“Old-time.” The moniker itself seemingly contains eons of musical cross-pollination, generations of aural tradition, lifetimes of carefully and purposefully — and haphazardly and accidentally — passing down the skills, stories, community, and tunes that make up the musical form. A new crop of old-time pickers has been slowly but surely emerging from the tight-knit, often insular (but almost never outright forbidding) ranks of the genre, with a continuing focus on the decades that have come before, but through a new lens. One of reclamation and representation, of mining stories and songs, one of painstakingly undoing the erasure that has prevailed over the history of any/all non-white, non-colonial, non-Christian, non-normative musics in this country.
Tui (pronounced TOO-EE), an old-time duo that includes fiddler Libby Weitnauer and multi-instrumentalist Jake Blount, perfectly epitomizes this new generation, this fiddle + banjo changing of the guard. In title and song roster their upcoming release, Pretty Little Mister, subverts the usual narratives of old-time — whether by turning the staple “Pretty Little Miss” on its gendered ear or by meticulously crediting and tracing back each track’s origins, often to fiddlers and pickers of color and other otherwise underrepresented folks of bygone eras.
“Cookhouse Joe,” the final tune on the album, was originally learned from a late-in-life recording of Kentucky fiddler Estill Bingham. And it’s okay that you might not recognize that name — that you probably will not is almost the entire point of the record. Tui has already done the work for their listeners, putting in the time to make sure that the old-time they create, for years past and the ages to come, tells the whole story of how and by whom this beautiful artistic tradition came to be. And on Pretty Little Mister it’s not only beautiful, it’s so much more.
Our June Artist of the Month is Josh Ritter, whose songwriting ambition has led him to stages around the world. It’s been 20 years since he first set out as a solo artist with a self-titled debut album, first performing in local clubs, then securing international gigs in Ireland and beyond. Now he’s touring behind his brand new album, Fever Breaks. As one surveys his catalog, it’s easy to put Fever Breaks alongside 2006’s Animal Years and find some comparisons between the topical songwriting, the cover illustrations, and the passion he brings to both.
Ritter opted to enlist Jason Isbell as a producer on Fever Breaks and even used Isbell’s band, The 400 Unit. It proved to be an interesting move, especially given that Amanda Shires happens to be a huge fan. Working as… well, a unit, the ensemble captured something special in these Nashville sessions — a vibe that Ritter is carrying out on the road with his own Royal City Band. Throughout the month BGS will be featuring music from throughout Ritter’s career, as well as a two-part interview conducted before a spring concert in Tennessee.
For now, as we anticipate the month ahead, spend some time with a collection of some of our Artist of the Month’s best work in our new Essential Josh Ritter playlist on Spotify.
This spring in New York City, Hadestown is being celebrated as a feat of storytelling at the not-obvious-until-now intersection between Broadway, Greek mythology, and folk music. Penned by Anaïs Mitchell, the production is sung-through on a rolling landscape of New Orleans-infused roots music, strung so seamlessly together that it feels like one long song.
It’s been nominated for 14 Tony Awards this year — worth celebrating in the folk world, considering the other accomplishments of its writer include a duo recording of songs from the collection of Francis James Child and a handful of stunning singer-songwriter albums. But what’s folkier than telling a timeless tale in hopes that we can learn something new about where we are and where we’re going? And, like most myths and folk songs, Hadestown seems to have been around almost forever.
“I never dreamed I’d be working on this thing for as long as I have!” Mitchell tells the Bluegrass Situation. “But there have been so many different chapters of it — the early stage show in Vermont, the studio album, the touring of the studio album with guest singers, the six years of development in New York with [director] Rachel Chavkin (and four productions in and out of town). Other artists, designers, actors, have kept the wind in my sails and in the sails of the piece itself.”
She adds, “When I finally had to let go of changing lyrics because we were close to opening night, I was walking outside the theater after a show and saw this crowd of kids waiting at the stage door to talk to the actors, some of them dressed as characters from our show. I had this moment of grace and humility and the deep realization that this thing has never been about me and the writing of it; it has always been so much bigger. The story is older than any of us and resonates in ways I will never understand. So I guess what I’m getting at is, my feeling about the mystery, the muse, the crazy challenging beautiful act of collaboration — all those things are as mystical to me as they’ve ever been.”
