From banjo geniuses to borderless country and folk, this time, our weekly new music and premiere roundup has a little bit of everything!
Kicking us off, BGS Podcast Network host and singer-songwriter Bri Bagwell, who’s behind the Only Vans podcast, brings us a lovely fresh country track called “Border Girl.” It’s about how close we all really are to each other, and how the culture, communities, and music of our neighbors really do rub off on all of us. From across the state line in Texas, Jack Barksdale accomplishes the complex through simplicity with “A Funny Song,” which is equal parts satirical and contemplative in an ethereal indie-folk package.
Virginian Jesse Smathers offers up his version of a Randall Hyton number, “Good Time Get Together,” and with the roster of bluegrass pickers he had join him in the studio for the recording, it surely must have been the titular good time get together just to make the single. Plus, Kenny Feinstein steps away from his band Water Tower for just a moment to release a bluegrass single under his own name, “Old Richmond Prison,” a “fast waltz” about mistakes, consequences, and redemption.
Banjo virtuosity brings us home, first with BEATrio featuring Béla Fleck, Edmar Castañeda, and Antonio Sánchez blending styles, sonics, and banjo, harp, and percussion on “Walnut and Western.” Not quite jazz, folk, jam band, or string band alone, the instrumental draws from seemingly endless inspirations, combining each with expertise and ease. The track is, of course, infinitely charming, raucous, and fascinating. Five-string aficionado Graham Sharp (who you’ll know from Steep Canyon Rangers) releases his brand new solo album today, How Did We Do It. We’re sharing “Living Like Thieves” from that project, an original which features Jerry Douglas, Lyndsay Pruett, Michael Ashworth, and more trotting towards a getaway while having a good time and with a vacation in mind.
It’s all worth a spin, that’s for sure! You know what we’re going to say– You Gotta Hear This!
Bri Bagwell, “Border Girl”
Artist:Bri Bagwell Hometown: Las Cruces, New Mexico Song: “Border Girl” Release Date: April 18, 2025
In Their Words: “I am from the border of New Mexico, Mexico, and Texas. My hometown of Las Cruces, New Mexico, is a very beautiful blend of people and cultures. I believe a lot of people feel that they ‘belong’ to different places, straddling a line between ethnicities and geographical influences that shape who they are. Instead of wrestling with the idea of feeling very deeply rooted in Hispanic culture without having it in my blood, I always have embraced the idea that where I am from seeped into the fiber of my being, and that is a beautiful thing. Being from the border of all of these places created a girl who sings in Spanish every night, loves both Selena and George Strait, and knows that the Rio Grande is just a divider for map (and not for a heart).
“My boyfriend Paul Eason really took to this song after I wrote it and recorded all of the instruments and my vocals in our home studio in New Braunfels, Texas. It features harmonies by Lyndon Hughes from The Wilder Blue, and receives a big reaction at shows when I play it live. I think people really relate to the idea of loving where you are from and embracing all of your geographical and cultural influences!” – Bri Bagwell
Jack Barksdale, “A Funny Song”
Artist:Jack Barksdale Hometown: Fort Worth, Texas Song: “A Funny Song” Album:Voices Release Date: April 25, 2025 (single); June 13, 2025 (album) Label: Truly Handmade Records
In Their Words: “I’m really interested in ways to inspire nuance and complexity with songwriting, which can be a surprisingly tough task. Somewhat counterintuitively, the way I tried to achieve that complexity in ‘A Funny Song’ is through simplicity. Sometimes if you strip something back to its simplest form and try to understand it through that point of view, you can gain a deeper understanding of it or, at least, a good foundation for future understanding. It’s not the final destination, but it’s good start. In this song, I used that same framework to try and understand some of, what you might call ‘the big questions.’
“This song borders on satire and works in pretty much the same way as satire, where the substance isn’t really in what’s being said, but in the listener’s reaction to what’s being said. Ultimately, I’m not trying to simplify ‘the big questions’ by telling a black-and-white story. I’m trying to create more nuanced thought around these questions in the minds of listeners, whether they agree or disagree with what the song has to say.” – Jack Barksdale
Track Credits: Jack Barksdale – Vocals, acoustic guitar, songwriter Diana Burgess – Cello Jared Reynolds – Uke Bass
BEATrio (Béla Fleck, Edmar Castañeda, Antonio Sánchez), “Walnut and Western”
Artist:BEATrio (Béla Fleck, banjo; Edmar Castañeda, harp; and Antonio Sánchez, drums) Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee Song: “Walnut and Western” Album:BEATrio Release Date: April 16, 2025 (single); May 16, 2025 (album) Label: Béla Fleck Productions
In Their Words: “Here’s a tune I have had for many years that’s been looking for a home and the right band. I am positive that this is the best setting it could have, and thrilled that I waited! Antonio and Edmar knew exactly what to do. This project kind of reminds me of the early days of the Flecktones, when audiences would go, ‘How is this supposed to work?’” – Béla Fleck
Kenny Feinstein, “Old Richmond Prison”
Artist:Kenny Feinstein Hometown: Los Angeles, California Song: “Old Richmond Prison” Album:Kenny Feinstein Release Date: April 18, 2025 (single); TBA (album)
In Their Words: “There’s something magical about siblings making music together. The way Jake and Carter work together reminds me of Ralph and Carter Stanley – it’s like they share a musical language that only brothers can understand.
“The song is about mistakes, consequences, and redemption – themes I’ve grappled with in my own life. There’s a universality to the story that I think anyone can relate to, whether it’s the weight of regret or the hope for a second chance. Water Tower will always be my home base, but this album is a chance to explore the music that shaped me as an artist. It’s a love letter to the sounds and stories that have been with me through every high and low.” – Kenny Feinstein
Graham Sharp, “Living Like Thieves”
Artist:Graham Sharp Hometown: Asheville, North Carolina Song: “Living Like Thieves” Album:How Did We Do It Release Date: April 18, 2025 Label: Enchanted Barn
In Their Words: “For me, this tune is about being in tune with the moment, paying attention to the magic when you find it. I was sitting at friend’s one afternoon thumbing through this melody and it seemed to capture the time and place (‘The prettiest thing that I know right now/ Is these little chords and the way they move/ The only place that I wanna be/ Is where I’m playing them for you”). I leaned on a recollection of an afternoon several years ago on vacation with my sweetie for the first verse. I’ve always loved Earl Scruggs’ banjo style in open D Reuben tuning and it happened to fit this song really well. Having Flux and this group of Western NC all stars on the track brought the whole thing together and made it sing!” – Graham Sharp
Track Credits: Graham Sharp – Banjo, vocals Ryan Stigmon – Guitar Michael Ashworth – Bass Jerry Douglas – Dobro Lyndsay Pruett – Fiddle Drew Matiluch – Mandolin
Jesse Smathers, “Good Time Get Together”
Artist:Jesse Smathers Hometown: Floyd, Virginia Song: “Good Time Get Together” Release Date: April 18, 2025 Label: Mountain Home Music Company
In Their Words: “When I first ran across this old Randall Hylton tune, I knew it was something that I wanted to record. I sought out the lyrics and Wanda Dalton, Randall’s sister, wrote them out for me. I truly cherish this tune and its uplifting melody and message. When I think of my friends, loved ones, and heroes that have gone on, it is a beautiful and consoling thought to think of the music making that will happen once we get to heaven. It will truly be a ‘Good Time Get Together’!” – Jesse Smathers
Track Credits: Jesse Smathers – Guitar, lead vocal Hunter Berry – Fiddle Corbin Hayslett – Banjo Nick Goad – Mandolin, harmony vocal Joe Hannabach – Upright bass Patrick Robertson – Harmony vocal Dale Perry – Harmony vocal
Photo Credit: BEATrio (Béla Fleck, Edmar Castañeda, Antonio Sánchez) by Shervin Lainez; Graham Sharp by Nathan Golub.
