arcadian Wild (mandolinist/writer)

Photo credit: Shelby M’lynn Mick

Mark Harris, “Lost Girl”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Just about every picker in bluegrass and old-time each has their own right-hand approach to their instruments. Even on the violin, a device with hundreds of years of technique and pedagogy behind its myriad bowing-arm methods, idiosyncrasies are still apparent in nearly every instrumentalist’s approach. The six-string, flat-top guitar — despite being perhaps the most common “ax” in the traditional five-piece string band — has experienced far fewer seismic shifts in playing style and technique, though its individual touches are just as varied. Clarence White and acolyte Tony Rice each reinvigorated the instrument’s role in bluegrass; and today, players like David Grier, Tommy Emmanuel, and Molly Tuttle conjure mind-bending, never before seen or heard acrobatics on their instruments. (Tuttle’s clawhammer guitar approach being a perfect example.) 

Mark Harris, an Australia-born guitarist now based in Colorado, offers his own innovative right-hand style on a new album, Old Time Guitar. His debut, the fifteen-song series explores old-time fiddle tunes re-arranged and configured for solo guitar. By playing with open tunings and capitalizing on their innate resonance, Harris is able to execute each composition as if a one-man-band, supplying his own rhythm section and simultaneously picking the tune. It’s like an old-time rendering of jazz guitar studies’ chord melodies plus open-string droning seemingly plucked from the banjo. The result, like on “Lost Girl,” is a loping, driving, homey sound with a polish — or perhaps a patina. On “Lost Girl,” Harris’ guitar is tuned D G D G B E (top to bottom), giving his flat-top box a honey-like resonance somewhere between a singer-songwriter’s DADGAD happy place and an open-tuned banjo.

With Old Time Guitar, Harris makes a compelling mark within a contemporary old-time scene hungry to demonstrate its canon isn’t just time capsule music, but relevant contextualized in the present — with production, arrangements, and outside-the-box thinking to match.

Photo credit: Tim Brown

MIXTAPE: The Barefoot Movement’s Holiday Favorites

Posted on by Editor

To get an idea of how much I love Christmas music, I’ll start with a series of questions. Do I have nearly 700 Christmas songs on my iPod? Why, yes I do! Did I scroll through every one of them in search of ideas for this playlist? I sure did! And did I start with about 75 songs, which I had an incredibly hard time whittling down to a mere 14? Yes, yes I did — I take this playlist business quite seriously. Also, on an unrelated note, do I actually still use an iPod classic? You betcha!

As you can plainly see, I love holiday music. At any other time in the year I might weary of hearing 100 versions of the same song. But at Christmas, anything goes. If a band I love has a holiday album, I’m most definitely buying it. In high school — these were pre-Spotify days mind you — I curated my own “playlists” and grouped them into categories like “Christmas Classics,” “Rockin’ Christmas,” and “R&B/Soul” and burned them onto CDs. Every year I would add more songs ’til eventually, they outgrew the CD format!

So I relished the opportunity to put together this specially curated Mixtape for the Sitch. I tried to stay away from the classic category, even though I love “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree” as much as the next person. My taste in music is very personal to me, so with every song comes a little story.

I understand that Christmas music is not for everyone. Even some folks who like it in small doses might tire of hearing the same songs year after year. But for me, these annual celebrations — whether Christmas, Halloween, or National Donut Day — give us something to look forward to when the constant toiling of life wears us down. And that is a good and worthy thing, especially in a year when so many joyful things have been canceled. I hope you enjoy this collection and that you’ll get some real enjoyment out of these great songs! Happy listening! — Noah Wall, The Barefoot Movement

Doc Watson, Del McCoury, and Mac Wiseman – “Christmas Time’s A Comin’”

Something about the combination of Doc Watson’s immediately recognizable guitar playing and Del McCoury’s high lonesome tenor, not to mention the great Mac Wiseman (who I just learned was a co-founder of the Country Music Association, who knew?!), transports me directly to a living-room, after-dinner, holiday pickin’ party. This may be the quintessential bluegrass Christmas song and this is my all-time favorite version. I love it so much, it makes me want to learn to flatfoot.

Red Clay Ramblers – “One Rose/Hot Buttered Rum”

The Red Clay Ramblers are a North Carolina-based Americana band who have been making wonderful music since the 1970s. I first heard this song on our local NPR affiliate radio station’s weekend folk show, “Back Porch Music.” I was introduced to many bands on that fabulous little program that is still airing today, from legends like Doc Watson to then-up-and-comers Nickel Creek. It’s been an honor to hear my own music played on there amongst them.

Just once in my life, I’d love to write some lyrics half as good as these, which so beautifully capture the gloom of a wet, cold, melancholy Carolina winter, when even sparkling lights and greenery seem colorless and out of place. Ultimately, it’s a love song, an ode to the ones who keep us warm, no matter the weather. “When dreary Christmas decorations line the streets and filling stations and dime store Santas can’t disguise their empty hands and empty eyes… In the dead of winter, when the tinsel angels come, you’re my sweet maple sugar, honey, hot buttered rum.”

