Tag: Old-time

The Fungi Sessions: Fiddler Hannah Read in Conversation with Sean Rowe

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

(Editor’s Note: Musician, forager, and ‘Can I Eat This?‘ host Sean Rowe recently chatted with singer-songwriter and instrumentalist Hannah Read for BGS about her new instrumental fiddle album, The Fungi Sessions, which was inspired by her mycologist father, who passed away in 2020. Their conversation has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.)

Sean Rowe: This is really cool for me, because obviously BGS had secret reasons for pairing us together and I think they made a good choice. I feel like we have some interesting things in common…

Let’s start with your origin. You were born in Scotland, correct? Whereabouts?

Hannah Read: Yep. I was born in Edinburgh. It’s a gorgeous city. I mean, it really is. I was born in Edinburgh, grew up there, and then I also lived on the Isle of Eigg, which is a wee island off the west coast of Scotland. When we lived there – I lived there with my mom and my sister – there were 60 people living on the island. Now it’s up to 120. It’s this incredible, incredible island, and that’s where I really got into music. We lived there full time when I was seven in a little house completely off the grid with no running water or electricity. Music just became my thing at that point.

That was kind of my Edinburgh – Edinburgh to Eigg and back. We were back and forth a lot until I was 18.

SR: I definitely want to talk about this new album, but before we get into that, can you tell me a little bit about the music you grew up with and also how it changed or evolved when you moved to the States?

HR: I grew up playing trad music. I’m heavily immersed in that scene. As I’m sure you’re well aware, the Scottish trad scene is thriving and has been thriving forever – at least in my lifetime. I was very involved in that. I was also very involved in the Scottish jazz scene. That was a big part of my upbringing.

My mum played music growing up. She played cello and we were around a lot of music. My dad was not a musician, but he listened. His record collection was absolutely bonkers and he had hitchhiked across America three or four times in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, and was super into all the folk revival stuff. I was hearing a lot of that growing up, a lot of California folk stuff. It’s funny that I’m living here now, but a big part of my upbringing was listening to a lot of that stuff, alongside going and seeing any acts that were coming over from America, doing the circuit over there. [At] about 15 or 16 years old, I got super into jazz singing. And actually, I went to Paris and studied jazz vocals for a year when I was 18. I did like a one-year diploma there. Then I went over to Berklee College of Music, because my underlying thing, even when I was doing that, was that fiddle music was my true calling.

SR: And why the fiddle? What does it do for you?

Hannah Read: Oh, the fiddle. When I play the fiddle – I was actually playing yesterday and I had put it into a different tuning, it’s like F B, F B, this tuning that I’d just heard about a couple of nights ago. It doesn’t always do this, but the way it just kind of evokes so much, it’s such a deep resonance in my body, basically. I think I felt that my whole life when I’ve been playing the fiddle, being able to play with people, the community. The fiddle has opened up so many doors for me, it’s just become my whole community.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Louisiana at Blackpot Festival. There’s this fiddle player called Rosie Newton who lives up in Ithaca and she was down there. She’s a great Cajun and old-time player and we hadn’t actually played tunes before, but we sat down and kind of like locked our knees [together] and played tunes. The way she plays, I was so interested to actually sit with her and play music. As you know, when you are playing just locked [in], there’s nothing in my mind as magical as when a fiddle on fiddle groove together.

SR: Aside from music, I’m also a forager. I have been for many years. I know that your father was a mycologist, how did you get into that world? What are some of your early memories around it? Your dad, I assume maybe he took you out on field trips, showing you things. Tell me about it.

HR: We were around it from when I was born, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently, obviously. You know, things from the salt shaker and pepper shaker in our house [were decorated] with little mushrooms. There was mushroomy stuff all over the walls – not in like a, “Bleh, we’re surrounded by mushrooms!” way, it was subtle, but it was very much there.

Dad had a lab at Edinburgh University. So when we would spend our weekends going to dad’s house, we would spend our weekends running around the labs at Edinburgh University. [I remember] the distinct smell of being in the biology lab at the university and checking out the new microscopes.

SR: Did you think it was weird? Compared to what your friends were doing or was it strange to you?