Sam Lee’s musical career grew out of his environmental activism, from the Mercury-winning album, Old Wow, to his ongoing conservation project Singing with Nightingales. The British folk star’s fourth album, songdreaming, released earlier this year, is his most creative venture yet. It’s a manifesto for reconnection with nature constructed from luscious, haunting reinterpretation of the songs of the UK’s Traveller communities.
Its title comes from the summer retreats Lee leads that bring people together to connect to their land and ancestry through song: “Singing to the land happens across the world in Indigenous communities that still have their relationship to nature very much intact,” says Lee. “It’s ceremony, it’s devotional work, it’s prayer.”
We spoke to Lee about songdreaming, how he sources material, queerness, connection to nature, and much more.
Sam, your music is usually based on traditional folk song, but these songs go far further from the source material than you’ve ever taken them before.
I had done a little bit of original writing on Old Wow, but this is an album where almost everything is written by me, some to the point where there’s no semblance of the primary folk song left. And that was a big risk, because I’m quite shy when it comes to thinking of myself as a songwriter. It’s not like I’m a seasoned Johnny Flynn or Anaïs Mitchell. It’s not my training, and I’m a very reluctant writer, because I failed English at school. I’ve always had a great sense of inadequacy.
What prompted you to step out of your comfort zone?
It actually came about in an unusual way – the songs were originally commissioned for a movie, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. It was an adaptation of a much-loved book about a man who walks the entire length of the UK, a portrait of our connection to the land and the healing power of passage-making. I was already a great fan of its director, Hettie Macdonald – her first movie, Beautiful Thing, was seminal for me when it came out in 1996 – so I was really excited to be involved.
We arranged and wrote lots of songs to capture the mood of the film and some were used, but there were all these, dare I say, leftovers? Being the resourceful, waste-not-want-not type, I said, “Well, these all have something in them that is powerful.”
What was your writing process?
I don’t have one particular method, but the way I work is a bit like the way I interact with nature. I’m a forager for sonic and lyrical opportunity, seeing relationships within words in the way that I see relationships within the ecosystem. You start to find what Simon Armitage, Britain’s beloved poet laureate, will call the “neon” moments, things that suddenly shine.
Can you give an example?
Absolutely. “McCrimmon,” the third song on the album, is a ballad I learned from my late mentor Stanley Robertson, who was a Scottish Traveller. There’s a lyric in the original which is, “no more, no more,” but I heard it as “in awe, in awe.” Suddenly a whole song about the state of awe appeared.
There’s another track which is a love song between a fair maid and a plowboy – I recalibrated and reframed it, so it’s a more complicated relationship between species that are in a state of separation. The folk songs say everything already. I’m like someone taking a Shakespeare play, resetting it, maybe adapting some of the language, like West Side Story from Romeo and Juliet.
Which of the songs came easiest?
“Green Mossy Banks,” which is actually about pilgrimage, was so easy to write. It was like, “Oh my god, I’ve been wanting to write this song forever.” And they didn’t even use it in the film!
What is it in that song that you had been longing to express?
The story of the film paints this wonderful portrait of free passage – there’s never a moment where it deals with trespass or permissions or this idea of private land. No barbed wire fences, or angry landowners going, “What do you think you’re doing here?” One could walk from Devon to the borders of Scotland and never have any issue.
But there is no person in England who goes on a country walk and isn’t affected by our punitive, archaic, and utterly unequal private ownership laws. That’s why I was a founder member of the Right to Roam movement. For all its avoidance of politics, “Green Mossy Banks” is a deeply political song. Social and ecological injustice is at the roots of so much of our international crisis.
Is the UK not quite a good place to walk compared to, say the US? The English have ancient rights of way that allow them to walk across private land, whereas try it in the US and you might get shot…
Absolutely. But where does the US get their notion of land rights from? They were inherited as an enhanced version of British law at a time when, in England, if you were caught poaching a hare or something, that’s it, you had your hands cut off, or you were hanged, or sent to Australia.
On the music video for “Green Mossy Banks” we see you surrounded by various mesmerising English landscapes.
It’s a combination of many of the pilgrimages that I’ve made with Chris Park, a druid, and Charlotte Pulver, an apothecary. At cardinal points of the year – the solstices, the equinoxes – we lead communal pilgrimages to places like Stonehenge, or the South Downs.
Are there any songs on the album that were inspired by specific places?
“Meeting is a Pleasant Place” is very much about the Dartmoor landscape, down to the very tor that we filmed the video on. The exact location shall remain nameless, because it’s one of the few tors that exist in a forest, as opposed to Dartmoor’s sheep-wrecked landscape of denuded grassland. It’s deep in beech and oak forests, which makes it especially stunning.
And the song itself came out of a Devon Gypsy folk tune.
Yes, and it contains this rather mystical language that had become something of a mantra to me. “Meeting is a Pleasant Place/ Between my love and I/ I’ll go down to Yonder’s Valley, it’s there I’ll sit and sing…” It’s bad English, but at the same time so powerful in its ambiguity. It could be a love song between two people, but in that Gypsy corruption of the words, suddenly it speaks about something so much bigger. So then I wrote my three verses as a love song to the land.
The appearance of the Trans Voices choir on the chorus turns it into something epic and anthemic…
It’s English folk gospel, as I call it. ILĀ, who runs Trans Voices, is an old friend and when the choir was set up I said I’ve got loads of songs that I’d like to speak to the queerness of land. Folk song often tends towards the heteronormative, and I want to break that down.
In the liner notes you also talk about the queerness of nature, what do you mean by that?
When you look at relationships within the natural world, sexual or otherwise, what you see is massive diversity in roles and identities. In the fungi world, for instance, there are hundreds and hundreds of genders, working collaboratively in community. Humans, too, need to start to recalibrate the way we behave in nature. So much of our subjugation and exploitation of nature has come through a male-dominated worldview and it’s not working.
One of the species you have a great connection with is the nightingale – as well as singing with them in secret woodland gigs every year, you recently wrote a book about their threatened extinction.
Yes, and when I’m with them, for seven weeks each spring, I get this sense of what is it like to be in a relationship that’s falling apart. That heartbreak, saying farewell, and knowing that it has a time limit to it. That’s what inspired the opening track, “Bushes and Briars.” It was the first folk song Ralph Vaughan Williams ever collected, and it’s a lament of a man and a woman who are separating. As somebody who spends a lot of time in bushes and briars trying to keep a relationship with a bird going extinct happening, that’s a space that is very familiar to me.
Coming from a background of singing acoustically, outdoors, how do you work up the big, dense sounds that populate your albums?
I do my writing with James Keay, who plays piano in the band. We both want a richness of sound, so that what are often very repetitive lines and melodies can take the listener on journeys through different emotional states. It’s about trying to paint as big a painting as possible.
As well as strings and horns and pipes, you’ve added a more pan-global feel with a Syrian Qanun, and a Swedish Nykelharpa.
We wanted to create textures that gave a sense of both the ancient and the unusual. I’d never used a Qanun in an arrangement before, though I have used dulcimers before on almost every album, which are part of the same family.
