Tag: Folk

I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger: 20 Versions of an American Classic

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While the traditional “Wayfaring Stranger” has been at the foundation of North American music for at least two centuries, its origin is far from exact.

Some historians have traced its genesis to the 1780s, others, the early 1800s. Depending on who you’re talking to the song may be a reworked Black spiritual, a lifted native hymn, or even a creation of nomadic Portuguese settlers from the southern Appalachian region.

The song, which features its singing protagonist contemplating better times with their family in the afterlife, first gained popularity at Appalachian revivalist sermons before slowly spreading westward with the pioneers. Though “Wayfaring Stranger” has remained a gospel constant ever since, what has probably done more to solidify its place in the American musical tapestry is its constant rediscovery and renewal in the near-secular and popular musical worlds.

In the 1940s, renowned actor and singer Burl Ives made “Wayfaring Stranger” one of his signature songs. By the hippie era late-1960s it was Joan Baez who introduced the free love set to the song. Next, Emmylou Harris turned it into a minor hit in 1980 and then The Man In Black himself, Johnny Cash, reclaimed it in 2000 during that magical late-career renaissance he had. In the song’s latest resurgence, British pop star Ed Sheeran has turned a near a cappella-and-vocal loops version of “Wayfaring Stranger” into a much-copied YouTube phenomenon.

With its evocative lyrics and magnetic melody it’s hard to do “Wayfaring Stranger” wrong. After all, Sunday school teachers and folk festival third-stagers have been churning out entirely competent versions of the song for decades. That said, the best versions of “Wayfaring Stranger” can be so much more. When a musician captures that gravitas and world weary challenge just right it’s like a lightning bolt right to the soul.

We’ve collected 20 soul-stirring performances of “Wayfaring Stranger” below.

16 Horsepower
16 Horsepower/Wovenhand singer David Eugene Edwards has made “Wayfaring Stranger” one of his signature songs, with a version of the track appearing on the 16 Horsepower album Secret South as well as the 2003 Jim White documentary-adventure Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus.

Neko Case
The fire-haired singer recorded a particularly stirring version of “Wayfaring Stranger” for her 2004 album The Tigers Have Spoken.

Bill Monroe
Bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe performed this version of “Wayfaring Stranger” on the early-1990s TNN program American Music Shop.

Dusty Springfield
British pop star Dusty Springfield’s elegant, melancholy take on the song anchored an episode of her 1966 television show.

Johnny Cash
This song, which appears on Cash’s 2000 album American III: Solitary Man, perfectly captures the mortality that infused much of the Man In Black’s latter period recordings.

Emmylou Harris
Seen here performing the song on Pop Goes The Country in 1980, Harris recorded the song for her album Roses in the Snow. Her version would hit #1 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart and #1 on the RPM Country Tracks chart in Canada.

Jack White
White Stripes/Raconteurs band member and Loretta Lynn appreciator Jack White recorded a version of “Wayfaring Stranger” for the Cold Mountain soundtrack. White also had a role in the 2003 film which featured Jude Law, Nicole Kidman and Renée Zellweger.

Tift Merritt
Here’s former Grammy Award nominee Tift Merritt performing “Wayfaring Stranger” in a library in Ringwood, New Jersey. Just because.

Ed Sheeran
The British pop singer’s version of the song uses loops of his own voice as musical accompaniment. The YouTube video of his unique performance has over 12 million views so far and numerous imitators.

Joan Baez
Baez recorded “Wayfaring Stranger” for 1969’s David’s Album, a record of mostly traditionals. It was created by Baez for her then-husband David Harris who was about to be sent to jail for resisting the draft.

The Pine Hill Haints
As this 2007 live version by The Pine Hill Haints attests, adding some rock ‘n’ roll to “Wayfaring Stranger” can yield impressive results. See also defunct gospel-punk band The Schomberg Fair’s version.

The Broken Circle Breakdown Bluegrass Band
Taken from the must-see-for-any-bluegrass-fan Belgian film The Broken Circle Breakdown, this version perfectly bolsters the movie’s tragic narrative.

Sam Bush, Bobby Hicks, Allison Brown
This all-star trio of bluegrass-newgrass players got together to perform a rather epic eight-minute instrumental version of “Wayfaring Stranger” at Harvard University’s Barton Hall in 2010.

Throwing Muses’ Kristin Hersh
Kristin Hersh, from first wave alternative rockers Throwing Muses, performs a rather haunting version of the song.

Tim Buckley
This version by late troubadour Tim Buckley was recorded in 1968 but only came to light in 1999 with the release of his Works In Progress compilation.

Eva Cassidy
Knowing the tragic story of American singer Eva Cassidy’s short life adds a sad edge to this mellifluous rendition from the Eva By Heart album which was released after her death in 1996.

Glen Campbell
The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour‘s titular country star used his early-1970s variety program to showcase this brisk version of “Wayfaring Stranger.”

Alison Krauss & Union Station
Bluegrass fiddler and Robert Plant collaborator Alison Krauss performed a standard-bearing version of “Wayfaring Stranger” along with Union Station at the Philadelphia Folk Festival in 1987.

Tennessee Ernie Ford
Complete with dark mood lighting, this 1961 performance on The Ford Show perfectly showcased Tennessee Ernie Ford’s booming bass-baritone.

Natalie Merchant
Former 10,000 Maniacs’ vocalist Natalie Merchant unfurled a hypnotic version of “Wayfaring Stranger” on her 2003 traditionals album The House Carpenter’s Daughter.

What versions did we miss? Tell us your favorites in the comments below.

Americana’s Complicated, Resonant Relationship with the UK

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Defining the special relationship is pretty hard right now. Donald Trump and Theresa May were pictured holding hands on their very first meeting. Two days later, 10,000 Britons protested against Mr. Trump outside the prime minister’s Downing Street residence. The most appropriate Facebook status update would be: “It’s complicated.” It’s 130 years since Oscar Wilde wrote, “We really have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.” For many Brits, still reeling from our unexpected lurch into Brexit, Trump’s shock election is proof that the two countries still walk a similar path. But to others, our cousins across the pond have never felt more distant and alien.

It was in this context that the UK’s Americana scene celebrated itself last week. A fledgling organization, the Americana Music Association UK was hosting its second-ever awards, as well as a two-day conference that offered a chance to consider not only the future of the music here in Britain, but also its present.

Americana has strong roots (excuse the pun) on this side of the Atlantic. Since Mumford & Sons’ mid-2000s breakout, bands like Fleet Foxes, Foy Vance, the Lumineers, and the Shires have found a ready audience, particularly during festival season. Country music has had its own revival — but it can seem remote to the British sensibility and way of life (and its costumes, frankly, outlandish). There’s something in the understated wistfulness of Americana that resonates with our national character: It’s why so many British households own Simon and Garfunkel albums, and why Bob Dylan has long been treated as one of our own.

The contemporary Americana scene is, however, still finding its identity in the UK — as demonstrated by the festival-cum-conference that preceded the AMA UK’s 2017 awards. The two-day affair took place in Hackney, London’s hipster haven where venues such as a vintage clothing store added to the retro appeal of the music; audiences were neatly split into 30-somethings who had raided their dad’s vinyls and the dads, themselves, many wearing jackets they’d had since the ’70s.