The story of Hadestown brings into parallel two love stories from Greek mythology: Orpheus and Eurydice alongside Hades and Persephone. In Mitchell’s narrative, both couples are torn in some way by doubt and fear. Orpheus (Reeve Carney) is the musician working on a song to change the world; Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) is the daring girl who falls in love with him. Hades (Patrick Page) is the king of the underworld and his wife Persephone (Amber Grey) is the plucky goddess who brings the spring and summer before returning to Hades’s side when the seasons change.
Mitchell told an audience recently that the whole thing came to her many years ago, as just “some lyrics [that] came into my head that seemed to be about this story.”
“Orpheus is this impossible optimist,” she explains. “[He’s] this dreamer who believes that he can write a song beautiful enough that he can change the way the world is, can change the rules of the world.”
Hadestown premiered as a community theater production in Vermont in 2006. Four years later, Mitchell made it an album where she sang as Eurydice and Justin Vernon was Orpheus. Greg Brown was Hades, Ani DiFranco was Persephone, Ben Knox Miller was Hermes, and the Haden Triplets were the Fates. As a folk album, Hadestown was anachronistic if not delightfully disorienting. Its songs all stood on their own, especially the lusciously navel-gazing “Flowers” and the provocative, accidentally topical “Why Do We Build the Wall?” They were each arrestingly understated, driven by the turns of the singer’s voice and the prosody in Mitchell’s lyrics.
Mitchell toured around, performing the album with a rotating cast of local singer-songwriters wherever she went. In 2012 she began a collaboration with Chavkin (Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812) and since then Hadestown has journeyed from a small thrust stage at New York Theatre Workshop in the East Village, to a larger proscenium stage in Edmonton, Alberta, then to the National Theater in London, and finally to Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theater.
Tipping a hat to the show’s folksinger origins, Orpheus really plays his acoustic guitar, the Fates wander with fiddle and squeezebox, people step to the mic when they want to emphasize what they’re singing about, and at the top of the second act, Persephone introduces the band. These elements help to set the show apart in a theater world where audiences are used to respecting a hard fourth wall.
“I come from the songwriter/music world,” Mitchell says, “and I’m very comfortable just hanging out for three or four minutes in a song with verses, choruses, maybe a bridge, digging the suspension of time and the cyclical beauty of music. So there’s been a super-slow learning curve for me in terms of how to take a song like ‘Wedding Song’ and put it in service of the kind of moment-to-moment storytelling we desire and expect from the theater. Especially because Hadestown is a sung-through piece, we needed the songs to work harder as scenes with stakes, events, and results for the characters.”
She continues, “Many of the songs for Hadestown existed as a kind of poetic portraiture and it took cracking them open, adding intros, interludes, bridges and outros, check-ins with other characters, to make them do that work. The addition of ‘Come Home with Me,’ which I rewrote one million times, in which Orpheus expresses his mission to ‘bring the world back into tune’ with song, and then especially the interlude where he debuts his ‘Epic’ melody and it has an effect on the world — flower magic! — really helped it feel like, when we got to the end of that song, something had changed. For Orpheus, for Eurydice, and for the audience.”
The Broadway incarnation is replete with these kinds of turning points and bringing them to fruition has meant a lot of rewriting for Mitchell. Thus, some of the songs that made sense on the album are no longer included, and some of the characters have evolved as well.
“I got feedback after almost every production we did about the Orpheus character not being in-focus enough,” Mitchell says. “He’s been the hardest character by far to write, I think because of all the characters in the show, he’s pure, an idealist, a believer, and everyone else has a sort of jaded or ruined quality which is easier for audiences to ‘buy.’ In earlier productions, because he’s this irrationally faithful character, mythologically speaking, and because of how he was written, he came across kind of cocky, overconfident, not the underdog hero we want to pull for.
“Finally, between London and Broadway, I really started massaging him into more of an innocent, naive character, an artist ‘touched by the gods’ who can see the way the world could be but has a hard time living in the world that is. That new character was very intuitive to Reeve [Carney], who is himself a very pure spirit. It felt right for Orpheus to be more of a mentee, an acolyte, a boy ‘under the wing’ of Hermes, the storyteller.
“So Hermes became much more of an uncle figure, more intimately involved in the story and its stakes than before. At the same time Eurydice was becoming more focused — and Eva [Noblezada] also brought so much intuitive toughness and humor to the role — as a runaway, a girl with a past, and demons that won’t leave her be. The Fates became, quite often, the voices in her head. I think those more meta storyteller characters each have a more pointed allegiance [on Broadway] to the character they hope will act out their world views.”