Maya Youssef, Britain’s best-known Qanun player, features on the one folk song that you haven’t changed, “Black Dog and Sheep Crook,” about a shepherd being thrown over by his lover because he’s “just” a shepherd.
I’ve kept its truth and entirety – it just felt so wonderful bringing the tragedy and the melancholy of the Qanun into that song.
So often in this album you’re grieving our detachment from and devaluing of the natural world. But the spirit and purpose of the music, as you describe it, is also to re-establish those connections. What are your current priorities for climate activism?
At the moment, there’s a big campaign to get young people voting, and voting for nature, in the UK. Hope for me is always about having a plan. And there are many brilliant plans out there. It’s about overcoming apathy and resistance and reawakening people to what we have to lose.
I can’t speak to what I think the outcomes will be, I think that’s a dangerous thing to do. But I hope that the album has as many opportunities to instill hope and beauty as there are moments of doom and tragedy.
Sun Without the Heat is Leyla McCalla’s fifth solo album, but it is different from past efforts and she brings the listener through the transformative process with her. Produced by Maryam Qudus at Dockside Studio in Louisiana, McCalla dug into her personal history, primary sources from Amistad Research Center at Tulane University’s archives, world musical influences, and her creative trust in her long time bandmates to bring forth a bright, kinetic, and meditative project.
The studio, nestled along the Vermilion Bayou, offered an insular, bucolic setting for the nine days McCalla and band were recording; a place where friends and children could visit and local fishermen provided fresh catch for dinner. Qudus’ direction provided McCalla with space and vision to piece together her research and personal edification, while her relationship with her band allowed a deeply creative process to unfold. McCalla spoke wistfully about the experience, “It was very luxurious to have that kind of space. And it’s just really a very nurturing environment.”
Traditionally a cellist, on this project, McCalla explores her relationship with the guitar. She delves into West African and Brazilian polyrhythms flowing underneath lyrics that, at times, feel like a repetitive prayer or mantra. She balances the seemingly unanswerable aspects of life with the sometimes illusive, but simple notion that many contradictory feelings can be true at once.
BGS spoke with McCalla via Zoom from her home in New Orleans earlier this month. McCalla discussed the experience of researching, writing, and recording, her relationship with fans and supporters, creative freedom, and trusting the process.
I’ve been listening to all your music the past couple of days and I’ve noticed that the sonic palette of this album is somewhat of a shift for you. It seems like there’s a transformation theme running through it, both lyrically and musically, and it seems like even in the process of recording it. So I wanna talk about that on multiple levels, but can we start with the process for this? It sounds like you went into the woodshed and didn’t come out until the record was done.
Leyla McCalla: This is an album that was mostly finished in the studio. I had a pre-production session with Maryam Qudus, who produced the record. It was also just this really crazy time in my life. I was on tour a lot and coordinating with kids’ schedules. We really only had 36 hours of workshopping songs. Maryam was really amazing at being like, “Okay, let’s play with this idea, and come up with a verse and a chorus.” So I think we came out of that pre-production session with about 7 different demos that were just these rough sketches and we sent them all around to the band. When we went into the studio, everyone contributed what they were hearing to the songs. I’ve been working with my band now for about six years. I think that we have developed fluidity in our process of coming up with parts and talking about music. And so I knew that I had these sort of vague notions of delving into psychedelia and Afrofuturism and mining, this incredible music from Africa, ultimately. I think that that’s been a consistent through line in all my work is connecting my music through the ancestral lines of the sounds themselves.
I played a lot more guitar on this record than any other record. For me, it was really about delving into the songwriting and figuring out what I wanted to say. I’d been doing a lot of reading of Black feminist thinkers, and contemporary thinkers like Adrienne Maree Brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Octavia Butler. I think this record for me was really about, “How am I going to survive life? What does it mean to be resilient? What does it mean to transform and change? And give myself the space to grieve and also to hope and to dream.” There are a lot of things that I was meditating on when I wrote these songs.
I remember feeling very vulnerable, because I was really going back into this more beginner’s mind. I’ve never gone into the studio and been like, “I don’t know what it’s gonna sound like on the other side.” I’ve always had the band pretty well rehearsed and gone in. This time it was like, “These are the things that are emerging in real-time.”
Did you feel nervous about it? It seems like you have a lot of trust with your band, which is a great starting point. And you had the 36 hours of workshopping and all the ideas that you came up with. But were there nerves about it walking in to record?
Oh, yeah. It was not nerves about, “Can I trust my bandmates to be awesome?” It was more nerves of, “Do I suck?” Which is classic imposter syndrome that artists have as part of the process of writing. You get an idea. It’s a good idea. You question whether it’s a good idea.
I’m trying to do a new thing. I’m trying to break new ground in my creative life and in my sonic expression. Within that, I think that there’s a lot of room for self-doubt. That’s why for this album it was critical to have the support of my bandmates and of Maryam, who didn’t have that kind of attachment to any of the songs. They were just there to help execute what I wanted. I think this album really has strengthened my trust in my songwriting and in my creative process. And just knowing that you don’t always have to know what’s gonna happen to know that it’ll be good.
Absolutely. I was just going to say when you said it was a sort of meditative for you, I think that really comes across, lyrically and sonically. There are these phrases that you repeat that are meditative and it seems like you’re asking questions, you’re answering the ones you can, and you’re submitting to the ones that you can’t. What you are saying you wanted to happen comes across.
Yeah, I think so. I think that there is, on a spiritual level, deep healing for me in writing these songs. I was calling that in. I was navigating single motherhood, divorce, breakups, and big deaths in my family. It was like, “How do I call myself back to myself, what is gonna guide me through that?” I think for me, doing a lot of sort of ancestral healing work and meditating on the the gifts and the things that I’ve inherited from my ancestors, those made their way into the songs.
Speaking of process, you mentioned in your liner notes that you are grateful for creative freedom on this project. And I’d love to know what creative freedom looks like for you and how it impacts your work. And maybe what a lack of creative freedom has felt like in the past for you.
I think creative freedom, for me, was kind of twofold. I have a label that is mostly doing stuff outside of the commercial realm. Obviously, we’re part of the music industry, but I never felt like I needed to make a particular album. I felt like the question from the label was, “What kind of album do you want to make? What is coming through right now for you? What do you want to say?” Being able to come from that place is very different than, “Try to take over this part of the market,” or something. It’s a lot more empowering experience. Also, not being afraid to go in different directions. Not being afraid to use weird pedals on my guitars, experiment with synths, have a freaking psychedelic freak out, or have piano on the songs or organ. It was just sort of intuitive, “Yes, this belongs.” And not feeling like anyone was going to disapprove of that.
I never felt that there was a particular agenda outside of the agenda that I wanted to fulfill. That has been a really empowering experience for me, coming off of my previous record where it was like, “Okay, these are these ancient rhythms that are Haitian and African, and this is a mapping of where Haitian people come from.” I felt empowered by that, but in a very different way, almost like I wanted to serve this music. For this record it felt like, “Okay, how can this process really serve me and serve my creative genesis?” Returning back to like a more beginner’s mind, “What are the things that really I love about music? What are the things that make me wanna write songs?”
I didn’t have as much of a mind for that with Breaking the Thermometer, because it had been such a longstanding collaboration that I had been working on for five years with a crew of theater makers and different musicians and then going into the studio.
I always felt like that project was like a garden of weeds that are growing out of control. It could be a book. It could be a theater project. It could be a dance piece. I explored the intersection of all those things together. Whereas this was like, “Okay, I’m just returning back to this one format. We’re making an album.”