HR: My dad was so passionate, he was contagious. I think his passion for mycology, mushrooms, and his work has been a massive influence on me and my work and the passion that I have towards music and what I do. I mean, it’s an obsession, he was obsessed. Completely obsessed. And I am pretty obsessed with what I do, as well.

I remember going down to Newcastle, dad had some colleagues down there, friends down there, that we would go on forages in the woods with. He would also come over to Eigg and we would go out and look at mushrooms. We were always going off and getting chanterelles and puffballs. It was just what we did. He was always pointing them out. However, I think because it was Dad’s thing, and it was [always] around us, I never took the time to go, “Hmm, I’m going to learn more about this myself,” because I was surrounded by it. When people would talk about being into foraging or mushrooms suddenly I’m like, “Oh yeah, me too!” But, until dad passed away – three and a half years ago, at the beginning of the pandemic – and suddenly mushrooms. It almost felt like dad died and suddenly all this whole world opened up for me, because everybody was stuck at home and able to delve into these curiosities like fungi and being out in nature more, it became this thing. I was like, “Oh, this actually is my thing.”

But I don’t know that much about it. That was a funny bit. You know, the Fantastic Fungi film coming out and all of the buzz around that, and I actually did not realize until the last couple of months that my dad was friends with all of these people and I had met them all. I had met Paul Stamets. Dad was the president of the Royal Mycological Society – also the British Mycological Society. He was president, so he actually organized the 2010 world meeting which happened in Edinburgh at Usher Hall. All of these people came and I met them all then.

I played at the opening and closing event and I was around all of these people, but I never put two and two together until a couple of years ago when these films were coming out and there was all the buzz and until the album was about to come out. I had one of Dad’s colleagues say, “I’ll send the album to Paul Stamets and Merlin Sheldrake” – and all these other people.

So, over this time it had crossed my mind, “I’d like to learn more about this stuff.” I didn’t have the knowledge and I can’t quite talk about mushrooms – because there’s so many people that know way more than me, I feel underqualified – but anytime it came up and someone was like, “I do a lot of foraging,” and I’d [respond], “Oh, you do? I don’t, but I did.”

In the spring, the day after the anniversary of my dad passing, I was contacted by a mycologist at Edinburgh University called Dr. Edward Wallace. The topic of the email just said “Fungi music?” I was like, “What?” It just said, “I would love to commission you to write an album of fungi-inspired music. What do you think?”

Right away I was like, “Yes, this sounds amazing.” Turns out he’s about my age, he is also a fiddle player, and had been to see me play and I’d announced, “I’m playing a tune called ‘Waltz to a Fun Guy,’ which was this tune I wrote for my dad” – which was just a simple little waltz that was on my old-time record.

[Wallace] heard that and he thought, “I would love to hear more of this stuff with more of a focus.” That’s really where it came from. There was a grant from, the Welcome Trust, which is a trust in London, and they funded a full album. They gave me the opportunity to do whatever I wanted. It’s been a really, really interesting process. It came out of nowhere and it actually came at a perfect time… I gave myself a week in May to write the whole thing, because I felt that it was really important for this album to feel organic and feel really grounded and capture a moment in time.

SR: Putting limitations on yourself can sometimes really boost creativity – and art itself, I think, by the limitations. I think that has a lot to do with the kind of thought that’s involved, the analytical side of things can wreak havoc when overdone. When I record, I will record in completely new environments with all new people that I haven’t met before. Could be a total disaster, but it’s the act of creating these limitations that I think make for a kind of danger, it’s a kind of unknown territory. But that can also open things up in a way. It also makes me think of foraging.

This is kind of funny, but I have this kind of superstition where I always joke to myself that if I prepare too much to go out foraging, I’m not going to find what I’m looking for. It’s those moments when I’m really not even looking for that thing, or I’m open to whatever happens, that I find something good – and then I might not even have anywhere to put the stuff to take it back home. There’s a sort of magic in that. The limitations, that’s a really interesting idea all around I think.

HR: I totally agree with that.

SR: When you were approached with this idea for this album, did you immediately think, “Oh yeah, instrumental”? Or did you have to work this out in your brain, whether or not you were going to write songs or do it instrumental?

