Norman Blake Archives - The Bluegrass Situation

Guitarist Cameron Knowler’s Poetic Portrait of Yuma, AZ and the Gorgeous, Bleak Southwest

Posted on May 2, 2025 by Justin Hiltner

It’s a warm, summery day in early April when I sit down with archivist, writer, and guitarist Cameron Knowler on the shores of Old Hickory Lake in Middle Tennessee. Both Knowler and myself happen to now live in Old Hickory, a small village in Davidson County that was formerly a DuPont company town and is nestled on the edges of the eponymous, manmade US Army Corps of Engineers lake on the Cumberland River.

The setting is a far cry – geographically, topographically, and ecologically – from Knowler’s hometown of Yuma, Arizona, a place that serves as the inspiration, background, and foreground of his stunning new solo guitar album, CRK (released April 4 by Worried Songs). Knowler’s upbringing in Yuma was traumatic and bleak, not exactly a storybook experience by any measure. Still, like many roots musicians and creatives, the landscapes and dioramas of the wild west California/Arizona border town have become the guitarist-composer’s primary muse.

CRK sounds like the desert. Like hot, searing parking lots. Like mesquite and cactuses and roadrunners and mesas and red rocks. Stark flatpicked and finger-plucked melodies give equal consideration and immortalization to sweeping natural landscapes and small, depressingly human settings, too. Unlike so many of his subjects and inspirations in and around Yuma, this collection of compositions never moves to pave over the intricacies, nuances, and subversions Knowler finds in revisiting his hometown in music and memories. Still, the album is as gorgeous and transportive as any of our favorite famous paintings of the Old West, or soundtracks to iconic western films, or depictions of ancient pueblos. Perhaps his subject is a strip mall or a vignette of the proverbial “suburban hell,” but in this context each feels like an entire universe unto itself, a dreamscape – a home.

CRK opens with a gorgeous prose poem set to music, a track titled “Christmas in Yuma.” Immediately, the record is thereby attached through terroir and tradition to other western artists like Steinbeck and McCarthy. The album’s package is ornamented with gorgeous photographs, polaroids, bits of imagery, printed art, and poetry, further evoking artists we associate with the Southwest like Dorothea Lange and Linda Hogan. But the stories herein are told almost exclusively by guitar – usually Knowler solo as centerpiece, but sometimes joined by ensembles including guitarists Jordan Tice (who co-produced the project) and Rich Hinman, as well as other instrumentalists like Rayna Gellert, Robert Bowlin, Jay Bellerose, and more. The guitar is an instrument so pervasive and ubiquitous we often forget how aptly it can showcase these kinds of narratives, and how at home the six-string always feels in the West.

But with CRK, listeners won’t ever forget those facts. This is a narrative album. Is it also a technical achievement, intricate and intriguing and complex? Absolutely. But making an impressive guitar album was clearly not Knowler’s goal. Telling stories, with his medium being the guitar and the traditions that encircle it, was his chief aim. To say the project is successful in this regard would be an embarrassingly trite understatement.

And so, while watching the springtime water birds and snacking on lunch – with Knowler’s neck, wrists, and fingers dripping in Native-smithed silver and turquoise – we two sat down on the banks of a long, twisting lake on the Cumberland River in Nashville to discuss the guitar, the desert, and the little town on the banks of the Colorado River called Yuma – that Cameron Knowler once, and still, calls home.

I wanted to start by talking about place. I’m obsessed with how music has been slowly but surely divorced from its relationship to place over time. Your album, what jumped out at me immediately was it has such a strong relationship to place. How do you take something physical, tangible, geographical – a place like Yuma or Old Hickory Lake – and translate that into your medium? How do you think about evoking landscape or evoking an image with music?

Cameron Knowler: That’s a great question. I have like 10 ways of responding to that. As you said, music is getting divorced from place and I think it’s something of a cliche at this point that we’re losing regionalism. In the sense that, even with bow strokes– fiddlers in Galax, Virginia are different than fiddlers in northern Virginia. Not consciously, necessarily, but just as a colloquialism. As a part of their place. I didn’t [have] an old man or an old woman playing a fiddle who taught me tunes, I never had any of that [regionalism]. Instead, the “white kid from the suburbs” phenomenon happened. When I moved to Texas, I got connected with a regional fiddler in Terlingua, Texas – kind of [where the movie], Paris, Texas started. I learned his repertoire, which was interesting in that he learned a lot from Brad Leftwich when they were young and living in Santa Barbara. That was the void that I was missing. Not even musically, just in my life. I lost my mom, I lost my dad, I didn’t have family, so to me that was a cue, like a clue.

Then it flips, because there is a robust fiddle tradition of the Tohono O’odham [Nation] right there on the Yuma, Arizona/California border. But that’s not my culture. I could have gone in and said, “I’m gonna learn this tune” – or melody or whatever. Then that [could be] my way into the landscape. Instead of coming at it from an internal perspective, it was an external perspective, basically like a western painter. Like an oil painter painting Tucson or Walpi.

To answer your question, it’s slippery, ’cause you can’t go on stage and say, “Okay, this instrumental song is about a grocery store that I grew up driving by.” [Laughs] I can’t say that. It does come from that place, but I don’t say that. For me, the visual aspects of the record, I weigh them as equally, I would say, as the sonics. I think that’s where I can insert song titles – all the song titles on the record are related to Yuma.

There’s this tradition of stark solo or nearly solo acoustic guitar as an iconic sound of “the Wild West.” One of the first things I thought about listening to CRK is the score and soundtrack for Brokeback Mountain, so much of it is just solo plucked, tender guitar. Then of course in other music that evokes the West, you have sweeping strings and countrypolitan country and western. Even in that context you’ll often hear nylon-string guitar out front, solo. There’s something about unadorned guitar that is connected to landscapes.

But what I’m hearing you say is it’s not about translating the grandeur of Western landscapes at all. It’s about the grocery store, or it’s about the building that burned down, or it’s about a stretch of miles and miles of highway.

Totally. Yes. There’s so much programmed into the sound. David Rawling says, “The sound of a minor chord is a cowboy dying,” which is such a great way of saying that.

I believe this is true of the development of the flat-top guitar in general. At a certain point in 1934 or 1933, when the dreadnoughts start to get developed, there’s something about that that conveniently carries forward the agenda of interrelated musics – like Hawaiian music and bluegrass music for two totally different agendas. Then that [sound and body style] becomes the golden standard. But there were so many other brands and makers and thinkers from different cultures making guitars that, in an alternate universe not far from our own at all, would’ve been the golden standard. I feel the same way about the tradition of the music itself, right? And a dreadnought itself can do an infinite number of things, but just the format itself excludes a lot. As a constant instrument to play solo.

Another thing that David Rawlings says about his small guitar is that the smallest things sound the biggest, when they are in their own diorama – describing what he does with Gillian [Welch]. That’s his goal, to convince listeners that the “baby dinosaur” [small guitar] can actually eat them. Working in miniature, making little boats in glass bottles, you open yourself up, it’s an entire universe. The littlest things sound the biggest. In that way, there’s opportunity in the format itself.

I think people like Norman Blake and John Steinbeck are both hyper-regionalists who synthesize very eclectic sources to create something that is uniquely their own, but also totally comes outta left field. ‘Cause yeah, you think about Norman and certain people would say he is a flatpicker. Some people would say he was a pot smoking hippie who played with John Hartford – and they’re both equally true! Tying together otherwise disparate histories is a compelling format and is rewarding to the solo practitioner, I think.

We should talk about Steinbeck. We talked about it a couple of weeks ago when we first met by chance. But you starting the album with “Christmas in Yuma,” immediately I was like, “Oh, I know where we are. I know what we’re doing.” We’re in the West, there’s poetry/prose poetry happening. That song feels like it’s part of a longstanding tradition. Immediately I was thinking about a couple of my favorite Steinbeck passages listening to that.

Starting with poetry, starting with spoken word over that beautiful sound bed that you’ve created for it, what does that accomplish for you as an opening to a record?

Two things come to mind. Kenneth Patchen, who made these poetry records for the Folkways label in the ‘50s backed by a jazz band and it was almost comical, but he took it so seriously and it’s so convincing when you just forget what the format actually is. The great Texas – I don’t even wanna say outsider artist, but in terms of how he’s viewed – outsider artist Terry Allen, with some of his concept records like Lubbock (On Everything) with the pedal steel. You can do anything at that point. That’s why I started [CRK] out that way.

Also, quite frankly, Ice Cube’s records – I’m thinking of N.W.A. – start out with these sound collages of him getting arrested or walking down a cell block, or the imagined character is. To me, he could do anything after that point. He could make the amazing record that it became, or he could have done some something entirely different. I just think it’s an earnest way of saying, “I’m not trying to do what you [already] know.” We all know that everyone is infinitely complex, but in terms of what they release, it’s fine to not be infinitely complex?

For me, it’s not a flatpicking record. It’s not a fingerpicking record. I’m really not trying to make it a guitar record, so to speak. I wanted to make it a narrative record. [“Christmas in Yuma”] was just an earnest way of saying, “I’m not what you think I might be.”

It’s also a tradition in these roots and folk music spaces to play with expectation. People generally know what a solo guitar record is gonna sound like and what it’s gonna be and what it’s gonna do. I’m imagining a program director at a radio station putting on the record and doing the 30-second listen through – and the first song is poetry?!

I think maybe that’s what you’re talking about? Whatever conscious or subconscious projection you might have about what this album is in your hand, or what this is about to be as you put it on, you want to play with that projection. You’re saying, “I’m gonna tell you what this is.”

That is a beautiful point because, not to go too far back [in my history], but I was “unschooled” and I didn’t have a high school diploma or a GED. [Through all the hardships I’ve faced], I’ve learned this notion of leveraging. I surveyed how I was going to be able to reach people, and it gets more representative of myself as [time] goes. But it’s always been under the guise of leveraging unexpected muscle groups towards something else. That’s just built into this like fight or flight thing. I just have nothing to lose.

Your point about the radio DJ – or whoever that’s listening to the poetry – I think that’s a unique opportunity. At that point, they’re suspending judgment. If I wanna listen to a guitar record, I’m gonna listen to Leo Kottke 6- and 12-String Guitar. It’s perfect. It does exactly what it needs to do.

People should continue to try to make records like that. To me, it’s not a push against that at all. It’s starting out on a different foot. You may end up in a place that, by design, is very different than you would if you just tried to hit it on the nose. You can still hit it on the nose. Then you might even have a chance to open it up to somebody. Sometimes people just don’t know who Norman Blake is. But then, there’s a tune like “Yuma Ferry.” Who plays like that? Norman plays like that. If I were to make a whole record of “Yuma Ferry”-style tunes, I think everybody listening would know that it was a Norman Blake type of thing.

Let’s talk about “Christmas in Yuma” a little more in detail, because I’m curious about how you created it. Was it the poem that made the music happen, or the music demanded to have a poem set to it? What was the creative process like for the track?

I woke up from a nap on December 21, 2021, and I just went to Google Docs and typed it out. It just came out like that. The recording process, I had my friends Harry and Dylan sit down with me in our friend Marshall’s studio and we just recorded improvisations with the loose framework. [It’s read by my friend] Jack Kilmer, who similarly grew up in the Southwest. His father, like my mother, was also Christian Scientist. Those are all the things that were vibrating around. I was like, “He has to do it.” He’s an amazing voice actor, amazing actor, and just a great musician. Very musical and a beautiful artist. I had him do it first.

