Tag: clawhammer

Bruce Molsky, “Cider”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Something about the simplest forms of bluegrass and old-time make them the perfectly fitting music to soundtrack autumn, with her crisp nights, warm colors, harvest treats, and seasonal drinks. The season evokes a back porch and round-the-fire pickin’, roots music in her most basic iteration, as respite and enjoyment for the long winter nights ahead. A fiddle, a banjo, a guitar, a mountain dulcimer, an autoharp – any of these would be the ideal score for summer giving way to fall. 

It’s fitting then, that Bruce Molsky’s “Cider” begins with a rake. Molsky’s 2006 album, Soon Be Time, is perhaps his solo magnum opus, a no-skip, nearly perfect collection of modern interpretations of old-time classics deliciously steeped in a subtle, autumnal vibe. The project includes numerous tracks that have since grown to be regarded as seminal recordings of each, to a new generation of bluegrass and old-time pickers. Tunes like “Lazy John,” “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” “John Brown’s Dream,” and others are seemingly regarded as Molsky’s own material now, with plenty of covers referencing Soon Be Time’s versions as source recordings. 

“Cider” isn’t the only fall-flavored tune on the album — see also: “Come Home” and “Forked Deer” — but its impeccable banjo tone, magnificent rakes, and jovial quality will warm you head to toe like a piping hot mug of your favorite appley drink. If you’re headed over the river and through the woods this autumn, Soon Be Time would be the perfect companion, especially with a taste of “Cider.” 

Photo credit: David Holt

Adam Hurt, “The Scolding Wife”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

 Adam Hurt is a banjo player’s banjo player. This role is well known in bluegrass, where almost an entire generation of banjo players, who came up almost immediately during and after Earl Scruggs’ popularization of a three-finger approach to the banjo, continue to go largely unsung outside of five-string niches and circles of Scruggs-style acolytes. Hurt is remarkable, though, because he’s not an acrobatic, up-and-down-the-neck, barn-burning bluegrass picker on the margins of the scene. Instead he’s a clawhammerist — but the musicians and instrumentalists who count themselves followers and fans of Hurt’s pickin’ aren’t just old-time players; they’re everyone.

On his new album, Back to the Earth, Hurt strays still further from “mainstream” banjo playing by returning to its roots: the gourd banjo. Back to the Earth is a follow up to Hurt’s 2010 project, Earth Tones, an album often regarded as a seminal work on the gourd banjo. Despite largely being anchored by solo tunes played on the modern five-string’s precursor (which was brought to this continent by enslaved peoples kidnapped from West Africa), the entire new collection feels firmly rooted in the present. Raw, rustic affectations often found on old-time recordings are missing here, but not to the detriment of the final product or its “authenticity.” These twelve tunes feel simultaneously immaculate and primordial. Hurt deftly follows the gourd banjo’s microtones, warbles, wobbles, and slides as they lead him, rather than the opposite — which might be the most distinctive aspect of his playing, compared to other clawhammer players, other gourd banjo players, and five-string or four-string players alike. 

Ricky Skaggs, Brittany Haas, Paul Kowert, Jordan Tice, Marshall Wilborn, and others guest on Back to the Earth in different groupings, depending on the tune, but on “The Scolding Wife,” Hurt performs solo, a man in dialogue with his ancient instrument, ringing through the millennia to land in 2020. If you aren’t already a fan of Adam Hurt and his playing, Back to the Earth is the perfect, charming, listenable introduction — and you’ll find yourself among the likes of fans including Skaggs, Haas, Kowert, Tice, Jerry Douglas, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, Molly Tuttle, Sarah Jarosz, and just about any other instrumentalist who’s ever had more than a passing interest in the banjo and her cousins on the instrument family tree. 

Photo credit: Martin Tucker

LISTEN: Mike Barnett, “Righteous Bell” (Featuring Sarah Jarosz)

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Mike Barnett
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Righteous Bell” (featuring Sarah Jarosz)
Album: + 1
Release Date: September 11, 2020
Label: Compass Records

In Their Words: “I wrote this just before the 2016 presidential election. Looking back, there is much work to be done before any ‘righteous bell’ is rung. The juxtaposition of the propelling, changing instrumental and the grounding, unchanging vocal melody creates a sort of galvanizing tension that hopefully inspires the listener to take action — voting, conversing, learning, protesting, etc. Just like in an old-time jam, the vocal melody and lyric fuels the fiddles and banjos, and everyone feeds off each other’s energy. Sarah Jarosz’s powerful singing and driving clawhammer banjo brought this song to life.” — Mike Barnett

Photo credit: Stacie Huckeba

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.