Sufjan Stevens – “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!”

I am a huge fan of Sufjan Stevens and his wildly imaginative, fearlessly quirky music. I gave his first collection of holiday songs as a Christmas gift to Tommy Norris, our mandolinist and my now-husband, back when we were first dating. It’s since become a staple of our seasonal collection. This song in particular strongly resonated with me, as I can recall moments in my childhood that mirror the lyrics. For many, family relations around the holidays are tense and somewhat less than “holly jolly.” I think that’s okay — holidays can be stressful, and no one is perfect. This Sufjan song offers anyone who has been on the giving OR receiving end of some righteous seasonal stress a lovely cathartic release. Other favorites from this collection are “Only at Christmas Time” and “Hey Guys! It’s Christmas Time!”

Ralph Stanley – “Christmas Is Near”

Ralph wrote this downhome delight himself and originally recorded it with his brother Carter in 1958. This newer version is unabashedly country and I love everything about it. It’s as pure as freshly fallen snow! While some of the songs on my list might highlight the somber side of the season, this one is the exact opposite, with lyrics that round up all the good things that make the holidays special: family, joy, and love. It’s a magical time, if we are lucky enough to be able to focus on these things.

Pearl Jam – “Let Me Sleep (It’s Christmas Time)”

My “Rockin’ Christmas” playlist has all the classic holiday tracks from greats like John Lennon, Eagles, and Queen. It also includes this grunge-era gem. Picture, if you will, 4-year-old Noah, a card-carrying member of the Pearl Jam fan club with a wicked crush on Eddie Vedder. If I remember correctly, this song was on an exclusive vinyl single that was sent to members of said fan club, and I was one of them! It’s such a dreamy tune, and while a look at the lyrics today reveals deeper meaning, 4-year-old me related to the simple joy of taking a cozy nap on a cold day during Christmas vacation. And y’all, I still love naps. Especially Christmas naps. Because I feel like I earn them.

Duke Ellington – “Nutcracker Suite: Peanut Brittle Brigade (March)”

This is a pick from our bassist, Katie Blomarz. She began performing with us in 2015 and brought with her a background in jazz music that was cultivated by her musical family. In her own words, “For me, the Christmas spirit is amplified in jazz/big band arrangements. The Nutcracker Suite interpreted by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn is the perfect harmony of a classical favorite by Tchaikovsky reimagined by a big band for a modern flair. This album has been a special one for my family because my dad, brother and I all grew up playing in big bands, and in non-2020 years, my brother plays this record live every December! It is a swinging change of pace from the pop songs on any Christmas playlist!”

Laurie Lewis & Tom Rozum / Merle Haggard – “If We Make It Through December”

When I was fresh out of high school, I landed a job at a local country music radio station. Though our programming was your typical Top 40 and wasn’t even handled at the local level, we would still get CDs sent to us occasionally, the old school, indie marketing way. This is how I happened upon Laurie Lewis and Tom Rozum’s seasonal album, Winter’s Grace. Believe it or not, this was the first time I had ever heard of Laurie Lewis, and even harder to believe, it was the first time I had ever heard Merle Haggard’s wonderful song (I was only 18, so cut me some slack!) I was an immediate fan of both. The song tells such a relatable story. I am always inspired by the way a song can take a moment in time, no matter how insignificant in the long run, and immortalize it. It’s the perfect healing device that brings comfort and affirmation, even when that moment has long passed. You can’t find Laurie & Tom’s version on streaming services, so we’ll include Merle’s here.

The Jackson 5 – “Give Love on Christmas Day (Group A Cappella Version)”

My R&B Christmas playlists feature tracks by folks like Otis Redding, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder, and of course, the entire Jackson 5 Christmas album. This song is what it’s all about. Whether or not you are religious, the sentiment of spreading love is universal, and that very concept is what lies at the heart of Christmas. I love the original Jackson 5 recording, but this one, a special track from The Jackson 5’s Ultimate Christmas Collection, is stripped down to just the vocals. It goes from being a full-fledged, studio package, to an intimate, almost hymn-like family prayer, sung by an extremely talented group of brothers. The quality of their voices is so palpable and innocent, which lends to the sincerity of the message. “Out of the mouths of babes,” indeed.

Rogue Wave – “Christmas”

I love Rogue Wave so much! And I was today years old when I realized that this Christmas tune of theirs from an awesome collection, put together by their label, Brushfire Records, is a cover of a song by The Who from their rock opera, Tommy. I’ve seen it, but I completely forgot about the song. Rogue Wave’s version sparkles like sun reflecting on a snow covered hillside, peppered with sledders. Seriously, that’s exactly what I picture when I hear it.