Lewis & Leigh

The acts, showcased simultaneously in three neighbouring venues, were more varied. Performances ranged from the folk-inspired Honey Ants to the bluegrass-pop blend of Cornish band Flats & Sharps, from the wild intensity of Henry Senior, Jr.’s pedal steel instrumentals to the delicate voice duos of Ben Smith & Jimmy Brewer. Robert Vincent, winner of last year’s Emerging Artist award, punctuated his charismatic country rock with an unexpected Merseyside accent. Across the road, Glen Phillips (of Toad the Wet Sprocket fame) suppressed his alt-rock instincts in a solo acoustic set that brought the night to a quiet, almost melancholic close.

Growing a more diverse audience will be key for Americana’s development in the UK, industry insiders were admitting. A panel, convened to discuss the genre’s future in the UK and Europe, noted that until recently the very label caused resistance among musicians and promoters, alike. “What has changed recently is that the whole scene has stopped being defensive,” said Sara Silver, head of UK operations at Thirty Tigers, the Nashville-based company that promotes and distributes artists from Lucinda Williams and Patty Griffin to Jason Isbell and the Avett Brothers. “At the beginning, it felt it had to justify itself, but last year’s awards event made me really proud.”

The instigation of an official Americana chart top 40 — some time before the U.S. began their own — is another example of the genre’s newfound confidence, even if 2017’s best-selling album went to a man who has been making music so long that the other nominees could well have been conceived to one of his records. And if Van Morrison’s appearance to accept his award for Keep Me Singing sprinkled stardust (“You’ve made a happy man very old,” he quipped), a performance by Mary Chapin Carpenter, Americana’s grand dame, gave everyone present a masterclass in expressive storytelling.

There was something gloriously authentic about staging the awards at St. John at Hackney — a dilapidated church where the marks in the ceiling aren’t artfully distressed, just genuine leaks — and a similar lack of pretension throughout the ceremony, including the bare-stage performances by nominees like Danni Nicholls, Yola Carter, and Sam Outlaw (who won International Album of the Year for Angeleno).

Perhaps fittingly, the biggest winners of the night were Lewis & Leigh, whose transatlantic partnership (Alva Leigh is from Mississippi, Al Lewis from Wales) claimed Best UK Album and Song. The gentle duo were celebrating the three-year anniversary of writing their very first number together, and their rendition of their award-winning “The 4:19” was the evening’s musical highlight, one whose romantic yearning would give Nashville’s Gunnar and Scarlett a serious run for their money.

Yola Carter

The event is, at its heart, a chance for what is still very much a family-style musical community to recognize and foster their younger kin — literally so, in the case of Wildwood Kin, the sibling trio from Devon who DJ (and awards host) Bob Harris named his emerging artists of 2017.

Carter, named UK Artist of the Year, pointed out that only 12 months ago she was singing a minor showcase at this same event — “Now, I’m here receiving an award,” she said, acknowledging the “encouragement and community” provided both by her fellow AMA members and by Arts Council-funded organisations like British Underground.

At the end of the night, Richard Thompson was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award, in the year that his band Fairport Convention celebrates its 50th anniversary. It was presented by his friend Harry Shearer, who called him a “craftsman, artist, and visionary” and praised his “absolutely idiosyncratic career.”

“This isn’t a subculture,” said Thompson, when he took to the stage. “It’s a parallel culture. And …” — cue huge applause — “it’s getting better.”

No Expectations, High Hopes: Sallie Ford in Conversation with Charlie Cunningham

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On first listen, it would seem Sallie Ford and Charlie Cunningham have little in common, except that they are human musicians. A singer/songwriter born in North Carolina but based in Portland, Oregon, Ford writes soul-baring lyrics that reveal a caustic wit, a persistent self-deprecation, and an abiding love for doo-wop, rockabilly, punk, and crunchy guitars. With her backing band, the Sound Outside, she released two albums, then went solo with 2014’s Slapback. But her latest, Soul Sick, may be her best yet: a set of lean, mean songs that reveal an ongoing battle with her baser urges, an emotional landscape where “the feeling of failing … is freeing.” Her music is blunt and direct, like a fist applied swiftly to your jawline.

Cunningham’s music, by contrast, starts as a gentle caress but ends as a deep scratch — fingernails digging into skin to draw blood. Through a series of EPs and singles, this London-born, Oxford-based musician has established himself as a formidable guitar player and a songwriter with a brutal economy of language. “I’m not here to pick a fight,” he sings on “An Opening,” “but we can, if you like.” Released on the Swedish label Dumont Dumont, his debut album, Lines, is taut and tense, with flourishes of synth and drums that underscore his percussive guitar playing.

Aside from a certain musical violence, Ford and Cunningham happen to share an understanding of music as a fundamentally cathartic endeavor, of songs as vehicles for the kinds of dark secrets you wouldn’t normally admit to a roomful of strangers. Never exactly grim nor simply self-absorbed, they are hyper-confessional lyricists, which means their albums are equally harrowing and relatable. Beyond that, they both come across very differently in conversation than they do in their music: amiable and animated, Cunningham speaking quickly and Ford punctuating her remarks with a piercing laugh.

One of the reasons I wanted to get you two on the phone together is that you’re both incorporating some styles that I don’t hear in a lot of music right now — Sallie with doo-wop and early rock, Charlie with flamenco. Those styles seem integral to your songwriting, rather than just sounds you’re dabbling in.

Sallie Ford: I just like retro music, in general. I grew up listening to a lot of oldies. My parents really liked the Beatles and Aretha Franklin and James Taylor, and we would have dance parties in the living room. [Laughs] So a lot of my music is about nostalgia. If you’re going to be influenced by anything, it has to be something that just calls you. What about you, Charlie?

Charlie Cunningham: First, I want to say well done on your album. There’s so much going on there, especially on that song “Unraveling.” You can definitely hear your soul influences coming through. As for me, I’ve always liked all sorts of music, but particularly acoustic guitar music. I used to listen to a lot of people like John Martyn and Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen — those kinds of people, playing that finger-picking style. I wanted to learn how to do that. I’d run out of tools, as far as playing goes. I went for flamenco because it seemed like the kind of thing I could understand. It sounded alien, but it also sounded somewhat familiar. It sounded very human and relatable. Once I did learn it, I was off. It just took a long time. I don’t know about you, Sallie, but it took me a very long time before I was ready to say, ” Here’s my music, people. This is what I do. This is me singing. This is me playing guitar.” That was the biggest hurdle for me.

SF: I grew up playing music, but it always mortified me to perform in front of people. My mom would have to make me. I played classical violin, and she would throw these concerts at her friends’ houses, and I would just die from embarrassment. It took me moving to a new city where no one knew who I was to realize that maybe I actually did like performing. Which is strange, because my whole family are performers. They’re much better than me. My father is a puppeteer, and he would make puppets with us. We lived way out in the boonies, and I was home-schooled. It was a pretty unusual upbringing. What about you?