HR: Great question. My initial reaction was [all over the place]. I just had so many ideas, off the bat. I remember calling my sister after getting that email being like, “I can do this– Oh, could be a children’s album–, Oh, it could be this– Oh, it should be accessible for this…” But it came together slowly more and more. I got a bit more anxious about it and I was like, “Actually,
Let’s keep it simple.” Nobody’s asked me for anything. I can do whatever I want here. Nobody is asking me for songs. Nobody is asking me for tunes. Then I was like, “I don’t actually know enough to write songs that will feel authentic.” It feels almost icky to me, writing about something that’s a very precious thing that I actually don’t have the knowledge to back up.

So I thought, keep it simple. I’m going to write, I’m going to just capture each tune. I want to capture a feel of some sort of different species. I actually reached out to one of my dad’s colleagues, Pat Hickey, who he used to work with at Edinburgh. He’s a scientist still based in Edinburgh, but not at the university. He and my dad used to make all these beautiful videos of mycelium growing, time lapse videos of them growing under these incredible microscopes. I asked him if he could send me a bunch of stuff and I just started watching those and seeing what came up.

If it was going to be lyrics and if stuff was going to naturally come that way, great! But it wasn’t. It was just instrumentals. I thought, “Great. This is going to be an instrumental record.” Volume 2 might have lyrics, but it also might not. I might collaborate with a poet, somebody who does have more knowledge on this stuff.

I think it would have been a very interesting, different thing if I had gone down the lyric route – and that door is not closed. I’m super keen to, I think that would involve collaboration. I would love to work with someone who does actually know a lot about it.

SR: Before we go through a few of the tracks, the first thing I’m very curious to know is about the interludes, because the little bit I read about them was that they include dirt and bark decomposing. How were those sounds acquired? It’s very cool.

Hannah Read: My friend, Charlie Van Kirk, lives up in Round Pond, Maine. He and I have been collaborating for years, but I really wanted the album to have something else – rather than just instruments. I wanted the listener to be taken on a journey.

I feel like there’s millions of fiddle tune records out there, but I’m glad that you went for a walk and listened to it. For me, [the goal was] having tracks and links that pull you down to the underworld or the undergrowth, where your imagination can go wherever it wants to go. Like the sounds of leaves. I gave Charlie full creative control with this. He’s a percussionist as well. I just wanted him to just go for it and see where it took him and just break up the album [with] little breathers. I really trust him as a collaborator and his musical instincts. The next album, I think might have significantly more of those sounds, I think they’re a crucial part of the album.

SR: If it were a film, they would be like a sort of filter on a film. A certain color that sort of wraps all of the songs together.

Let’s go through the tracks. When “Silverphae” comes on I get this ominous sense from it, but not a sinister kind of ominous. It’s more like a mysterious kind of feeling, but also inviting, like there’s something to see here. “Panellus Dancer” is the next track, that’s the one that’s in waltz [time], so there’s obviously a connection with dance. Are you referring to the glowing mushroom in this?

HR: There’s this book, which was my dad’s, but there’s a whole section on bioluminescent mushrooms and there are videos that go with it. I’m actually going to share some of the videos online soon. They’re so beautiful, you’ll love them. They’re just amazing.

SR: Totally get that. It kind of reminds me of jellyfish actually, in a way – the grace of it all. And that was another feeling I got from it, there’s a mischievous that came up for me, a playfulness to it, and also joy. I love that one.

I thought “Stinkhorn” was funny, because I do have an experience with that mushroom and I think for most people, the smell comes to mind. But it’s such a celebratory song, I thought it was funny because what immediately came to my mind was kids smelling the stinkhorn and running to go get their friends. You know how kids do that? They love to have each other smell something that smells horrible. That was the image I was picturing, but why so happy about stinkhorn? Tell me about it.

HR: “Stinkhorn” is a bit of a curve ball in the record, because I know what a stinkhorn looks like. I know that they can be slightly repulsive. I just find them funny. They’re funny things. And I also just think the name “Stinkhorn” is a great old-time [tune] name. I was watching stinkhorn mycelium and it’s so beautiful, it’s absolutely stunning. These videos, it’s absolutely beautiful, it’s kind of the opposite of what the stinkhorn physical model looks like.