The Judds – “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem”

One Christmas Eve, I was attending the annual service held at my great grandmother’s church. One of the performers they had scheduled to sing came down with something, and the other musicians asked me to fill in on this song. It went over so well, it turned into a tradition, and I came back and sang it every Christmas Eve for the next 15 years. Needless to say, it earned a very special place in my heart, especially after we lost my grandmother at age 96 back in 2018. Every time I hear this recording, I remember listening to it in my car in the parking lot, to remind myself which part to sing, and my precious grandmother, beaming with pride in the audience. This is another song that I would file under the label “quintessential bluegrass Christmas listening.” The Judds’ version is perfect, thus I have yet to record a version myself, as I can’t think of one thing I would do differently.

Bob & Doug McKenzie – “The Twelve Days of Christmas”

And now a fun one! One of my holiday playlists highlights things that fall into the humor category. The selections include songs like Porky Pig’s “Blue Christmas,” barking dogs singing “Jingle Bells,” and the parody of Black Sabbath’s Iron Man, “I Am Santa Claus.” I have about five spoofs of “The 12 Days of Christmas” because, well, it just lends itself so well to mockery! This one is my favorite. The characters Bob & Doug Mckenzie are fictional Canadian brothers, created and played by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas on the sketch comedy show SCTV that aired during the ‘70s and ‘80s. I won’t say too much. You’ve probably heard it, but if you haven’t, you should. My favorite line: “Next year, get me a chainsaw.”

Track Dogs – “How Christmas Was Meant to Be”

We met the band Track Dogs at Folk Alliance International several years ago. I was walking by a hotel room showcase and the sound I heard from within made me turn around and go listen. Their typical instrumentation consists of guitar, trumpet, bass, and percussion, and they are made up of members from England, Ireland, and the US, yet the band came together and now resides in Spain. The fusion of all these elements yields something truly unique. Lead singer Garrett Wall, whom I must be distantly related to (at least I hope so) has one of my favorite voices in modern music. This song is eloquently penned, perfectly arranged, and beautifully recorded. A new Christmas favorite for me, to be sure.

The Seldom Scene – “Silent Night”

No autotune here folks, these guys are the real deal. The Seldom Scene is one of my all-time favorite bluegrass bands. When I was a preteen, and all I listened to was Limp Bizkit and Korn, I went through a phase where music like theirs was “too bluegrassy” for my taste. Then one day, I saw the light, thank God. They have such a signature sound, they were true innovators, with harmonies that stand alone in creativity, even today. This song in particular is the perfect example of why people buy Christmas albums. It’s simply pleasing to hear a band you love sing a familiar song, even one that has been recorded thousands of times and sung for centuries. Oh and by the way, I still love Korn and Limp Bizkit and have absolutely no shame in admitting this. If they had Christmas albums, I’d probably buy them.

Ryan Shupe & the Rubberband – “The Gift”

Ryan Shupe & the Rubberband are described as an American rock/bluegrass band on Wikipedia. The “rock/bluegrass” classification kind of makes me chuckle, but it’s true! Their style marries the two seemingly opposite genres of music. We shared a booking agent with the band for a while and we were able to play a few events with them. Every year when I hear this song, my sincere desire to spend my time on Earth doing good is renewed. It’s so hard to keep this ideal at the center of my attention, when the inevitable storms of life keep me constantly distracted and focused on myself, and my innate introversion pressures me into seclusion. But when I hear this song, it gives me the motivation I need to get back out there and try again, to seek to do better in every way I can, to be a friend, an ally, and a comfort to anyone in need. It’s a lofty aspiration, and I am just a work in progress, but this song gives me hope that I might one day find the strength to live up to it.

Photo credit: Workshop Media Co.

The BGS Radio Hour – Episode 191

Posted on by Amy Reitnouer

We are so excited to bring to you the BGS Radio Hour podcast. Since 2017 the BGS Radio Hour has been a recap of the wonderful music, new and old, that we’ve covered here on BGS throughout the week, broadcast over the airwaves in Murfreesboro, TN, southern California, and around the country. Now you can check back in every Monday for the Radio Hour in podcast form!

APPLE PODCASTS, SPOTIFY
Appalachian Road Show – “Goin’ to Bring Her Back”

This North Carolina-based band, who just released their sophomore album Tribulation, is a supergroup of sorts – with members having formerly played with David Grisman, Mountain Heart, and Josh Turner. “Goin’ to Bring Her Back” is a recent release, in the Road Show’s own style of classic bluegrass.

Ian Foster – “Voyager”

Canadian songwriter Ian Foster first wrote this song when the famous Voyager 1 spacecraft passed into interstellar space, AKA, “the space between the stars.” A monumental moment for all humanity, it inspired this song — which is about faith in ourselves, science, and who we are.

Scythian – “Galway City”

Always a festival favorite, Scythian has a deep connection with their fans: deep enough to have taken over 600 of them along to Ireland on tours over the last seven years. The Virginia-based group brought us a song about those magical nights in Galway City.

Frank Solivan – “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”

Throughout this holiday season in particular, it’s important to remember those traditions which unite us. Though many holiday reunions may hot happen this year, Frank Solivan brings us this warm reminder of how we’ll “muddle through” for BGS Wraps.

