Tag: Jake Blount

ANNOUNCING: BGS and PineCone Present Shout & Shine 2019

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Along with our partners at PineCone, the Piedmont Council of Traditional Music, we are proud to announce our Fourth Annual Shout & Shine: A Celebration of Diversity in Bluegrass. The 2019 iteration will be the event’s biggest year yet, taking over the Dance Tent during IBMA’s Wide Open Bluegrass festival in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday, September 27, from 12 noon to 11pm. (See full schedule below.)

In 2016 Shout & Shine became the first event of its kind at the week-long bluegrass business conference and festival. Born as a direct response to the North Carolina General Assembly’s controversial “bathroom bill,” HB2, Shout & Shine’s fourth year continues the showcase’s growth and strengthens its mission of highlighting and reincorporating the voices and perspectives of underrepresented and marginalized artists, musicians, and performers — not only at the showcase, but throughout the convention and festival.

Headlining the year is the Shout & Shine Square Dance Party, led by banjoist and ethnomusicologist Jake Blount and jaw-dropping fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves. The dance will feature Michigan-based square dance caller Boo Radley (AKA Brad Baughman), who specializes in using gender neutral directions for dancers, opening up the square dance — traditionally regarded as a conservative, white, heteronormative space — to non-binary and non-heterosexual participants. All are welcome to participate, with no prior experience or partner required!

The day will kick off with Crying Uncle Bluegrass Band, prodigies from the Bay Area led by Asian American brothers Teo and Miles Quale, who have just returned from a tour of Finland and are fresh off an appearance on the Grand Ole Opry. Percussive dancer and ethnochoreologist Nic Gareiss will give a step dancing performance with old-time banjoist Allison de Groot, followed by a set of music from Hubby Jenkins, who is a blues and old-time multi-instrumentalist, Grammy winner, and veteran of the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

Prolific folk, children’s music, and bluegrass stalwarts Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer bring their Grassabilly Rockets, featuring Jon Weisberger and George Jackson, to the dance tent as well, followed by their friends, compatriots, and IBMA Momentum Award nominees Cane Mill Road — North Carolina natives who will be joined by Williette Hinton, buckdancer and son of acclaimed blues musician and dancer Algia Mae Hinton.

Realizing a longtime goal of Shout & Shine’s producers, the showcase will feature an Indigenous artist for the first time, Lakota John, a local North Carolinian and his trio with deep roots in Piedmont blues and old-time, down-home acoustic music. Finally, bluegrass legend and trailblazer Laurie Lewis will headline the evening with her band, the Right Hands, before the night’s rollicking, square dance conclusion.

Shout & Shine is made possible by these partners: the Raleigh Convention Center, the Greater Raleigh Convention Center and Visitors Bureau, and IVPR. Shout & Shine 2019 presenting sponsors are Ear Trumpet Labs, Jamie Dawson of ERA Dream Living Realty, Pre-War Guitars, and Straight Up Strings. The Dance Tent is sponsored by WakeMed, FOX50, and Golden Road.

Shout & Shine 2019 is dedicated to the memory of dancer, choreographer, innovator, and roots music luminary Eileen Carson Schatz. Admission is FREE. More information can be found through IBMA at worldofbluegrass.org.

Full Schedule:

12:00-12:45pm – Crying Uncle Bluegrass Band (open dance)

1:15-2:15pm – Nic Gareiss & Allison de Groot (step dance demonstration)

2:45-3:30pm – Hubby Jenkins (open dance)

4:00-4:45pm – Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer and the Grassabilly Rockets (open dance)

5:15-6:15pm – Cane Mill Road with Williette Hinton (open dance, buckdancing demonstration)

6:45-7:30pm – Lakota John (open dance)

8:00-9:00pm – Laurie Lewis & the Right Hands (open dance)

9:30-11:00pm – Shout & Shine Square Dance Party with Jake Blount, Tatiana Hargreaves,
Boo Radley (caller), and friends (inclusive square dance)

 

Tui, “Cookhouse Joe”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

“Old-time.” The moniker itself seemingly contains eons of musical cross-pollination, generations of aural tradition, lifetimes of carefully and purposefully — and haphazardly and accidentally — passing down the skills, stories, community, and tunes that make up the musical form. A new crop of old-time pickers has been slowly but surely emerging from the tight-knit, often insular (but almost never outright forbidding) ranks of the genre, with a continuing focus on the decades that have come before, but through a new lens. One of reclamation and representation, of mining stories and songs, one of painstakingly undoing the erasure that has prevailed over the history of any/all non-white, non-colonial, non-Christian, non-normative musics in this country.

Tui (pronounced TOO-EE), an old-time duo that includes fiddler Libby Weitnauer and multi-instrumentalist Jake Blount, perfectly epitomizes this new generation, this fiddle + banjo changing of the guard. In title and song roster their upcoming release, Pretty Little Mister, subverts the usual narratives of old-time — whether by turning the staple “Pretty Little Miss” on its gendered ear or by meticulously crediting and tracing back each track’s origins, often to fiddlers and pickers of color and other otherwise underrepresented folks of bygone eras.

“Cookhouse Joe,” the final tune on the album, was originally learned from a late-in-life recording of Kentucky fiddler Estill Bingham. And it’s okay that you might not recognize that name — that you probably will not is almost the entire point of the record. Tui has already done the work for their listeners, putting in the time to make sure that the old-time they create, for years past and the ages to come, tells the whole story of how and by whom this beautiful artistic tradition came to be. And on Pretty Little Mister it’s not only beautiful, it’s so much more.