CC: I was born in London, but I grew up about an hour outside of the city in a bit of country. I say “a bit of country” because you have these cities like London and Birmingham and Northampton, and then you have the bits of country between them. I lived in one of those. There was always music playing in my house, but there weren’t many players in my immediate family. My granddad used to sing. I’ve got lots of brothers and sisters — I’m one of five — and we were always trying to out-sing each other, not with any kind of skill, just in terms of volume. It was mainly a thing I did on my own, really. Music struck me early. I’d watch a lot of MTV, back when it was just one channel, and VH-1, and I stared to get interested in the world of music. We listened to a lot of Stevie Wonder and Elton John and these classic songwriters at a very young age … Why does my answer suddenly seem so much longer than yours?

SF: Ha! I think you’re just good at talking. I tend to clam up.

CC: I don’t think I am. You’re quality over quantity. Anyway, do you feel any relief now that your album is done, or do you feel anxious putting it out there in the world?

SF: I’m really excited. I’ve had a whole year off, and I have a new band, so I’m excited about all that. This will be my fourth album, which is crazy. But one thing I am nervous about is just now realizing how hard it is to be a musician, and I think it’s getting harder with digital downloading. Are you familiar with that really nerdy TV show in the U.S. called Nashville?

CC: No, I don’t know it.

SF: It’s not great. It’s a lot like a soap opera, but the reason I bring it up is because they’re all talking about how musicians are being affected by downloads. The fact that they’re talking about it on a major network television show about pop-country musicians is scary to me. I’m like, “Oh my god, what did I get myself into?” Maybe it’s not as bad in Europe, so I guess I could stop touring the U.S. and just tour over there.

CC: When I was listening to your stuff, there’s definitely this sense of being aware that what will be will be — like in that song “Failure,” when you’re talking about failure being freeing and a fleeting thing. That’s a good way to think about doing music, just knowing not to expect much. It really can be liberating. It does free you up writing-wise, because you don’t have to worry if it will sell. I think live music is one of the only things now that’s actually flourishing, perhaps more than ever, just due to the fact that people have to play gigs and tour to make a living. That’s the only way I can do it. So, in a way, maybe there are some positives, but it’s a bit of a Wild West, at the moment.

SF: I feel like I’ve written my most important album, and it’s just … I’m trying not to think about the past and how it’s been such a struggle. I want to change my way of thinking. I feel like I’ve been doing this long enough that I start to make assumptions about how things are going to go. Maybe that’s just how I am — always preparing for the worst.

CC: Preparing for the worst and hoping for the best.

SF: That is my motto, actually, although I word it slightly differently: No expectations, high hopes.

CC: That’s the only way to be, isn’t it? Because, at the end of the day, it’s the music that’s going to stay forever. That’s not going anywhere. That’s your thing that you’ll look back on and say, “I’m so glad I did that.” And it’s such a good record. I like the guitar sounds. What’s going on with the guitars there? Were those vintage amps?

SF: Yeah. I have tube amps. It’s actually all new equipment, but it’s modeled to sound old. I really dig Fender guitars, especially if you put them on the most trebly sounding pickup. I really love a thin, trebly sound. I love surf music. Actually, when I first learned guitar, my first teacher was trained in flamenco playing. He could do all this fast picking because of that training. He got some of the chops. Here’s a question for you: Do you play solo when you tour, or do you have a band with you?

CC: I’ve been playing solo for the last couple of years, but I’ve got a European tour starting pretty soon and there are going to be a couple of other people on stage with me. It’s still really minimal stuff, just some light percussion and some soft synths underneath to give it a bit of a lift. It’s still fairly simple and calm stuff, nothing too dramatic. I think the only way I was able to play music for the last couple of years was to do it on my own. Otherwise, it’s just too expensive to travel with a group of people. But I could usually say yes to anything because it’s just me and my guitar and a bag. But now I think I could probably justify getting some people on board, so I’m looking forward to traveling with other people for a change.

SF: Sometimes I think I might go back to doing that. I never did it that much. I did open mic nights, when I first started playing. My biggest goal right now is to go to Japan, and I feel like that’s not going to be a money gig. So maybe the next record will be a solo record that lets me tour in Japan.

Why do you want to go to Japan?

SF: I went to Japan when I was 12 because I had a bunch of pen pals. Since I was home-schooled, my parents would let me write to pen pals as part of my homework. So I would spend hours researching the countries they were from, and I was obsessed most of all with Japan. I learned Japanese and had a Japanese teacher, and she took me back with her to Japan to meet some of my pen pals. I’d really like to go back. I find that most Americans are pretty fascinated by Japan. What’s your dream tour, Charlie?

CC: To be honest with you, I really want to tour across the pond in your part of the world. I’ve never played a gig in America, but I’m coming over for the South by Southwest festival in March. Hopefully I can get some other dates during that trip. That would be fantastic. It’s a bit of a dream, but growing up in England, watching the telly and listening to American music, we knew American culture really well over here. So I think it would be interesting to see it and play some gigs over there. I’m just going to go over on my own, not with a band or anything. So, you’re from Portland, right?

SF: I lived here for about 10 years. I moved from this little city in North Carolina called Asheville, which is like a miniature Portland but not as famous. It’s one of the most liberal college towns in the South. Have you heard much about Portland over there?

CC: I’ve been to the States once, and one of the places I went was Portland. I went there and Seattle. I really like Modest Mouse, so I was excited to see the city. I heard this band called Mimicking Bird. Did you ever hear them? I think they’re on the label that Isaac Brock from Modest Mouse runs. It’s really nice music. And Johnny Marr from the Smiths lives in Portland, I think. I’ve seen that program Portlandia, as well, which I love.

SF: So many cool musicians who live here, for sure, but it still feels like a small town. That’s what I like about it. You run into people you know all the time, and most people know each other, especially in the music scene. Most of the time people aren’t very competitive with each other.

CC: A little bit of healthy competition can be okay, but generally you need to be supportive. That sense of community is important. I think that’s why I keep ending up back in Oxford. There’s a sense of community here, and good music. People go to each other’s shows and they keep an eye out for what everybody else is doing. That really helps the creativity and makes you feel involved.

What took you to Oxford?

CC: It’s not a million miles away from where I grew up. Basically, I grew up between Oxford and London, and I ended up studying there — not at Oxford University. I should just clear that up right now. But I did study at a university in Oxford for a little bit. I met a lot of people there, and there’s a big music scene going on there. You’re only an hour away from London, so you can be really involved in that scene, but then you can step out of it and be in this much smaller town. It’s an inspiring place to be. There are lots of people from all over the world in Oxford, because of the university. So you get to meet a lot of different people. And I love a bit of history. It’s nice to walk into town and see all these really old buildings. It’s a clam place to be. When I get home from touring, Oxford is a good base. I’ve lived here for eight or nine years total, but I keep moving away and coming back. Maybe I’ll end up staying a bit longer this time.

SF: I saw something on your Facebook about how you went to Abbey Road. What was that like?

CC: Yes! I went there to master the album. I recorded it in New Cross in south London, and then I did the mastering at Abbey Road. What a great day that was. I was such a Beatles fan when I was growing up, so it was just crazy to be there. You go through the studio and see all these pictures of people who have played there. And it’s everyone. It felt humbling, and I was really trying to be present for it. There’s a lot of stuff that happens and you don’t sit with it properly, but I spent most of that day really trying to take it all in. And they did such a job with the mastering. They really took it to another level, and it was incredible to watch and hear that happen.