Then we went to the studio and we just said, “This is how long the track is. We’re not gonna play to the track. We’re just gonna play.” There was one take that was like the perfect length of time and I just put it under there. All those sonic features that interact with the vocal are totally incidental.

The music of CRK is so evocative and so visual and is so good at text painting, but I wanted to talk about your work in other media and about how you curated the package for the album, too. You’re so multifaceted in what media you’re working in – archives, photography, visual art, written word, music, melody. How do you see all those forms converging and diverging with this project specifically? Because I see your eye for detail at every level. You can just tell from the package that the whole thing is art to you, not just the songs.

Photography, it is always fiction. That, to me, is the beauty of it. If there’s a picture of someone jumping, you don’t really know where they jumped from. Or if they smile, they are actually crying? Maybe this person crying is not the good guy. Maybe they’re the bad guy.

You can start to track things like that, as the smile gets “invented” throughout photography. But it’s this line of fiction that, if you spend enough time with it, you can infer things right or wrong in there. They can all take you to a different place. Movies are that way, but you lose a little bit with the moving image. ‘Cause then you see the speed at which they’re moving, even if the frame rate isn’t representative of reality.

But then, say you’re playing jazz standards and you’re playing things with semantic content that came from a show, a Broadway show in the ‘40s. You’re shackled by the semantic content of that. I think it’s a convenient metaphor, in my opinion, to see photography and instrumental music as this thing, where – back to working in miniature – smaller things give you more room to insert yourself into it. I shouldn’t say more room, but there’s more fiction to play with, I would argue.

There’s less to compete with.

Right? In terms of things being programmed to you. In movies, you have the aesthetics, you have the costumes, you have the music, you have all this stuff. With photo books, the way that they’re sequenced by gestures is such a fitting way of dealing with sequencing things that aren’t visual. There’s a lot of inspiration from the photo book as a tradition, in terms of sequencing. And how with photojournalism, we don’t really have an American, coalesced identity of the West without the photography of the Dust Bowl. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at FSA photographs and there’s some great Dorothea Lange photographs in Yuma from May of 1935 which can be seen via the Library of Congress. I actually licensed one of them that was not within the purview of her [federal] work from the Oakland Museum and that’s in the song folio for CRK.

Obviously, Norman Blake is a really important musician to you and Dave Rawlings is as well. You’re talking about wanting to make music, wanting to make a record that isn’t just another acoustic guitar, flatpicking, flat-top record. Norman and Dave are great examples of guitarists who make albums that aren’t just the same old same old, and aren’t just products, they’re art. Both showcase that simple solo guitar, that miniature world we’re talking about, can be so expansive and huge and lush. But who are the others? Who are the folks that modeled for you that having your own voice and perspective on your instrument was more important than just doing it to do it. Or to be “best” or to sell yourself as a product for consumption?

For banjo, I think John Hartford. I love the idea that Blake Mills said, he called guitar an instrument for assholes. [Laughs] What I love about that is, no matter how you look at a guitar, the guitar is always a toy. [Andrés] Segovia tried to institute a formal repertoire. The bluegrass people tried to, the rock people [tried to]. Is Jimi Hendrix the definitive repertoire for the guitar? AC/DC? But, it’s still a toy. It’s still marketed as a toy.

I don’t need a million people to listen to my music to make a living or to keep doing it. It’s all within the art/archives, how to make these raw ingredients that are embedded into everyone into something that’s not commercial, but digestible.

In terms of other people [who inspired me]. John Fahey. Leo Kottke, but I didn’t fingerpick up until about three and a half years ago. About 80% of the record is finger picking. To your point about the poem earlier, there’s more outside of the solo, acoustic guitar canon of stuff, too. People like Rambling Jack Elliot and Sam Shepard, yeah.

One final point, I would play these solo concerts in Texas of just flatpicking melodies, like four flatpicking melodies in four different keys. And I was just like beating my head up against a wall, trying to tell some sort of cinematic, fiddle tune-driven [story over an entire set of just flatpicking]. I wanted there to be an arc. Through stubbornness, I decided I was going to learn how to fingerpick convincingly, where I had control of each voice. It’s really hard. It was a pain in my ass to figure that shit out.

But yeah, I see them all as tools: the poetry, the flatpicking, the fingerpicking, the drumming. It could be seen as pushing back against commercialism or whatever, but in some ways it’s actually the opposite. I was like, “I want more. I want a diverse audience. I want as many people to listen to this as possible.” Not sheer numbers, but in terms of who they are and what their listening diets are. Not just everybody in the audience being someone who will already know each of those fiddle tunes.

Photo Credit: Steve Perlin

You Gotta Hear This: New Music From Tim O’Brien, Joe K Walsh, and More

Posted on April 4, 2025 by Justin Hiltner

This week our roundup of premieres and new music is a special, “Oops! All Bluegrass!” edition of the weekly series. But still with plenty of variety herein.

Kicking us off, Infamous Stringdusters fiddler Jeremy Garrett unveils “Fly Away to Your Love,” a driving and bluesy modern take on how love can take command of your life, drawing inspiration from Romeo and Juliet. Garrett’s labelmates, Montana-based bluegrass band the Lil Smokies, continue with the theme of love, romance, and sacrifice with “Lay it Down for Love” – because investing in love always pays off.

Guitarist Cameron Knowler showcases “Mule at the Wagon” an acoustic guitar trio number from his new album CRK, which releases today and text paints the beautiful – and stark – Yuma, Arizona, its surrounding states, deserts, and the plains. Plus, mandolinist and professor Joe K. Walsh launches his new album, Trust and Love, today so we’re highlighting a lovely and vibey instrumental, “Oatmeal,” that he appropriately wrote over breakfast.

Bluegrass legend, multi-instrumentalist picker and singer-songwriter Tim O’Brien announces his upcoming album, Paper Flowers, today as well. The lead track from the project, “Lonesome Armadillo,” was written with folk icon Tom Paxton and O’Brien’s partner Jan Fabricius, who features across the new album. It’s a funny tale of a backyard critter trap and a surprise armored four-legged prisoner. Meanwhile, supergroup Sister Sadie bring us a devastating and heartfelt song, “Let the Circle Be Broken,” about interrupting cycles of generational trauma and finding redemption in ourselves and support systems. Written by Sadies Deanie Richardson and Dani Flowers with in-demand songwriter and artist Erin Enderlin, the track is moving and deeply resonant.

Each week of new music is its own adventure, but this roundup feels particularly superlative. You know what we think– You Gotta Hear This!

Jeremy Garrett, “Fly Away to Your Love”

Artist: Jeremy Garrett
Hometown: Drake, Colorado
Song: “Fly Away to Your Love”
Album: Storm Mountain
Release Date: March 28, 2025 (single); June 27, 2025 (album)
Label: Americana Vibes

In Their Words: “When troubles may come, in any relationship, the idea is to persevere – to overcome with grace. The hope of love eternal, or at least a love that stands the test of time. And in the end, like Shakespeare’s famous Romeo and Juliet, if it can’t be, then there is no hope of anything better. So, will it command your life? Is dying in hopes to be with the one you love better than life itself without that someone? Fly away to your love is a modern take, written in an old-time way, encompassing that passion and story in a song.” – Jeremy Garrett

Track Credits:
Jeremy Garrett – Lead vocal, fiddle
Chris Luquette – Guitar
Ryan Cavanaugh – Banjo
Travis Anderson – Bass

Cameron Knowler, “Mule at the Wagon”

<a href="https://worriedsongs.bandcamp.com/album/crk">CRK by Cameron Knowler</a>

Artist: Cameron Knowler
Hometown: Yuma, Arizona
Song: “Mule at the Wagon”
Album: CRK
Release Date: April 4, 2025
Label: Worried Songs

In Their Words: “‘Bull at the Wagon’ is a fiddle tune I sourced from The Lewis Brothers, a great old New Mexico-via-Texas string band with a sweet tooth for rambunctiousness. I changed ‘bull’ to ‘mule’ because, well, I’ve had a few donkey encounters out in West Texas, not far from where the Lewises cut their four sides for the Victor label in 1929. It’s one of those titles that popped into my life at the damndest times – while playing tunes with Frank Fairfield in Los Angeles, performing at a border crossing party in Terlingua, Texas, and visiting with Norman Blake at his home in Rising Fawn, Georgia. To my ear, its melody moves past some of the stylized landscape found in American traditional music these days; maybe it’s the way the four chord asserts itself in the second part, or the way the five chord lands so starkly and dominantly in the third; this mix of quick and static passages is highly generative for arranging and improvising.

“I wanted to see what this tune would yield in a lilting, sort of pastoral setting, so I called my talented friends Jordan Tice and Robert Bowlin who graciously agreed to record it with me at The Tractor Shed in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. Jordan tuned to open G (capo 2), I played out of standard (capo 2), Robert in standard with no capo. Mr. Bowlin and I are playing our old Gibson J-35s and Jordan is using his Preston Thompson OM. The performance found on CRK is one of the first takes.” – Cameron Knowler

Track Credits:
Robert Bowlin – Guitar
Cameron Knowler – Guitar
Sean Sullivan – Engineer
Jordan Tice – Guitar, producer

The Lil Smokies, “Lay It Down for Love”

Artist: The Lil Smokies
Hometown: Montana
Song: “Lay It Down for Love”
Album: Break of the Tide
Release Date: April 4, 2025
Label: Americana Vibes

In Their Words: “The greatest honor of my life is to have spent it fully immersed in music. That’s not to say it hasn’t come without cost. Words can’t carry the weight of the sacrifices required, though I’ve enjoyed trying to explain. All I know is that the loss and doubt I’ve faced has given me a more beautiful life than I ever imagined when I set out on this path. I wouldn’t change a thing. ‘Lay it Down for Love’ was written in some of the darkest days of my life, when there was no evidence that my wagers would come back to me. Today I hear it as a reminder that those days come and go, but investing in love always pays off.” – “Rev,” Matthew Rieger

Track Credits:
Andy Dunnigan – Dobro, vocals
Matthew Rieger – Guitar, vocals
Jake Simpson – Fiddle, guitar, vocals
Jean Luc Davis – Bass
Sam Armstrong Zickefoose – Banjo

Tim O’Brien & Jan Fabricius, “Lonesome Armadillo”

Artist: Tim O’Brien & Jan Fabricius
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Lonesome Armadillo”
Album: Paper Flowers
Release Date: June 6, 2025
Label: Howdy Skies

In Their Words: “There’s an awful lot of talk about migrants invading from the south, but nobody’s talking about armadillos. After we started trippin’ over little holes in our yard, Jan baited a raccoon trap, focused the security camera on it, and then we drove to Memphis to play a show. On the set break, we saw we’d caught the hard-shelled offender, but after the show we saw that he’d arched his back, bent the trap, and escaped. We told Tom Paxton about it the next week and he said, ‘Let’s tell his story.’