LISTEN: Natalie Padilla, “Fireweed”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Natalie Padilla
Hometown: Lyons, Colorado
Song: “Fireweed”
Album: Fireweed
Release Date: September 6, 2019

In Their Words: “As many of my songs do, this one started as a clawhammer banjo one-part melody. I was in Crested Butte, Colorado, with my band Masontown doing a few mountain town shows and had a bit of time to sit down with the tune on this great porch that backed right into the mountain. The pink fireweed was still blooming, but near the top of the plant which is a sign that winter is coming. This song is meant to symbolize the importance of all seasons life has to offer, even the dark ones.” — Natalie Padilla

Photo credit: Woody Meyer

Rhiannon Giddens, “Following the North Star”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Rhiannon Giddens is not only our Artist of the Month, she’s roots music’s renaissance woman. She’s an outspoken activist, a MacArthur Genius grant winner, a veritable music historian, and opera-oriented podcast host who has scored and staged a ballet, acted on a major television series, given her fair share of keynote addresses, and has helmed more than one supergroup. Somehow that list only begins to scratch the surface of Giddens’ contributions to our roots music communities. Who knows what other incredible ideas will come from her mind, her pen, and her banjo in the months and years to come.

Here’s the thing. In the flurry of credits Giddens’ bio will inevitably spit at you it’s easy to forget what might be the most important line item in her IMDb or Wikipedia profiles: she’s a damn fine picker. “Following the North Star,” an amuse-bouche of an instrumental from her 2017 release, Freedom Highway, is an excellent reminder of that fact. The bouncing, clawhammer banjo is stark against just percussion and bones, a percussive folk instrument played by hand, similar to playing the spoons. It’s a shockingly simple, but never simplistic production. Each note drips with Giddens’ understated virtuosity. Her understanding of the music’s past, present, and future is translated effortlessly by buttery fretless banjo, which retains every ounce of its haunting, melancholy potential in defiance of the tune’s forward-leaning tempo.

‘Tis sweet to be reminded that, no matter where her creative compass may take her, she’ll always have the chops — she’ll always be a killer banjo player. And, from this banjo player’s perspective, that’s what’s most important anyway!!

10 Young Banjo Players You Aren’t Paying Enough Attention To

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

We don’t blame you. Banjo is typically all about praising the masters, mimicking their technique, and playing “it” — whatever tune, song, lick, or fill — exactly the way the heroes did it. Of course it’s easy to overlook up-and-coming pickers who are innovating the instrument and letting their own personalities shine through their playing. Rest assured, we’ve been keeping up with a panoply of younger banjo player virtuosos for you, just in case you’ve overlooked ’em.

Gina Clowes

The most recent addition to Chris Jones and the Night Drivers, Gina Clowes’ debut album, True Colors, is a surprising departure for anyone who might be expecting songs along the lines of the more traditional-leaning material of the Night Drivers, but Gina’s playing refuses to be pigeonholed.

Catherine “BB” Bowness

BB has a chameleon-like ability to deftly shape her playing to fit any number of styles. With her Boston-based bluegrass band, Mile Twelve, she tends to lean into a more traditional approach, hard driving and uncompromising. In other contexts, she demonstrates she’s as progressive and outside-the-box as any Fleck/Pikelny acolytes out there.

Tabitha Agnew

Based in Northern Ireland, Tabitha Agnew and her two brothers tour and perform as Cup O’Joe. The subliminal transatlantic touches through her playing are like Easter eggs, keeping listeners on their toes, never quite sure what’s coming next.

Victor Furtado

Typically on banjo, when your aim is speed and intensity you give up some measure of precision and nuance. Not Victor Furtado. Whether he’s playing an emotive, pensive tune, or a foot-stomper like this, he never sacrifices any of his intricate, unexpected musical ideas. Oh, and remember Gina Clowes? Victor and Gina are siblings. Go figure.

Matthew Davis

There are plenty of young banjoists out there in the world right now who are obsessed with learning and transcribing every note they can from progressive trailblazers like Béla Fleck and Noam Pikelny. (And rightly so!) However, National Banjo Champion Matthew Davis (of new acoustic, bluegrassy string band Circus No. 9) is one of very few whose own imaginative voice on the instrument comes through louder than any of his influences, which gives his playing a remarkable maturity.

Little Nora Brown

This ain’t your usual, “aw this kid is playing an instrument as big as they are!” cutesy sh*t. It is a compelling case for reincarnation, though. It almost sounds like Little Nora Brown has a host of roots music legends pouring out of her fingertips and through her lips. Leave it to the young people to remind all of us that old-time music is relevant in any context, but especially poignant and transformative when it’s allowed to be in the present.

Steven Moore

A two-time National Banjo Champion, Steven Moore is a career biochemist who plays the banjo with downright effortless command, combining modern styles with classic, timeless licks and tricks. The moral of the story here is that when a banjo player plays an utterly stunning Don Reno cover, you oughta pay attention.

Uma Peters

She may be stoic, quiet, and generally shy, but Uma Peters is not one to overlook. At 11 years old, her old-time banjo skill level is already so high we can hardly imagine the heights to which she’ll take it. Again, this music stands for a whole lot more than just cuteness. Uma Peters for President.