Here’s a quick question for you. That song “Get Out,” is that about trying to get songs out of you, trying to get music out of yourself?

SF: I love that interpretation. It’s cool when songs can mean different things to different people. When I wrote it, I was thinking about how I tend to give up pretty easily. If I’m feeling overwhelmed by a situation, my first inclination is to remove myself, especially struggling to do music. It’s overwhelming, and I tend to give up on things too quickly. I’ll take some new class or try some new hobby and, before I even start, its like, “Oh no, I’m already over this.” You can’t do that before you’ve even started. You can’t be the best at something as you’re learning to do it.

I recently took this weird circus class, and I had this competitive feeling, like I want to be really good at it. But it was so hard and I struggled so much that I swore in front of the whole class. They were trying to get me to hang upside down, and I finally went, “Screw this!” It was the very first class. I made the mistake of going with my friend who was really good at it. I was jealous.

CC: At least you went to the class. Some people might not even try. I think that’s admirable.

SF: I started doing hip-hop dancing a few years ago. I was pretty bad, but it was so much fun that it kept me coming back. I would never do it in front of anyone, but there’s so much about it that I love. It shuts your mind off. Everybody talks about yoga shutting your mind off, but for me, it’s dancing.

CC: I used to dance a lot more than I do now. I need to dance more. I used to enjoy going to clubs and dancing, but when I got older, I got more self-conscious. Maybe that’s something to fix. Maybe when I’m in Austin, I should have too much to drink and end up dancing somewhere. Note to self …

Sallie Ford photo by Kim Smith-Miller. Charlie Cunningham photo by Louisa Stickelbruck.

Feeding Pigeons and Eating Pizza with Mipso

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It’s a mellow Fall afternoon in Carrboro, NC, shortly before the early-evening hustle to get home. A lot of students make up the little town’s population thanks to the adjacent town of Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina, but Carrboro is also a home to artists and other creatives — its cheap living, easy-going attitude, and compact layout make it an attractive spot to set up camp.

The roots music upstarts in Mipso call Chapel Hill home, though they hang out more in Carrboro. Singer/mandolin player Jacob Sharp sits in a small brewery downtown, as the band’s new record, Old Time Reverie, pours out of the speakers. Sharp is quick to admit it’s weird, but that’s one of the perils of the area’s tight-knit music community — it’s as common to hear locals’ tunes playing on shop stereos as anything else.

But this is hardly the most exciting thing going on for Sharp and his cohorts at the time: The day before, the newly released Billboard charts featured Old Time Reverie at the top of its bluegrass listing, at number 20 on its folk chart, and number 23 on its Heatseekers chart. The band spent the previous 24 hours fielding dozens of phone calls about the feat, but they didn’t see it as a big deal. For Mipso, the chart numbers were merely a passing recognition of something the band has already put years of hard work into, and its members hope that Old Time Reverie will help push them along even further toward a sustainable, long-term music career together. Guitarist Joseph Terrell, bassist Wood Robinson, and fiddler Libby Rodenbough join Sharp to discuss the band’s work up to this point and what they hope lies down the road.

Joseph, you mentioned in another interview that bluegrass was a big tent, and I think we’ve all talked about that together, at some point. Could you talk about that a little more and how y’all fit into that?

Joseph Terrell: I think there are a lot of great young artists that we’ve gotten to know, touring over the last couple of years. We have great respect for some of the early bluegrass guys like Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, Flatt & Scruggs, and the Stanley Brothers, but don’t feel like loving them and respecting them and playing music that feels informed by them necessarily means playing music that sounds exactly note-for-note like them.

Jacob Sharp: Within the context of the charts, it’s funny, because we’re also on the folk one, which is probably how I think more people would understand this album if they hadn’t seen the tags beforehand. I would think it’s a little more naturally under that point. I think it’s cool for Billboard to put it up on a couple, and I think it’s good for bluegrass that — as a genre and as a home — it’s become broad enough to sneak over there because, previously, that probably wasn’t as much the case. There were enough bands that pulled heavily enough from bluegrass to get cross-catch, but I don’t think any of us would really say this is a bluegrass album or that we’re a bluegrass band. But we’ll totally take being on the charts, and we love learning from that place and being a part of that community.

JT: I think it’s interesting from the charts' perspective, too, because the folk charts have Jason Isbell and Ryan Adams’ 1989 album. And that’s rock ‘n’ roll. They’re all a bit blurry, I think, right now. And I can imagine traditional bluegrass people saying, “Wait a second: If you’re not going to use this as a bluegrass chart, then why have it? If you’re going to broaden it to be acoustic music, then call it acoustic music, not bluegrass.” So I can understand how the terms get frustrating when you try to really understand what they mean.

You’ve spent a lot of the last year on the road. How has that been? Do you feel like you've gotten into the swing of it now?

JT: It’s definitely been a big adjustment. We live in Chapel Hill, but to say we live anywhere is kind of a stretch. At some point in a touring musician’s life, when you’ve been a musician for a long time and traveling a lot — for example, like we were talking about earlier, when you wake up on a Tuesday in the middle of Iowa in February, you have that sense of, “How did I get here? Where am I going? What am I doing?”

JS: That question of “How did I get here, where am I going” is in both senses — like, “Where was I yesterday? How did I actually arrive in this location? And what happened over the last two-and-a-half years of my life that I thought this was rational? What major glitches in logic have I found?”

JT: There are great things, too. We’re all grateful for having gotten to know so much of the country. I think that sounds like you’re trying to find a way to make it sound good, but genuinely, it’s been super cool.

Before you hit the road, how much of the Old Time Reverie was done? How did you fit recording and writing into your touring schedule?

Wood Robinson: The songs were pretty much written before we got in the studio in December of last year. We had a week there, and another week in early January, and a final week in early February between the Northeast run and the Midwest run. It was basically all done before the breadth of the year happened.

JS: When we were touring in 2014 — Summer and Fall — that was really our transition into full-time touring. We had carved out time. We wanted to understand the motions of touring before getting into the studio.

Libby Rodenbough: There were very discrete sections. We had to very intentionally set aside time for recording, and it was very scheduled. I know some people who record as they’re on the road, and they do a few days here and leave for a few weeks, and do a few days here. For us it was like, “This is now studio time,” and then back to the road again after that.

Many contemporary folksy bands style themselves to be sort of old-timey looking, and y’all definitely don’t do that. Has that been a really conscious choice?

LR: It is not really that important, and I don’t think that we spend so much time thinking about it. But it is kind of tricky to negotiate that. I find myself wondering sometimes if I’m playing too much into a stereotype. I think, even though we dress in regular 21st-century clothing, it’s also kind of influenced by our general aesthetic tastes. It’s not a mistake that we’re all from this area, and we all listen to some acoustic music, and we like leather boots. We like rural-influenced-type clothing — it’s not like we’re dressing up like cowboys all the time, but we have those inclinations.

 I think it has to do with family history, but also, in our lives, we’re drawn to many things like that. I studied a lot of folklore in school, and I’m drawn to the traditions of the South — musically and culturally, generally, and also aesthetically. So I think that’s part of the way we dress, for sure. But you don’t want to be too thematized in a band in a certain genre. And I think that has to do, too, with the fact that we don’t want to be pigeonholed as playing a particular type of music exclusively. And if we were to dress a certain way and have a banjo in our band — there are certain cues you can give your audience, and we don’t want to give them those cues.