SR: I felt like it had to be some kind of comedy in there – and it is funny too. It makes me think of the phallic nature of a lot of mushrooms. It’s almost like nature is joking around, like it ran out of ideas to you know to for a unique design. So it’s like I’ll just use this. I got a kick out of that one.

The next song is definitely a departure from the last one, but I was curious about the title, “Celia.” Is that someone’s name or is that related to mushrooms somehow?

HR: That was related to mycelium!

SR: I wasn’t even paying attention to the title of the album when I was listening to it, but I wrote down a couple of things and one of them was “interconnectedness.” Also the mechanistic imagery of nature. In other words, these sort of woven tapestries – mycelium is like exactly what I’m describing here.

I remember I had a psilocybin experience a while back – I know a lot of people share this kind of thing too – where you’re seeing a lot of connectedness in things, like gears in nature. That’s what was going on in my head during “Celia.” So well done.

The next one, “Valley Fever,” from this I got a deep sense of solitude, almost like trying to shut out the noise of life and look closer. Which, is very much a common theme that comes over me in nature, but I felt like this one was powerful. It was like drawing me into a quiet that the other songs hadn’t necessarily done as much.

HR: That is very interesting. This one was written to create a lone feeling. It feels very Western. I was drawing from a few images that I’d been given that were quite orange and they felt like the desert. I was rolling with that. I was writing it [imagining] Utah, and a horse, like just a lone cowboy riding on a horse.

But the more I got into it, the more I was struggling with the name. Struggling, because that [western place] was where I’d been taken with it. I was like, “How does this link in? Is this random?” And then Edward [Wallace] was like, “There is a fungus that is only found in the desert, and it’s called Valley Fever.”

SR: That’s so cool.

HR: I feel like it does have a very lonely feeling and it feels sparse. And it feels sparse in the way we did it just fiddle and guitar and upright bass.

SR: I love that. This next song, “Nick’s,” is my favorite. I’m assuming that’s your father’s name? Nick? To me, this is the most melancholy song on the record. For me, melancholy is a different kind emotion than depression or sadness. It’s not those things. There’s a kind of sadness in it, but it’s almost like an acceptance at the same time. There’s a real beauty in that collective feeling, those things that work together to create that feeling of melancholy. It has a transient quality to it, too. It’s almost like a storm that comes in and is only there for a moment and then blows out, you know?

HR: God, well you nailed it on the head! That’s the one that I wrote the last day in the studio. I listened to everything else that we had done and I was like, “We’re missing this.” We need– I need this feeling. And that was the feeling. A feeling of a cathartic piece at the end of the album.

Because, it is a tribute for me. I wouldn’t have just made a mushroom-related album. I wouldn’t have come up with that if it hadn’t been for my dad. It wouldn’t be interesting. Why should I do that?

I didn’t know the rest of the order of the album at this point, but I knew I wanted to end the album with “Nick’s” and leave the listener with that [melancholy, cathartic] feeling. Because I feel like there’s also a hopefulness in that last track. It’s a very fragile piece for me.

The album came out 20th of October and on the 19th, the day before it released, I played the album at a launch show in Edinburgh. Played the whole thing top-to-bottom with the banjo player, Michael Starkey, who’s on the record, and Patrick Hickey, who I was talking about before, did a video for every track.

By the time it got to that last piece, it was so emotional. That piece is incredibly emotional to play, but it feels so important at that point, at the end of the whole suite. I was shocked and actually overwhelmed and very surprised to feel that way in the live performance. Suddenly, the emotions, I was trying to keep it together, but that’s what music is. That’s why I do this.

I’m really happy to hear that you enjoyed it, that’s a very special tune for me.

SR: I can imagine. I’m sure your father would be really proud of that – and of the whole record, but especially that one. Such a beautiful melody and you really captured the feeling.
​

Photo Credit: Sean Rowe by Joe Navas; Hannah Read by Samuel James Taylor.

WATCH: The Montvales, “Lou”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: The Montvales
Hometown: Knoxville, Tennessee, but currently residing in Cincinnati, Ohio
Song: “Lou”
Album: Born Strangers
Release Date: February 2, 2024

In Their Words: “I spent a year teaching English in a small town in France. My baby niece came to visit during that time and I got to take her to the ocean for the first time. I showed her beaches, vineyards, and forests.