“Jan and I started weekly co-writing sessions with Tom in the spring of 2023 and twelve of the fifteen songs on our June 6th release, Paper Flowers, come from those Wednesday afternoon Zooms. It’s our first real collaborative project and a narrative of Jan’s and my life together runs through the record – from courtship to growing old together, with a road trip, the armadillo, and a granddaughter’s wedding in between.” – Tim O’Brien

Track Credits:
Larry Atamanuik – Drums
Mike Bub – Bass
Jan Fabricius – Mandolin, vocal, songwriting
Mike Rojas – Accordion
Justin Moses – Resophonic guitar
Tim O’Brien – Guitar, vocal, songwriting
Tom Paxton – Songwriting

Sister Sadie, “Let the Circle Be Broken”

Artist: Sister Sadie
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Let The Circle Be Broken”
Release Date: April 4, 2025

In Their Words: “Dani Flowers, Erin Enderlin, and myself wrote ‘Let the Circle Be Broken’ right after my Dad passed away. He was an abusive man who verbally, emotionally, and sexually abused me for most of my 18 years living at home with him. When I confronted him as an adult, he said that it had been done to him as a child. This song is about that generational trauma and abuse that keeps getting passed down. The continuing of that trauma and abuse stops with me. It doesn’t go any further. It was such a healing and therapeutic experience to write this with Dani and Erin. The recording session for this was so emotional for me. I felt like I was talking to my Dad at the end during the instrumental fade. He was there and he heard me. That circle is officially now broken.” – Deanie Richardson, fiddle

“Deanie, Erin, and I wrote this song about generational trauma, which each of us have experienced different levels of. This song is about how we’ve decided that these cycles that have been repeated over and over in our families end with us. I was born into a family of some of the worst types of people to ever exist in this world and it is sometimes so hard to sit with the fact that you come from a line of people who are capable of doing such awful things to others — to you. While I can’t say the same for many of my family members, I can say for sure that my children will never experience from me what I experienced from my mother and what she experienced from hers and what she experienced from hers.” – Dani Flowers, vocals

“The song ‘Let The Circle Be Broken’ touches us all within this band because of its very personal nature. We feel it every time we perform it on stage. Deanie, Dani, and Erin wrote an incredible song that touches the audience. It’s not uncommon to look out and see tears streaming down people’s faces. As a creator, it’s very overwhelming.” – Gena Britt, banjo

“I resonate so deeply with the message of ‘Let The Circle Be Broken’ and I find myself a little emotional every time we play it. As someone who is actively working to heal my own generational family trauma, seeing the strong women around me working to do the same makes me feel hopeful, grateful and connected.” – Rainy Miatke, mandolin

“I think ‘Let The Circle Be Broken’ is a beautifully written song that a lot of people need to hear. It has a very important message about stopping generational messes and I cry almost every time we play it. I love Deanie so much and I know this song means so much to her, as it does to all of us. ‘Let The Circle Be Broken’ I think could mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, too, and that’s the sign of a fantastic song. Dani Flowers, Deanie Richardson, and Erin Enderlin crafted an amazing piece of art.” – Jaelee Roberts, vocals

Track Credits:
Deanie Richardson – Fiddle
Gena Britt – Baritone banjo
Dani Flowers – Lead vocal
Jaelee Roberts – Harmony vocal
Mary Meyer – Mandolin, piano
Maddie Dalton – Upright bass, harmony vocal
Seth Taylor – Acoustic guitar, electric guitar
Dave Racine – Drums, percussion

Joe K. Walsh, “Oatmeal”

<a href="https://joewalsh.bandcamp.com/album/trust-and-love">Trust and Love by Joe K. Walsh</a>

Artist: Joe K. Walsh
Hometown: Portland, Maine
Song: “Oatmeal”
Album: Trust and Love
Release Date: April 4, 2025
Label: Adhyâropa Records

In Their Words: “There are so many tunes that I love that are comprised of an entirely (or almost entirely) diatonic melody which has been harmonized with non-diatonic chords. Some favorite examples are ‘Moon River,’ ‘Someone to Watch Over Me,’ David Grisman’s ‘Dawg’s Waltz,’ Pat Metheny’s tune ‘James,’ and Matt Flinner’s tune ‘Fallen Star.’ I’ve taught a tune-writing ensemble at Berklee for many years, with the idea that each of member of the ensemble writes and presents a tune every week, and I like to use this idea as a prompt for the students. This tune was one I wrote over breakfast in response to this prompt one morning before heading to Boston for school.” – Joe K. Walsh

Track Credits:
Joe K. Walsh – Mandolin
Rich Hinman – Pedal steel
Zackariah Hickman – Bass
John Mailander – Fiddle
Dave Brophy – Drums

Photo Credit: Tim O’Brien and Jan Fabricius by Scott Simontacchi; Joe K. Walsh by Natalie Conn.

10 of Our Favorite Roots Cellists

Posted on February 26, 2025 by Justin Hiltner

Though an uncommon encounter in the roots music scene, the BGS team will always applaud a roots, folk, bluegrass, or old-time cello moment. With velvety, rich tones and a unique percussive capacity, the cello deepens the flavor of every tune it encounters. While not considered a traditional bluegrass instrument, it carries an ancestry boasting many folk interweavings – and its proximity to both the upright bass and fiddle grant it a certain amount of creative leverage while integrating into roots music.

The cello’s undefined yet familiar positionality allows cellists an unconventional playing ground for innovation; without the same distinctly canonized roots traditions as say, the fiddle or the banjo, cellists can access a broadened range of textures and styles.

This list, though it is by no means comprehensive and is curated in no particular order, pays tribute to some of our favorite cellists in a variety of roots music contexts.

Leyla McCalla

A prolific multi-instrumentalist and multilingual singer, Leyla McCalla’s impact on the roots music scene continues to be nothing short of profound. An alumna of the GRAMMY-winning Black string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops and founding member of Our Native Daughters (alongside Allison Russell, Rhiannon Giddens, and Amythyst Kiah), McCalla also has five solo releases under her belt. She is the daughter of two Haitian immigrants and activists and her work is widely informed by Afrofuturist thinkers and Afro-diasporic musical influences. The 2022 recipient of the People’s Voice Award by Folk Alliance international, McCalla’s work has been recognized time and again for her deep commitment to ancestral study and social change.

More Leyla McCalla content here.

Mike Block

Ever seen a cellist perform standing up? If you have, they’ve probably heard of Mike Block. Among the inaugural wave of cellists to perform using a strap, Block was the first cellist to ever perform standing at Carnegie Hall and he did so using his own patented creation, the Block Strap.

Sonically, Block has also explored an expanded range of motion, as he is well known for his cross-cultural collaborations. While BGS fans may know him best from the Mike Block trio, his acoustic string band with Joe K. Walsh and Zachariah Hickman, Block also tours with an electric trio called Biribà Union, a duo with Indian tabla player Sandeep Das, a six-piece American/African fusion band, and the Silk Road Ensemble, a collective formerly spearheaded by fellow cello luminary Yo-Yo Ma. Block, astoundingly, has also released 20 albums of his own music, in addition to recording, performing, and arranging for other musical giants such as Miley Cyrus, Elton John, Raffi, and more.

Yo-Yo Ma

Perhaps one of the most renowned cello players of all time, Yo-Yo Ma is widely recognized for his feats in classical music. His discography includes over 120 albums (19 of which earned GRAMMYs), both paying tribute to the classical Western canon and forging revolutionary cross-cultural connections. One of our personal favorite examples here at BGS is Ma’s participation in the Goat Rodeo Sessions, a stellar 2011 collection of classical and Appalachian entwinements featuring Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile, with vocals from Aoife O’Donovan showcased as well. The result is nothing short of breathtaking – truly an original fusion of soundscapes that remained unparalleled until the supergroup’s release of their sequel album, Not Our First Goat Rodeo (2020).

Read our exclusive 2020 interview with Yo-Yo Ma on Not Our First Goat Rodeo.

Monique Ross

Hailing from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and now based in Nashville, cellist Monique Ross is one half of the dynamic sibling duo SistaStrings. She and her sister, Chauntee Ross (violin), blend their classical training with gospel, R&B, and folk influences to yield music that once again proves the age-old wisdom that there is nothing quite like sibling synastry. The pair’s vocal and instrumental prowess enrapture with both distinctive emotive execution and precise relationality. Both also perform as members of Brandi Carlile’s touring band and Carlile will serve as the producer for their upcoming project currently in the works.

Find more Monique Ross and SistaStrings here and here.

Larissa Maestro

Larissa Maestro is a Filipinx multi-hyphenate talent based out of Nashville, Tennessee. Named “Instrumentalist of the Year” at the 2022 Americana Music Awards, Maestro was the first cellist and the first member of the AAPI community to receive that honor. A composer and activist as well as a musician, Maestro arranges chamber music, co-founded a community orchestra (The Nashville Concerto Orchestra), and often fundraises for non-profit organizations through their craft.

Maestro’s ability to weave lush string arrangements into a vast array of genres positions them as a highly coveted collaborator, having worked alongside the likes of Hozier, Margo Price, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Ms. Lauryn Hill, John Legend, Allison Russell, and more as well as fronting and collaborating with various projects and bands.

Natalie Haas

Known for her impeccable traditional cello playing, Natalie Haas keeps centuries of Celtic traditions ablaze. She and Scottish fiddler Alasdair Fraser have toured together for twenty-three years, reviving and reimagining the tradition of cello/fiddle duets, popular in 18th and 19th century Scottish dance music. Though historically these duets featured a droning cello and melodic fiddle, Haas’s curiosity coupled with her virtuosity explore the cello as a dynamic instrument, capable of harmony, melody, percussion, and every blended iteration thereof. As Peter Winter once said, “Natalie basically wrote the book on the cello’s place in Celtic music.”

Ben Sollee

Ben Sollee is a Kentucky-based cellist and activist whose interdisciplinary work seeks to connect and elevate his communities. His most recent solo album, The Long Haul, interpolates both American influences and inspirations from the global south to deliver a dynamic album that, in part, processes the many griefs he faced during COVID’s inaugural years while maintaining a buoyant sense of resilience and growth. In addition to his innovative cello playing, Sollee works as a composer, having scored several films and the podcast “Unreformed.” Sollee has also recently helped spearhead a non-profit called Canopy to support local Kentucky businesses mindful of having a positive social and environmental impact on their community.

Read more about Sollee and The Long Haul here.

Nancy Blake

A pioneer for glimmers of cello in the modern American roots landscape, Nancy Blake is a cross-genre hero. Nancy began her relationship to the instrument at age 12 and grew up playing cello in the Nashville Youth Symphony. On a fortuitous day in 1972, her band Natchez Trace opened up for prolific picker Norman Blake. The two eventually married, and Nancy aptly fused her cello playing into Norman’s musical landscape. She also picked up several other more traditional roots instruments, such as guitar, fiddle, and upright bass, appearing on many of Norman’s releases throughout his career.

Joy Adams

Dr. Joy Adams is a versatile multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, composer, songwriter, and educator from Washington state who currently resides in Denver. While you may know her best from her extensive touring with Nataniel Rateliff, Darol Anger, and the all-women powerhouse group Big Richard, she has accrued a sprawling list of collaborators throughout her career. From recording on the Emmy award-winning soundtrack of The Queen’s Gambit to performing with the likes of Chick Corea, Kenny Loggins, Ben Folds, Waxahatchee, and more, Adams weaves energetic innovations into each of her collaborations.

Read our recent interview with Big Richard on their brand new album, Girl Dinner.