Gabe Hirshfeld

More than just a bluegrass meme master, Gabe Hirshfeld is another example of a banjo player who refuses to let his playing style fit neatly into any of the molds already set forth by bluegrass forebears. On the five-string he can be unflinchingly traditional, totally off-the-wall, borderline insane, and/or all of the above all at once.

Alex Leach

Playing an arch-top banjo player in the Clinch Mountain Boys is quite the mantle to take on, but Alex Leach does it with ease and aplomb. The world needs more right hands backed up against bridges, more raised heads, and more playing and filling while singing lead. Just follow Alex’s example.

Lede image: courtesy of Mountain Home Music Company

Putting Words First: A Conversation with Sunny War

Posted on by Editor

Sunny War (born Sydney Lyndelia Ward) stuns listeners to silence with her guitar playing. For some, it’s the way she plays — her finger’s dexterous ability to reach seemingly impossible places, playing a clawhammer style of guitar most associated with banjo and formerly with acoustic blues musicians. For others, it’s the melodic trance she creates as a result of that skill. Either way, she coaxes strange and hypnotic sounds from her instrument.

The nomadic Sunny was born in Tennessee, but spent her life following her single mother, as the pair moved from city to city and state to state, before she finally settled in Venice Beach, California. There, she picked up busking, a task that situated her at a crossroads involving performance and practice, and in turn helped her hone the guitar-playing skills that continue drawing such attention.

With her 2016 album, Red, White and Blue, Sunny employed a more traditional folk sound, but her new album, With the Sun, extends like an elastic to rope in folk-punk and a touch of Malian guitar work. Long drawn to brutally honest songwriting, Sunny challenged herself this time around to work from the lyrics first before building melodies around her words. The result is a set of candid songs touching on alcoholism, police brutality, self-loathing, toxic relationships, and more. If being a confessional songwriter means couching some of that confession, in order not to maintain a certain image, Sunny has no problem laying bare her truth. After all, she’s “Gotta Live It,” as she sings on that track. Her husky voice warbles for effect against her soft, melodically laced guitar, reminding listeners that the human experience is messy, and all the more beautiful for its imperfections.

Red, White and Blue colored within the lines of folk, so to speak, but With the Sun pushes in messier stylistic directions, and the results are extraordinary. What was the biggest change, in your opinion, between these two projects?

Red, White, and Blue, we had only three days to record the whole thing. I was younger, also. I guess that makes a difference, too, but I didn’t have that much time to even listen to it, and decide if I didn’t like something. With With the Sun, I was able to do stuff over. A lot of the songs on the album had a bunch more instruments on them, and then we would listen to stuff, and we’d write back and forth, and I was like, “Nah, that’s too much.” So now it’s very minimal. But if we only had three days …

It might not have been.

Yeah, I don’t even know. I’m a couple years older, and we spent almost a year working on it and not rushing on anything.

Your story struck a note with me because I also grew up moving from city to city. Within that nomadic existence, then, where has your sense of rootedness come from?

I think everywhere I lived, I felt like I was from Tennessee. If I went to a new school, people would say something about how I’d talk. I never had a Southern accent, but it was always a different accent than wherever I was living. When I went to Michigan, they thought I sounded weird. People were always asking me where I was from. I’m from Nashville, so I think I was always trying to hang onto that somehow.

You’ve mentioned approaching With the Sun lyrics first, as opposed to melody. Why set that challenge for yourself?

I feel like I’ve never really had good lyrics, so I just wanted to focus on that. Usually, I just play and I try to think of words that go with whatever I’m playing. I feel like I get trapped in a thing where it’s like I can only fit so many syllables in this space, if I want to use this riff, so I’m putting the guitar before … I may have more to say on whatever the song is about, but because I like a riff so much, I’m like, “No, it doesn’t work. I can’t play this, if I’m singing this.” I thought it’d be better to write poems, and then build around the poems. If you’re that obsessed with guitar, then you should just do an instrumental album or something. It wasn’t balanced.

There are some fascinating juxtapositions in the subjects you cover: “I’m a drunk and a dreamer” (“Gotta Live It”). Why was it important for you to portray this kind of complex humanity?

I don’t know. See, that just blew my mind. A drunk is a dreamer. It’s like you’re trying to stay in a dream state in a weird way.

True, I suppose I was reading it from an escapist point of view.

Yeah, but I feel like you’re only escaping because you’re … not dreaming, but you’re not really satisfied with reality. I feel like I know everything about alcoholics from AA. I’m like, “Man, these are some passionate, good people.” If I try to write — this is a challenge, too, because I have a lot of stuff that I don’t use because I don’t think it makes sense, so all the lyrics that I chose, it’s like there’s a lot of stuff where I was trying to write about a certain subject or something, and I can’t get into it because it was forced.