“Sometimes being far away makes troubling news of home feel more vivid. Threats to American public land felt especially heartbreaking as I watched my niece grow to love the land for the first time. I wrote this song imagining a future in which she gets to love all the mountains, beaches, and forests that I love. It felt like the only acceptable option was a world passed on to her intact.” – Sally Buice

Track Credits: Produced by Mike Eli LoPinto
Engineered by Sean Sullivan
Mixed by Jake Davis
Mastered by Kevin Butler

Photo Credit: Suzi Kern
Video Credit: Contrary Western

BGS 5+5: New Valley String Band

Posted on by Justin Hiltner
Artist: New Valley String Band
Hometown: Malmö, Sweden
Latest Album: New Valley
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): A Justification for Playing the Banjo

Which artists have influenced you the most?

Our greatest source of fiddle tunes would be the American fiddler Rayna Gellert. We fell in love with her groovy playing and her taste in source material. Many of the tunes we play are from her record, Ways of the World, including the title track which we also recorded for our debut album, New Valley.

Sam Amidon is another source of inspiration. His exploration and retelling of the traditional material with a quite minimalist style of arranging is something that guides parts of our process and something we strive to achieve ourselves.

Anna & Elizabeth would be our go-to when it comes to vocals. What they do is just absolutely astounding and continues to give the shivers to this day, even after hearing their music many times over.

Lastly we have many inspirations from the Nordic, especially from the Swedish trad scene. The duo Hazelius/Hedin and the band Bäsk are both big inspirations. Just like us, they both play traditional fiddle/dance tunes in a modern style and arrange old songs and ballads with a lot of after thought.

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

Musically, the three of us all come from the Nordic folk scene and the modern style of playing and arranging traditional Swedish dance tunes. When the band was formed we made a conscious choice that instead of fondly playing old-time music as historically or culturally accurate, we’d rather discover it and express ourselves in the way that we felt most natural. The result of that process became our own unique style of playing the old Appalachian fiddle tunes and songs. With interest and respect for the individual instrumental traditions, we arrange our music in a similar way that we would with the Swedish polskas or schottises. We call this style “Nordic Old Time” and we see it as our mission to explore this concept, and with it we can spread the traditional North American music to our peers and colleagues in the Nordic folk scene.

What has been the best advice you’ve received in your career so far?

Lukas, our banjo player, once met with the great Swedish folk musician Ale Möller, one of the founders of the Swedish world music scene. His advice to young musicians was to choose between being a specialist or a generalist. Either you can fit in any band or project or you establish your speciality so that when someone wants that, you’re the only one to ask. This spurred Lukas to both get more into the old time tradition that is otherwise a bit unknown in the Swedish folk scene, and to learn all stringed instruments there are. With all that being said, which path do you think he chose?

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

In April this year we performed at a small festival called Växjö Country Roots Festival. It’s a one day festival where six different bands that play American folk and roots music are doing one concert each during the evening. The event was sold out and there was a nice energy in the room. The performance went well and the audience seemed to like our way of interpreting the old time style, but the best thing about the festival was that it was a great way of gathering a lot of musicians doing bluegrass/Cajun/old-time/Americana music in Sweden.

It was really nice seeing the other concerts, but also jamming backstage, talking to other people doing a Nordic version of American folk music, and realizing how different it can sound. The arrangers did a great job with finding bands doing quite different sounds and even if it was a long night, the audience had a high energy the whole evening and it all ended with the musicians having a long jam session at the hotel until late night.

What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?

As a band, the only ritual we have so far is to warm up our voices together. We’re including more and more songs in our repertoire, and to be able to push our voices on stage it’s important for us to do some warming up and check-ins with our intonation. Apart from that we all have some individual things we like to do before going up on stage.

If Adam has the time he likes to massage his feet. He picked that up from one of his teachers at a camp some years ago. According to this teacher, if you’re comfortable and grounded with your feet, you will be comfortable and grounded on stage.