Casey Murray

Like many of our favorite cellists, Casey Murray is a talented educator in addition to their performance and compositional ventures. A Berklee grad based in the luscious roots scene of Boston, Murray finds much inspiration in blending Celtic, old-time, folk, classical, and improvisational sensibilities – like in their work with forward-looking string band Corner House. They particularly enjoy providing musical accompaniment for contra dances around the New England area, an exercise of their keen attunement to the rhythmic possibilities the cello has to offer.

Of course, even with ten incredible entries, our list of roots cellists barely scratches the surface of this vibrant community in folk, bluegrass, and beyond. With plenty of examples – like Rushad Eggleston, Nathaniel Smith, Kaitlyn Raitz, and many more – still to pull from, we’re already prepping a Part II to our roots cello exploration. Who would you include?

Photo Credit: Ben Sollee courtesy of Big Hassle; Leyla McCalla by Noé Cugny; Yo-Yo Ma by Austin Mann.

For Guitarist Jordan Tice, “Perfect” Recordings Are Never the Goal

Posted on January 20, 2025 by Justin Hiltner

Bluegrass. Newgrass. Chambergrass. Jamgrass. Thrashgrass. So many sub-genres, so little time. For guitarist Jordan Tice – solo artist and longtime member of Nashville-based Hawktail – there’s no time at all, because labels don’t define art and they don’t factor into his creative process.

“I don’t necessarily think about it,” he says. “I mostly do what I feel like doing and incorporate sounds that feel relevant, that I have a personal connection to and an excitement to explore, and the ability to replicate and share. I’d like to think that personality can unite disparate things if the heart is pure.”

Tice weaves a thread of musical connectivity on his new release, Badlettsville. The EP features two covers, Bob Dylan’s “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” and Randy Newman’s “Dayton, Ohio – 1903,” as well as the originals “Mean Old World” and the instrumental title track. The four are staples of his live shows, but only now have they been committed to recordings.

“They’re all fundamental to my show and are requested as much as my other songs, but they didn’t have a place on either the last record or the next one, so they belonged in Badlettsville,” he says. “They fit together sonically as well. As soon as we got those four things down, I was like, ‘This is something.’”

Ever busy, Tice isn’t slowing down in 2025, although the emphasis is shifting somewhat. After two hectic years, Hawktail is dialing back a bit on gigging and Tice is devoting time to another solo album. “Hawktail has an EP in the can that will hopefully get out sometime soon,” he says. “We’re doing a few festival gigs but taking a much lighter year. I’m doing some dates in support of [Badlettsville], in addition to festivals with Hawktail. But I’m trying to take a little bit of a step back to focus on making this new record.”

Your website bio begins, “Jordan Tice is a musical seeker of the most dedicated sort.” What does the term “musical seeker” mean to you?

Jordan Tice: I’m always exploring my own interests and creativity, and also exploring the music that I do play, the roots of that. I want to understand myself and everything I do, and everything that came before me, better.

Part of the art of music is communicating to anybody, not particularly musicians. The more you understand about music in general, the more you understand what works and what doesn’t. The more you do it, get out there, and play and make records, the more you understand how things register and land with people – different types of thoughts and sentiments, things like that. Music is the art of sculpting sound within a given amount of time for someone who’s giving you their ear.

How has that manifested itself over the course of your solo albums and Hawktail?

With everything you do, there’s something you want to repeat about it, but there’s also things you want to do differently. I mostly grew up writing instrumental music and Hawktail is entirely instrumental. Long about 2015 or 2016, I started writing songs like crazy, just out of nowhere, and I realized I needed an outlet for that. But the instrumental stuff is still near and dear. Keeping a foot in both doors allows me to scratch this itch and this love for both of these things I do.

Did moving to Nashville have something to do with your songwriting?

I think so. I can’t provide concrete evidence, but the coincidence is too great – the fact that I started writing songs right when I moved to Nashville. So the answer is yes, but I couldn’t tell you exactly how. I also started hanging out with a lot more songwriters. My community was more instrumental-based in Boston and New York, where I lived before, so there’s definitely the influence of some new friends I made upon moving down here.

You’ve been playing guitar since you were 12. Does it sometimes feel the same today as it did then?

Yeah. I actually started taking lessons again, from a classical guitar teacher, just because I have some time off the road this winter. There’s things I wanted to improve and I decided I needed some help. I’m always trying to improve, always listening to things, and even in the music I love, there’s still the same sense of mystery of, “How did they do that?” The breadth of everything you’re aware of and assimilated expands, but at the same time it’s the same old [thing].

What led you to classical training?

We’re not doing classical music per se, I should clarify. But a lot of the things I was hoping to work on were technical-based, and classical guitar has such a codified, rigorous, technical study and a pedagogy related to technique in a way that other genres don’t necessarily have.

I’ve studied a lot of facets of music, but I’m not formally trained by any stretch. I took some jazz guitar lessons here and there, and I studied composition, but in terms of guitar I’ve never had formal technical training. I felt I was up against some roadblocks and walls with my playing and decided I needed the help of an expert, a teacher. This [teacher] came strongly recommended from my friend Chris Eldridge from Punch Brothers, and it’s been rewarding to expand the technical facility side of things.

You played a Preston Thompson Brazilian Rosewood and your main guitar, a Collings, on Badlettsville. Tell us about those guitars.

I was at Laurie Lewis’s house in Berkeley with Brittany [Haas] from Hawktail. We were in town playing and we were helping her move some furniture. She had this Preston Thompson in the corner that she was trying to sell and I was interested. It’s from 2016. She hand-selected the cut of Brazilian rosewood, a beautiful piece of wood, and had them make it with this wood that she had sourced. I absolutely love it. It’s going to be my main touring guitar for my solo stuff coming up.

The Collings is a D1A mahogany dreadnought that I bought in 2014. It’s perfectly balanced. It almost sounds like an old guitar. The overtones are exactly right. I have a relationship with Collings, but I bought this one at The Music Emporium in Boston because I liked it so much. It’s been my main axe for the last ten years. It’s what I play in Hawktail and what I recorded my last solo record on.

I brought both of those guitars to the studio, in addition to this new Yamaha FG Indian rosewood guitar that I’ve been working with them for the last couple years to promote and develop. They’re great guitars, and it was a fun process getting to work with them and help get the word out. They’re really fantastic.

How do your picking styles with Hawktail, on your solo work, and with other artists come together to create your style?

I write a lot of music, so my identity as a writer maybe puts those things in the same world. So I would say that it’s filtered through the same mind, and also the conceit is that it’s my music. Hawktail is collaborative, obviously, but it’s part of the same musical world.

I’ve always looked up to Norman Blake and Doc Watson. Norman Blake does a lot of different things, but you don’t really think about it. He plays fingerstyle, flatpicking, traditional music, writes his own music, but it all makes sense in the context of his world. I’ve always admired that as an archetype for a folk musician. He’s himself first. He’s not a historian. He picks and chooses things that work in his musical world, as opposed to something outside of himself. He’s an artist that happens to combine all these folk music techniques and sources into something that’s his own.

You’re thought of primarily as an acoustic player, but you also play electric guitar. Which ones?

I grew up playing rock and roll, in addition to bluegrass and things like that. My first music was the Allman Brothers. I got together with this guy in my church and he showed me the twin lead thing. We’d learn the two leads and then we’d switch. That music is near and dear to me – Jimi Hendrix, the Allman Brothers. So I’ve always played a little electric too. I think it’s going to work its way into the next album.

My main electric is an American Standard Telecaster that I swapped out some of the pickups and modified a little bit. I put a higher-output Seymour Duncan pickup in the neck position and I made it a four-way switch, so you have the humbucker setting in addition to the normal three settings.

Also I have a Yamaha Revstar Professional that they just sent that I’ve been having fun with as well.

What do acoustic and electric guitar each bring out in your playing?

An electric allows you the opportunity to fill up a room with less effort. You can saturate a room with sounds with less notes, with less physical effort. An acoustic is a parlor instrument. It’s meant to be played in a small room with your head right up against it. As soon as you stop making noises with your hands, the noise goes away. With electric, a lot of times less is much more, and with acoustic, a medium amount is a medium amount.

With this new record, I’m going to do it with drums, so I’ve been messing around with pickups on electrics and … I don’t want to say effects, but ways to expand the breadth of the sound, get a little bit of that electric expanse, but still treating it like it’s an acoustic. That’s been a fun and interesting pursuit.

How does collaborating with other musicians push you musically?

I have a little home studio setup, but I love going to the studio. I love there being, “This is the time that we’re making the record. What happens, happens.” I think that urgency puts you into a superpower mode. Also the camaraderie. There is truly no substitute for live chemistry. AI can try all it wants, but it will never get it. The communication and sound that happens … there’s so much subconscious and physical factors that are changing constantly. You can’t substitute it.

I love the element of not trying to perfect things, of a record being a snapshot in time. Treating it that way helps you bring your A-game because it’s, “I need to be able to do this at any given time.” It makes you focus on delivering a performance, crossing all your T’s and dotting your I’s, so that it’s all there when it’s time to push “play,” or when it’s time to play with other people, or time to get in front of people.

What snapshot does Badlettsville represent?

The tunes weren’t created or arranged with the idea that they’d be on a record, so in some ways it’s like a snapshot of the live show I’ve been doing over the last couple of years. It’s really organic in that regard.

All these arrangements came about from playing live, specifically with Paul Kowert and Patrick M’Gonigle. Patrick’s been playing a lot of shows with me, and Paul is my BFF partner in crime in Hawktail and beyond, so it represents my relationship with those two guys in a big way.

Also my interests, the fact that there’s cover songs by Randy Newman and Bob Dylan. If I had to pick my two favorite songwriters, it would be them. It’s a snapshot in time of the manner in which I’m playing and thinking about music and the people I’m doing it with right now.

Photo Credit: Cameron Knowler

A True Original, Italian Guitarist Beppe Gambetta is a Bluegrass Innovator

Posted on November 26, 2024November 27, 2024 by Justin Hiltner

Most listeners would probably attribute the incredibly unique musical approach of guitarist Beppe Gambetta to his country of origin. Being a native of Genoa, Italy, he certainly brings a global and European folk flair to his bluegrass and old-time inflected six-string compositions. But it would be shortsighted to simply credit that truly original voice to mere geography.

Gambetta is an instrumentalist who always works with intention. Developed over a lifetime of playing and cultural cross pollination, his style exists in the fertile ground somewhere between a triangulation of Norman Blake, Doc Watson, and Django Reinhardt. He’s learned from, recorded, collaborated, and performed with so many of “greats” such as these across several generations of American roots music virtuosos. Gambetta is a bluegrasser through and through, but he’s also so much more.

His latest album, Terra Madre (released in April 2024), is a lovely continuation of his lengthy and harlequin catalog of recordings. It’s bilingual, cinematic, and thoughtful, while also impassioned and brash. But he’s never a one-note musician, so the collection is artfully subtle at the same time. Gambetta doesn’t just know this intersection – aggressive and gentle, bold and subdued – it’s as if he lives there. It’s his address.

Perhaps most of all, Gambetta is a perfect representation of how an individual can bring himself into a generational folkway and established aural tradition such as American roots music, while simultaneously preserving his selfhood and his singular point of view. Our email interview, like the new record, is a perfect representation of Gambetta’s melting pot style – and the way he uses the entire earth, terra madre, as his medium.