There’s this band, the Dicks. They’re an ‘80s Texas punk band, and the lead singer is this gay guy from Texas and his dad was a cop, and all his songs are so fucked up. He has a song where he’s like, “Come on and shit on me,” but basically, the whole song, he’s describing how nothing anyone does to him can be any worse than all the shit that’s happened to him. That’s the kind of lyrics I’ve always liked. I like feeling like I’m talking to the actual person because I can imagine he has a personality. A lot of writers might actually be saying something like that, but they’re like, “That’s too graphic.” They try to make it clean. I’m a raunchy songwriter who’s crazy and just says whatever they feel like.

And that’s the thing: Maybe those artists are playing into an image because of the commercial factor.

Yeah! Okay, like now they’re dead inside. They have all these hopes and expectations, that’s the problem. I’ve been trying to be a musician so long, that now I’m just trying to make songs that I like because I’m just like, “Fuck it.” I don’t even know what people like. I feel detached! I felt like I was trying to think commercially, also, but even if you study it — like what is a hit or what is successful musically — it doesn’t even make sense. Even if you’re a logical musician who studied jazz or whatever, it doesn’t even make sense at all. In the ‘90s, I think you might have felt like, “Man, all the music is garbage,” but now it’s like, “Damn, that was really good compared to now.” I feel like there are cool scenes you could try and fit into and still feel respectable about your own … I don’t know. I can find a lot of independent music that I love, but I don’t even know what it means to be a commercially successful musician that I like.

You said you included a surdo drum to imitate a heartbeat on “If I Wasn’t Broken,” and that you hoped the result felt soothing to listeners who were hurting. Sound healing is an interesting practice involving vibrations and rhythm — were you aware of that at all when creating the song?

Dang, that’s heavy. Well, I don’t know a lot, but I used to work for ayahuasca ceremonies.

Right, so you’d have to be soothing and calm.

When I did the ceremonies, I would only play instrumental music, and it would kind of be trance. There was a shaman, and then the shaman had an apprentice or something. They would come up to me, and be like — it would be depending on the chord, if there were too many minor chords — ”That’s too intense. You’re going to really freak someone out.” It was really serious.

One time, there was a lady, she had to move away from me because it was just too much. It’s like they were in a different state, but it made me learn about how … like I feel like every note and chord has a personality and some kind of way it can affect someone and give someone a mood, but you could really study it, I guess. And even the rhythm! If the rhythm would change a certain way, it might be too aggressive and freak people out, even if everything you’re playing is … it’s crazy. I learned a lot about what actual soothing is.

Maybe you didn’t study it, per se, but it sounds like you’ve absorbed something because especially on “The Change You Make” and “With the Sun,” there’s a melodic trance happening there.

Yeah, I think after doing the ceremonies I got more into playing softer music. I did it for four years. I met these people on the boardwalk and they invited me, and then I met the shaman. They did two a month. I thought it was creepy. The first day I went, I was like, “This is a cult,” because everyone was wearing white. It was weird to me. It was really hardcore hippie shit I’d never been exposed to before.

Especially if you have to be in the background not reacting.

I was just there trying to make some money and I was like, “Dude, what are you doing?” I was freaked out.

That would be intense.

But then I got used to it. I found out a lot of the people that were going to the ceremonies had PTSD from crazy stuff that happened to them, and they’d been trying to get help. It was pretty heavy and serious. It helped me not feel weird anymore about it because at first I was like, “These people are getting high in a really weird way,” but then I was like, “This is medicine.”

Photo credit: Florencia P. Marano

Steve Martin: Making the Same Sound Different

Posted on by Editor

The sound of a five-string banjo has a cosmic pull. When Earl Scruggs first took to the Grand Ole Opry stage with Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys in 1945, his rapid-fire, three-finger picking style shocked and stunned the Ryman Auditorium audience and radio listeners across the country. The standing ovation he received shook the entire building to its rafters with hands clapping, boots stomping, and hootin’ and hollerin’. It was the Big Bang of bluegrass banjo.

Almost every banjo player could tell you the first time they heard the instrument, the first time they encountered its cosmic pull — a personal, introspective banjo Big Bang unique to each person who is struck by its irresistible, joyful, magnetic sound. Steve Martin describes the first time he heard a banjo as his “What’s that!?” moment. “I kind of pin it on the Kingston Trio,” he remembers. “But I know there were earlier things. I fell in love with the four-string banjo, too. When I was 11, I would go to Disneyland to see the Golden Horseshoe Revue, and there was a four-string banjo player. When I worked at Knott’s Berry Farm, there was a four-string banjo player there, too.” His voice shifts to a whisper, as he adds, “But, we all know that five is better.”

He continues, “I do believe it was kind of the Kingston Trio or folk music, in general, that really made the sound like, ‘Wow, what a happy, wonderful sound!’”