Tina Adair – “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses”
Tina Adair, lead singer of the powerhouse group Sister Sadie, delivers to us her take on an ’80s classic, originally recorded by Kathy Mattea. Adair and the rest of her bandmates in Sister Sadie are our Artist of the Month this December!

Sarah Harmer – “Little Frogs”

The story we didn’t know we needed. From her new album Are You Gone?, Sarah Harmer brings us a song crafted from summer memories and small pleasures. The video, however, gives us a glimpse into the day in the life of a “little frog.”

Deutsch & Thorn – “Scorpio Sun”

Colorado banjo guru Andy Thorn first recorded this tune with the Colorado Playboys (Travis Book, Jon Stickley, and John Frazier.) Over a decade later, the composition once again is given life in a collaboration with pianist Eric Deutsch recorded in vibrant Mexico City.

The Steel Wheels – “The Healer”

Virginia’s The Steel Wheels were recent 5+5 guests — that’s 5 questions, 5 songs. We chatted with the band about their inspirations, cherished memories of being on stage, and dream musician-meal pairings. This week on the Radio Hour, they brought us a song from their new album, Everyone a Song, Vol. 1.

Katie Oates – “Here in Gastonia”

By way of Katie Oates, this week we honor 29-year-old Ella May Wiggins, a songwriter and textile worker who was shot and killed in an infamous workers’ strike of 1929. This song, written by Si Kahn and from the album We Go On: Si Kahn’s Songs of Hope in Hard Times, reminds us of the ongoing struggle for better lives and justice, for all people.

Jesse Colin Young – “Sugar Babe”

Songwriter and folkster Jesse Colin Young (of the Youngbloods) brought us a return to his roots with his new record Highway Troubadour. The South Carolina-based artist revisits decades of his musical material while exploring a new launch into solo performance.

Ron Pope – “Christmas Where I Come From”

It’s no doubt that we’re all missing people this holiday season and Ron Pope is no exception. While there will be few big family Christmases this year, we can still sit around and sing our favorite Christmas songs, which is exactly what inspired this new release from Pope.

Gillian Welch – “Rambling Blade”

Beloved Gillian Welch and her partner David Rawlings were among the many affected by the Nashville tornados in March 2020. After saving a collection of demo recordings which were scattered amongst the wreckage, Welch has so graciously invited the rest of the world in to hear these 48 unreleased songs. On this episode of the BGS Radio Hour, we bring you “Rambling Blade.”

Sister Sadie – “900 Miles”

Like we said: Sister Sadie is a powerhouse – no ifs, ands, or buts about it. The all-female, hard-driving bluegrass band racked up multiple awards at this year’s IBMA Awards, including the highest honor: Entertainer of the Year. The group is our December Artist of the Month, so check back for tidbits all month long, as we have plenty to feature on Sister Sadie!

The Infamous Stringdusters – “Joy to the World”

One thing that bluegrass bands haven’t been slack on this year is Christmas songs. No exception, the Infamous Stringdusters bring us this classic, done Dusters-style of course, from their new album Deck the Halls.

Photo credit: (L to R) Tina Adair by John Dorton; The Infamous Stringdusters, ‘Dust the Halls’; Gillian Welch by David Rawlings.

Sister Sadie: Bluegrass Entertainers, Teachers, and Most of All, Friends

Posted on by Editor

Sister Sadie is a bluegrass supergroup featuring no-holds-barred instrumental and vocal talent presented as world-class entertainment. To list each member’s history in bluegrass and their accomplishments would take up more space than this entire interview, but their music speaks for itself. These women have spent their lives perfecting their craft. The band originally formed to play a one-off show at the historic Station Inn in Nashville. Once they started playing, they knew that they had found something special.

Since that night they have gone on to perform on the Grand Ole Opry, receive a Grammy nomination, and rack up two historic awards from the International Bluegrass Music Association. In 2019 they were the first all-female group to win IBMA Vocal Group of the Year and in 2020 they became the first all-female group to win IBMA Entertainer of the Year. These awards represent not only their individual lifetimes’ worth of hard work and passion, but also the work and love that they put into their music and each other.

BGS caught up with three of the band’s founding members — Tina Adair (mandolin, vocals), Gena Britt (banjo, vocals), and Deanie Richardson (fiddle) — for our Artist of the Month interview.

BGS: Since IBMA was virtual this year I haven’t gotten to see any of y’all in person to congratulate you on your award. I imagine this recognition must feel exciting since you’ve all been playing for your entire lives. Does winning Entertainer of the Year hold any special significance to you?

Tina Adair: I’ve been singing on stage since I was 3 years old. As big of a ham as I am now, I was as big a ham back then, too. I’ve always loved the stage and I love entertaining people and making people feel good and having a good time. I think people go out to see shows to get a break from the everyday world and to enjoy music because music is very therapeutic. It’s always been a goal of mine to make sure that people leave smiling bigger than they did coming into the show and feeling like they’re part of something. I know that Gena and Deanie are the same, all we’ve ever known has been music, you know? It’s not just a part of our lives — it is our life. So to get to do this as a profession, just makes us even luckier. And then to be recognized by your peers. Entertainer of the Year has always been something that I’ve dreamed about all my life. It’s been very special and we’re very honored and grateful.