It meant connecting with some of my earliest influences. That’s why I went back to listening to a lot of artists from the tropicalismo movement in Brazil, in the ’60s and ’70s. There was all this experimentation with traditional music forms and rock and roll and psychedelia. I love that music. There’s something about it that just really speaks deeply to me. And I think that it’s also because of my generation, who I am, and where I am. I’m drawn to things that are out of the box. And I’m also drawn to really solid groove and feel and deep emotional content. I never had an agenda other than to figure out what I want to sound like and being able to have that space. A lot of these songs were about like, “How do I get out of my own way?”
When you started thinking about making this record did you know that you’d be playing more guitar than cello? Did you write on guitar? What was the relationship with that instrument like?
I was writing a lot on guitar. I wasn’t like, “I’m gonna play guitar and not cello.” I didn’t have an agenda in that way. I really wanted to explore different shapes in my fingers and try different rhythmic structures. Guitar is exciting for me in that way. I’ve done a lot of finger-picking in my work and there’s plenty of that on this record. But I’m like, “What about this inflection? What about this texture? And what about this feel? What does that conjure?” That was really fun for me.
Fun was also really central to the process. I was like, “I want to heal, I want to be creative, I want to expand my sonic palette, and I also want to have fun.” I do this work to have fun. I don’t do this work to be the “king of the capitalists” or something. I want to have a good experience with it and find it enriching. I feel like the guitar is the ultimate symbol of liberation and freedom. It has a different meaning to me than the cello. With cello, I know the notes. I am thinking about technique and I have to think about how I’m holding my body. Guitar is just like, “This is who I am.”
For sure. Partly because the guitar is so mobile. You can walk off into the woods with it.
Yeah, totally. You should see me walk through an airport. I’m carrying my guitar, my banjo, and my cello, and I’m always like, ”Man, life would be so much easier without this cello.” But it’s such a powerful thing. When I’m playing cello, it feels totally like, “Wow, this is also home.”
Cello moves so much air. It can completely change the vibration of a room.
Totally. I always tell my bandmates, “Oh, we gotta be careful with that cello. It’s like melting a dark piece of chocolate on stage.”
I think a lot about sense of place and how a place can affect the creative process. Since you were sort of in a “lock-in” at Dockside Studio, I want to know if that studio and that place had an effect on this record.
Oh, yeah. Dockside is an incredible place. There’s a house with a pool and then a whole other house with a studio. The grounds are beautiful and well-kept. You’re right by the river.
There was a sense of deep relaxation for me there, because it is kind of separate. If it were in the middle of a city, there would be so much more distraction. But because there isn’t, I felt like it really helped me to focus and to tune in. We burnt candles there every day. We were calling in a lot of spirits and support. I did a lot of just sitting by the river and writing and reading in order to write.
And Maryam is amazing. If it had just been me producing the record, it would have been way more disorganized. Maryam was amazing at being like, “Okay, Leyla, we don’t need you in the studio right now. What we really need from you is to go and write.” I feel like I do best in those sorts of relationships, when someone is gently nudging me in the direction of what’s gonna be most productive for me. I was really able to get to a place of being productive and feeling quiet enough to actually hear whatever was coming through. If we had made the record anywhere else, it would have probably sounded completely different. We are all pretty well versed in the different styles of Louisianan music, so we kept thinking, “What is this sound that we’re coming up with?” And we were like, “This is Louisiana tropicalia.” It’s a fun construct.
Tell me a bit about what your relationship is like with fans and supporters of your music and the impact that they might have on your creations or your career.
For my first record, I did a Kickstarter campaign and I asked for $5,000, because I didn’t know how expensive it is to make albums. I ended up making over $20k. That whole process of doing the Kickstarter was such a boon to my career. At that point, I had been touring with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. No one really knew who I was, but I realized that there was support and space for me to be doing these projects that combine research and intellectual pursuits with making music. That’s the line that I have been toeing this whole time. And it is incredible, over the years, the number of connections that I have made from pursuing two things at once and growing this academic life within my body of work as a recording artist.
People have brought me, over the years, limited edition Langston Hughes, Haitian Creole poetry from the 1800s, translations of Zora Neale Hurston books that are in French or German. Those are the kinds of connections that feel so sustaining creatively for me and really enriching. The music industry is so inundated with artists, and everyone’s trying to stand out. That kind of symbiosis, I think, is really critical not only to me as an artist but to me seeking support.
That’s wonderful. There’s something sort of clinical about the traditional record label rollout of material in the past, but now it feels like, because of social media, because of things like Kickstarter and house shows, a wall has broken down.
Totally. And I feel people really connect to that, even sometimes more than the actual songs. Which may be problematic in one way. Everything is kind of about more of this “cult of personality” thing. Not that I’m super invested in developing that, but I do feel like the fan base is invested in me as a person, and wants to want to support the music as a result of that.
Can you talk a little bit about the collaboration with the Rivers Institute and the Amistad Research Center at Tulane, and how that might have informed this project, or what you’re working on in general?
I was invited by the Rivers Institute to be their first music fellow. They have this incredible artist-in-residence program that is in concert with the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, which is an incredible archive of stuff from all over the South, particularly Louisiana Black culture. There are so many oral history interviews. I discovered writers that I didn’t know about, particularly a guy named Tom Dent, who feels like he’s kind of like the Langston Hughes of Louisiana.
I’ve always known how important archives and libraries are, but it’s just so much information. There’s a woman named Jade Flint who works there who helped me. She was like, “What are you interested in?” I’m like, “I like poetry. I like organizers. I like movement work.” I found myself down this path of discovering letters that Fannie Lou Hamer had written to her best friend. She was from the Delta in Mississippi and in the ’60s was really active in registering Black voters at the height of Jim Crow. She was attacked. She was beaten really badly for that. She just kept on fighting her whole life for Black people to have the right to vote and for political participation for Black people at a time where that came at a great cost to her mental, emotional, and physical health.
There’s an organization called Core New Orleans, which actually did a lot of COVID testing during the pandemic, but they were also working on voter registrations. I was reading their pamphlets that were like, “This is how you deal with potentially violent situations. This is how you approach people about trying to get them to vote.” I was doing that and concurrently reading things about emergent strategy and pleasure activism and comparing notes like, “These are the activists of yesteryear and the organizing principles.”
And then I was reading Adrienne Maree Brown’s books. She’s like, “You’re gonna need to masturbate before reading this chapter, because otherwise you won’t be connected with your pleasure center. That is essential to this activist work.” You could see this sea change in the attitude about what is actually going to aid our collective liberation the most.
During this time, my grandfather passed away and he [had] started a Socialist Haitian newspaper called Haiti Progress. Both of my parents are activists. I’ve been immersed in a lot organizing and activist stuff my whole life like going to protests throughout my childhood, especially regarding Haitian immigrants and human rights issues in the United States.
All of these things just really filled me with this feeling of, “Wow! It’s taken so much bravery to be able to fight the good fight and keep these conversations moving forward.” I think we still have a long way to go. I did a lot of reflecting on that. And that song, “I Want to Believe,” was written during that residency. It’s a simple song, but I wanted to write something that was almost a song that could be sung at a protest, something that was not quite gospel and not quite protest music, somewhere in the middle.