The title track of Terra Madre is cinematic and vibey, with a bit of funk and a dash of charming silliness. I love that it starts with the sound of footsteps, grounding the listener on terra madre herself. Can you talk a bit about the song, its title, and how being embodied on earth, on this rock hurtling through space, inspires your music and songwriting?

The song “Terra Madre” is the most dramatic of the album: the footsteps are from a couple of escaping refugees, the song is about their dreams. They meet with friends and jump the border wall in the dark of the night with fear, pain and hope. We don’t know the exact story, the place where it happens is also unknown in order to represent a ubiquitous pain that can be found all over the world.

It was hard to express these extremely dramatic sentiments only with acoustic instruments, but the use of the flatpicking style with strong bass lines and heavy strums turned out to be a good tool. I used a regular guitar but also a low bouzouki guitar and few slide guitars “prepared” with special strings and tunings. As you noticed, I added the sound of the escaping steps in order to ground the listener to the earth and with drummer Joe Bonadio we decided not to use the snare drum in order to create a more “suspended” atmosphere only with toms and cymbals.

How much of the earth’s current worries are in this album? How much did the planet’s current state of being inform the song itself?

The album’s general concept is related to the cry of pain that rises from our Earth and to the right of musicians to dream about a better world in moments of darkness. In the different songs there are dreams for a better life, for peace, repentance, friendship through music, adventure, forgiveness, survival of minority cultures, redemption, dreams to win, rage, envy, hate, and more.

In a period where leaders and politicians in charge are not able to resolve conflicts and crises there is a need for every other category to give a positive contribution. Probably scientists, philosophers, historians, theologists will give important contributions, but also artists can do their part.

I’m sure that even in modern times there is still a strong power that comes from folk songs and I decided to write my songs in different languages. For different reasons the album is totally self-produced and if you self-produce you need to put more love, passion, time, and money using all your resources.

“Sit and Pick with You” is certainly the stand out track on the album. Can you talk a bit about that song, its meaning, and how important the community aspect of this music is? Because, truly none of us would exist as pickers in bluegrass and string band music without folks – whether friends or peers or heroes or legends – to sit and pick with.

The inspiration for the song came to me during a California tour. I wrote it in order to celebrate some musical encounters with legendary fathers of the music – David Grisman, Dan Crary, Peter Rowan – dear friends who, at the end of their careers, continue to hold high the torch of beauty. I wrote the song with the sounds of the 1930s in mind, with a guitar riff inspired by “The Wildwood Flower” or “Jimmy Brown the Newsboy,” because I believe it is a timeless sound that can still speak to people’s hearts and move them.

I decided to sing the song as a duo, like an old brother duet. I first asked Norman Blake by sending him a handwritten letter in pencil, as we used to do in our correspondence in the 1980s. The reply was really kind, also handwritten by Nancy and signed by Norman, who thanked me for the thought and encouraged me in the project, but at that time Norman felt that his voice was not at the right level to appear on an album.

Luckily, my friend Tim O’Brien was available to sing it and did it with a perfect vintage-style rendition. Then David Grisman added his unmistakable signature [sound] on mandolin. Dan Crary played guitar in harmony, taking advantage of the depth of his “long neck” guitar tuned down a tone. The final touch to the quartet’s sound came from bassist Travis Book.

The positive meaning of the song is felt by many fans who identify with the sentiments it expresses: The joy of getting together and the friendship that comes from the beauty of music. Many began to incorporate it into their jam sessions with friends, as it happened at the Walnut Valley Festival campground in Winfield, Kansas, a gathering place for music lovers par excellence. I received many requests for the guitar part and finally now I distribute the tablature at all my concerts. For sure, this is the standout track of the album and it got a very special recognition and attention. It was number one in the Folk DJ chart in June and July and still now it is present in the top positions.

Your approach to the guitar – and really, to music and composition and picking in general – is totally unique. You have a voice all your own on the instrument. I think a lot of listeners on this side of the Atlantic would attribute that to your being Italian, but I think that’s a bit shortsighted and simplistic. How have you cultivated your particular style and how do you keep your music and creativity fresh and innovative, to yourself and to your listeners?

I wanted to develop my own particular voice, starting from the style of the American fathers and filtering in the influences gained during my tireless journey on the road that has given me particularly formative encounters, not only in Italy but in the whole world. It took time and attention, choosing and adding to my style drops of beauty from different sources, trying to limit the obvious “Tony Rice mania” and using ideas also from Dan, Norman, Clarence and much more.

For sure, all my studies about old Italian music and generally my natural Italian aesthetic sense and passion for melody has influenced my style. The work that I did in researching and studying the “Italian string virtuosi” and performing the albums Serenata and Traversata (produced with David Grisman) left an important mark in my playing.

Studies and stylistic research in flatpicking can go in different and almost opposite directions. On the one hand, the virtuosity of breathtaking phrasing combined with speed and improvisation – the shiver in your spine that you start to feel when you listen for the first time to “Black Mountain Rag.” On the other hand, the search for expressive techniques and melodies that touch the listener’s soul – the passion and tenderness of “Church Street Blues” in Tony Rice’s version is the perfect eye-opener to the expressive potential of flatpicking beyond mere circus performance.

This second aspect, probably underestimated in the current scene, is the one that fascinated me the most. I worked a lot to learn to play slow (using tremolos, partial strummings, crosspicking, and “separate crosspicking” on two, four, five, six strings, string jumps, crosspicking to obtain grace notes, etc.).

Rhythmic tension and speed, however, continue to fascinate me; it was fun to develop the licks of my tune “Chipmunk,” an instrumental that describes the run of New Jersey’s fastest pet on the front porch of our Stockton home, using down-down-up on two strings at 162 beats.

The secret of the freshness of my style stays in continuing to be excited by both creating something new and playing something old, and in sharing this happiness every day with my wife Federica! Often before taking the stage I revive the memory of those who helped me and believed in my art (Mama Gambetta first of all) and this gives me a strong power. Even if I am close to my seventieth birthday I continue to be ready and happy to do my job.

I also think your shows are so stunning and one-of-a-kind, too. You do so much with just a guitar, your voice, and your stories. How do you keep your show engaging and interesting, when you have so few variables or so few inputs? Do you find such a stark set up to be limiting or empowering or…

Standing in front of an audience with one guitar, a voice, and a pick is certainly a big challenge. That is why I have been working over the years to create a show that I can take to audiences around the world and to distant places. I try to speak to people’s hearts and maintain my authenticity, deciding to minimize the use of excessive volume, technology, and sound effects, avoiding wiggles and winks, and simply presenting myself as I am, as if I were playing acoustically in a living room.

An artist who influenced me in this direction was John Hartford, for whom I opened a concert in Ohio many years ago and I was inspired by his charisma in communicating alone with the audience. Over the years I have studied singing, learned how to narrate and create special atmospheres with the use of open tunings and different languages, and also to joke with the audience with “Old World” irony. Not to mention “Gino,” the name I gave to my pedal loop, which I always use sparingly and treat as an old cousin who travels with me and accompanies me with his guitar.

In music, limitations are often a source of creativity; Django Reinhardt invented amazing phrases using only two fingers of the left hand, blues harmonica players got missing notes by inventing bending, and so on. In flatpicking, the strong limitation is the inability to play two distant strings at the same time as you would do easily with fingers. The effort to overcome this limitation has always forced me to invent creative solutions.

Can you tell us the story or stories behind “Saint James Hospital”?

In 2023, on the centenary of Doc Watson’s birth, in addition to visiting his grave and playing a tune for him, I decided to rearrange some of the master’s songs so that I could celebrate him on many occasions, because Doc was my most important influence and changed my artistic life.

Doc was a giant because he invented a fresh repertoire for the acoustic guitar and developed a unique and engaging way of building a show. Among the various songs of his repertoire, “Saint James Hospital” represents his extraordinary ability to discover and rearrange true gems of beauty. “Saint James Hospital” comes from ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s earliest field recordings, when he was first allowed to record the prisoners in a Huntsville, Texas, jail in 1933. Among the various prisoners was James Baker, known as “Iron Head,” and from this seemingly dangerous character came a song with a refined and touching melody that spoke of repentance, redemption, and a dream of a better end of life.

For me it was a challenge to create a new arrangement after Doc Watson’s and Tony Rice’s masterpieces. I decided to invent a new interlude using many guitars in different tunings and I completed the arrangement on the high register with the arpeggio of a Cuban tres. The result was well-rewarded because also “Saint James Hospital” appeared for many months on the Folk DJ charts.

What’s next for Beppe Gambetta? What should folks be watching out for?

One of the reasons I continue to be active and innovative with so many projects is because I am lucky enough not to have a retirement plan! It’s a joke that tells the truth: The anxiety of having to keep working for a long time feeds my creativity and helps my determination to invent new music, new productions, new events and embark on new journeys.

Future projects fortunately are many, first of all the upcoming tours in America and Europe in support of Terra Madre.

Besides touring, an event I’m very excited about will happen on February 15, 2025 in Mendocino, California. It will be a reunion concert with Dan Crary, who just turned 85. We will celebrate his legacy and more than 30 years of touring as a duo. On May 15-16-17, 2025 there will be the 25th edition of my Acoustic Nights, a thematic concert series with international artists on the stage of the Teatro Nazionale in Genoa, Italy, an event that we conceived with [my wife] Federica and made grow over the years. The edition number 25 promises to be a beautiful big party with a large audience of friends who will come from far away to celebrate.

Also, in Italy, I produced two different plays with actors and script, one related to my autobiographical book, Declarations of Love, and the other related to songs about legendary bandits.

Among the American projects I would like to mention, the trio show about Italian virtuosi of the early 20th century with Mike Guggino and Barrett Smith (members of Steep Canyon Rangers). It is a “side” project that is growing over the years and for the first time we will take it to a festival, Wintergrass, in 2025.

With the Folk Project in Morristown, New Jersey, we started an annual event, the New Jersey Guitar Summit, an educational full-immersion event with a final concert (held in October). And also in New Jersey on January 11 and 12 we will have my “home concerts” with guest Bruce Molsky at the Prallsville Mills in Stockton, New Jersey.

If there were any picker, living or passed, that you could sit and pick with today, who would it be and why?

In this respect I am very fulfilled, because one of the greatest joys of my artistic life is that at different times I was able to play “Salt Creek” with Doc Watson, Norman Blake, Dan Crary, and Tony Rice, four fathers of the music I love.

Of course, if I had the time machine, I would also choose to play “Salt Creek” with another great father of flatpicking, Clarence White, who I never met because he died young in a car accident. Using the same time machine I would certainly travel to Paris to play with Django Reinhardt, then I would move to Argentina to make music with the tanguero Roberto Grela. In Portugal it would be wonderful to meet the Portuguese guitar passion of Carlos Peredes, while in Italy I would certainly love to meet the early 20th century virtuoso Pasquale Taraffo, the inspiration for so much of my research.

The most enjoyable jam session of the last few years was with guitarist Cameron Knowler, a young picker who amazed me by cultivating and carrying forward into modern times the sounds of Riley Puckett and Norman Blake, a sign that among the new generations there is a refined aesthetic sense that goes beyond fashions and gives us hope for the continuation of the forgotten beauties of the past.