Michael likes to take some time backstage to do some breathwork and settle his mind. If it’s possible, he also likes to take the time to get familiar with the room/venue from the perspective of the stage before the show, to be more comfortable and prepared for what to expect with that specific stage.

We’ve also learned from experience that Lukas needs to eat something before a show.

Photo Credit: Aija Svensson

Nora Brown and Stephanie Coleman Bring Old-Time to NPR’s Tiny Desk

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Perhaps the most remarkable skill of New York-based old-time duo Nora Brown and Stephanie Coleman is their ability to place canonical old-time material – fiddle tunes, ballads, breakdowns, hornpipes, transatlantic lyrics, and more – firmly in the present. Aided and abetted by their youth and their now longstanding musical collaboration, the two deftly entwine together timelessness and the fleeting, effervescent moment, leaving listeners on the edges of their seats as we cling to the temporal and seemingly miraculous space that opens up between them.

Brown and Coleman thrive behind NPR’s fabled Tiny Desk, all at once broad and bold while tender and understated, simple. Unadorned, but flush and full. Their new EP together, Lady of the Lake, features two of the numbers they performed at NPR’s headquarters in D.C., the title track and “Copper Kettle.” But they open their mini concert with a set, “Across the Rocky Mountains” and “The Old Blue Bonnet,” with Brown on guitar, before switching to her signature clawhammer banjo. For being so young – she only recently dropped the “Little” from her former stage moniker, Little Nora Brown – her voice carries an ancient ache. As their vocals resonate together in close harmony, Brown and Coleman remind of so many old-time, string band, and bluegrass duos that came before them, like Hazel & Alice, Laurie Lewis & Kathy Kallick, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, and many more.

We hope then, like those impactful and influential duos that came before them, that Nora Brown and Stephanie Coleman continue to gift us with gorgeous music such as this for many decades to come.

Photo courtesy of Nick Loss-Easton Media

Artist of the Month: Folk Hero Alice Gerrard Is Unafraid to Be a Real Person

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

(Editor’s Note: Fiddler, songwriter, and creator Libby Rodenbough writes this personal essay on her friendship with and admiration for BGS Artist of the Month, Alice Gerrard, accompanied by her original photos taken for Gerrard’s new album, Sun to Sun.)

I remember first hearing Ola Belle Reed’s “Undone in Sorrow” when I was 19 or 20. I felt like a portal had been opened unto a world that had existed around me my whole life, unseen and unheard. I grew up in North Carolina going to visit my mom’s family in Madison County, along the Blue Ridge, where any of the graveyards on the mountain sides with their little mounds of clay outside my backseat window might have been the one from Ola Belle’s song.

That portal didn’t open for me in the mountains of North Carolina, though – it was in Chicago, at the Old Town School of Folk Music, an institution that had come out of the ‘50s folk revival. I was big on Pete Seeger and John Prine at that time in my life, and had found out my dad had a cousin with a spare room in Chicago, so I went on a little pilgrimage during a recess from college.

It was there that I learned my first old time fiddle tunes, belting the refrain “down in North Carolina” from “Waterbound” at the school’s open jam while the Chicago winter dumped three feet of snow outside. It was there I first learned the rudiments – very rude in my case – of clawhammer banjo. It was also there that I first heard a left hook of a song called “A Few Old Memories” by Hazel Dickens, which appeared on her 1973 duo record with Alice Gerrard, Hazel & Alice.

I went home from Chicago with new eyes and ears. Places I’d known forever became newly populated with epic figures, recast in the light of 200-year-old narratives. My first semester back in school, I was in an introductory folklore course taught by Mike Taylor (of Hiss Golden Messenger) and he started talking about his friend Alice Gerrard, who lived a town over in Durham. I was fairly well tangled up in time and place at that point – even the deceased people I’d been learning about were brand new to me – so I had to blink a few times to digest that she was the same person singing harmony on “A Few Old Memories.”

Today, 10-ish years later, I sit with Alice in preparation for writing this piece and she tells me about driving Ola Belle Reed in her Dodge van on tours through the South in the late ‘60s. She’s my oldest friend (nearly 90), and all competition lags behind her years pretty pathetically. She also makes a lot of the people I talk to seem boring. We’re in the same business: We sing songs and play shows and make records. She’s been doing it a lot longer, and I think she knows about five times as many songs.