Further, the set has evolved: it is a barroom, a small world that feels both familiar and familial. But when we enter the underworld, the set becomes darker, cavernous. Though it physically expands, the result somehow feels heavier, more enclosed.
“We could see the effect that Orpheus’s divine music has on the world,” she says. “In the case of ‘Wait for Me,’ … the way to the underworld reveals itself to him. It’s a moment where I feel like all the design departments were bringing so much inspiration. … We go from a very warm, safe, round place, to a place that is suddenly terrifyingly large. It’s all of a sudden cold. There’s steel, those industrial lights go up and up and up. I find it very visually moving every time.”
There’s also a lift and turntable in the stage that add to the journeying portions of the show. Nowhere are the set changes more powerful than in the stunning, breath-stopping delivery of “Wait for Me” and its reprise in Act II. In the latter, Eurydice and Orpheus switch places in their travail of trust and doubt, singing with a workers’ chorus whose presence adds new depth to the show.
“The Workers were always a part of the story conceptually,” Mitchell says, “but at New York Theater Workshop we didn’t have space or budget for an ensemble, so that ‘role’ was taken on by the entire company. When we began to build in the dedicated choral, choreographic presence of the Workers, it really expanded a lot of things. ‘Wait for Me II,’ for example, gains a lot of momentum because suddenly the implications of Orpheus and Eurydice’s walk are bigger than the two of them.”
“Wait for Me II” is where the intersections of song, story, myth, folk tradition, and theatrical allegory become writ-large in the narrative. We’re reminded that a song, created as the expression of an individual, can encourage many others to follow new paths — or as the posters outside the theater say, help us “see how the world can be.”
“People inspire each other in ways no one will ever understand,” Mitchell says. “No one is coming up with any of this shit from scratch. We are standing on the backs of our ancestors and we’re singing to and for each other. The other very meta thing about letting go of the piece for Broadway was [recognizing] nothing is ever perfect. We don’t love Orpheus because he’s perfect. He’s flawed, he falls short, and we love him anyway. We love him for trying. There is goodness in the endeavor itself, whatever the outcome is.”
Lede image: Reeve Carney and Eva Noblezada Secondary image: Amber Gray, Patrick Page, and Reeve Carney Photo credit: Matthew Murphy
Artist:Anthony da Costa Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee Song: “Shadow Love” (Acoustic) Album:Shadow Love EP Release Date: Single – May 31st; EP – June 14th
In Their Words: “This is a song that has followed me around for years. I first wrote this song back in 2015 and have performed it live with my band many times… I always had fun playing it, but never felt like it was all the way there. My friend Ruth Moody (of The Wailin’ Jennys) and I had recently been discussing the possibility of writing songs together. While working on the EP, I decided to send ‘Shadow Love’ to Ruth and asked her to write another verse. She sent me that second verse while on the road, and it haunted me for days afterwards. ‘Maybe I knew you long before I met you / a hologram, a winter mist / Not everything can last forever / Not everything can feel like this.’ The song was done. What was once a loud Weezer-rock shredder became a duet between two loves, two ghosts. I wanted to share this live, acoustic version of the song (featuring Ruth as well as Sam Howard on bass) as a capture of friends sharing a feeling in real time. Enjoy!” — Anthony da Costa
Beyond the significance of May 2019 being BGS Artist of the Month Pete Seeger’s 100th birthday month, this is a chance to recognize that Pete is an artist for every month. His gentle cantor, amiable smile, expertise on both banjo and guitar, rattling voice, respect for the music of the past while making it relevant for the present, political awareness, and constant fight for social justice make him a man for all seasons.
All month long, BGS will be celebrating Pete’s legacy — a legacy that lingers years after his passing. To kick things off, here’s our all-encompassing playlist of the Essential Pete Seeger to get you up to speed. And if you want to dig deeper, check out Pete Seeger: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection, which includes a 200-page book with essays, commentary, photographs, and liner notes, along with six CDs of classic and unreleased music.
When it came to guitars, gadgets and such, JJ Cale bought plenty of stuff and more often than not wound up giving it away eventually. When it came to his music, however, Cale was not one to cast anything aside. Over the decades of his long and storied career, he amassed hundreds of recordings of songs, fragments, alternative mixes and other sonic ephemera. Fifteen songs, all complete and finished by Cale himself, have been rescued from his hard-drive vaults for the posthumously-released new album Stay Around.