Photo Credit: Giovanna Cavallo

Bluegrass Memoirs: The Earl Scruggs Revue Early Recordings

Posted on November 19, 2024November 19, 2024 by Justin Hiltner

In our last Bluegrass Memoir, “Beginnings,” I described David Hoffman’s documentary, Earl Scruggs with his Family and Friends. By the time NET aired it, the Revue was already off and rolling with Earl’s new music.

In 1970, bluegrass festivals – the first was in 1965 – were becoming quite popular. The music’s supporters had discovered that such events could present their favorite music to broader, younger, urban audiences. These larger crowds brought their tastes and preferences with them. At these booming festivals, new acts like the Earl Scruggs Revue spoke to musical perspectives shaped by contemporary popular music.

The Revue played to large numbers at Monroe’s Bean Blossom Festival that spring and to Carlton Haney’s Camp Springs Festival on Labor Day weekend. Earl’s solo album, Nashville’s Rock, and Randy and Gary’s solo album, All the Way Home, were released that year.

The Earl Scruggs Revue at Bill Monroe’s annual Bean Blossom festival, Bean Blossom, Indiana, June 1970. (L-R) Unidentified bassist, Jody Maphis, Randy Scruggs, Earl Scruggs, Gary Scruggs, and Leah Jane Berinati. Photo by Carl Fleischhauer.

In 1971, Columbia released Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends (C 30584), a soundtrack album that included much of the content of Hoffman’s documentary along with two additional fine vocals by Doc Watson. In its liner notes, Don DeVito characterized the show’s topic:

Earl Scruggs is a man who has paid his dues. You can forget the generation gap … Earl has always been an innovator and an adventurer…

Also in 1971, newgrass music emerged. Its key figure at that time was singer-songwriter and banjoist John Hartford, whose “Gentle on My Mind” had been a 1967 Glen Campbell hit. John had flourished in the LA television business as a writer for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and a performer on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour.

Hartford and Scruggs – they’d met in 1953 – had developed what Bob Carlin, in My Memories of John Hartford (University Press of Mississippi) calls “a deep friendship.” When Hartford returned to Nashville in 1971, he recorded what is now considered the first newgrass album, Aereo-Plain. The Revue’s Randy Scruggs played bass on this ground-breaking disc alongside Tut Taylor, Vassar Clements, and Norman Blake.

The Revue and Hartford were at the center of Nashville’s jam-based music, which embraced musicians from new scenes blending rock and older genres – folk, bluegrass, and country. Both bands appeared at a number of bluegrass festivals in 1971 and the Revue was busy recording in Nashville.

I Saw The Light With Some Help From My Friends (1972)

Earl was working on his next album, I Saw The Light With Some Help From My Friends: Earl Scruggs with Special Guest Stars. The back liners of the album (Columbia KC31354) described it as “Earl Scruggs and The Earl Scruggs Revue in performances with Linda Ronstadt/The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band/Stacey Belson and Arloff Boguslavaki.”

Stacey Belson was a pseudonym for blues singer Tracy Nelson, then with the band Mother Earth. Arloff Boguslavaki was Bob Dylan’s pseudonym.

Bill Williams’ liner notes describe the fabulous jam sessions that were happening at the Scruggs family house – hence the album’s concept:

Picture, if you will, the group sitting around together at the Scruggs home (although the actual locale was shifted to Columbia Studios) …

For this album, the studio became the living room and the producer was Don Law, the Nashville vet who’d worked in the ’30s with blues legend Robert Johnson and western swing pioneer Bob Wills and in the ’50s with Flatt & Scruggs.

At this Scruggs family jam session were Earl and sons along with their Madison High School contemporary, drummer Jody Maphis. Also in the room were fiddler Vassar Clements, in the process of moving from Hartford’s band to join the Revue, and several others who’d later join the Revue, including pianist Bob Wilson, a Detroit R&B musician who’d moved to Nashville and subsequently recorded with Bob Dylan.

Each of the featured star guests are heard in solo, sometimes singing in harmony with each other. Earl plays on every cut. Great to hear his backup work with all its nuances! Randy’s lead guitar and Vassar’s fiddling appear throughout.

It was as if these people had showed up at the Scruggs home one evening to play for and with each other – an old-fashioned domestic music session, with the host going around the room inviting each to perform and providing musical backups for all. The evening’s repertoire was the kind of stuff you might expect at such an event: mostly recent country, folk, blues and rock – things you might have heard on the radio lately in 1971.

The sound was that of contemporary popular music, suggesting that this was what you’d hear if the Earl Scruggs Revue came to your living room, festival, or auditorium.

The album’s first side opens with an LA country soul rock tune, Bonnie and Delaney’s “Lonesome and a Long Way From Home.” Gary is singing lead and playing bass; Nelson adds harmony. This is rocking R&B – Wilson’s piano opens the break and, with fiddle and drums, keeps it rocking to the end. Earl’s banjo is out front throughout.

Next comes Merle Haggard’s “Silver Wings,” sung by Linda Ronstadt with harmony by Nelson. The backup piano and Dobro are joined by a fiddle break. Straight-ahead Nashville country.

Track three features “Boguslavaki” (Dylan) singing Charles E. Baer’s 1896 hit, “It’s a Picture From Life’s Other Side,” a song that had gone into the folk tradition and been frequently recorded by hillbilly and gospel singers in the ’20s and ’30s. The laid-back fiddle, bass, and drums, along with Nelson’s harmony on the chorus, mark this as a parlor folksong.

It’s followed by Nelson’s performance of “Motherless Child Blues,” where accompanying musicians Earl, Norman Blake, Randy, and Vassar stretch out with some nice blues breaks.

This side closes with Mike Nesmith’s “Some of Shelley’s Blues,” performed with members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, with Gary Scruggs and Jeff Hanna doing the singing and Earl and Randy both taking instrumental breaks.

The second side of the album opens with a vocal by Gary on another Bonnie and Delaney cover, “Never Ending Song of Love.” Ronstadt sings a county cover, Cash’s “Ring of Fire.”

Dylan brings out another pre-war country folk oldie, a great “Banks of the Ohio.” While Nelson is featured singing folksinger Bruce “Utah” Phillips’ “Rock Salt and Nails,” a song first recorded by Flatt & Scruggs in 1965, with Ronstadt adding harmony on the chorus.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band contributes another Nesmith song, “Propinquity.” The side closes with the album’s title track, a sing-along for everyone, “I Saw the Light.” The album was released in 1972.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972)

Around the same time as I Saw The Light was made, banjoist John McEuen of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band asked Earl to be on their new three-LP concept album, Will The Circle Be Unbroken. Scruggs was playing in Denver with the Revue when he and McEuen met. The Dirt Band’s sound, with McEuen’s skilled Scruggs-style banjo, appealed to him, as did their project to honor and make music with the earlier generation’s pioneers. That had been his own goal in bringing Maybelle Carter into the studio to record with Flatt & Scruggs back in 1961.

Earl, well-connected in Nashville as an Opry star with record, television, and movie hits, helped bring a number of his country music friends into the project. Both Gary and Randy were also involved, as were several of Hartford’s Aereo-Plain band members, notably fiddler Vassar Clements and Dobro player Norman Blake.

Unlike Earl’s Nashville’s Rock album, which covered recent rock and pop hits on the banjo with Nashville studio backing including electric instruments and, on several cuts, a soulful female vocal trio and a string section, this album had completely acoustic backup by the Dirt Band as they covered legacy hits by country, bluegrass and folk pioneers like Roy Acuff, Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson, and Jimmy Martin.

Earl played a pivotal role in the making of these recordings, playing guitar or banjo on sixteen tracks. The whole Scruggs family can be heard: Randy contributed guitar, autoharp, or voice on eleven tracks, Gary sang on eight, and Louise and Steve sang on one track.

Of the many interesting performances on this award-winning album, Randy Scruggs’ acoustic guitar version of “Both Sides Now” was perhaps the most remarkable; the final selection in the set, it followed a group sing-along of the title track, similar to the closing on the Earl’s I Saw The Light, in which all of the Scruggses sang. These recordings, released in 1972, were made in August 1971.

The Scruggs Brothers (1972)

Also recorded in 1971 was Gary and Randy’s second Vanguard album, The Scruggs Brothers (Vanguard VSD 6579). Some of the same musicians who played on I Saw The Light performed here, like Tracy Nelson, the Dirt Band’s Jeff Hanna and John McEuen, pianist Bob Wilson, and drummer Karl Himmel; but the album had more of a country rock sound. It opened with “Little Maggie,” a song Flatt & Scruggs had recorded at Carnegie Hall in 1962. With Gary’s bass and Jody Maphis’ drums leading the way, it sounded something like the Nashville studio A-listers Area Code 615’s 1969 version.

Throughout the album, Randy played a majority of the solo breaks, some on acoustic guitar but most on electric, in a heavy metal style similar to what I heard him playing in Maine in 1975. Four tracks were their own compositions, two by Gary and two collaborations.

On one, the instrumental “Trousdale Ferry Rag,” Earl played banjo. This up-tempo, bluegrass-style piece has an unusual ending, shifting to a slow blues beat. Most notable is Gary’s “Lowlands,” a great ballad set to the tune of Earl’s “Sally Ann,” which both brothers had been hearing at home all of their lives (Flatt & Scruggs recorded it in 1960). Gary plays guitar, Randy picks banjo.

Covers of older (dare we say traditional?) material includes a rocking version of Jimmie Rodgers’ “T for Texas,” and the other cut on which Earl played banjo, “Hobo’s Lullaby,” which features a sing-along chorus similar to that on the closing of the I Saw The Light and Will The Circle Be Unbroken albums. Another older piece was “The Johnson Boys” (Flatt & Scruggs did it 1962) on which John McEuen’s frailed banjo created the album’s most old-timey sound.

The Earl Scruggs Revue at Bill Monroe’s annual Bean Blossom festival, Bean Blossom, Indiana, June 1970. Randy Scruggs, Earl Scruggs, and Gary Scruggs. Photo by Carl Fleischhauer.

The boys’ continuing involvement with country rock is reflected in two songs that originated in 1967 with the LA band Hearts and Flowers. “Rock and Roll Gypsies,” which closes the first side of the album, seems to have been an attempt to garner radio play – it’s the only track on the record to include string section backup. The other Hearts and Flowers-connected track, “Bugler,” a sad song about the death of a dog, had recently been covered by Clarence White with the Byrds.

Live at Kansas State (1972)

During this year of extensive studio recording, the Revue was also out playing on the road. Although Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends included a few examples of the group in action outside the studio, Live at Kansas State (Columbia KC 31758) was their first full show album.

Many of the songs the Revue did at this 1972 concert remained in the band’s regular repertoire and showed up, for example, at the 1975 Maine concert, including “T for Texas,” “Paul and Silas” (they titled it “Bound in Jail All Night Long”), “Sally Goodin[g],” “Carolina Boogie,” “Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven,” and “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”

Several were on their recent albums, like “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and “Both Sides Now.” Bluegrass classics included “Good Woman’s Love” and “Bugle Call Rag.”

In 1998, a reviewer for No Depression wrote that Live at Kansas State was “probably their album most deserving of a full reissue … a surprisingly cohesive ‘bluegrass-rock’ blend, the likes of which has seldom been heard since.”