I love a library, I love an archivist, and I love being in that space and finding things that feel like a secret. How you process that as a person in the present, feeling the history in the present, and how it comes across – that is reflected in your lyrics. We have access to so much information today, but that information is very much filtered by these multinational corporations. There’s search engine optimization and all that, and we can’t really dig down until you go into a place like that where those regional details exist, like in an archive or library.
It just is incredible to me, because there’s so much to keep track of. And you know, even the different categories like oral histories or audio interviews or drafts of books or poems. There are unpublished pieces that may only be read by five people every year. Those five people then know about this thing and can share it with their community, and make work from it, or include it in their research papers. There’s there’s endless ways to see the world and then filter this information.
I feel like my job as a musician is looking for those bits of information that feel like the diamond in the rough, like the thing that I’ve been looking for my whole life. That’s really the chase. It really keeps me in the archives.
Can you talk specifically about the title track, “Sun Without the Heat?” In your liner notes, you dedicate the song to Susan Raffo and Frederick Douglass. I’d love to know more about that.
Susan Rafo released a book called Liberated to the Bone: Histories. Bodies. Futures. I went down this rabbit hole of progressive thought. Her book is written for healers, people working within the medical industrial complex, and anyone who’s engaged in healing work, whether that be on a community level or on a one-on-one basis. I read that book, and it was really fortifying for me.
She has this theory of the original wounds of our society, which are the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of African people through the transatlantic slave trade. It’s about our inability to grapple with the harm that has been perpetuated and is being perpetuated from those original wounds. It is holding us back from larger systemic change. There’s a chapter where she references a speech that Frederick Douglass gave in 1857 to a room full of white abolitionists. He said, “You want the crops without the plow. You want the rain without the thunder. You want the ocean without the roar of its waters.” I was immediately like, “Those are song lyrics.” I just heard it immediately. Those were just such beautiful words and and phrases and concepts, and I kept on singing that.
It occurred to me, “You can’t have the sun without the heat.” I was like, “There are only three phrases, and I need that one other thing.” I was also thinking about how so many of these songs to me are about transformation, and are about what change really requires of us. And it felt like those phrases spoke so well to that theme.
I read a book called Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Ghums. It’s a Black feminist study of marine mammals off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia and the things that we can learn from them about survival, resiliency, living on this planet, and our inherent connection to nature — you know, how to thrive on this seemingly unsustainable planet. It is also about our connections to each other and community.
For a long time, I think in my own personal life I was like, “I just can’t help but feel like I’m drowning.” But I didn’t want to just make a record about that feeling. I wanted to make a record about getting through that feeling: about breaking through the overwhelm.
Since her solo debut in 2014, Vari-Colored Songs: a Tribute to Langston Hughes, multi-instrumentalist, composer, songwriter, and thought leader Leyla McCalla has routinely and consistently expanded her own sonic universe. But these have not been gratuitous or ambitious artistic reinventions. Instead, the cellist and multi-instrumentalist intentionally and organically brings in new and exciting textures, influences, stories, cultural touch points, and text paintings into her work. On April 12, she’ll continue in a similar vein, once again broadening her own endless musical horizons with a brand new record, Sun Without the Heat, available via ANTI-.
After Vari-Colored Songs, a collection of thoughtful, dense, and engaging adapted Hughes poems, Haitian folk, and originals, the critically acclaimed and “fan favorite” collection, A day for the hunter, a day for the prey (2016), brought in still more French, Haitian Creole, and bilingual material, underpinned by string band sounds that recalled her days performing and recording with the Carolina Chocolate Drops – but with many iconoclastic wrinkles and touches uniquely her own. At no point has there seemed to be any floundering or self doubt, musically and otherwise, in McCalla’s releases, but still their progression points to a growing confidence, an indelible sense of self, and an unwavering commitment to telling often untold stories. Time and again, she plumbs the depths of her own soul, her family, her lineage to discover and honor narratives regularly left in the shadows.
Sun Without the Heat certainly finds McCalla – who is based in New Orleans – covering exciting, tantalizing new ground that neither feels entirely new or, again, like any sort of attempt at frivolous reinvention. Instead, this album is a re-distillation of the personal journey – whether inward or outward – that McCalla has invited us to join her on since Vari-Colored Songs. Over 10 tracks, Sun Without the Heat is fiery while inviting, with limitless sparks and an intractable gravity. Building on her Haitian roots, which remained front-and-center in 2019’s incredible TheCapitalist Blues and also anchored her theatrical sort-of-concept album, Breaking the Thermometer (2022), on Sun Without the Heat McCalla again subverts antiquated ideas around “world music” and global folk by grounding Afrobeat, Ethiopian music theory, Brazilian Tropicalismo, and more in her American folk and string band expertise.
The result, like on TheCapitalist Blues and Breaking the Thermometer, is as charming as it is dense, crave-able and nutritious, entirely one-of-a-kind while obviously interconnected with so many constituent musical traditions. There are clearly lessons learned and perspectives gained from her time collaborating with supergroup Our Native Daughters – with Amythyst Kiah, Allison Russell, and Rhiannon Giddens – here, too. On the new album, with her arm-length resumé at her disposal, McCalla remains the industrial-strength adhesive holding together all of these seemingly disparate parts. Sun Without the Heat’s current singles, “Scaled to Survive” (listen above), “Tree,” and “Love We Had” are a perfect aural triptych to demonstrate McCalla’s deft combination of inputs to create a singular output.
It’s nearly impossible to overstate the impact the Carolina Chocolate Drops and its now legendary alumni have had on American roots music and global folk. Giddens, Dom Flemons, Rowan Corbett, Justin Robinson, and more each continue to increase their audiences’ scope of understanding well after their time in the Grammy Award-winning group. But the niche McCalla has carved out and built a home for herself within since branching out from the band is truly her own.
Sun Without the Heat is timeless while Afrofuturist, essential but never essentialist. This is folk music crafted in the spirit of folk musician activists the world over since time immemorial. When you listen to McCalla, whether Sun Without the Heat or Capitalist Blues, or any of her five studio albums, you can rest assured what you’re hearing is truly idiosyncratic, while she never lets her listeners mistakenly assume she and she alone is the sole arbiter of these sounds, genres, and traditions. It’s a deft balancing act that perhaps only she can execute with such ease and such entrancing music.
All month long, we’ll be celebrating Sun Without the Heat and Leyla McCalla as our Artist of the Month. Enjoy our Essential Leyla McCalla Playlist below and stay tuned for our AOTM interview to come later in April.
The members of American Patchwork Quartet present an array of diverse backgrounds – both musical and cultural. The group is made up of Clay Ross, multi-Grammy winning guitarist and founder of Gullah group Ranky Tanky; Grammy-winning Hindustani classical vocalist, Falguni “Falu” Shah; internationally acclaimed jazz bassist, Yasushi Nakamura; and Juno Award-winning drummer, Clarence Penn. However, even with the variety of identities and backgrounds they do represent, the ensemble makes it clear in their live performances and in every conversation they have that “APQ” is not a group made for the sake of some exaggerated or token sense of unity. Despite their most prominent accolades and individual backgrounds, this group isn’t a concept band or a supergroup made for shock value.
American Patchwork Quartet was born from a foundation of genuine friendship forged between four people connecting with one another, rather than four musicians immediately rushing to talk shop. It was from there that interest in the differences the way each of them interact with and understand music, inspired the idea to form “APQ.” The group would discover through their curiosity things both mutual and unique to their relationships with music – as well as things mutual and unique to their shared identities as Americans. It’s this aspect of APQ’s bond that made American folksongs the bedrock of their repertoire for performances and their newly released, self-titled debut, which includes longstanding American folk fare like “Shenandoah,” “Wayfaring Stranger,” “Gone for Soldier,” and “Beneath the Willow.”