Hanging out with Alice helps me understand why she wanted to be friends with people like Elizabeth Cotten and Luther Davis, who were elderly when she met them. She heard the way they played and sang and had to talk to them about their lives. “They knew exactly who they were,” she says. For a young person who had moved across the country from Oregon to Washington, D.C., without maintaining much contact with home, dropped out of college, and had four children, that self-knowledge was aspirational. Though their rootedness in their communities was part of what drew her to them, she didn’t think of them as avatars of bygone primitive ways of life, or as characters in a play – they were people. Elizabeth Cotten was somewhat guarded, but over years traveling and playing together, she told Alice about indignities she had suffered as a domestic worker and as a Black female folk performer, and about subtle acts of defiance she had worked into both vocations. Luther Davis talked about how lonely it was to get old and run out of witnesses to your own life.

Alice is likewise unafraid of being a person. She’ll tell you straightforwardly that she was unprepared to be a mother, that it was essentially impossible to pursue a music career – which was something she knew she wanted for herself – and still give adequate time to her kids. We commiserate about music industry bullshit and engage in light shit-talking about the idea of showmanship.

She’s usually wearing one of her collection of t-shirts that pertain to her dog Polly’s agility training facility (“Fast and Furryous”). This past March, when I took these photos of her to use for promotion of her new album, Sun to Sun, we went through her closet together and dug out some gems, including a bedazzled commemorative t-shirt from Obama’s inauguration.

I have no training in photography – I shoot film because I enjoy the feeling of not really knowing how it works. We went to Duke Gardens in Durham, where we both live, on a week when the cherry trees had popcorned into glory. Alice looks radiant in the halo of those glowing blooms. But I also love the photos where she’s at home, standing in front of the brick retaining wall around her front yard, before she realized she still had her Apple Watch on. The sky was so blue that day, her white hair incandescent. She looks like she knows something you don’t, but in a warm way, like she knows you’ll get it eventually.

Alice is unafraid to treat a song like it can handle a little handling. She knows that songs are alive and she’s interested in being a part of their lives, not their memorialization. She smiles talking about how, in an old John Cohen film, the Madison County ballad singer Dillard Chandler starts a song in a key around here (she holds her hand at her waistline) and ends it here (she raises her hand up level with her temple). She’s delighted by the particularity of the human touch. She prefers singing voices with a bit of weirdness over purely pretty ones. Talking about Carter Stanley’s high whine, she says, “Whatever was eating on him from the inside, it was showing up in the way he sang. Nina Simone, the same way.” She tells me what a struggle it is to teach that kind of feeling to people accustomed to singing prettily. “If you’re trying to get somebody out of the soft, breathy voice, you say, ‘Look, your kid is running out into the street and you have to call your kid back.’ You don’t say,” — she coos — “‘Heyyyyy Brian, get back here.’ You say, ‘BRIAN! GET BACK HERE!’”

Whenever I’ve played music with her, Alice seems to lean into what people at the Old Town School liked – actually, loved – to call “the folk process;” she lets arrangements evolve as the spirit of the universe sees fit. I’m lucky she’s not a stickler for tradition, even traditions she could write encyclopedias about, because my fiddling style is distinctly unmoored. I was a half-rate Suzuki classical violin student growing up and then at the Old Town School I learned how to accompany folk singers on songs with three or fewer chords. I came home and started going to the old-time jam at Nightlight Bar & Club in Chapel Hill, where the jam leaders were American Studies PhD candidates who also grew up learning fiddle tunes from their hometown octogenarians. Some of my friends started a band called Mipso that was flirtatious with bluegrass and asked me to join, but I told them up front I didn’t know any licks. (They didn’t seem bothered by that.) I’ve since learned a few licks, and I would rather play an old time tune any day of the week than do almost anything else, but I never could sit still long enough to do what Alice calls “holding the line” — keeping and caring for the tradition.