JS: I think style, like everything else you do from day to day, the more you do it, the more you think about it in more nuanced and critical ways. Going into this album process, we were thinking about the imagery of the cover and the clothes we were wearing in a different way than we had previously. Libby thinks about that stuff a lot, individually, and we thought about that stuff, collectively. This time, we worked with Dear Hearts, from Durham.

LR: I think it is worth noting for someone like me — who spends way too much time and way too much money on clothing anyway — I would be doing this regardless of whether or not I was a performer. It’s just a passion of mine. But when you get to be onstage and wear some of this stuff, there is some semblance of justification for it, which makes me feel better about myself. I would say it’s one of the perks of being a performer that, if I buy, for example, gold sequin pants, I can be like, “Well, this is for the stage! This is just a business purchase.” I don’t write it off, but I do buy some things like that with a very slight sense of justification, and I appreciate that.

JT: An example for me is, I recently saw a band performing with a microphone that was as big as a dinner plate. I said to the other guys that I thought that it was a real failure of the microphone that it amplified the voice well, but it distracted from the performance completely. If I wore gold sequin pants, and someone left the concert and all they thought about was my gold sequin pants, I think that would be a failure of my style. I want people to leave our concerts thinking about music and thinking about our songs. That being said, it starts to make sense to be thinking about how your clothes play a role in what people think about you. I don’t think it’s wrong to wear something you think is cool, but we’re not David Bowie exactly.

LR: We are the David Bowie of bluegrass.

What do you see for yourselves in the next year-plus?

LR: I think a lot of what we see is the same … but more. The same … but better. Probably hitting a lot of the same areas and doing a similar level of touring, in terms of how many days on the road, but hopefully better gigs and better attendance and cooler venues. The things that we see happening already — the people that we’re meeting, the bands we’re getting to play with and stuff — leads me to believe that that will happen. It feels like we’re headed in the right direction.

JS: It’s a funny thing to be learning about. You start to understand it in these cycles that are, like, 16 months in the future. This album was done in January, the songs are just now new to the stage but they’re old songs to us. We’re excited to get into the studio, but we understand that when that happens sometime later next year, there’s no way it can come out before February of 2017. You start to understand stuff in a weird world, these chapters that kind of have a slow roll.

LR: Somebody asked me recently, “Is it full-time?” I thought, it’s way more than full-time. It’s full life. It’s what I think about all the time. When we’re on the road, it’s pretty hard to fit anything else into your brain that isn’t band-related. I would love to have the time and, thus, the brain space to remember the other parts of who I am. I love being invested in the band, but I think it can get a little too much and, if we’re looking at longevity as a group, I think that actually depends on having some individual focuses that are far afield.

WR: There are only so many years you can tour 180 shows, which translates to, like, 220 days a year. You just can’t. You physically reach a wall, and we’re young enough to maybe prolong that wall a little bit further down the road. But it feels good to be consciously making changes in that regard.

Do you find it difficult having to balance thinking about all these long-term things with being present in everyday life?

WR: The one thing that catches up with me — it is my life, so it’s relevant and it isn’t just business. But, often times, when I call a friend, I don’t want to talk about music. And that’s impossible if that person is in music. It feels fake or something like that, sometimes, when you’re talking about your career, because it feels like you’re having a business talk about your hopes and dreams and stuff like that when you’re talking to a friend you’ve had for years. It subconsciously happens. You’re not actively trying to push your career on other people, but that is basically everything we do, so that is what’s been going on.

LR: And you get used to conversations that are kind of about you, and they’re uncomfortable, a lot of the times. There are a lot of conversations after shows, where you’re trying to learn how to gracefully reply to a lot of compliments that start to feel kind of meaningless. I find that when I return to talking to a friend who doesn’t give a shit that I play shows, it’s refreshing but also kind of disconcerting. I sort of snap out of a fog I’ve been in on tour. And, when you have those moments, you realize a certain kind of unreality or different reality that you’re in when you’re on tour. But sometimes it’s not other people imposing it on you. You can’t get yourself to stop talking about work. I’m in my own head, fighting with myself, like, “Stop talking about the band,” but I can’t think of anything else, because it’s all I do and think about most of the time.

Photos by Katie Chow for BGS

3×3: Jones Street Station on Lead Belly, Yellow Mustard, and the New York Bluegrass Scene

Posted on by Amy Reitnouer

Artist: Jones Street Station
Hometown: Spread across the U.S. — Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, San Francisco, Minneapolis
Latest Album: Wolf at the Door
Rejected Band Names: Formerly “the Jones Street Boys” named after a random gang in The Warriors

What song do you wish you had written?

“Walls of Time” and “The Weight” 

Who would be in your dream songwriter round?

Bob Dylan, Lead Belly, John Prine, Cole Porter, Willie Dixon, Bill Monroe, Buddy Holly, Joni Mitchell, Guy Clark

If the After-Life exists, what song will be playing when you arrive?

“Sweet Heaven When I Die,” of course

How often do you do laundry?

Lots

What was the last movie that you really loved?

The Big Short

If you could re-live one year of your life, which would it be and why?

23 when we met had just moved to N.Y. and found the bluegrass scene there.

What’s your favorite culinary spice?

Nutmeg

Morning person or night owl?

Night owls

Mustard or mayo?

Yellow mustard on a Chicago hot dog!

Squared Roots: Scott Biram on the Legend of Lead Belly

Posted on by Editor

Though Lead Belly was merely a man, his story reads like the stuff of legends. He had multiple encounters with the law, was sentenced to a chain gang, escaped, killed a relative, and got thrown back in the hoosegow, earned himself a pardon because the governor was a fan. But then he stabbed someone else and got put back in prison, this time in Angola, where Alan and John Lomax found him. He was released, again, after serving his minimum and pleading with the governor, but committed a second stabbing, in the late ’30s. All the while, he so impressed everyone who heard him that he also landed himself in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Known primarily for playing 12-string guitar, Lead Belly also played the piano, mandolin, harmonica, violin, and diatonic accordion on the hundreds of songs he recorded over the course of his all-too-brief career.

Texas songwriter Scott Biram grew up on those songs and, later, learned the stories that went with them. In his own bluesy, folky, soulful Americana style, Biram hears the inevitable echoes of Lead Belly coming through, including on his latest release, The Bad Testament. The influence is there in the miscegenation of musical styles, but also in the way Biram approaches his role as raconteur.   

Why Lead Belly?

Well, Doc Watson was taken! [Laughs]

[Laughs] Fair point.

I would definitely say he’s among my biggest influences — Doc and Townes Van Zandt are my other two. Lead Belly has been in my life my whole life. My dad listened to him a lot when I was a kid. I have quite a few songs where I do a little rant in the middle, where it’s not really singing as much as it’s telling a little story or saying something. I think I got that from listening to Lead Belly.

Right. Must be nice to have parents who listened to cool music. I grew up on Barry Manilow and Dionne Warwick.