In 1972, the band included fiddler Vassar Clements and Dobroist Josh Graves, a bluegrass icon who’d just left Lester Flatt’s band. The album package has several photos of the band; these are notable in that they include everyone but pianist Bob Wilson, who is very much present in the album’s audio.

Wilson had moved to Nashville from Detroit’s R&B scene. His first years in Nashville were slow going, but that changed when Bob Dylan came to town to record Nashville Skyline and wanted “a funkier piano sound than the usual Nashville cat could produce.” The success of his work on Dylan’s album gave him plenty of studio work and he also found time to go on the road with Scruggs.

“When I was with the Earl Scruggs Revue,” he recalled, “Earl always introduced the band, and when he came to me, he always told the crowd, ‘And this is the man who played piano on Nashville Skyline, Bob Wilson.’ I must admit the applause felt really good.”

In his memoir, Bluegrass Bluesman, Graves spoke of the challenges he enjoyed while rocking with the Revue: “Earl and that bunch forced you to work up new licks. You had to come in there on the stuff they were playing. It was so loud I couldn’t hardly stand it, but I really enjoyed it. It opened a lot of doors for me. They were into a lot of things. …”

“Earl was doing the same old tunes with a little modern touch. Earl got bored with bluegrass – I’ll tell you that. He just didn’t want to play it anymore. They had that big beat, that sound behind it, and that’s what he liked.”

“He’d play ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ with that band and people would go wild.”

I saw this, too, in Orono in 1975.

The Revue carried on into the early ‘80s, with albums that drew from contemporary pop music and brought younger country, folk, and rock stars in as guest artists. We’ll touch on a few of these next time.

(Editor’s Note: Read our prior Bluegrass Memoir on the Earl Scruggs Revue here.)

Neil V. Rosenberg is an author, scholar, historian, banjo player, Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee, and co-chair of the IBMA Foundation’s Arnold Shultz Fund.

Photo of Rosenberg by Terri Thomson Rosenberg.
Inset black and white photos by Carl Fleischhauer, courtesy of Carl Fleischhauer.

Edited by Justin Hiltner.

LISTEN: Bob Minner, “Ginseng Sullivan” (Featuring Ron Block)

Posted on February 25, 2022 by Editor

Artist: Bob Minner
Hometown: DeSoto, Missouri
Song: “Ginseng Sullivan” (Featuring Ron Block)
Album: From Sulphur Springs to Rising Fawn
Release Date: March 11, 2022
Label: Engelhardt Music Group

In Their Words: “As musicians, we’re instinctively drawn to songs and the people who write them. That’s been my musical life with Norman Blake. His classic ‘Ginseng Sullivan’ is a true gem in both Blake’s legacy and the bluegrass, Americana, and folk genres. Recording this fresh interpretation with my old friend Ron Block was such a great experience. And the friendship with Norman and Nancy that has stemmed from this project is truly one of the most cherished experiences in my life. I hope you all enjoy what we’ve done.” — Bob Minner

Photo Credit: Ginger Minner

Inspired by Tony Rice, Punch Brothers Give ‘Em ‘Hell on Church Street’

Posted on January 25, 2022January 27, 2022 by Editor

It was banjo player Noam Pikelny who heard first. On December 26, 2020, he messaged his Punch Brothers bandmate Chris Eldridge to tell him the news that Tony Rice, their bluegrass hero and Eldridge’s guitar mentor, had died on Christmas Day. “It just didn’t seem like it could be real,” says Eldridge. “It was a complete shock.”

The band felt more than just sadness at the legend’s passing; there was regret, too. Eldridge had thought about calling Rice to tell him what they had been working on — a reimagining of his landmark album, Church Street Blues — but had resisted the urge. “I thought, you know what, it’ll be cooler if I can just give him the music. ‘Hey, we made a thing for you…!’” The moment had never come. It was a heartbreaker.

Hell on Church Street, Punch Brothers’ sixth full album, was recorded in Nashville the month before Rice died. The 1983 solo record that inspired it is high canon among bluegrass lovers with its wistful songs and fiddle tunes repurposed as dazzling guitar solos, laid down in the period when Rice was opening up bluegrass music in multiple directions at once. Punch Brothers have remained faithful to the original tracklist, but equally to Rice’s boundary-pushing creativity.

What emerges is a kaleidoscopic mise en abyme — their versions of Rice’s versions of songs by Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Gordon Lightfoot, et al. — both reflecting bluegrass’s rich progressive history and refracting through their own endlessly inventive perspective. Those hoping for Chris Thile to indulge in some light Gordon Lightfoot karaoke, in other words, will be disappointed. A few have already cried sacrilege. Witness the internet backlash that accompanied the band’s release of the title track, which resets Norman Blake’s famous lyrics to an urgent 5/4 meter.

“You never want to admit you look at internet comments but some people were pissed,” says Eldridge. “I thought, oh boy, wait til these people hear ‘Gold Rush!’”

Even Pikelny admits he had a few early qualms about the technical ambition of that initial recording. “It took us a day and a half [in the studio] to play it with the effortlessness and ease it needed. But I’m glad we stuck with it, because if we were just going to play it like it’s already been played then really what’s the point? It becomes like a Civil War re-enactment.”

“And it’s just not true to the spirit of what Tony himself exemplified his entire career,” adds Eldridge. “This record was never a memorial — it was a living tribute created in the spirit of some of the deep lessons we learned from Tony: you have to be yourself. If you’re going to make music, play it the way only you can play it.”

Certainly only Punch Brothers would take bluegrass standard ‘Gold Rush’ and turn it into a piece of esoteric free-time improv, ethereally led by Gabe Witcher on fiddle. “For the record we all love that Bill Monroe tune,” says Eldridge, with a wry smile. “But I don’t even think I’ve played a fiddle tune that’s been that deconstructed and stripped of basic elements like pulse and beat before.” It is, laughs Pikelny, certainly not a version likely to be heard at a contest any time soon: “Contestant 11, you’ve been disqualified!”

Hell on Church Street is a record that might never have been made but for the pandemic. The band’s need to quarantine before they could assemble in the studio had restricted their time together and they were looking for a project that would satisfy them musically without turning their precious time in each other’s company into a songwriting bootcamp. “When we’re on the road together it’s camaraderie, it’s therapy,” says Pikelny. “We said, ‘What can we do that we can still enjoy being with each other?’”

Their minds turned back to a similar conversation they had had in Japan two and a half years previously. During their residency at the Blue Note in Tokyo, the band were asked to prepare a set of bluegrass standards for the 2019 Rockygrass festival (or, as Pikelny puts it: “Don’t bring all your original shit!”). With limited time to rehearse — or perhaps, given the allure of the Japanese capital, not a great deal of inclination — someone had suggested paying tribute to an artist or record they loved. The response was unanimous, almost instantaneous. It had to be Church Street Blues. “That record was so sacred to all of us,” says Eldridge.

The live set that followed at Rockygrass became one of the great wish-you-were-there experiences: a performance fizzing with spontaneity, in an atmosphere crackling with passion. It had been a busy festival for all of them — bassist Paul Kowert playing a set with Hawktail, Pikelny performing with Stuart Duncan — and when they took to the stage, they had been working on the material for just four hours. But the coupling of their collective virtuosity with one of bluegrass’s most beloved of song collections created instant electricity.

In Nashville last November they saw the chance to reignite that experience. “It’s not something we get to do much these days,” says Eldridge, “make music by the seat of our pants. And it’s one of the things that initially brought us together, all the way back the first time the five of us got in a room together. It’s something very special to us, and with this project we got to tap into that side of the band that tends to lie dormant for long stretches — to enjoy what it’s like when we don’t have super tight arrangements, when we just have to listen and be very reactive.”

It also allowed them to delve far more deeply into the songs on Church Street Blues than they ever have had before. “You get closer to the material when there’s a responsibility to make it your own,” says Pikelny. His own parents had loved Tom Paxton, for instance: Pikelny had been familiar with “Last Thing On My Mind” since he was a kid. “It had always seemed like just another heartbreak song — it was only when we started working on it I realised how profoundly sad it is.” At the start of their arrangement, Thile’s voice yearns out over the lone plucked notes of the fiddle, a sound like the ebbing of lost time.

But it’s “Streets of London” where Punch Brothers’ ability to mine the meaning of a song and transform it into sonic expression is most evident. Where Rice rendered the melancholy of Ralph McTell’s lyrics through his bell-like baritone, here the stories of abandoned, lonely lives are tossed about in broken melody and dismembered harmony. This is a sad song that’s been restrung with anxiety and tautened with menace, in a manner that detaches it from some nostalgic past and confronts you with the shamefulness of our world’s ongoing poverty and isolation.

What the band wishes, above all, is for the album to honour Rice’s own experimental and fearless musicianship. To most, the man himself had remained an enigma, withdrawn from the bluegrass world and even his peers to the end of his life, ever since the loss of his voice had stopped him performing. “He seemed like a king off in a castle,” says Pikelny. “I wish I’d once got to hear what Tony Rice’s guitar sounded like in a room, but he wasn’t accessible in the way of so many bluegrass heroes.”

But to Eldridge he had been more — a family friend and musical mentor, the man who used to crash on his parents’ sofa when his touring schedule brought him through DC. Eldridge can still recall the moment, aged 12, when Rice effectively changed the course of his own life forever. They were at the Graves Mountain bluegrass festival in Virginia, “and all of a sudden I was like, that’s a Zeus on stage and he’s throwing thunderbolts,” he remembers. “It wasn’t so much that his playing was so great, it was obviously really great that goes without saying, but the impression on me was that every note he’s playing is meaningful and is very direct. It was like they transcended being musical notes and took over your whole being.”

“Isn’t it true that the reason your nickname Critter got reinstated was due to Tony?” interjects Pikelny.

“It was entirely due to Tony! When I was in utero my parents referred to me as the critter, people called me it as a little boy but eventually they stopped and everyone called me Chris. Then when I went down to Merlefest with some of my college friends in 2001, we were hanging out with Tony, and the name came back with a vengeance! And here we are today…”

It’s a touching thought: that Rice’s legacy should have made so personal and lasting a mark on Eldridge, even as it continues to influence the musical world that he and Punch Brothers inhabit. “I would argue that he more than anybody ushered bluegrass into its modern form, in terms of the new standards of musicianship and song selection. He was probably more responsible for that than anybody.” Pikelny nods his head: “The way the music has expanded in all these different directions, Tony was involved in every single one of them, whether it was J.D. Crowe & the New South or David Grisman. It was like a superpower. He was such a team player, there was something about the way he played when he was around he just elevated everybody.”

They’ll never know exactly what their hero would have made of Hell on Church Street. Pikelny suspects there would be bits of it he may have even hated. But they hope that he would have recognised it as, above all, a love letter. “I hope he’d be proud,” says Eldridge. “Of what he encouraged us — and everybody else — to do.”

Photo Credit: Josh Goleman

Inspired by Poetry and Banjo, Norman Blake Collects Songs for ‘Day by Day’

Posted on November 30, 2021 by Editor

Norman Blake’s list of career achievements reads like a “who’s who” of bluegrass, country, and old-time music. But what will ultimately cement his legacy is his talent as a songwriter and storyteller. Whether he’s playing one of his countless original songs that have become new classics of American traditional music or singing an old song from his youth, Blake always conveys powerful meaning and emotion.