He picked up the banjo as a teenager, taking on three-finger, Scruggs-style picking with the help and influence of his friend John McEuen. But, unlike most banjo pickers, who choose one style — Scruggs’ namesake method, or jazz and ragtime on tenor and plectrum banjos, or any of several types of frailing — Martin also had a “What’s that!?” moment with the old-time form, clawhammer: “It was a record called 5-String Banjo Greats and another record called the Old-Time Banjo Project. They were both compilations. So I don’t know who introduced me to clawhammer. When I was learning three-finger and I was into it about three years, I started to really notice clawhammer, and I go, ‘Oh, no. I have to learn that, too.’”

He is a master of both three-finger and clawhammer to this day and, on his brand new record, The Long-Awaited Album, he shifts effortlessly between the two — sometimes within one song.

Through his career as a comedian and actor, the banjo was ever at Martin’s side. It was a part of his stand-up act, it was peppered into his comedy albums, and it made cameos on his TV appearances. It would be cliché to assume that the banjo and bluegrass were a byproduct of Martin’s comedy career, but the instrument was never an afterthought, an addendum, or a prop. In fact, bluegrass and folk music showed him from his early show biz days working at theme parks that humor was an integral part of these musical traditions.

“When I first started hearing live music, like the Dillards or folk music of some kind, they all did jokes,” he says. “They all did funny intros to songs. They did riffs. They did bits. And then they did their music. That’s essentially what we’re doing now.” The silly, whimsical, comedic elements of the music Martin makes with his collaborators, friends, and backing band — the Steep Canyon Rangers — are just as much a testament to Martin’s history with bluegrass as they are a testament to his extraordinary comedy career.

During the seven years that elapsed between their last bluegrass album, Rare Bird Alert, and The Long-Awaited Album, Martin and the Rangers wrote, developed, and arranged the project’s material during soundchecks, band rehearsals, and downtime on the bus. Barn-burning, Scruggs-style tunes and contemplative, frailing instrumentals are sprinkled amidst love songs and story songs, silly and earnest, all steeped in quirky, humorous inventiveness. The album is centered on a solidly bluegrass aesthetic — but bluegrass is not a default setting.

Musical and production choices for each song were pointed and deliberate, with producer Peter Asher, Martin, and the Rangers keeping each song central and building out the sound around any given track’s core idea. “I love the sound of the five, six instruments that are traditionally bluegrass,” Martin clarifies. “That’s all we need. The Rangers, they say bluegrass is five musicians playing all the time. Other music is five musicians not playing all the time. In bluegrass, they have breaks, but there’s always the backup going. There’s always everybody chopping. So I thought, ‘What if we left out some of the instruments? What if we were not playing all the time?’ It really made a different sound.”

By leaving out an instrument here or there, adding in a cello or, in the case of the lead track, “Santa Fe,” an entire Mariachi band, the album’s sound registers immediately as bluegrass, but refuses to be lazily or automatically categorized as such. First and foremost, it sounds like Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers. “I’ve always loved the idea of the sound of the banjo against the cello, or viola, or violin, because you have the staccato notes against the long notes. The cello or viola contribute to the melancholy and mood of the banjo. But mostly, it’s just us, the seven musicians, including myself. We can reproduce it on stage … except for the mariachi. But the song called for a mariachi band, you know?” He laughs and adds, “There’s almost no way to avoid it.”

Where many bluegrass and folk writers eschew modern vernacular, places, and topics, Martin leans in, embracing contemporary scenarios and themes that don’t necessarily fit the stereotypes of train-hopping, moonshine-running, field-plowing folk music. The Olive Garden, nights in a biology laboratory, a gate at an airport, “Angeline the Barista” … the timelessness of roots and folk music isn’t lost in these themes and settings; it’s enhanced, it’s relatable, and it’s damn funny.

“I’ve written a song about a train, and I’ve written a song about Paul Revere. I think it’s got to be specific for people. They’ve got to go, ‘I know that!’ If I’m writing about a train, I know that 99 percent of people that the song will be heard by won’t really have that experience. But if I write about the Olive Garden and a girl busting up with you, I think a lot of people can relate to that, even if they don’t have that exact experience.”

The relatability and visibility of Martin’s music have brought bluegrass — and the banjo — to countless ears that may have never heard it otherwise. In 2015, the International Bluegrass Music Association awarded Martin a Distinguished Achievement Award with this visibility and outreach in mind. With The Long-Awaited Album; the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass that he awards annually; a national tour of his banjo-forward, Tony-nominated Broadway musical, Bright Star; and a heavy touring schedule criss-crossing the country with the Steep Canyon Rangers and his longtime comedy partner, Martin Short, Martin is poised to continue bringing the banjo to many first-time listeners.

But when faced with the idea that he, himself, could very well be the “What’s that?!” moment for an entire generation of brand new banjo players, he is unfalteringly modest. “What I try to express with the banjo is the sound of the banjo. When I first heard Earl Scruggs, I loved his skill, his timing, and his musicianship. I regard myself as someone who’s expressing the sound of the banjo rather than being a superior, technical player like Béla Fleck. So, if anyone picks up the banjo from hearing me, it’s because they fell in love with the sound of the banjo. What I do is get the sound of the banjo out there to a broader world, I guess.”