[Laughs] There was definitely a lot of Eagles and Crosby, Stills, and Nash at my house. But my dad listened to a lot of Doc Watson and Lightnin’ Hopkins and stuff like that.

I can see why he would gravitate toward that stuff. Lead Belly really did have a singular style — this mix of blues, folk, gospel, and country on a 12-string guitar. What was it that spoke to you in that mish-mosh or maybe it was the mish-mosh?

I think a lot of it had to do with just being a part of my life when I was a kid with my dad listening to it so much. We had this vinyl record that was the soundtrack to the film Lead Belly which is a pretty obscure movie, not really easy to find. I think they filmed it in ’76 or something like that. I was a little kid. They filmed it in the little town that I lived in and I was in my dad’s arms on the edge of the set while they were filming the scene where Lead Belly shot his friend and went to prison.

Well, one of the times he went to prison …

One of the times … yeah. [Laughs] So I heard that soundtrack a lot, which wasn’t actually Lead Belly playing on the soundtrack. It was Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and someone named Hi Tide Harris who I haven’t been able to find too much on, even with the Internet.

Once I got into roots music, when I was a little older and started playing bluegrass and started really playing the guitar a lot and learning blues, Lead Belly was just naturally somebody that I gravitated toward. And his story is so interesting. I read all the biographies. I read a lot of biographies on musicians that influence me so that I don’t just have a shallow knowledge of them. If I’m going to be playing some of their music, I want to definitely know as much about them as possible.

That’s awesome. I had never studied much of his life until prepping for this. But, I mean … the guy recorded hundreds of songs, worked with the Lomaxes, had a radio show on WNYC, went to Europe, and was in and out of prison multiple times — sang his way out of jail a couple times — all before dying at 50 or 51. That’s some hard living. Can you imagine spending even a couple years in his shoes?

No. [Laughs] I mean, I can imagine, but I’m probably not going to do a very good job of imagining what something like that would be like. I’m just a guitar player. [Laughs] Actually, he only sang himself out of prison once. There’s a legend about him that he sang himself out twice, but really, the second time was kind of exaggerated. I think he was in prison in Louisiana, at that time, and he got out on something called “good time” which is, I think, probably good behavior.

Right. He served his minimum and got out. Here was an interesting thing that I learned: He played at the Apollo, but the Harlem audience didn’t really resonate with him as deeply as the folkies did. He had a lot in common with Woody Guthrie, maybe more so than some of the old blues guys, but why do you think the Black audience didn’t connect?

First of all, he was a country guy. And I don’t mean country music; I mean from the rural South. So I’m not sure anyone from New York would really see it as anything but a spectacle, at that time. But, also, I wonder — and I’m just guessing here — I know that John Lomax used to kind of have him dressed up in a prison uniform and stuff like that, kind of clown him around out there and make him seem like he was just straight from the prison. I imagine that might have been a turn-off to some people in Harlem back then. I know Woody Guthrie, when he went to New York and was supposed to be on something and they wanted him to dress, as he described it, “as a clown,” he said he’d be back in a few minutes, went downstairs, and left. Didn’t even come back to the studio. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Yeah. I read that Life magazine did a three-page spread on Lead Belly and the title of the article is not something I’m going to repeat.

Yeah, I get ya.

And it was considered an honor that he was getting this prominent placement. But it makes sense that the minstrel thing wouldn’t fly.

It might’ve been a turn-off to people in Harlem. If there was anyone from the South who lived in Harlem at that time, they probably weren’t impressed by it because, to them, it was just a reminder of what they just left.

The other thing I love about listening to his stuff and pouring over his stories is that he lived through an era of history that was rife with huge moments and he documented history as it happened, writing songs about the Titanic, the Hindenburg, Jim Crow, FDR, Hitler, etc. Pete Seeger carried his style forward. Bob Dylan, to a certain extent. Who else do you hear carrying the Lead Belly torch?

You mean documenting history as it happens?

Yeah. Ani DiFranco does a bit, which she picked up from Pete Seeger.

Honestly, nobody comes to mind that is documenting current events in music so much that it’s actual historical stories in the songs. There are a lot of people saying their thoughts about the current states of everything, but I can’t think of anyone that actually sings a story about a tragedy.

Santiago Jiménez, Jr. — Flaco Jiménez’s brother — has a record called El Corrido de Esequiel Hernandez: Tragedia de Redford. The album is titled after the song about a kid in Redford, Texas, down in the desert on the border, who was walking his goats one day and the guys in the DEA or Border Patrol came and shot him because he had a rifle walking, like he did every day, with his goats. He was basically a shepherd and he got shot. That’s the only one I can think of that pops out and that’s not a popular artist or anything. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Right. I was just thinking Hurray for the Riff Raff does it a little bit. Rhiannon Giddens, a little. But no one to the same extent. I mean, if you read Lead Belly’s song titles, you can trace history.

A lot of the time you have to listen to it as “The Hindenburg Disaster, Part I” and “Part II” because they couldn’t fit the whole song on the single. They had to put it on both sides!

WATCH: Driftwood, ‘Too Afraid’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Driftwood
Hometown: Binghamton, NY
Song: "Too Afraid"
Album: City Lights
Release Date: November 4, 2016
Label: Yellow Bike

In Their Words: "'Too Afraid' is a song about the girl you know you shouldn't see anymore, but you just can't help it. It's about that kind of attraction. I think everyone has someone in their life, at some point, that fits into that category so it seems to be very relatable, making it so much fun to play at shows. Plus it earned us our first FCC warning which seems like some sort of achievement." — Joe Kollar

Photo credit: Marc Safran

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band: An Unbroken Circle

Posted on by Editor

In 1971, Richard Nixon was president and the United States was divided. It was an era marked by civil rights struggles, Vietnam War demonstrations, and labor union losses. The counterculture movement that evolved in the 1960s was continuing to take shape and was intrinsically linked to the outpouring of a whole generation’s worth of musical innovation. Amidst social upheaval, at a time when your music reflected your politics, a common ground was forged among unlikely sources. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s milestone 1972 album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, single-handedly bridged generational and cultural gaps by pairing country music veterans with young hippies from Southern California.

“I don't think we realized the sociological impact that that record would have,” says Jeff Hanna, founding singer and guitarist of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. “On the surface, it looked like, 'What the hell are they doing making music together?'”

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band formed in Long Beach, California, in 1966 and became a staple of the wave of California rock that included acts like the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and the Eagles who were all exploring old-time country sounds in their own music. By the time the recording sessions for the Circle record began, the Dirt Band was fresh off the success of their cover of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles,” which had become a Top 10 pop single. Record executives and fans, alike, were anticipating a follow-up in the same vein. But the band’s manger and producer, Bill McEuen — brother of band member John McEuen — had another idea: to get the band in the studio with the bluegrass and country musicians that had influenced them when they were coming up.

“I have a lot of respect for [the Dirt Band] for doing it, for going out on a limb, you know, and doing that kind of thing in the middle of a career that was just really on its way up at that point,” says multi-instrumentalist and longtime Dirt Band collaborator Jerry Douglas. “They were the famous people on the record and their guests were the people that they were introducing to their audience, you see. So it was kind of going out on a limb for them. You know, the record company didn't wanna do it. Nobody wanted to do it. They just kind of pushed it through and it was a success.”

