Grab tickets to the rest of the festivities at the Bluegrass Situation Presents: A St. Patrick’s Day Festival at New York’s New Irish Arts Center, with de Groot and Hargreaves participating in an opening night jam session with fiddler-banjoist Jake Blount and traditional dancer Nic Gareiss on March 17 as well as a headlining show from Blount and Gareiss on March 18.
Welcome to the BGS Radio Hour! Since 2017, the show has been a weekly recap of all the great music, new and old, featured on BGS. This week, we reflect on artists lost in 2020 and look forward to some upcoming releases from the biggest names in roots music. Remember to check back every Monday for a new episode.
Tony Rice’s passing on Christmas Day 2020 was an unexpected loss for the entire world of roots music. Fortunately for all of us, he leaves behind an enormous legacy of recordings from his career, which began in 1971 with Sam Bush and the Bluegrass Alliance. Our most recent Toy Heart episodes dive into Rice’s personality and music, crafted through conversation with those closest to him.
From Tulsa, Oklahoma Jared Tyler of Saugeye brings us this tribute to his late pup, from the band’s self-titled album. After Lillie passed, he was observing all of the holes she dug in the yard. Did she ever find China?
Selwyn Birchwood – “I Got Drunk, Laid, and Stoned”
Tampa-based blues artist Selwyn Birchwood proves to BGS this week that you can party to blues music. “When I look back at all of the blues songs that I really loved growing up, a lot of them were about drinking, f#%^ing or smokin’,” Birchwood told us…”So I wrote a song about all three!!”
The Dead South – “In Hell I’ll Be in Good Company (Live)”
So many artists, the Dead South included, have missed performing live more than we can imagine. So, why not put out a live album? This week, we’ve got this Dead South hit from Served Live.
Alabama-born and New Orleans-based artist Alabama Slim brings us a single from The Parlor. A mere four hours of recording – straight to tape – at the Parlor studio, alongside Little Freddie King and Ardie Dean, and the result is a master class in deep, soulful blues.
Allison de Groot w/ Quinn Bachand – “Tom Billy’s/Trip to Athlone”
Our bi-weekly Tunesday Tuesday feature is changing in 2021, from an artist spotlight to a monthly roundup of instrumental music and the themes which connect several recordings. This week, we look at modern Irish banjo styles, and artists like Allison de Groot who add their own unique contributions.
Texas duo Hardened & Tempered are our recent guest on 5+5 – that is, 5 questions, 5 songs. We talked inspirations, rituals, and a dream musician and meal pairing. Their new album Hold the Line, is out now!
Amanda Shires & Jason Isbell – “The Problem”
Regular viewers of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon may have seen Shires and Isbell grace the stage recently. The power-couple stopped by the show to perform Shires’ new single, “The Problem,” just another example of her impeccable songwriting.
From Joe Mullins and Smithsonian Folkways. We’re looking forward to Industrial Strength Bluegrass, an album honoring the rich bluegrass history of Southwestern Ohio, created by an influx of mid-century migrants from Appalachia in search of factory jobs.
Surely, one thing we’re all missing are the endless hours on the highway accompanied by a favorite mixtape. Singer-songwriter David Starr brings us just that this week, featuring this classic Jackson Browne song, which Starr does himself.
As we wind down our January Artist of the Month – the complete soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? – we’ll leave the first month of 2021 with this soothing melody from the Cox Family, featured in the film.
From her new album, That’s How Rumors Get Started, Margo priced brings us this resurrected song from her former band, Buffalo Clover. Coping with losing a child, Price and her husband began hanging around a rough crowd of musicians, and “partying harder than the Rolling Stones.” Hence, this song about drinking and partying your talents away – something Price wrote of her friends but later recognized in her own actions.
From Edwards, Colorado, Wolf van Elfmand sings about the lessons we learn from loss. Rathering than basking in the anger or loneliness that follows, he pursues what he considers the only other option: acceptance.
Nathaniel Rateliff – “Redemption”
From Justin Timberlake’s new film, Palmer, Nathaniel Rateliff brings us “Redemption.” The film tells the story of a small-town high school hero turned ex-convict, humbly returning to his roots. After Rateliff’s previous release, And It’s Still Alright, grew his popularity in 2020, he was tasked with writing this song for the film – and it came naturally.
Photos: (L to R) Margo Price by Bobbi Rich; Tony Rice by Heather Hafleigh; Amanda Shires by Alysse Gafkjen
Editor’s note: Tunesday Tuesday is changing slightly in 2021. What began in 2017 as a bi-weekly tune feature and short review will now be expanded into a monthly roundup of interesting, engaging, and groundbreaking instrumental music and the themes we trace within it.
One of the most thoughtful and virtuosic clawhammer banjoists around, Allison de Groot (Molsky’s Mountain Drifters, The Goodbye Girls) has released a brand new video with fellow Canadian, guitarist Quinn Bachand. The two old-time musicians found themselves with free time hunkering down on British Columbia’s coast last fall and joined together on a gorgeous rendering of a couple of tunes — not rousing old-time or bluegrass fiddle melodies, though. Instead they chose a pair of Irish jigs: “Tom Billy” and “Trip to Athlone.”
“When I’m playing in a new style,” she goes on, “I try to capture aspects of what makes the music special to my ear while still embracing the unique qualities of clawhammer banjo.” And on “Tom Billy” and “Trip to Athlone,” she does just that, impeccably so. De Groot is a player that at times can perfectly disappear into her source material, but her obvious embrace of clawhammer’s idiosyncrasies is what makes these Irish forays so entrancing.
“Adapting jigs to the five-string banjo is not a historically new endeavour, but there is lots of room to explore clawhammer banjo in this setting. I find a lot of freedom in that space!” That freedom is perhaps the most charming aspect of this set of tunes — second only to the joy always apparent in de Groot’s picking.
Though perceptibly rare, other banjo players have indeed been enticed by that very same freedom (de Groot is right that it’s not a new endeavor). The five-string banjo, especially post-Earl Scruggs, is an instrument with intrinsic qualities of innovation, acrobatics, and thinking outside the box. The physical instrument itself and the lore driving the mystique behind it lend it perfectly to Irish and Celtic folk music.
Irish music fully embraced the banjo — the four-string iteration of the instrument, most often tuned in fourths (C, G, D, A) — by the mid-twentieth century, closing a transatlantic feedback loop that began in Africa, landed the banjo’s precursors in the Americas brought by enslaved Africans, and then transported the instrument in its modern form back across the Atlantic to Ireland. This conclusion occurred after the four-string banjo (and any/all banjos with varying counts of strings) skyrocketed to the height of fame in America’s popular music of choice throughout the nineteenth century: minstrelsy.
Its punchy volume, its bubbly, single-string triplets, the low buzzing of the wound strings were each folded into the greater sound of Irish folk so naturally, from the purest traditional instances to the most daring punk affectations. The banjo’s subversive, trailblazing tendencies are ripe for exciting forays and experiments. One such experiment is banjo player, builder, and inventor Tom Saffell’s behemoth Infinity 8-String Banjo.
Whatever it is about Irish banjo playing that just works, these pickers demonstrate there’s an entire world to be discovered not just in other genres that may be seen as outside of the norm for our instruments, but even more so in the space created between those genres. That’s as close to a definition of American roots music as we might get, the “melting pot” quality we all know and love, evident and flamboyant in each of these examples of Irish banjo on more than four strings.
Photo credit: Patrick M’Gonigle