Gena Britt: That’s pretty much everything I would’ve said.

Deanie Richardson: Yeah, that was pretty good. I’d say we’ve all been going to IBMA since we were teenagers. We all dreamed of being nominated for awards, but I don’t know if we ever thought it would happen. And like Tina said, that Entertainer of the Year category is special for some reason, so winning is just the icing on the cake. It means that we’ve not only gone out and played our best, but entertained them. Tina’s a great entertainer. She can grab that crowd and take them on a big journey. They’ll laugh and cry and anything they need to feel emotionally she can do that with an audience. To pull this off, to experience these awards and what we’ve accomplished together as five friends who have grown up knowing each other and going to IBMA that’s the really special part for me.

You all have this connection to mentoring the next generation, which is such a big part of the bluegrass tradition. How do you feel about being able to influence the generation of bluegrass in general and of women and bluegrass?

TA: Each of us has had such a lifelong journey, and we’re not old, but we’re middle aged now. So we’ve got some experiences to share. With age comes wisdom. I’ve been [working] at Belmont [University] for 20 years now. Personally I love that college age, because it’s such a transitional period in a person’s life. That’s the age where you’re coming into being a young adult and learning to make decisions. I love to be involved in lives at that point in time. I love to be able to provide advice to the kids and share any kind of tips. One of the best pieces of advice I always give to my students that I learned from one of my mentors is to do something every day to help forward yourself towards a goal or the career that you want to go after. Whether you spend five minutes on it or 10 hours that day on it, do something every single day.

And then, as far as influencing women and everything, I hope I can be an influence to a female that doesn’t fit the typical mold of what people think you’re supposed to look like in society. You know what I mean? People who need to be encouraged to get on stage or find the courage to want to learn how to play something even if they’re just sitting in their living room. I think that’s important — having that self-confidence and awareness of knowing who you are and knowing what you stand for. And being okay with yourself. Lord knows I’m not a size four, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve got the confidence of a size two. I love people. And I think if you give love to people then they’re gonna give back to you. I really feed off the energy of an audience because if I’m interacting with them and they’re interacting with me, then they’re invested just as much as I’m invested in them, you know? If I can influence one person that may have thought they couldn’t do something but changed their mind after seeing a Sister Sadie show, then that’s made our journey worth it.

DR: We’re not ones to harp on this whole “We’re women, blah, blah, blah.” But there are lots of women out there who paved the way for us like Laurie Lewis, Lynn Morris, and Kathy Kallick. We look up to them and they made it possible for us to win these awards. Somebody said the other day in an interview, “No woman has ever won this award” or all-female band or whatever. It is a male-dominated business, but there have always been women in this genre. There have been women always working towards what we just accomplished and they helped us get to where we are. And I hope that we’re paving the way for the next group of women to come right behind us. I think we’re working past saying, “Here are some women, and they just did this.” Because, you know what? We’re freaking good. And we just did this. Eighty percent of my roster that I teach is young girls playing fiddle and I want them to not have to worry about being a man or a woman. I want them to just want to be good, or to be the best, and to get out there and do this because that’s their goal.

Gena, I had a question for you because you played in Petticoat Junction, which is another historically significant, all-female group. Do you feel like there’s much of a difference performing in an all-female group now versus back then?

GB: Back then, there were a few other all-female bands, and at the time, if you called a promoter to book a show or something, they would say, “Well, we’ve already got a female band that weekend. We don’t need another female band.” I think we’ve grown so much since then. It hasn’t completely gone away, but we have stepped away from that. Yes, we are women, we are in our 40s, we all have these jobs that we’re doing, like, I have a day job and everything. But people are recognizing our music and we’ve been given these awards, because we’re carrying our own and we’re doing as best we can as musicians.

It’s great to see all of that progress. Bluegrass has this thing where men age into reverence, kind of no matter how talented they are. If you’ve been around for long enough, then people recognize that you have some wisdom which is turned into social capital. But women don’t seem to get that same treatment. It seems like it’s much harder for them to age into legends. You just stop hearing about them as much. It’s a really unsettling phenomenon. So I think it’s doubly exciting for you all to, uh, as… I’m trying so hard to not say, and I’m not saying at all that you guys are —

TA: Just say it, Tristan!

You’re only older than me! You’re not old, I’m just a baby.

TA: I mean, we’re all one step away from menopause. At least I really hope I am, because if I’m not, there’s something else wrong with me. [Laughs]

GB: I was 18 when I joined Petticoat Junction. That was 30 years ago. I’m 48. That gives some perspective on how long we’ve been out here doing this.

You’ve been doing this your entire lives and have been actively involved in the scene the entire time and I think it’s reflected in your music. You’re all talented musicians. The music that you play has its own sound, but clearly has a lot of different influences. How do you bridge the gap between bluegrass and folk and country and blues?