Through an abundance of performances that have taken them to various regions of the U.S. – and now an album of painstakingly arranged and honed songs – APQ is prepared to show and tell how individuals such as themselves can be connected through contrast. They showcase how folk music can tell specific stories of people, places, and times and can stay true to its past while adopting a new present and future – just the way one does when immigrating to somewhere new.
After attending one of APQ’s performances, I connected with the group to share their story with the diverse community of BGS and beyond, speaking with guitarist-vocalist Clay Ross and vocalist Falu Shah. Our conversation, via Zoom, stretched between New York and Arizona, just days before the group embarked on a cross-country album release tour, which kicked off in Princeton, New Jersey on February 9.
What brought you all together to form a quartet, particularly one that’s driven by more than the aim to “make music for a living?”
Clay Ross: It really started with my relationship with Falu [Shah]. We were working at Carnegie Hall as teaching artists. At least twice a week we’d be together either writing songs or developing a curriculum to teach our students and we really enjoyed being together and we enjoyed becoming friends.
At that time, I was [also] getting Ranky Tanky started and doing a lot of research in the folk archives of Alan Lomax, Guy Carawan and other ethnomusicologists that collected songs from across the United States. One day, I asked Falu, “Tell me what you think of this song, ‘Pretty Saro.'” She listened to it, loved it, and she learned it. Then we learned how to sing it together. We just felt like “Wow, this is something really special!” And we liked the idea of collaborating.
Around the same time, I met Clarence Penn at the Monterey Jazz Festival. We ended up on this flight that got canceled on the way back to New York. So we were in this airport for 10 hours, talking and bonding over all these life things and not about music at all. We became friends first, which was a really great way to start a collaboration. I said, “We need to find a bassist,” and we both immediately thought of Yasushi Nakamura – one of the first musicians that I ever played with when I came to New York 20 years ago. Clarence was playing with him that whole time and they’re like brothers. Yasushi is a family man, he’s got two kids, and so we’re all really connected beyond the music. We connected as people and we can relate to one another as parents and as human beings.
I think between meeting Clarence and knowing that I wanted to deepen this collaboration with Falu somehow, that was where the idea [for APQ] was born. I felt like, we’re all American, you know? That’s the one thing that connects us, no matter how different we are and how radically different our pasts and our backgrounds may be. We are now all connected as Americans and so we all have some access and an entry point into these American folksongs. They can be a part of our story now, whether they were a part of our traditions up until now or not.
Falu, as both a U.S. immigrant and a vocalist primarily trained in Indian classical rather than Western music, how was your experience in becoming part of APQ?
Falu Shah: For me, American folk music was something my mother only played records of. I grew up in India, in Mumbai, and my mom was a big fan of Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris and growing up she played this music, which I found absolutely intriguing. We only had one one record store in the entire city of Bombay and it was called Rhythm House. My mom had to travel 45 minutes in a train to get to this record store, stay there, and stand in a line for four or five hours. She would bring Michael Jackson and I would think, “Oh, my goodness, why would you bring me all these [records]?” And she said, “Because I want you to have a broad vocabulary of music, not just Indian classical.”
The biggest difference I found in both music styles is harmony. Sometimes I feel Western music is very delighted to use chords. And harmony context was very different for me. Clay used to tell me to sing in a different key. And I’m like, “How do I sing like that?” It’s a different style of learning. So in Carnegie, when we were doing all the songs and all the writing, Clay used to always switch harmonies, and I thought, “I really like this concept.” That was the first thing that intrigued me: that Clay would never sing what I sang – he would always find another note and he would completely change the melody of that song, but it sounded so beautiful when layered together. I had to unlearn a lot of things to learn how to sing [American folk] music. So my journey has been always as a student. I still consider myself as a student and I’m always going to APQ concerts and rehearsals thinking, “What can I learn this time?”
How does APQ decide on repertoire to explore, interpret, and perform?
FS: Clay will send me a song and I will find a folk melody or an [Indian] classical raga that is close to it. And if it’s not, then I’ll tell Clay, “I don’t like this song.” …When I told Clay, “I love this, I don’t like this,” it’s based upon this [idea] of what can I as an immigrant and Indian person, what can I bring to this song that already doesn’t exist? There are so many people who have already sung it and they have sung it so beautifully. What am I adding? Something has to relate because our cultures are so different. For us to break the boundaries of continents and lines between us, we had to connect with the beautiful harmony of music.
CR: I’m looking for songs that are spiritual and not religious – and that celebrate man’s humanity to man. And that speak to the universal qualities of all people – be it love, nature, heartache and longing, loss, or joy.
How do you balance the idea of APQ’s music existing as “teaching tools” or “portals to history” with the idea that music can and should be entertaining?
CR: It’s an organic process of creation that I gravitate towards things that are both entertaining and fun. And [things that] also have a depth and that can guide you into a whole world – whether it’s history or emotional exploration. Because really, for me, I’m trying to live. I’m trying to live in those big questions of like, “Why are we here? Where are we headed? Where have we been? What does it all mean?”
How has the journey been working with one another toward the goal of inspiring enthusiasm and curiosity around multiculturalism through folk music?
CR: I think any endeavor you embark upon with other people, and it doesn’t matter if they’re your own family and your own blood, it’s always a negotiation with oneself… and learning to appreciate the positive surprises that come out of it.
FS: [Clay, Clarence Penn, and Yasushi Nakamura] know rock and they know jazz and they know the [American] culture. I had to do research. I have to give [Clay] microtones that are proper to the mood of the song. Indian music is very balanced and very thought out. I had to have chemistry with Yasushi and Clarence. I kept telling Clay, “I need to understand more to play with them.” I’ve always tried to figure out my journey as a musician.
CR: I think that [Falu’s] persistence is what gave [APQ] life. She could have very easily had an attitude of “I don’t do this.” Falu has had to bend far more than we’ve had to bend to her. The frame of what we’re dealing with is American music. She’s adapted to that frame. I think that process in and of itself is what this band is about. We’ve definitely had to tap into our best human qualities to get to this music. I’m so proud of this music just for this reason, for what it represents, what we’ve had to live to arrive at this document, this album, that we have now.
Where do you think folk music can find its place in a world that often looks ahead, rather than stopping to contemplate who and what’s around us in a meaningful and lasting way?
CR: I think folk music will continue to exist in a place of meaning and quality. [Folksongs] may be ignored in the short term, but in the long term they will remain. We all just have to do our best to find our tribe of people who appreciate what we do… I feel this is an album that is a document that will last, because people can go back to it.
FS: I feel folk music is always going to be amazing, because it is by the people, for the people. And it’s inherited from generation to generation and something that’s worked for 400 years. There is no doubt about it. Our children’s children are going to listen to and learn and sing ‘Shenandoah’ – I guarantee it – because it the power of folk music is so unique and so important and strong that if it has worked for 400 years, I don’t know why it would not work for another 400 years or more.
“What do Chinese and Appalachian music have in common?” is not really the central question in the minds of Cathy Fink, Marcy Marxer, and Chao Tian, whose From China to Appalachia concerts may first appear wildly random in their combination of instruments and styles. To these expert folk musicians, the real question is, “What don’t Chinese and Appalachian music have in common?” The latter would have a much shorter answer.