“I wanted to make sure everything on this was really ‘new,’ songs that people hadn’t already heard,” says his widow, Christine Lakeland Cale, who oversaw the project. “You know, you go on YouTube and there’s a bad-sounding grainy video from a gig somebody recorded on their phone. I tried to find things that hadn’t even been out that much. I was looking for the most Cale I could give people.”
Cale, who died from a heart attack in 2013, was a marvel of consistency as a recording artist. Well beyond “After Midnight,” “Cocaine,” and his other signpost compositions, he left behind more than a dozen albums long on relaxed, amiable grooves. So it should come as no surprise that Stay Around offers that same level of quality, even though it consists of recordings spanning more than three decades.
The album’s tracks range from solo recordings to full-band arrangements, with highlights including the loping ode to road life “Chasing You” to the title track’s romantic crooning. Christine compiled the material in collaboration with her late husband’s longtime manager Mike Kappus, who was well-versed in Cale’s working methods. It wasn’t unusual for Cale to leave songs sitting around for years, or even decades, before releasing them. “Roll On,” the title track of Cale’s final 2009 studio album, was a song he’d had in the bag since the mid-1970s.
“I was kind of in on the complete evolution of it all,” Kappus says. “He would send me cassettes, with something like a picture of his driver’s license as artwork, just this private little clever thing between us. We’d be talking about the next album and not everything he sent would make it. At one point I told him, ‘Man, you’ve got a couple of really good, solid records here.’ But the temptation for any artist is to do what’s fresh and that’s what would happen. So there was all this material left over.”
Christine admits it took her “a couple of years of walking around foggy and not all there” until she felt up to diving into Cale’s recorded archive, which was not stored on a pile of tapes. Instead, Cale left behind about 50 hard drives on Alesis HD24 machines, a format Christine says has been obsolete for years. But Cale didn’t upgrade beyond that because the format worked and he was comfortable with it.
“He used to joke to people, ‘I’m too old to learn something new, I like what I have and I use my ears, not my eyes,’” Christine says. “So he never made the transition to Pro Tools. He could hear peaks of distortion that had to come out, instead of seeing a line on a screen to edit. He liked the familiarity of his home studio because he didn’t have to spend any time setting things up — just flip the switch and get creative.”
But just because Cale’s recording methodology was to set it and forget it, one shouldn’t conclude that he was any sort of behind-the-times Luddite. Cale was a skilled studio technician who “loved engineering more than anything else,” according to Kappus, and he had a lifelong fascination with the tools of his trade. After buying new gear or instruments, Cale would usually take them apart and rebuild them. He’d do the same thing with records, after a fashion, going to record stores and buying the entire top 10 bestsellers to study.
“He’d want to check out whatever people were buying,” Kappus says. “Not to try and copy, but to check the engineering and production aspects. We were at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Los Angeles once, where most of the people working were pretty into acoustic or folk music. And Cale starts talking about the mixes on ‘Back That Ass Up’ and some new Britney Spears record. Everybody there was going, ‘What?!’ They figured he’d only know about Willie and Waylon. But he had a lot of curiosity and he’d appreciate the mixing and recording of that stuff in a very true, knowledgeable way. It was the furthest thing from snobbery.”
Of particular note on Stay Around is its one song that Cale didn’t write, “My Baby Blues” — which Christine calls “my nod of self-indulgence,” because she wrote it herself. “My Baby Blues” is a song she and Cale recorded in 1977 at the first session where they met. Cale’s version here dates back to 1980 and Christine considers it a real find. But her favorite cut on the album is the title track, a meditation on the pleasures of being with the one you love (“Stay around, stay around, girl/And let’s make love one more time”).
“That one just floored me when I found it,” Christine says. “I couldn’t believe that one, and the guys at the label came up with the idea to make it the title because, ‘We hope his music stays around.’ That’s brilliant, how come I didn’t think of it? But I was too close to it. It takes a village.”
Some of the solo recordings are particularly intimate, especially “If We Try,” which comes by its kitchen-table feel honestly. That was one of his favorite places to record when he was home alone, and the track feels “as if you’re right there sitting at the table with him,” Christine says.
While Christine isn’t yet thinking about a follow-up, there’s more than enough material still in the vaults to make another album, which could be 100 percent previously unheard material the way this one is. And she thinks that the spirit of her late husband, who would have turned 80 last December, probably approves.