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.

Art Achieved and Abandoned: Charlie Parr in Conversation with Gina Clowes

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Charlie Parr and Gina Clowes both have a thing for banjos and dogs.

Parr’s new album is actually called Dog, and the title track argues that even man’s best friend has a complex inner life: “A soul is a soul is a soul is a soul,” insists the furry one as the Minnesota human picks out an acrobatic acoustic blues riff. Parr is an especially deft and intuitive player who jumps from old-time to bluegrass to blues to folk faster than a greyhound, but Dog is first and foremost a songwriter’s album. Parr inhabits various points of view — a dog, a hobo, another dog, a hoarder — as useful projections of his own depression.

Clowes’ new solo album, titled True Colors, isn’t canine-themed, but it similarly presents her as an exceptionally well-rounded artist. After dominating banjo competitions for 20 years, the Virginia native (perhaps better known under her birth name, Gina Furtado) joined the ace bluegrass outfit Chris Jones & the Nightdrivers last year, so it’s no surprise that her songs would showcase her swift and graceful picking. But songs like “Good Old-Fashioned Heartbreak” and “The Wayward Kite” reveal a graceful singer and an insightful songwriter.

And she has farm animals.

Gina Clowes: I’m battling my frisky little goat. She’s been jumping all over the place and following me around as we talk. Charlie, I think with that song “Dog,” you’re asking the question we all have in our hearts. I grew up with a border collie by my side all the time. Now I have a boxer mix. It’s actually my son’s dog.

Charlie Parr: Reuben is a miniature schnauzer, so she’s not a very big dog, but she’s an enthusiastic walker. One of our cats died, and we ended up getting this little dog, and she’s just an amazing addition to the family. She’s very dedicated to the notion of not taking walks that have much to do with where you, the human, want to go, but with what she’s interested in and the smells she smells. My idea of a walk is very different, and I used to make her take the routes I wanted to take. Suddenly it occurred to me that it’s cruel if the only time you get to go for a walk is when somebody else lets you and then they make you do what they want to do. I felt like, “Oh my God, that’s so terrifying.”

What did you do?

CP: I started following her around town and letting her stop and do whatever she wanted to do. And the walks took on this epic strangeness where I would find myself in parts of town that I had no idea existed. She would take me to these odd places that I’d never seen before. I live on the shore of Lake Superior, and she would take me to new parts of the shore I had never seen before. You think you have a handle on where you live, but you don’t at all. I felt like I owed her a debt of gratitude for reminding me that it’s not about me. It’s not even really about her. It’s about something else. We did this together, not to sound too crunchy about it.

GC: Growing up with my border collie, Maggie, I feel like I came across so many more adventures than I ever would have without her. We spent all of our time out in the woods. She would find these injured animals. She had a very different view of the world that we don’t have.

Is the time you spend with these animals good for writing?

CP: The way I write songs is weird, because I end up writing stories and distilling them into songs. Those walks with Reuben are always good for that. Some weird story will come out of them, and I jot down stuff when I get home. Three-quarters of the time I throw it away, but that last little bit of time, it will turn into something that I think is not too bad.

GC: Part of it, too, is getting away from listening to music. You get out in nature and your brain has a chance to put together whatever influences it’s been absorbing when you’ve been in the car or in the kitchen listening to music. It’s a quiet time, and that’s when I come up with some of my better ideas.

CP: I listen to a lot of music. Obviously you do, too. But I have to spend a certain amount of time each day deliberately not listening to music. When I’m walking with Reuben, I never listen to music, partly because I don’t like things in my ears. When I do long drives, I listen to music. I’m a child of the ‘70s. We’re album-oriented people, so I will listen to a record and then I will stop for about the length of a record. I listen to music and then not listen to music about as much time.

That seems like an interesting idea. It gives you time to absorb and think about what you’ve heard, rather than just cramming even more notes into your ears.

CP: When I was growing up, I had my father in the front of the house. He grew up in the ‘30s, so his primary listening was around songs. He was interested in songs. His record collection was weird and shambolic, and he had a lot of 78s and old LPs from the ‘50s. He wasn’t into album-oriented anything. My sister, on the other hand, was listening to album-oriented rock from the ‘60s and ‘70s. The Grateful Dead and Captain Beefheart were playing in the back of the house. So I got interested in both of those things. But I find it hard to stop listening to an album after I’ve started. I have to let them play through, because you feel like you haven’t finished it somehow.

GC. It’s like an opera. You miss part of the story. I’m the same way. I’m just behind the times, and I would rather just pop in a CD rather than listen to Spotify.

CP: I’m part of that generation that was not raised with that technology. We had just enough technology to be spoiled, but not enough to be weird about it. I hate to be that way. I end up being that way around my son a lot, starting a lot of sentences with, “In my day …”

GC: So, Charlie, I noticed you’re using a slide on your left hand. Are you doing that with the banjo, too?