There’s a sense of belonging, of homeyness, of ease to this musical collaboration. With their primary configuration including Chinese hammered dulcimer played by Tian, clawhammer five-string banjo played by Fink, and cello banjo played by Marxer, those overarching moods could feel surprising, but for this trio there is really no such thing as not belonging.
Fink and Marxer have constructed every facet of their lifelong careers with community building centered – that’s how they connected with Tian, after all, when she participated in a fellowship program at Strathmore Arts Center nearby their home in Maryland. Fink & Marxer host their hugely popular UkeFest at Strathmore, and Fink is often a mentor of fellowship artists such as Tian. When the three began making music together, they realized the seamlessness of their musical and cultural vocabularies almost immediately.
That realization, it turns out, is contagious. Recently, a simple promotional video of the trio performing a song to highlight a slate of performances went viral on TikTok. At the time of this writing, it has gained more than 550,000 views, more than 101,000 likes, and 14,000 saves. (Theirs is a music well worth holding onto for later.) Fink, Marxer, and Tian immediately noticed an impact from the viral video at their shows, with multiple dates selling out and new fans driving hundreds of miles to catch a tour date.
Listening to the three perform, the ease and charm of the music – however disparate its parts may feel – is immediately apparent, whether through a screen, a workshop, a community event, a concert, or a sing along. It’s clear that Cathy, Marcy, and Chao are using their music to teach the world and anyone who will listen that with roots music, there’s no such thing as not belonging.
We spoke to Fink, Marxer, and Tian via FaceTime last month, as they prepared for a short tour in the mid-Atlantic and immediately following their viral TikTok. The trio will continue touring From China to Appalachia throughout 2024 with appearances planned at Wintergrass, in the Northeast with special guest Jake Blount, and beyond.
Let’s start with your recent viral video on TikTok, I wonder what you might think is so exciting about this particular combination of instruments? Because, clearly there is something about this lineup that has resonated with folks! I have a couple of my own ideas about it, but I wonder what you think is particularly electric about banjos and Chinese dulcimer together?
Cathy Fink: Chao, do you want to start?
Chao Tian: Okay! So, I play the Chinese dulcimer, right? The most common question that people ask me in this country is, “What’s the difference between the Chinese one and the American hammered dulcimer?” They share a similar history. The Chinese dulcimer was actually introduced to China by British travelers back more than 500 years ago. And, somehow I have just felt, when I play with Appalachian musicians, or play American Roots music, I feel like I’m home. This instrument actually feels the same way – back home. It just melts into this genre of music smoothly and without any problems. The music languages are quite matchable, perfectly.
I feel like if I try to collaborate with musicians of any other type of genre – like, I play with jazz musicians – I need to learn their language. For Appalachian music, I just feel like I speak it, not the native language, but some kind of accent. But, without any limitations to communicate with those musicians.
I wanted to ask you, also, because one of the first things that came to mind for me when I saw your collaboration is Abigail Washburn collaborating with Wu Fei. Could you talk a little bit about the difference between a guzheng and a dulcimer and about your approaches and how they differ?
CT: Yes, that’s another question that people think about when they see our collaboration. Some of them just bluntly ask us, “What’s the difference?” Instrumentally we have some differences [from Wu and Washburn], because Cathy and Marcy, they are multi-instrumentalists. They can play more [instruments] and our music style is versatile.
The dulcimer’s history and background is quite different from the guzheng, because guzheng is a Chinese instrument traditionally and dulcimer is actually a worldwide instrument. As I said, [the U.S.] is a home country of this instrument.
We have a collaborative vibe and more like a family vibe. Like a family reunion… I define our collaboration as an intercultural collaboration. For most people’s opinions, they see us, too, like an intercultural thing. But when people talk about intercultural collaboration, we somehow initially think about what’s the difference between these two cultures, or three cultures, or among different cultures.
Our collaboration is based on mutual understanding and cultural respect. When we started this collaboration, we noticed there are a lot of commonalities between Chinese traditional music and American roots music. So this intercultural collaboration transformed from, “Let’s just try something” into, “Let’s delve into more about the musical language, the musical form, the scales–”
Because there are similar scales we use – the pentatonic scale, the modes. The format of the folk musics are similar, very similar. I always feel like even though folk music, those little tunes are short, but they can contain very powerful, immense messages that we can deliver to people.
And I really think our title, From China to Appalachia, actually is a very clear description. Yes, literally, but it’s not only that. Some people on TikTok suggested a very interesting idea, that we should replace China with my hometown, Beijing, because Appalachia is a region and China is a country, right? But actually we use that title not to describe the geographic thing, we are talking about music. We’re talking about culture. So from China to Appalachia, there is something that strongly linkages between them. Not only musically, not only culture, but also on a people to people level.
We should try our best to find what our commonalities are, more than trying to show, “I am special! I am special! You should listen to me! You should listen to me more!” So, it’s just musical healing.
That’s such a great answer and it makes me think of, Cathy and Marcy, how you’ve always placed community so central in how you make music. It’s not something that’s an after effect of music making for you. It’s something that’s very present in the beginning stages when you make music. Can you talk about how this project is another example of how you build community with all the music making that you do?
CF: It’s definitely that and I thank you for recognizing that. Right now, we’re in the midst of a tour that is co-sponsored by Mid Atlantic Tours of Mid Atlantic Arts. To our delight, one of the criteria for presenters participating [in the program] is that there be a community outreach event. In each place that we go, that event is different. We’ve performed for some high school kids, and this weekend our outreach was playing music at a Unitarian service. I have to tell you, it was the most beautiful service of community gathering and worship without using two words that you almost always hear in a church – God and Christ. Everyone was included. They didn’t care who you worshiped. They didn’t care who you were. If you wanted to come together and be in community, then please come in the door. For us to play music in that scenario was really amazing.
In Fredonia, [New York], it just so happened that Emily Schaad – a fiddler in the old-time music community, but also a phenomenal conductor and classical musician – had just moved to Fredonia, and we were playing at the Fredonia Opera House. They reached out to Emily and said, “How about putting together a workshop?” So, Emily had her orchestra students come and she reached out to all of the regional youth bluegrass organizations. We had a room of like 75 people – her orchestra students, kids learning bluegrass, Appalachian dulcimer players, tuba players, horn players, you name it. There was an amazing cello player who took over on Marcy’s cello banjo and immediately understood what it was.
We put together an arrangement of a tune and that was meaningful to everybody. Then, we have something coming up this weekend in Martinsville, Virginia at a place called Piedmont Arts and we’re so excited about it. Our first set is going to be based on our repertoire, we’re just going to pick what we want for an hour long set. In our second set, there’s a Chinese watercolor artist, local to that community, who has an exhibit at Piedmont Arts right now, and he’s going to be on stage creating a new watercolor while we play music, much of it improvised.
I think this grant [from Mid Atlantic Arts] has opened the door to more community. I think it will be a centerpiece of every place we go. When this grant is finished and presenters are interested in us, one of the things that we’re going to say is, “What collaborative community thing can we do?” How can we meet more people eye-to-eye, music-to-music, or whatever it may be?
Community is one of the most important things that this show and our collaboration stands for, and we’ve made music with Chao for, I don’t know, six years or so. She did some touring with us and Sam Gleaves, which was really fun. We did a little run out to Ashe County Arts Council there, in our neighborhood. And that was an interesting test for how does this music fly in Appalachia? It was just amazing, the response.