“I have had a lot of weird things happen,” she says. “Probably more so during the foggy period. But even now, things happen where I think, ‘Somebody’s just making sure things go this or that way.’ This world can’t just be it. I do think there’s something once we leave here, I just don’t know what. There’s got to be another level of intelligence in the universe because we’re such a flawed species. Without sounding too much like an old hippie, it seems like there’s the ability to let somebody know it’s okay. And he has.”
Artist:Anna Tivel Hometown: Portland, Oregon Song: “Minneapolis” Album:The Question Release Date: April 19, 2019 Label: Fluff & Gravy Records
In Their Words: “This is a song about that stuck feeling, that stagnant winter sadness that can take over everything until you have to physically move yourself to shake it loose. I started writing it after a long tour in the Midwest. I was thinking about how that feeling can seep into a relationship until it seems like the only sane thing to do is pack up and start over somewhere else.” — Anna Tivel
Mandolinist Andy Statman is quick to deny that his identity — he’s a devout modern Orthodox Jew — has anything to do with his music. “To tell you the truth,” he says, “it never entered the picture. I was just into the music…”
However, his latest album, Monroe Bus — an exploration of traditional mandolin techniques utilized in contexts as familiar as Bill Monroe standards and as far-reaching as klezmer and jazz-infused originals — belies that denial. And, as we converse about his history in music and the harlequin nature of the album it becomes obvious that his work isn’t devoid of his identity at all. In fact, the opposite is demonstrable.
Statman’s music is, of course, archetypically and idiosyncratically his own. He, as much or more so than any other mandolinist on the scene today, is truly original. He’s reached this destination not through purposeful attempts in his music to express his identity — religious, cultural, and otherwise. Instead he simply focuses on playing the most meaningful music he can, while remaining in the moment and establishing human connection with his fellow musicians. The rest, his whole identity, shines through his art organically and effortlessly as a result. Statman is a testament to roots music’s ability — whether consciously or subconsciously, overtly or covertly — to allow its purveyors’ souls to be the keystones on which entire albums, catalogs, and genres are built.
BGS: Your record strikes me as “melting pot” music. Whether you’re playing more jazzy music or bluegrass or klezmer, you’ve always considered your music to be quintessentially American. Why is that?
Statman: First of all, I’m an American, so the culture I grew up in was an American culture. I heard things through an American ear, I saw things from an American eye, and while there might be certain regional differences, all in all it’s all pretty much the same. I grew up right after World War II, my father was a veteran. I was born in 1950, so I grew up in the early 1950s in an area in Queens, New York called Jackson Heights. It was a diverse neighborhood. Everyone got along. Everyone grew up together. The other kids were just other kids, and it didn’t matter what their background was. The music played at this time was classical music, or jazz, or square dance music, or other stuff. As a kid we used to have square dances every week in public school. I remember every year we used to have a Lebanese American come and play songs for us. At that era you were able to sort of culturally imbue almost all of the last one hundred years of American culture. It was all there to be touched and heard and seen and lived. It was there, in the air, but it was America so it was live and let live.
What was your entry point to bluegrass, then?
My brother is about eight years older than me. He went to college in the ‘60s — 1960 I guess was his first year. He got very involved in listening to like the Kingston Trio, the Limeliters, the beginning of the folk revival. Then he started bringing home records of Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez. That wasn’t really so much for me, but then he started bringing home some New Lost City Ramblers records and this other record that Mike Seeger was involved in, Mountain Music Bluegrass Style, which basically was recordings of the incredible bluegrass scene in Baltimore, Maryand, and Washington D.C. in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s — people like Earl Taylor and Smiley Hobbs, just an amazing collection. I really gravitated to that. I remember for my birthday he got me Foggy Mountain Jamboree, a compilation of the early, classic Flatt & Scruggs Columbia 45s. He was also involved in what they used to call jug and skiffle bands and they used to rehearse at the house. He played guitar and sang and there was a banjo player in the band who played some bluegrass and I was just very excited by that whole thing. That just did it for me. All I wanted to do was play bluegrass.
What was it about the music that grabbed your ear?