CP: Sometimes I do. I play a fretless banjo, so it can be hard to tell. But I do like using a slide. When I started playing, I had an interest in slide guitar, so the very first thing I did, when I was eight years old, was try to play slide guitar. I’m completely self-taught, so I’m doing everything upside-down and backwards. The slide adds something like two tones to every fret space, so it becomes really interesting. I’ve played a lot of slide on the banjo. Lately I haven’t been playing much banjo, but I’m trying to get back into it.

GC: I love the slide on the banjo. You don’t hear it very often, but one of my favorite players, Tony Furtado, does that sometimes. Last week, I went to the music store to pick up something really small, just a button for the guitar strap. When I tried to pay, they said, “Sorry, we can only accept a credit card if it’s over five bucks.” So I grabbed one of the bottle slides because it was sitting on the counter there. Might as well. Somehow that makes me more inspired to give it a try.

CP: It’s a unique sound. Banjos are a lot like resonator guitars: The attack isreal swift and the delay is real swift. So you have to do some stuff to keep your tones going, and bottleneck is a really an answer to that. I borrowed a friend of mine’s banjo that had a magnetic pickup installed in it. I wasn’t really into the sound of the pickup, but what I was into was the fact that I could take an E-bow and play it on the banjo. It works on the magnetic pickup, and the tones I got out of that were otherworldly. I was completely fascinated. I really like a lot of experimental music. Paul Metzger plays a 23-string banjo and used a lot of electric manipulations with it.

GC: I feel like the banjo has been boxed in, maybe because it’s relatively new to be doing it three-finger style.

CP: I think you’re right. It has been boxed in. People have decided that there’s only one tuning that’s associated with the banjo. I asked Dock Boggs about that. He would re-tune his banjo for almost every song, and I asked him about it. He said something to the effect of, “The song comes out of the tuning.” I thought that was fascinating.

GC: Yes. If you listen to a lot of old-time banjo playing, they change their tuning so much more, and it really does open up the spectrum of moods you can get out of it.

CP: I use a lot of open C, except I end up pitching the D string all the way up to E. I really like that a lot. It’s a little tight, but it’s a cool chord.

GC: Just make sure you point it away from your eyeball when you tune that one!

Is that something you’re actively pursuing? Are you always looking for new ways to play this instrument?

GC: For me, it’s not so much about trying to find a new sound. It’s more about just trying to find a better way to evoke a particular feeling. I like Scruggs-style banjo playing. Earl was awesome and he created this super-cool style that was him expressing something. It works out as a great template for players to use now, but I’m looking more at trying to figure out different methods of explaining the mood that I’m going for. There are many more ways to do that.

CP: It’s a bit of a mixture, sometimes, between manipulating the mechanics of the instrument and manipulating the technique. In 2006, I developed a brain disorder called focal dystonia, which completely destroyed my picking hand. I had to re-learn everything from scratch because I could only use my index finger. I used to use my middle finger a lot, but now it’s like a trigger finger — it just sucks up into my palm. I spent about a year looking at players like the Reverend Gary Davis and Elizabeth Cotton and Roscoe Holcomb to get some inspiration for how to do everything with just thumb and index finger. I had never had to do anything like that in my whole life, but at the end of the day, it turned into … well, it had to turn into a good thing or it was going to turn into a truly bad thing. It forced me really rapidly to change things about the way I played, even the way I sit and the way I hold the instrument. I found some places that I didn’t think I would ever find, and I had a little more power in my picking than I had before. Some of the frilly stuff had to go away, but I found other things to replace it and developed some self-confidence I didn’t have before.

GC: I can’t even imagine going through that. Is it physical or psychological?

CP: It’s repetitive stress syndrome in your brain. That’s what I’ve been told. I started playing guitar when I was eight and became very quickly obsessed with it. I tried to play all the time, but I didn’t have any lessons. No one every told me, “Don’t do that or you’ll end up with a problem in your future.” I did everything wrong for a long, long time. Now I’m 50 years old and I’m playing a little catch-up to get things to sound right. But it’s made me develop some different ways to look at things. When I want to get certain sounds, I have to work within the parameters of what I have. Sometimes that means manipulating instruments. I’ve added strings to guitars or taken strings away. I’ve put snares on the banjo head to get that buzzy sustain out of it. I try to do whatever I think needs to happen to get where I want to go. Half the time, I don’t even know what I want, and then something will come out that I like and I’ll amplify that a little bit more.

You’re both playing in traditions that can be very conservative, very restrictive. But on these new records, it sounds like you’re very consciously trying to find new ways to play.

GC: I love bluegrass. I was raised on it. I’ll always love it. But it does put you in a small box. There’s a specific form to every song — two A parts and two B parts and so on. That’s part of what makes it so great. It’s easy to get up on stage and jam. There’s a big repertoire that everybody knows, so you can all play together. But I don’t like the idea of genre, because it’s always going to be too small for all the ideas you want to use. You can’t use them all, if you’re trying to stick them all into a very small box.