When it came time to recruit a slew of Nashville greats for the project, the generational divide ended up working in the Dirt Band’s favor. Their friendship with the Scruggs family began when Earl Scruggs brought his children, who were fans of the band, to a gig they played at Vanderbilt University in 1970. Scruggs became the first artist they invited to guest on the Circle record. They snagged Doc Watson the same way: his son, Merle, was a fan of the band.

“One of the things that was really interesting with a lot of these acts is, their kids were fans of the band. There was kind of a stamp of approval from the younger generation,” recalls Hanna. “And Merle Watson said something like, ‘Well daddy you love the way they sing and play.’ And also the invitation was, ‘We've got Earl Scruggs.’ And Doc said, ‘Yeah, that sounds like fun,’ so there it went.”

Other guests included heavyweights like Jimmy Martin, Mother Maybelle Carter, and Roy Acuff.

“I mentioned to Bill McEuen, at one point, that I'd read this article about Roy Acuff where he said he'd play real country music with anybody anywhere. And we talked about that and Bill said, ‘Well, let's see if he'll put his money where his mouth is,’” Hanna says.

But Acuff wasn’t an easy sell: His initial meeting with the band didn’t go as well as they were hoping. It turns out that the idea of West Coast hippies in their early 20s recording in Woodland Studios in Nashville was a bit of a hard pill to swallow.

“[Acuff] came in and he was just largely unimpressed with us. He was kind of like — he wasn't totally negative — it's just kind of flat and he said later, ‘Well, I don't trust a man that I can't see his face,’ and we all had like massive beards and mustaches and long hair,” Hanna remembers. “Meanwhile, we got in the studio and recorded our tracks with Merle Travis and, lo and behold, Roy Acuff comes strolling in, or sort of quietly walks in the back of the studio at the end of the day. And Bill played him — it was either ‘Nine-Pound Hammer’ or ‘Dark As a Dungeon’ — one of those. And Roy got this big smile on his face and he said, ‘Well, that ain't nothin' but country. I'll be here tomorrow. Be ready.’ So we cut those tracks, so he was in.”

The result was a monumental cross-generational album that combined genres and styles.

“Just to put it in context: You've got Merle Travis's Travis-picking; you've got Earl Scruggs' Scruggs-style banjo; you've got Maybelle Carter, Carter scratch; and Doc Watson — even though flat-picking isn't named after him, it should be,” says Hanna. “I mean, just all these guys that were just so big in our world.”

The Dirt Band’s love of country and old-time sounds goes way back, so it was a natural progression for them to want to honor and record with these musicians.

“A lot of us got into bluegrass because of the folk boom in the mid-60s. A lot of us also had older siblings and they'd bring home these records by Peter, Paul, and Mary or the the Kingston Trio,” says Hanna. “When I first started playing guitar, I bought a Pete Seeger instructional LP and book that had a section about the Carter Family and Maybelle Carter and her playing style, as well … I was a huge fan of the Everly Brothers. We all were. The Everlys, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, Little Richard: that stuff killed us. But I think something we all had in common was our deep love of the sounds of Appalachia. And blues for that matter. But a lot of it was acoustic music, I've gotta say.”

Singer/songwriter Jackson Browne joined the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band when he was 17 years old, after meeting them at a gig at the Paradox club in Tustin, California, a little town in Orange County. “Getting to play with them was a huge installment in my musical education because I got to sit there and play these really intricate songs,” Browne recalls. “I mean, they were all better players than me, so I learned a lot.”

What struck him immediately about the band, he says, was their vast musical palette.

“The Dirt Band was great because they were true music fans and music aficionados. They weren't just kids that were playing folk music that they heard. They dug deep, is what I'm saying,” says Browne. “They found recordings of the Memphis Jug Band and those things were hard to find. I mean, like that wasn't just lying around. And they were kind of musicologists even then, from the very beginning.”

This year, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band celebrated their 50th anniversary as a band. In commemoration, they returned to Nashville for a star-studded concert at the famed Ryman Auditorium last September, which aired on PBS and was released on DVD. Aptly titled Circlin’ Back, the show was both a nod to the first Circle record and a career retrospective that incorporated the musicians that have impacted the band’s history. Vince Gill, Alison Krauss, Rodney Crowell, Jerry Jeff Walker, John Prine, Jerry Douglas, and Jackson Browne were among the handpicked guests.

“What was even cooler to me than playing the show that night was the rehearsals that we had before,” Douglas recalls. “The first time you do a run-through of one of those songs is so magical. It has all of this extra spark and fear and everything in it. So there were sparks flying in the rehearsal hall when we were doing these things and trying to figure out who played on what.”

Just as the Dirt Band introduced their audience to their earlier influences on the first Circle record, the Circlin’ Back anniversary show connected the next generation of artists and fans together. Musicians like Vince Gill and Jerry Douglas, who remember buying the first Circle record when it came out, are now considered “little brothers” of the Dirt Band. Although they are each musical powerhouses in their own rights, the anniversary show was an opportunity for them to play with some of their heroes.

“I think the first time I played on the song with Jackson Browne that I played lap steel on, I held my breathe through the whole thing,” Douglas says. “I'm such a fan of all of those guys and then they bring Jackson Browne in, and I'm playing on this thing with Jackson Browne and I'm just going nuts inside. So much raw emotion that's happening.”

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band has always had the ability to tap into emotion. Through their shared love of traditional music, they impacted legions of listeners by bridging generations and styles. Their legacy is littered with stories of parents and children bonding over the first Circle record, which is arguably one of the most significant releases in the history of music. At a time of cultural unrest, it showcased music’s ability to bypass divides and cross boundaries. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was Americana before Americana had a name, and their genre-bending illustrates the most important facet of music: how it connects us all.

Photo of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in the early 1970s courtesy of the artist.

STREAM: John Fatum, ‘John Fatum’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: John Fatum
Hometown: Chicago, IL (now based in Brooklyn, NY)
Album: John Fatum
Release Date: December 9
Label: Dala Records

In Their Words: “There’s a nebulous aspect to rhythm that you can’t write or put down. It’s not definable. You couldn’t create unless a human was playing it. I really believe that life is a rhythm, that we’re all on some trajectory through time. Music provides us that pulse that tracks us through life. And it’s a steadying thing, instead of free fall.” — John Fatum

MIXTAPE: Bloodshot Records’ Chicago Sounds

Posted on by Editor

Bloodshot Records has been operating in Chicago for the entirety of its 20+ years as a record label. As the story goes, the label was birthed — written on a bar napkin at local watering hole Delilah’s — to compile the sounds and ideas of a burgeoning country/punk scene in and around the city in the mid-’90s. On our site, it says, “We’ve always been drawn to the good stuff nestled in the dark, nebulous cracks where punk, country, soul, pop, bluegrass, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll mix and mingle and mutate.”

And while Mike Smith and I haven’t been there since Bloodshot’s inception, we grew up on the catalog (Heartbreaker, anyone?), along with other sounds of similar ilk and of similar community. If you spend enough time in Chicago going to and playing shows, drinking at the Hideout or Schuba’s or Empty Bottle, or just meeting people who are vaguely into music, there are names that consistently arise — ones that have the respect of other musicians, live music show-goers, and casual standers-by.