On a very simple level, emotionally, I was excited and moved by the music. It really spoke to me. The singing, the harmonies, the instrumental playing. There was an excitement to it that I really liked. I was very moved by the slower, ballad types of things, also. I started listening on the AM radio to WWVA out of Wheeling, West Virginia, which was a bastion of country music back at that time. We had a guitar in the house, my brother’s guitar, so I started learning the Doc Williams guitar method, I learned some chords, but I really wanted to learn banjo. I finally was able to get a banjo and started taking lessons.
On Sundays back then in Washington Square Park people would go down and play outside in different groups. There’d be a group playing bluegrass, a group doing topical songs, a group doing blues, so I started meeting people doing bluegrass. On these records that I liked I was getting more and more moved by the mandolin playing — it was really exciting me. Earl Taylor’s playing and I think on the Scruggs records it was Everett Lilly playing one or two solos that were just like, wow. I was getting chills from hearing this stuff. I decided I would make the switch and become a mandolinist. I had already been playing banjo and guitar for a few years. I was still in my early teens, so when I stepped into the mandolin role I already had some muscles developed and some understanding of the music.
The record, Monroe Bus, really clearly illustrates the value and the beauty that comes from allowing our musical art forms to reflect our identities. How do you think we can help foster the idea that any background or identity is valid and can be showcased through these art forms?
You know, I don’t think that way. Forgive me. I’m just into playing music, playing the best music that I can, and I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been able to study with a lot of musicians of different cultures and different backgrounds, both playing American music and music that maybe isn’t played here so much. To me, it’s all about the music. When I’m playing, I’m just playing. Identity or background is really meaningless to me. It was always like that, but at this point in my life even more so. When I’m playing I’m just looking to play the most meaningful music I can play. Those are my only real concerns.
Bill Monroe (foreground) and Andy Statman at Fincastle Bluegrass 1966. Photo by Fred Robbins
You are always blending different musical forms in these crazy, unexpected ways. How do you respond to folks that are worried that that dilutes bluegrass or that it will kill the genre in the long run? What’s your response to the typical, “That ain’t bluegrass” kind of gripe? Do you have one?
First of all, this is not a bluegrass record, obviously.
But there are undeniable bluegrass threads throughout.
Of course, but I’m not presenting myself as [pure bluegrass.] I spent a lot of time studying bluegrass, and there are always new insights and things to learn, but for me, the original blossoming of bluegrass is where it’s at, where it reached its fullest expression. If I’m going to listen to bluegrass, I’m probably going to listen to bluegrass from before 1970. Not to say that what came after is bad, this is just my preference. The feelings and creativity of that particular period, to me, are really unsurpassed. And while the technical level might have gotten better, this doesn’t necessarily make for a more meaningful, deeper music, it just makes for a more athletic music. [Laughs]
Listen, people have to be who they are. It’s just music. There are always going to be people who hear things differently, who want to add or subtract things, and if you don’t like it, then you don’t like it. I can see that there’s a strong core of people who are really interested in playing music in the mode of what was played in the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. I think there isn’t any danger of that not continuing.
I do believe, though, that it’s important for musicians to really try and master a traditional style. Because, if you’re going to try to build on something, you really need to understand where it’s coming from, to be able to relate to that music on its own terms. Which is getting back to the roots of all this music and being able to speak that language naturally, in your own way and find your own voice in it. You’ll understand phrasing, variation, improvisation, how to play melodies, how to bring out what’s in the melody, how to play rhythm. Without that firm grounding in a particular style, particularly when we’re talking about folk music, it won’t click.
It’s interesting that you say that, because I think that a song that perfectly illustrates what you’re talking about on the record is “Raw Ride,” a sort of version of Bill Monroe’s “Rawhide.” I love this version because the song is so iconic, but you’re still turning it on its ear. You’re demonstrating that foundation that you’re talking about, but you’re finding your own voice in it. How did you come up with this arrangement?
Well, I’ve been playing the tune for years. “Rawhide” is one of those tunes that, if played in the traditional Monroe manner, requires a lot of energy. It’s always a question of is it worth the energy for the payoff? [Laughs] It usually is. There’s obvious extensions of the melody or the chords that you hear if you’ve been involved in playing other types of music. So I just sort of followed those. As with all of these things, it reflects who I am, my musical experiences, and my studies.
…When you’re writing music and playing music it really just reflects who you are and what your experiences are and how you live. It’s a reflection of that. That’s what Bill Monroe did. His music was a synthesis, an ongoing synthesis, and he developed a certain kind of aesthetic.