CP: Musicians didn’t make up genres, anyway. It was record companies and radio stations and furniture stores that decided what the genres were. I don’t like them, either. All of the most exciting music that I’ve heard — including bluegrass music — has come from that weird in-between space where somebody did something slightly different, like Bill Monroe or Captain Beefheart. It’s happening now with a lot of groups, like Megafaun, for example. They blended a lot of electronic sounds with accordion and clawhammer banjo and came up with a couple of brilliant records before they stopped. It’s hard to say what genre they’re in because they’ve added so much stuff. I think that’s brilliant.

It gets back to an idea we were discussing earlier of how you listen to music. You don’t just listen to one style of music. You listen to a lot of different stuff. So why would you play just one narrow kind of music.

GC: Something I latched onto early: When I was learning to play the banjo, I was told I should imitate my banjo heroes. But someone else told me, “Why don’t you imitate other instruments? Why not imitate the guitar or the saxophone or whatever? Try different forms of imitation.” That opened the door for me to try new ideas and come up with new things.

CP: I had a conversation with Dakota Dave Hull, a player in Minneapolis who told me, “Don’t listen to so much guitar music. Listen to piano music. Listen to horns. Listen to jazz. Listen to a lot of different stuff.” You end up taking those voices back to the instrument you’re playing, and it adds a lot. I was also inspired by Spider John Koerner, who was constantly messing with his own songs and with other people’s songs. At one point, I was talking to him about an older song, and he pointed out that we wouldn’t be talking about that song if people had messed it and forced it through that folk process. Without that, it would have died. We’re only talking about it because people loved it enough to screw with it.

GC: Everything I put on True Colors turned out to be so very personal that it was a little uncomfortable. I had this idea that I could blame it on a friend: “Oh, a friend of mine went through that experience, not me!” But those songs are based on real feelings that I had, real experiences, and it was therapeutic for me to write about them. It helps to process everything that I go through. It’s what we talked about earlier — spending some time in quiet and working things out. Last summer, when I was writing everything for the album and getting ready to record, I stopped writing in my journal and I stopped listening to music. I just stopped cold turkey. My husband was worried, but I was just processing things and writing about them. And there they are now.

CP: That sounds familiar. I had a lot of bad internal stuff that kept getting recycled and regurgitated and, after a while, I needed to write the songs and get them away from me. I only really broke loose of them when I got other people involved. I was going to make this a completely solo record, but then I thought that would be devastating. The songs are already horrifying and way too personal, so I need to bring in other people and let them become an influence on the music. It changed stuff a little, but it also didn’t sound so dark anymore, I guess.

GC: I know what you mean about bringing people in. I was nervous showing my songs to people, but they came in and they’re happy and they played the living daylights out of the songs. Everybody just got the mood. It helps to get out of that space in your mind.

CP: There’s a certain amount of lightness that’s created by playing with other people. I’ve played mostly by myself, but when I play with friends, it’s a massive relief, just the amount of joy it creates. It’s hard to explain that kind of lightness that comes into even the darkest music, when you have other people there.

You both talk about getting these songs out of you and away from you, but then you record them and take them out on tour. You have to live with them every night. Is that difficult?

CP: I don’t ever regard songs as being finished. I’m not writing a book or painting a picture. I’m creating something new every time I sit down to play a song. In a weird way, I’m rewriting the song, which is now influenced by the audience and their energy. It’s not the same song as it was when I first came up with it. Now it’s something different. It’s not a song about A or B. It’s a song that includes something else. It becomes easier to deal with, because it’s no longer my burden alone. I’m sharing it with a lot of people who have all these different interpretations.

GC: That hits the nail on the head, Charlie. I write to distance myself from something. I write to let it be free and do whatever it will, so it doesn’t feel very personal when I share the song with somebody. It doesn’t have the same sense of being a deep, dark secret anymore. Now it’s out in the world. I’m free from it.

CP: Exactly. For me, it’s all about process. When a song feels finished, I just quit playing it. It’s not interesting to me anymore. You can’t work on it anymore. It reminds me of Simon Rodia, a folk artist from Los Angeles. He created the Watts Towers out of cement and junk, broken pieces of porcelain. He took 34 years to build them. He would come home every day from his job and he would cement little bits of pottery on these weird sculptures. Then, one day, he came home and there was no more room to add anything else. So he went next door to his neighbors and gave them the keys to his house and then he left and never came back. You can go and visit those towers, and there’s a sign out front that reads, “Art achieved and abandoned.” His art was all in the process. It’s not the finished product. That’s what the song is. It’s a process. When a song is finished, I have a tendency to just leave them behind. Even if I’m just learning a song, I usually won’t ever play it again because the process of learning is over.

Charlie Parr photo credit: Nate Ryan