When we started doing more work together, remember that when COVID hit, there was a lot of anti-Asian sentiment in the country. We felt like making this music together was our statement of community and of humanity. We never had to say a thing about it. We just had to all be there together and present a very honest sense of community and love.
It’s perhaps another reason why this TikTok video of yours took off. Because, I think a lot of people, whether consciously or subconsciously, when they see banjos they might not know anything about banjo music besides stereotypes. I think there’s something about this lineup, and in particular the mission that you’re bringing to the music, that makes it so inviting to folks. You’re not just saying, “Come and listen to us.” You’re saying, “Come be a part of this.”
I think that’s part of why people see and hear this music and it might come off as intellectual or cerebral music, but they’re responding to it in a very down to earth way and they feel invited by it.
CF: And it’s very participatory. I will tell you, in Richmond, when we started singing and playing “High on a Mountain,” there were a lot of people there who knew the song. We just said, “Sing it with us!” And my God, did they ever sing it with us. There are several songs in the show full of sing-along participation, and I’m going to guess that a lot of the new fans through TikTok and social media haven’t been to a lot of folk concerts where that’s kind of an expected part of what happens.
But we have a very full circle story with a piece that Chao brought to the group after she heard a recording of Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie doing it. It’s a Chinese song called, “Three Rules of Attention and Eight Points of Discipline.” They recorded it in 1975. It’s a really awkward choice in many ways, because it deals specifically with peasants who were leaving Chiang Kai-shek’s army for the Red Army. They used this particular piece of music in the Red Army to teach what I’m going to call, “rules of humanity.” When you hear and read these rules of humanity, and you look at what’s going on in the world today, you go, “Oh my God, 1928, this song?” And Chinese people in the audience feel like we’ve brought them back to their home and their childhood. It’s a really interesting thing. Pete has, of course, a thousand people whistling on it with him. I can’t whistle worth nothing. Marcy’s pretty good at whistling. but we get the audience singing “La” and taking over the song and we’re all there together
I wanna make a quick point about Abigail and Wu Fei, because so many people make that immediate connection, too. First of all, I wanna say that we’re friends with Abigail and Chao has met Wu Fei, and I find that what we do is, separately, is very complementary. There are some differences – you know, Abby speaks fluent Chinese! Chao’s trying to teach us to sing in Chinese, and we’re working on it every day. That’s a little part of how she’s stretching us in some ways. And then we’re stretching her in some ways.
Additionally, in our show From China to Appalachia, there’s a sort of hidden parentheses: “And beyond.” From China to Appalachia (and Beyond). It’s a big focus of ours to collaborate on Chinese and Appalachian music, but it is also a real joy to pick a Django Reinhardt piece like “Dark Eyes,” which Marcy plays on the mighty ukulele. So then we have ukulele and guitar and Chinese dulcimer. Or, we’ve kind of reinvented Cousin Emmy’s “Ruby.” We have a gourd banjo, Marcy on the doumbek – she’s got a pink Barbie doumbek – and Chao on hammered dulcimer. Chao does things on hammered dulcimer that no one else does. She’s got a slide she uses on it, she’s got all these interesting sounds.
We certainly see what we do as embracing a lot of different world music concepts and basically, we feel like it’s all very complimentary. We’d love nothing better than to share a show and collaborate with Abby and Wu Fei.
That’s perfect as a segue, because I also wanted to talk about sonics and about the music itself. Marcy, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how as you’re crafting these tunes, how are you thinking about building the ensemble? How do you decide which instruments you’re going to utilize when?
Marcy Marxer: At first, we just try a bit of everything and see what works best. For me personally, the cello banjo is working really well in this group. My main instrument is guitar, of course, and I will be playing more guitar in the future, but I love the high angelic overtones of the hammer dulcimer with Cathy’s banjo ringing and then the cello kind of being, as Chao calls it, the panda of the group. [Laughs] The giant panda. [That combination] is just a sonic sound that I’ve never heard before.
You know, the hammered dulcimer was so popular in the ‘70s and ‘80s in old-time, traditional music. Then it kind of fell out of favor. Much of that had to do with the fact that the hammered dulcimer was hard to tune and the rest of the group would have to tune to the dulcimer. But it’s such an engaging sound. I mean, it really captured my heart ever since I was a little tiny child, listening to my grandma play, and then playing it myself. I think it’s really time for the hammered dulcimer to come back. I mean, we still have a generation or two of hammered dulcimer players who are 60 and over and some younger players, but I’m not so aware of them. But, I’d love to see the hammered dulcimer really come back into American traditional music in a way that younger people can still learn from the masters.
Audiences have always loved the hammered dulcimer. It’s just like old-time festivals and jams where it kind of fell out of favor to a point that some hammered dulcimer players just don’t go.
We need to bring that back, because there’s just a spirit and a liveliness to the dulcimer that nothing else has. You’ve got your percussion, you’ve got your sparkling tones, you’ve got your deep tones. It’s a real joy to play along with, to hear Cathy’s banjo and Chao’s dulcimer together just blows me away sometimes. It’s really stunning. And then to be able to add the lower stuff and take some solos. For me, that’s the comedy part, the cello banjo solos always make people laugh.
CF: Marcy’s kind of like the pinch hitter, right? I do three things: I sing, I play whatever banjo is the best banjo for the moment, and I play rhythm guitar. Like Marcy, I think the unique center of our sound is the cello banjo, the five-string banjo, and the hammered dulcimer. But then Marcy adds ukulele. She adds a mandolin. She adds tin whistle if it’s appropriate. She has percussion things. She plays the doumbek. With each song that we play, Marcy and I are going in our heads, “What does she play that might add something to this, that we don’t mind schlepping on the road?” [Laughs]
Marcy describes this sometimes like you have this box of crayons. Chao’s got a big fat crayon, I have two or three small crayons, and Marcy owns the rest of the box! [Laughs]
In Their Words: “The museum’s musical atlas of instruments continues with the opening of another wing, the first in a series on bowed instruments. To stretch boundaries over the earth and over time is to forsake them; whether it is a matter of Synchronizität or just the plain unconscious. In Western cultural history, the bowed instrument is a late installment, after centuries, of an almost primordial vibration that we imagine in sound; see in the old paintings; and yet can sample in the remnants of the ancient world captured on gramophone records.” – Pat Conte, curator
“The Secret Museum series is legendary. It opened up new possibilities for me when I first heard it in the 1990s. The curator is Pat Conte, he did something remarkable, even more so because it was before the internet: Starting in the 1970s he began assembling the first and arguably greatest collection of world music recorded in the 78 rpm record era of the 1920s – 1950s, give or take. He did it by casing junk stores in Queens, New York, the most diverse place in the world, and by maintaining letter correspondence with collectors and dealers across the globe. That is the music you will find on the Secret Museum of Mankind albums.
“Conte programs the records by feel, not with a predefined structure. The records are not meant to be academic, they are meant to move the listener. The movement is emotional, using music that was recorded in different places and at different times. Each listener will experience the sequence in their own way, and each track is its own world.
“The Secret Museum of Mankind: Atlas of Instruments – Fiddles, Vol. 1 continues the series and presents fiddle sounds developed and practiced across the globe. The compilation, drawn from Conte’s pioneering and remarkable personal collection of 78 rpm discs recorded in the 1920s – 1950s, offers fiddle music recorded across the world from Crete to Madagascar, Mexico, England, Sicily, Norway, India, the USA, Cape Verde, China and more.” – Eli Smith, producer
Image courtesy of Jalopy Records, Nick Loss-Eaton Media
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