When I came out of the closet and was going through that process of coming to terms with my identity as a gay man, I had a moment where I doubted my place in bluegrass. I thought maybe bluegrass wasn’t the place for me, it wasn’t a place where I could belong. Did you ever feel like your Jewishness made you question your place in bluegrass?
Not really, no. To me, it was all about the music. All the musicians I know are wonderful, thoughtful, and kind people — in the bluegrass scene and in others as well. We’re all in this together and we all have a common passion for the music. It’s a uniting force. It has a real life of its own, and we’re just sort of passing through it, so to speak. If you’re worried about the thoughts or beliefs of the people you’re playing music with, then you can’t really be playing music. Music, in its essence, is the great unifier. It can unify people in terms of ideas and feelings and speak to the commonality of everyone. At that point, all of these other things melt away.
It really has to do with heart. It’s a spiritual thing. In Hasidic teachings they say that music, particularly instrumental music, can go higher than anything. A song without words isn’t even bound by the concepts of those words. In certain ways, it’s a universal heartbeat. You can see the tremendous life force that music carries. To me it’s something that’s very sacred.
Born María Gabriela Moreno Bonilla in Guatemala City, she knew she wanted more as a teenager and journeyed to the USA with that big voice and an even bigger dream. She has since lived several lives inside the dark heart of the LA music business, getting signed to Warner Brothers at 18 and then dropped and signed by Epic Records, only to be dropped again by age 20.
Why didn’t she give up and go home? Because the dream was a bit bigger than that. Over the last decade and a half, Gaby has put out a series of sonically adventurous and politically fearless English and Spanish language albums that have created an international fanbase which takes her around the world each year. Hopscotching from early jazz to introspective folk to Dap-King-assisted soul, Gaby has been filling concert halls from Berlin to Sydney, winning her a Latin Grammy in the process, setting up a dream collaboration on a new album with Van Dyke Parks, and getting her weekly appearances on NPR’s Live From Here as Chris Thile’s secret weapon. She even helped write the theme song to the beloved NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation!
While she may be multi-talented, she is also among the kindest, sweetest souls to be featured on The Show On The Road. Make sure you stick around for a new song she plays at the end and a short story she wrote on the spot about UFO’s and time travel.
Luther Dickinson trusted his intuition when he set aside two or three days to make an album with like-minded friends who had never met each other. By pulling together these kindred spirits — now known as Sisters of the Strawberry Moon — Dickinson crafted a beautiful roots collection, simply titled Solstice.
“It was amazing that we all converged. We picked two or three days, met in Mississippi, and recorded the record,” he says. “Everybody brought two or three songs and we just took turns backing each other up.”
The luminous cast include Birds of Chicago, gospel group The Coco Mamas, Amy Helm, Amy LaVere, and Shardé Thomas, with finishing flourishes from fiddler Lillie Mae and B3 organ master Charles Hodges. Intimate as well as immediate, Solstice serves as a testament to the power of fast friendship.
The Bluegrass Situation caught up with Dickinson, Amy Helm, and Birds of Chicago’s JT Nero before a show at Nashville’s City Winery.
BGS: You only had two days together, people were bringing their own songs, and not everybody knew each other. You must have been operating on instinct. Is that fair to say?
Dickinson: Totally. I feel the most alive when I’m producing because you’re in the moment and you’re making instinctual decisions, but you’re drawing from your whole life and all of your experiences, and everything I learned from my dad and everything he’s taught me, and everything he’s learned from all the producers who taught him. But also you have to be open and sensitive to what’s going on in the room.
It really is a very exhilarating feeling, producing records. And sometimes it can go completely wrong if you say the wrong thing. But I really do love it. Yeah, you’re running on instinct and you’re running on blood and guts. But it’s like doing anything when you’re in the zone, whether you’re an athlete or a pilot. You’re just trained to be in that moment. Time slows down and everything comes together.
Amy, why did this concept appeal to you, to go to Memphis and make this record?
Helm: I mean, any invitation to go hang out with Luther and a bunch of cool people in Memphis is an instant yes. I had not met any of the other people on the project but I was excited about it and I trust him and trust his compass of coolness. It was a delight to be down there and hang out in Memphis. I rented a Jeep and drove around down South, which is always one of my favorite things to do — to just roll around down there. My aunt Mary lives in Memphis so I got to see her. It was a really, really nice time, and it’s led to some incredible friendships that have turned into other projects. Ally [Allison Russell from Birds of Chicago] and JT came and sang on my record that I made with Joe Henry. Now we’re doing this tour with this record. Those guys made a record together afterwards, so it’s been a nice chain reaction – the right kind of chain reaction.