DR: Going into the studio and picking material is a hard thing for five people to do, and as women who all have different tastes and different senses of artistic creativity, it’s a challenge. Everybody brings songs to the table and then we choose as a unit what we think works as a band. That’s a hard process for us, but I feel like, at the end of the day, we work really well through our differences. Hell, we’re probably gonna break into a fight, but it’s gonna be alright. We’re gonna make it through it. And at the end of the day, there’s gonna be 12 songs on the record that we can kick ass on. Part of it comes down to Tina has a singing style that works for her, Gena has a singing style, and Dale Ann had one as well. So that brings in the blues, the hardcore traditional, the folky, from each of us.

GB: It’s all those influences. The East Kentucky, Alabama and the blues from Tina, I’m straight-ahead, traditional bluegrass from here in the heart of North Carolina. And it’s like you said, it is a cohesive sound. We’re all together. All those influences do help create our sound.

TA: It’s what brings it together.

You all clearly put a lot of work and love into your music and it’s really paid off.

DR: The one thing I am most proud of about this band is that we started as five friends played that show at the Station Inn. It went from there to another show, to another show, to a record to another record, to a Grammy nomination, to the Opry, to Vocal Group of the Year, to Fiddle Player and Entertainer of the Year. I wouldn’t have won that Fiddle Player or the Year award without this band so I’m truly grateful for all of that. But we’ve done this all by ourselves. We are five women who love each other, who work through our differences, and who have worked hard together.

We’ve done the booking, we’ve done the managing, we’ve done the publicity — it’s all been organic. It’s not something we’ve gone out and pushed, it’s not something we’ve gone out and publicized a great deal. It’s just all happened organically. It took on its own life. Everything that has happened with Sister Sadie has happened because it was meant to happen. And it’s just out of our love for this music and for each other. That is what I’m most proud of. Five women who raise kids, who work day jobs, who teach, who play professionally. Five women who have done this together. I’m super, super proud of that.

TA: Me, too. I want to piggyback off of that because that’s an important point. We didn’t start off to make it big or anything. We just wanted to play music together and instead of doing it in our living room, we thought, “Well, we could do it at the Station Inn, and that would be fun.” Because Station Inn is like all of our home away from home. So that’s how it all started. I think everything has a time and a place and everything happens the way it’s supposed to happen. I think that night at the Station Inn was supposed to happen. That is what led us down this road to accomplishing and achieving some things that have been lifelong dreams of ours that may not have ever come true had Sister Sadie not been formed. We just love each other dearly and hopefully that comes across. I hope the concept of Sister Sadie comes across as nothing more than we’re trying to love. I love people, we love each other, and love making music. We love bluegrass.

Photo credits: Deanie Richardson by Kerrie Richardson; Tina Adair by John Dorton; Gena Britt by Mike Carter

BGS Wraps: The Infamous Stringdusters, “Joy to the World”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Infamous Stringdusters
Song: “Joy to the World”
Album: Dust the Halls
Release Date: December 4, 2020

In Their Words: “Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, after all touring was indefinitely canceled, we were trying to figure out how to stay connected musically as a band spread out all around the country. We started to consider doing some remote recording projects (each guy from his own home studio), but doing a brand new original Stringdusters album requires us to be together. I had actually already started thinking about a Christmas album last year, but never had the time to start recording it, so when the idea came up we were able to use that list of mostly traditional songs and added an Andy Hall arrangement of ‘Winter Wonderland.’

“I put together arrangements for the band, wrote charts, made a guitar track and the guys all added their parts one by one. As the pieces were coming in and I was assembling and mixing them in my studio, the songs started to come to life and I felt like the band was together again. It was truly therapeutic and particularly nice that it was joyful holiday music, which helped me through some of the darkness happening in the world around us. We hope this album can help bring a little of that joy in to people’s homes, and we wish everyone a happy and healthy holiday season.” — Andy Falco, The Infamous Stringdusters

Enjoy more BGS Wraps here.

Rescuing Her Musical Archive, Gillian Welch Reboots 2020 With ‘Boots No. 2’

Posted on by Editor

Fans of Gillian Welch have been rewarded for their customary patience with an abundance of albums released in 2020. During the earliest days of the pandemic, Welch and her partner, David Rawlings, stayed in and recorded songs from a collection of old songbooks. (The result, All the Good Times, received a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album last week.) And after literally rescuing an archive of tapes and instruments from a tornado in March — one that blew the roof off their East Nashville studio — the pair set to work on another major undertaking.

This time, the result is even more bountiful: Three albums, encompassing 48 rarely-heard songs written and recorded in 2002 to fulfill a publishing deal. Only a few compositions have seen the light of day, namely the recordings of Alison Krauss & Union Station’s “Wouldn’t Be So Bad,” Solomon Burke’s “Valley of Tears,” and I’m With Her’s “Hundred Miles.” The engaging, one-take performances remained tucked away until this year, but they’ll be compiled into a three-disc box set titled Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs in December, packaged with a book of photography and a songbook of their own. These unearthed tracks were recorded in between 2001’s Time (The Revelator) and 2003’s Soul Journey; meanwhile, Boots No. 1 was an equally satisfying 2016 collection of outtakes from her 1996 debut album, Revival.