Here, we’ve compiled our own mixtape of Chicago’s current roots/alt-country artists. Maybe none of them implicitly fall under those umbrella (and sometimes unwanted) terms, but they all possess some sort of grit, twang, or attitude that slots in with the roots aesthetic. — Josh Zanger

Wilco — “Casino Queen”

The band took shape after the split of alt-country originals Uncle Tupelo and, as Wilco progressively leaned more toward pop/indie rock, Chicago has happily claimed them as a musical staple. Early in the band’s career, you could still hear the alt- influences, especially on their debut album, A.M., songs like “Casino Queen” and “Box Full of Letters” remind me of Jeff Tweedy’s creative work with Jay Farrar (now of Son Volt) and Brian Henneman (of Bottle Rockets).

Robbie Fulks — “Aunt Peg’s New Old Man”

Robbie is a Bloodshot original — his first album is catalog number BS011 — and, in my opinion, what keeps the Chicago alt-/roots scene relevant and vibrant. If you think I’m partial, take a trip to the city and go see his residency at the Hideout on a Monday night while he’s in town. Every show is different, with different themes and different guests, but ALL of them feature Robbie’s excellent musicianship and high-wire wit.

Hoyle Brothers — “How Many More Nights”

Since I moved into the city many years ago (and for many years before that), the Hoyle Brothers have been a local honky tonk treasure. They’ve been doing weekly happy hour residencies at the Hideout and Empty Bottle since early 2000s, and it feels like a rite of passage to have attended and gotten drunk at one of their performances.

Lawrence Peters — “Another Year”

If you’ve been to the Hideout, you’ve seen Lawrence behind the bar slingin’ PBRs and cheap whiskey shots. There’s also the chance that you’ve seen him playing honky tonk and country music as the Lawrence Peters Outfit, in one of many renowned local bands, or DJing country tunes at various bars and clubs.

Waco Brothers/Jon Langford — “Receiver”

Jon Langford is a man about town — making art, playing shows, making music, making his political voice heard, kissing babies — and I have yet to meet a person who doesn’t love him. Also, every time he comes to the Bloodshot offices, he makes it a brighter place and then leaves with, “Thank you, good people of Bloodshot, and keep up your great work!” On his own or in various projects, he’s beyond prolific. With the Wacos, content comes a little more slowly, but always carries an added punch in the band’s potent rock ‘n’ roll/punk/country form. In full disclosure: A Waco Brothers 7” is the label’s third release.

State Champion — “There Is a Highlight Reel”

I haven’t seen the band play in a while, so I’m not sure if they even call Chicago home — their Facebook page lists “Chicago/Louisville.” They have a grungey, garage, twangy sort of sound that brings to mind an alternate genre Uncle Tupelo. Freakwater’s Catherine Irwin lends guest vocals to this song, giving it an extra bit of eerie grit.

— Josh Zanger, publicist at Bloodshot Records

Al Scorch — “Everybody Out”

In Chicago over the last five years or so, Al Scorch has been at the forefront of the roots music scene. His combination of bluegrass, folk, country, and punk-rock is uniquely Chicagoan — it’s a direct cross between tradition and rebellion. In the city, you can see Scorch telling urban stories over his lightning-fast banjo pickin’ everywhere from punk clubs to square dances, DIY spaces to theaters. He is a true everyman. I grew up on punk music, and I moved to Chicago from the beautiful Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, a hotbed for roots music and traditional bluegrass, in particular. When I first saw Al Scorch at the famed punk club the Empty Bottle on a Saturday afternoon, it was the first time Chicago truly felt like home to me.

Ryley Walker — “On the Banks of the Old Kishwaukee”

Ryley Walker has been playing multiple styles of guitar (classical, jazz, psychedelic, bluegrass … you name it) in punk bars and jazz clubs around Chicago for years, both solo and with some of the Chicago underground’s most iconic musicians. In local music circles, everyone knows his name for different reasons. In 2014, Walker signed to Dead Oceans, a Bloomington, Indiana, label that specializes in indie rock with splashes of roots music, and released three terrific albums in two years. Just like Walker’s guitar-playing, the albums span a wide genre map, much of which draws from folk, bluegrass, and classic country. Throw in a few jazz and psych numbers, and it’s a unique blend of guitar-led American music.

Devil in a Woodpile/Rick Sherry — “Shake It and Break It”

Devil in a Woodpile is a roots music fixture in Chicago, and Rick Sherry is the carnival barker-like vocalist fronting the unplugged string band. His baritone bellow is earth-shaking while his harmonica playing is to be reckoned with. Devil is also uniquely Chicagoan, as they mix Appalachian-era bluegrass, country (the stuff that floated up the river and landed in the old juke joints and square dances of mid-century Chicago), and folk with the brand of blues that was born in Chicago. Folks will gather in the small Hideout barroom (there’s a reason we keep mentioning the Hideout — it is truly THE roots music haven in Chicago) to watch Devil in a Woodpile play unmic’d in the middle of the room, right on the checker-tiled floor. It’s an event every time. Sherry can also be seen playing in the swingin’ Sanctified Grumblers and the acoustic pickin’ Hatstretchers.

Whitney — “No Matter Where We Go”

Though they aren’t your typical “alt-country” or punk-infused roots that often defines the Americana underbelly of Chicago, Whitney is a band not to be overlooked in the conversation. Born out of the ashes of the short-lived indie rock band Smith Westerns, Whitney combines soul, AM radio pop, late-Wilco-leaning guitar wizardry, and ‘70s-era country music that would make Gram Parsons tap his foot. It’s a unique sound amongst the psychedelia and garage vibes that currently permeate the Chicago indie rock scene. You’ll often see them playing with a brass section and a pedal steel guitar, simultaneously, as evident in their hometown hero set at the 2016 Pitchfork Music Festival.

Henhouse Prowlers — “Leaving You for the Interstate”

As made clear in this piece, a multitude of Chicago bands incorporate bluegrass into their music, mish-mashing it with punk, blues, and country. But the Henhouse Prowlers (previously known as Sexfist — yes, you read that correctly) are one of the few that play traditional bluegrass in the Windy City. Crowded around a mic, pickin’ away on banjo, guitar, dobro, upright bass, and fiddle at Martyrs on almost any given weekend, the Prowlers sound more like the Cumberland Gap in the 1950s than Chicago in the 21st century. Their lyrical allusions are what bring it back around to modern times. They have a song called “Spoiler Alert.”

Jim Elkington — “Slow Train”

If you’ve seen live music in Chicago, you’ve seen Jim Elkington play guitar. The virtuoso has played with everyone from Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy to Eleventh Dream Day (with Freakwater’s Janet Bean) to various Mekons-related projects. (I once saw him play a David Bowie tribute set with Jon Langford and Sally Timms at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art that felt like a bad acid trip — but you’d never know it through Jim’s deadpan while he shredded away.) I can’t tell you how many shows I’ve been to in which I didn’t even know he was playing until he emerged from the shadows on stage. He’s ubiquitous. Elkington has also released several albums of superb guitar instrumentals steeped in country, bluegrass, and other roots stylings on the Paradise of Bachelors label.

— Mike Smith, new media publicist at Bloodshot Records

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