For this record, everybody brought in their own songs, but the record feels unified as a whole. Do you sense a common thread that runs through the album?
Helm: I would say that, the spirit of friendship is where everybody was coming from with it. So there’s a relaxation that happens with that for me, and I’m sure for these guys. When it’s your own thing and the clock is running and there’s money going down the drain fairly quickly, you’re trying to make it work and hope you got the best performance, it’s really easy to get inside that head for me. So if you’re in a cool room in the middle of Memphis, and you’re eating great food and having great conversations on your way to the studio, and then you get to hear a singer like Allison Russell, that’s it, you’re there.
Nero: The thing that will always be particularly special about this record to me is that you can hear lifelong friendships being made on record. We hadn’t met each other, really, but we’re a family now, and part of that is Luther’s instincts. That’s the thing with music – there are a million things out there that are brilliant but they wouldn’t easily be simpatico with what we’re doing. So finding your tribe members is what it’s all about. I think Luther had an inkling that it would be that way, but you never know – and it was that way. And you can hear that happening on record. It’s rare you get to bottle that lightning.
Dickinson: Man, the music is just an artefact of our friendship. I hope that’s maybe what they’ll feel. A warmth, and we all have longing in our music, and we’re singing about our musical families and our loved ones who aren’t with us. So, hopefully we will generate a place of love. It has a grandmother’s Sunday dinner type of vibe to it.
I like “Sing to Me” — there’s power in that song. What mood were you hoping to set with this recording of it?
Helm: I recorded that song on my first record, with my dad playing drums on it, but I recorded it then with no harmonies. I knew that there were going to be a lot of other voices there this time, and I’ve always wanted to hear that song with an angel choir on it. So I brought it in for that, hoping to gain that, and it became a very cool, vibey thing. I love the way it turned out.
What goes through your mind when you hear that song now, in its new incarnation?
Helm: Just really the mastery of a master player, and how it can change a song and make you sound better! [Laughs] That’s one of the things! Because the playing on it is so exquisite, with the organ that Charles Hodges put on and the guitar that Luther put on. And just also getting to sing it with Ally and finding the magic of that vocal collaboration, and the overtone that she and I get.
Dickinson: Do you remember that take when they walked in? Like, that was the moment that you guys met, right?
Helm: Yeah, that was it.
You met basically in front of a vocal mic?
Helm: We did! They came in and sat down. Ally sat there cross-legged and started listening and closing her eyes. I don’t know, I was a little intimidated …
Dickinson: But that second take — that was the one.
How often did that happen, with the second take being the one?
Dickinson: Oh man, some of this record, especially on Ally’s songs, are the run-throughs! We had to go back and save the run-through because she pours blood and guts into the microphone. Just this heartbreak, I get goosebumps thinking about it! I usually edit two takes together – like the second half of the first take, and the first half of the second take.
But a lot of her stuff was the run-through and we’d patch it up from there. That’s the great thing about modern technology – you can capture moments. Amy LaVere, on the bass, she’d done her homework. She knew every song and had them charted out, and the fact that she was nailing the run-throughs even, really made it work. She really did a good job.
There was a lot of re-interpreting going on, with some of the songs being recorded a long time ago, but Shardé has a real unique beat. She’s a character, man, and growing up with her grandfather [Otha Turner]’s fife and drum music, but also growing up with Beyoncé, who is her idol, she is a very unique musician with great instincts. What I like about her is that you can bring a country song to her, and she won’t play anything near a country beat. And I love that!
Amy, what does that feel like when you’re singing so closely with these people you just met?
Helm: You know what, that is my favorite of all time! That’s the thing that makes all of us gamble everything else in our lives, for better or for worse. [Laughs] For financial distress or not, to keep on doing it because there’s nothing more satisfying than finding that. It revitalizes my faith, honestly. It’s like a spiritual ease that I feel when I get to do that stuff.
It reminds me that all things are possible, and all things are new upon each song and each recording. And it’s limitless, the people you can connect with and interact with in music. There’s such joy in that way. I think for people who make it and for people who listen to it, you’re having that same experience. Following that and finding that – as you can see, I could go on and on about this. It’s magic for me.
Photo credit: Joshua Black Wilkins
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.AcceptRejectRead More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