BGS caught up with Gillian Welch by phone.

BGS: Prior to preparing these releases, how often did you revisit these recordings?

Welch: Not really, let’s see. They’re pushing 20 years old – they’re 18 years old. I’d say… twice? So, close to once a decade? What would happen is, somebody or an artist that we knew would come to us, asking if we had any songs nobody had heard. Did we have any unreleased songs? One time, Buddy Miller called us up, and I love Buddy. He’s a friend. And he said, “You guys don’t have any country R&B songs, do you?” And I said, “Funnily enough, we’ve got a couple of these that we just didn’t know what to do with.” And he said, “Well, I’m making a record on Solomon Burke!” So, that’s how Solomon came to record “Valley of Tears.”

And same, Alison Krauss heard “Wouldn’t Be So Bad” the day I turned in all these songs to the publishing company. My manager hadn’t even heard them, and my publisher was playing them for my manager, who also managed Alison. They weren’t even pitching her “Wouldn’t Be So Bad.” She was in there to listen to other people’s songs and she heard it through the wall, is what I heard, and came in and said, “What’s that one? It’s awful, that’s just pitiful, I want that one!” [Laughs] So, that’s pretty much how it went. And same thing with I’m With Her. They were looking for some tunes. But truly, man, that’s about it.

How were these recordings made? Did you record them originally on reel-to-reel?

Yeah, they’re on quarter-inch reel-to-reel. They were recorded on a portable Nagra. The old field recordings, when they would take tape machines out to people’s farms and record folk songs and whatnot, these were often the machines they were hauling around. They run on batteries. Just lovely tape machines. So, we had a Nagra at the house and I was singing into a SM57 duct-taped to a guitar stand. [Laughs] My guitar and vocal are going into one microphone. It was very, very minimal, because we didn’t think we were making records, honestly. We weren’t. That’s one of the things that sets this collection apart from our records, is these weren’t records! None of that self-awareness, or self-consciousness, was present. These songs were written in a marathon long weekend and each song was recorded a minute after it was done.

David Rawlings and Gillian Welch by Henry Diltz

All 48 songs were written in a weekend?!

Yes. The ideas, they had languished, unfinished, in writing notebooks. They’d been kicking around. It wasn’t like I had thought of all these things in a weekend. But, I had shortfall with my publishing deal. As we started putting out records and we started touring… I don’t write on the road. So I fell behind. It was like I was never going to be done with it. My life had changed so much, that particular deal had kind of run its course. I didn’t know what to do.

Dave was the one who had the courageous and crazy idea. He was like, “What if we just turn in all the songs?” I sort of laughed, like, “Really? 48 songs?” [Laughs] He was like, “Yeah,” and he started pulling out the old notebooks. I write in spiral-bound, college-ruled notebooks, and there were just stacks of them around. He started pulling them out and we would look for a song that had just never gotten finished.

And he said, “Whatever the song needs, to make it a song, here we go. Right now.” We’re going to do it. He would put this sheet in front of me, and I would try and finish it, and he would go try to find another. And as soon as he came back in, I was supposed to have finished the one he had handed me previously. Then we would turn the tape machine and sing it once, and then that was that. Then we would finish another one. So, yeah, all of these recordings are first vocal takes of me. And I hear it. There’s an off-the-cuff-ness.

As you were recording these songs, were you in chairs facing each other?

I was on the couch! [Laughs] It’s a funny thing, releasing these into the world. It’s strange timing, to have rescued them from a tornado, and to be confronted with them again after all these years. And to literally think, “Why are we saving these?” It was really shocking. You keep things like this, maybe notebooks or photographs or tapes, and you think, “Well, maybe I’ll do something with them someday…” Here’s the sudden realization that they may not always be available to you. A tornado could come along and pulverize the entire thing.

Now, when you say you saved them from a tornado, that’s quite literal.

Oh yeah! That is completely literal. I picked them up in my arms and ran them through a collapsing building, so yes, it is completely literal! In the dark, in cascading water and debris. We physically saved every one of our masters, and every one of our guitars and microphones and gear. … I don’t want to go through that again. It’s the closest window I’ve had to what people go through in extreme duress and trauma. It was really something. That was how our year started out.

As I was looking through some of your press materials, I saw a photograph of you – and the photographer was you. Are you interested in photography? Is that something you’ve taken up?

Yeah, actually, that’s what my degree is in. I have a Bachelor of Arts in photography that I got and promptly made no use of. But I have it! Funny enough, now that we all walk around with cameras on our person, in the form of a phone, at all times, I take more photographs these days than I have since I was an undergrad, you know? I think you’re referring to this record of folk songs that Dave and I made during lockdown, and they said, “Well, we need a picture.” [Laughs] So I took a picture of myself and I took a picture of Dave threading tape on the tape machine that lives in our bookcase.