Even now at 83 years old he is still able to present music that is timelessly relatable. Norman and his wife, Nancy, have been retired from stage performance for many years now but continue to play music together in their home in northern Georgia. His new album, Day by Day, offers two new originals as well as a collection of songs (all recorded in one take) that made an impact on him, particularly as a young boy.

“You’re trying to get a feeling and a mood across that conveys what you’re doing,” he tells BGS. “And then I’ve always believed in poetry. Anything I’ve ever tried to sing. Most of it has been fairly poetic in some way. I really do believe in the quality of the material. That’s something that I’m very adamant about. I don’t want to sing something that just doesn’t grab me in some way in a poetic way. I don’t want to do it if it doesn’t do that.”

BGS: In preparation for this interview, I read some of your previous interviews and saw that you were pretty sure that your 2017 album, Brushwood (Songs and Stories), was going to be your last record.

Norman Blake: I say that all the time. I say the same thing about this little project that just come out. I keep threatening to say that I don’t want to do it anymore. But I’ll end up working up some stuff and then I feel like, well, I could record that. It’s up and down.

Was there anything in particular that you think made you want to record something new? Was it that you’ve been performing all your life and you don’t really do shows anymore? Do you think of albums as a way that you can still perform without having to get up on stage?

I think it’s that a little bit. I’ll put it this way. I’ve never said this but it’s sometimes you feel like, well, that song may have been done way back yonder somewhere or somebody else may have done it. But if you like it and you’re able to do it, then sometimes you feel like, well, maybe I’ll do that and get that one out of my head. I’ve always felt that way about recording. In fact, most of the things I’ve recorded over the years, I couldn’t do them today. Once you record them, you can forget them.

It’s clear that you’re very dedicated to finding material that’s important to you. Did you go looking for specific kinds of material, or is it just stuff that you like that you found along the way?

It’s just stuff that hits me. There’s no particular reason. Sometimes it’s just at a given time in your life, there’s a set of words and maybe the tune that goes with it that you just don’t get out of your head. Sometimes it just sticks with you for no real reason. And those are the ones that I’ve always felt like doing because there’s some kind of message in them somewhere. Even between the lines a lot of times.

How does being a songwriter affect you as a song collector and vice versa?

The old songs have always affected what I wrote. I always liked to say that if I wrote a song, I wanted it to be hopefully as good or approaching as good as some of the old things. And sometimes that’s real hard to do because you’re dealing with a different time and language. They influence each other back and forth. One feeds the other, I think.

A lot of your music has become timeless. I know it’s sort of awkward to reflect on that, but so much of your music has become part of the modern canon, alongside all of these older songs.

Yeah, I’m glad that some of that has happened. That’s a satisfying thing for me to know that, because I feel like then my stuff might stand up in the long run, as well as some of the old stuff, which is what you’re looking for.

By recording these old songs you’re actively keeping them from being forgotten. But one of your original songs, “Time,” is about how we can’t control the passage of time.

That’s right, yeah. And you remember a lot when you grow older. I think that song speaks to some of that. Some lines in that song, in the first couple of verses, are a little more abstract. A lot of things that I might have written in the past took a different approach. And then it gets, I think, into more familiar territories as it goes on, as to the kind of stuff that I might usually write.

The other original is that banjo tune, “Old Joe’s March.” Have you been playing a lot of banjo recently?

Been fooling with the banjo over the last four or five years, yeah.

Sounds good on that track.

Well, thank you. I don’t have any particular style that I try to identify with. There are so many great banjo players and so many styles. I’m just playing what seems to come natural to me on that instrument. I played guitar behind a lot of banjo players in my life, and I guess I heard all kinds of banjo, so I don’t know, I have a conglomerate of a lot of things in my head. And then being a dobro player, too, I think some of my right-hand stuff might even come over from that a little bit. My banjo playing is kind of in a different vein. A lot of it is two-finger influenced and sometimes it gets into a clawhammer thing.

I love that because those old banjo players weren’t trying to do anything in a particular style. Most of the time they were just trying to play the banjo.

That’s right, yeah. They didn’t have anything to go by, all those old guys. They were just isolated. And that’s just what they came up with.

Your guitar playing feels that way to me. There’s not really anybody that sounds a lot like you. And it doesn’t seem like you’re trying to emulate anybody.

No, I don’t. I never was a good copy of when it came to other people’s music. I’ve always said my approach to it was that I tried to take the mood of it. If it spoke to me in that way, I’d rather take the mood than try to actually play their licks or something.

I think that’s part of why you’ve become a steward of this older style of music because it’s not just you copying something and putting it out. It’s very much in the same musical vein as the people creating that music 100 years ago or more.

It’s hard to copy an era at a time. That’s the hard part to copy if you really are trying to, because time is just different today than it was 100 years ago.

And you’ve lived through a lot of huge changes in the world. It’s changed so much since you were a kid.

Oh, yeah. Oh, my goodness. Yes. I realize that a lot of those changes are natural, and I’m certainly not against progress but I feel some things are being lost. People are not living such a rural existence in this kind of music anymore. This music has moved into the cities, urban areas, and a lot of the people playing it now are coming from those areas, so it’s bound to change. That’s been happening ever since it’s been going on. And there are some great players out there, some awesome musicians these days, no doubt about that.

I was wondering why you did everything in one take for this record. Was there something behind that decision?

Personally, I never was one to want to go over stuff a lot. I tried to basically know what I was doing before I went in there. I knew these by heart. I have read a lot of stuff right off of a book when I recorded and done it that way, and then I didn’t learn them after I recorded them. But I did know these old songs, and I’ve always been of the thinking that that first or second go-around is the most spontaneous thing. And that’s got something. If you go over it, you may polish it up a little bit, but I think you can get the spontaneity and the feeling sometimes the first or second time around. I always try to do that if I can.

I’ve heard stories about Bill Monroe saying similar things about not wanting to do too many takes.

No, you get bored with it and you start losing more than you gain sometimes. I’ve always felt that my performance in the long run somehow is not much different than an old radio program. In a way I could get up on the radio and do the same thing I do on record, basically. I’m kind of a holdover from the old radio days which were getting towards the end when I got started.

That’s really interesting. I never connected those dots, but that makes a lot of sense.

Especially since, yeah, I always admired people that could do that, who could just get up in front of a microphone and do what they did and it came out and that was it. That’s how they sounded. And that’s kind of the approach that I tried to take, especially when I’m playing by myself. That’s totally it. That’s the way I’m thinking about it.

Photo Credit: Christi Carroll

BGS 5+5: Anya Hinkle

Posted on July 21, 2021April 20, 2023 by Editor

Artist: Anya Hinkle
Hometown: Asheville, North Carolina
Latest album: Eden and Her Borderland
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): Anyabird

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

I guess far and away I have to answer — Gillian Welch. I grew up in the New River Valley of Virginia listening to Tony Rice, Norman Blake, Taj Mahal, Hot Tuna, Muddy Waters, Grateful Dead, and Old and in the Way, loved bluegrass and blues, but also female folk singers like Joan Baez and Judy Collins, pop stars like Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, and songwriters like Sarah McLachlan, Natalie Merchant, and Suzanne Vega. It just took Gillian to come around with her Revival album and put all that together for me, that you could incorporate all those great roots sounds into something completely modern and original. I was living in California at the time I heard her first album. I grabbed my fiddle and headed straight down to 5th String Music in Berkeley and started going to every bluegrass jam I could find. I thank her for giving me the idea that I could do it too — because of her genius, I could begin to imagine myself singing and playing guitar and writing songs too. It’s important to have someone you can look up to and that you can relate to so you can even have the idea in the first place.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

For more than a dozen years now, I’ve been hanging around the Cumberlands with my buddy “Hippie” Jack Stoddart, someone who, in his rough and audacious way, brings people together to make a lot of magic. Hippie said to me one day, “I want to introduce you to Zona.” He’d been doing a lot of outreach work out of an old school bus bringing groceries and coats and toys and stuff to people living in former mining towns in Middle Tennessee. So he brought me up the mountain to meet the hardened sweetness that is Zona Abston. We sat around her kitchen table and she told me her life story, a miner’s daughter, growing up with little education and no money, not much luck or hope. When we collapsed back in the truck, Hippie said to me, “You better write this shit down!” And so I did. I wrote every detail: the cancer, the hunger, the cheating, the shining, the debt, the babies, the heartbreak. I came back with a mess of notes and thought, “How do I make a song out of this?” So I sat down and tried to pull out the most specific and moving details of everything she told me and created a ballad for her. I was super nervous to play it for her because, well it was HER life. SHE had to live it. But when I sang it for her the tears rolled down her beautiful face. She said, yup it’s all true, every word of it.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

I actually thought about this a lot earlier this year, during the pandemic when I was trying to understand what my purpose was in music when it seemed like the industry was going to hell. I decided to focus on three things, and wrote them on a yellow sticky note that is taped in front of my desk for quick reference. The first is authenticity, and a commitment to truth and honesty to who I am as an artist. It’s a challenge to believe that it’s all already inside. I don’t need to grasp at something outside of myself. I just need to continue to learn to trust myself and be myself. The second thing is connection — connection with other artists and musicians, connections with my fans and supporters, and connections with anyone along the path. Those beautiful relationships are the foundation for anything I can possibly hope to accomplish in this lifetime. Saying “yes” and valuing the people that show up for me is oxygen. The third thing is creativity — growth and discovery. Allowing myself to surrender to the journey, giving up thinking I have to have everything figured out and under control. I need to just submit to curiosity, openness, and faith.

Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?

Before I was a musician I was trained as an ethnobotanist. I traveled half the world studying plants and their uses and connections to culture. I love referring specifically to plant species in my songs because they can be so symbolic in our physical world. For example, in the the title track for my new record, Eden and Her Borderlands, I use a couple of plants that carry a deeper meaning. The cedar is fragrant and twisted, it’s green the year round, its oils are used to protect against decay and disease, it is sacred and ancient in its symbolism. I also use the sycamore. It is stately and grand, always grows near sweet water. It is often a boundary and its presence on the landscape signals a threshold that we approach and then cross over. Adding these botanical details to the song is like adding spices to a recipe, it gives more depth, even for those that might not know anything about botany. And who knows, maybe it will inspire people to love plants like I do!

How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?

I love this question because initially there can be so much fear in exposing your true self. Absolutely mortifying to lay bare the thoughts and emotions of a real human, the one behind the Facebook posts and the stage persona and the person you think you are or wish you were. The real one with all the real flaws, that is the person that is actually interesting. But the songs really push yourself (myself!!!) to look in the mirror and substitute the “you” with “me,” to get personal. Well, it’s a journey of acceptance and insight. Getting personal is the thing that connects us to the rest of humanity and, honestly, the thing that makes a good song, the thing that makes a song relatable.

I recently took a songwriting course with Mary Gauthier. In the song I shared, I kept referring to myself as “babe.” She said, who is babe? She focuses a lot on pronouns, you know, who are we talking about here? Because in our heads, it’s always about us. It can’t NOT be. We are trying to figure out what the hell we are doing here and if we are at all worthy of anything we are pretending to do. It takes a lot of working through fear to write songs. It’s good work.

Photo credit: Sandlin Gaither