Gillian Welch by Gillian Welch

I’ve been reading about people who have started to play banjo during the pandemic, to cheer themselves up. Has that been the case for you?

I’ve heard that too! It’s so interesting to see how people are dealing with this, and apparently guitar sales and banjo sales are way up. It’s heartening. Who would have seen that coming? People are learning to play instruments, or returning to ones that have been in the closet for many years, and it’s really a wonderful reaction. We all find our own ways. And for Dave and I, it’s been pulling out all these old folk songs book, flipping them open to a page, and singing all these folk songs. Somehow, that’s been our reaction.

How old are the books?

They’re anywhere from a hundred years old, to fifty years old, forty years old… You know, I like these folk songbooks. I started singing folk songs when I was very young and I came at them not from records, but from this tradition of songbooks and being taught them by teachers and other people. It was not a recorded medium, at first, for me. Strangely, though it sounds incredibly old-timey, it was an oral tradition. …

So, we’re just returning to it. It’s the only thing that made sense to me in April and May of this year, was to sing these songs that touched upon other songs of great upheaval and tragedy and loss. And yet, people came through it, right? It doesn’t matter how dark or tragic the material is. The fact that the song exists tells me that people made it through. That’s part of the great power of folk music. And I use folk as a really, really big word, to cover almost everything! [Laughs] As someone once said, “Folk music is just music sung by folks.”

If I have my timing right, these recordings were made between the O Brother, Where Are Thou soundtrack and Soul Journey. Looking back on that time in your career, there must have been so much happening, and so many commitments you had to honor. Where do you draw strength from, when you start to feel overwhelmed?

Well, that’s an interesting question. When I really start to get overwhelmed, and it has definitely happened this year… It’s been such a challenge to remember who we are, in the face of being separated so much from what we normally do, you know? It’s hard to remember who we are! And I found myself really, in my most dislocated moments, putting on the records that I love. And honestly, this is going to sound kind of crazy, but I’ve heard it from other people, too, who have been putting on our music. Almost to fill the social gaps, to have another person inhabit your home, right? And I did that also. Because I’ve seen no one but Dave, really, and I found myself putting on records and almost communing with them like friends.

I see that there’s a box set coming on vinyl and CD, and there’s a songbook, and a lot of photos. It seems like all of your passions are channeled into one big project.

You know, it was really fun to make that book, that photo-music-lyric book that is a companion to the box set. I’ve never made a book before and it was a really interesting intersection of everything I’ve ever done, with all the photography. I’d say it’s about half [composed of] found photographs, and some photographs of mine, and some photographs of Dave. As it turned out, I realized doing this, there aren’t that many pictures of Dave and I from back then. We didn’t just always have a camera. There are so many pictures to document more current times, but we did find some.

When you listen now to this collection of songs, what kinds of emotions does it bring out in you?

When I listen to them, I think about the craft of songwriting. I think that there’s almost a humbleness to them. There’s not very much ego in them, because I wasn’t writing them to be “recorded by the recording artist Gillian Welch.” I was just trying to have them be songs, and we were so focused on their song-ness. And now 20 years later, I like that about them. We just put things that we were thinking about, and things that we were seeing.

Like in “Back Turn and Swing,” Dave is from New England, and every summer up there, you can’t sit down to a meal where there’s corn on the cob without a protracted discussion about past years’ corn, and how this corn rates against the other years’ corn. It’s funny, it’s hilarious! You just talk about different years of corn! So, I like that that made it in. I like it when these little things that we notice as we go through the world make it into the songs, and this collection has a lot of that. There are a lot of little moments in there.

I’m glad it exists, and it wouldn’t have existed — all of these things would have stayed in the notebook — if it weren’t for having to satisfy my publishing deal! So, I certainly had no hard feelings about any of it. It’s amazing that we did this, and given the timing of everything, I can’t believe in the year of 2020, with all this upheaval and pain and loss and isolation, that we had all of these songs sitting in a box, to say to people, “Here you go.” We rescued them. They are lost no more.

Photo credit (lead): David Rawlings; Photo credit (pair): Henry Diltz; Photo credit (middle): Gillian Welch

WATCH: Tina Adair, “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Tina Adair
Hometown: Haleyville, Alabama
Single: “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses”
Release Date: October 30, 2020
Label: EMG – Engelhardt Music Group

In Their Words: “I have loved this song and been singing it since I was a little girl. I always thought this would make a good bluegrass song and wanted to record it for some time now. So when I joined the EMG team, Adam Englehardt, Glen Duncan and I met to go through material for the album. I brought this song in and they loved the idea of doing a bluegrass version. Once it was all finished, we all looked at each other and almost at the same time said, ‘This should be the first single!’ To me, this is a song about the never-ending love story and about hope and happiness.” — Tina Adair

Photo credit: John Dorton