I’m indebted to, and grateful in my heart for, people who do that work. I may roll my eyes at gatekeeping, but it’s more than wide-eyed would-be fiddle players at the gate; it’s the whole monster of monolithic, capitalist cultural imperialism, chomping down on everything small or strange. Songs can, and do, disappear, like cultures and forests, and not just by inertia but by clear-cutting. A lot of days I feel self-conscious about whatever it is I’m doing instead of holding that line. When I listen to Alice tell stories about the many singers and players she’s known over the years, though, I remind myself that they each have a distinct relationship with tradition – and with what it means to be an artist.

For a long time there’s been a divide, rhetorical and sometimes actual, between “the folk” and “the folkies,” which maybe means country people versus city people, or maybe people who grew up in a given musical tradition versus those who came to it later. Alice and I both fall into the latter category, though she’s had considerably sharper focus since her initiation. I’d rather replay a 10-second clip of a Mark O’Connor fiddle solo at one-quarter speed forty-seven times in a row than try to examine that dichotomy in any more detail at this moment, but I did spend a lot of my undergraduate days thinking about authenticity and who’s entitled to do what with old songs. Alice has often found herself among people who look at it from an academic angle – her ex-husband, Mike Seeger, came from a folklorist family – but her view remains that the compulsion to define and categorize is basically academia trying to justify itself. I don’t take that as bitter or glib, I just think she hasn’t found it necessary, in her personal relationship with the music she loves, to try to determine who gets to claim it. Or maybe, for Alice, the claim is in the singing. Talking about what makes a voice “authentic” (a word that sends a chill down my spine), she paraphrases Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart from 1967 in his definition of pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

As we clink the ice around our $7 decaf specialty iced lattes, Alice tells me about a song she’d just heard, a haunting falsetto voice with nylon string guitar, in the opening scene of Pedro Almodóvar’s new short film, Strange Way of Life. After some Google sleuthing, she identified it as a recording by the Brazilian artist Caetano Veloso (in fact, the movie is named for it – “Estranha Forma de Vida.”) She’s head over heels for this song, itching to go home and dig into Veloso’s catalog. If they ever meet, I know she will have great questions for him, the type of questions that make a person believe songs must do real work in this world.

I ask her if she thinks of her music as having “a purpose.” “Not really,” she says. But she goes on, “I want people to hear what I hear in this music.”

In my view, that’s an altruistic goal, because it’s clear that whatever it is Alice hears in the music, it gives her life its very marrow. I admire the decades she has devoted to learning and documenting traditional music, but what I aspire to most is the way she still loves a song — viscerally, instinctively, with gusto. That’s what makes a line worth holding.

“There was something about the music, the quality of the voices,” she says, recalling first hearing Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. “There’s so much beauty in it, it’s like, God, yeah.”

I had that “yeah” moment when I heard “Undone in Sorrow” and “A Few Old Memories” – and now, Sun to Sun. I hope to be saying “yeah” like that about songs for the rest of my life.

All photos: Libby Rodenbough

Basic Folk: Folklore Forensics With Alice Gerrard

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

Bluegrass hero and former weird kid Alice Gerrard strongly believes that traditional music is connected to everyday life. She has said: “When you listen to traditional music you have such a sense of this connectedness of this person’s life. It comes out of the earth.” She was first exposed to folk music while attending Antioch College. Jeremy Foster (her boyfriend at the time, who would become her first husband) introduced her to The Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music. Upon listening, she became hooked and more drawn to lonesome and rough folk songs versus pristine vocalists. That mentality of keeping her performance untarnished and imperfect has followed her ever since.

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After she and Jeremy moved to Washington D.C., she became acquainted with Hazel Dickens. She considered Hazel a mentor figure and studied her musicality. The two would record four albums together as the seminal duo Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard. The two did not speak for many years after they split in the late ’70s. The breakup was messy and hard for both, particularly Hazel. Years later, they reconciled and would perform and were close until Hazel’s death in 2011. Nowadays, Alice, who lives in Durham, North Carolina, has begun digitizing her huge photo archive for a book as well as performing with younger generations of traditional musicians. People like Tatiana Hargreaves, Reed Stutz and Phil Cook are regulars on her stage. They also contribute to her new album, Sun to Sun. Alice digs in talking about her unorthodox parenting style (which is no secret), imperfectionism, appreciating memory and the fantastic new record.

Photo Credit: Libby Rodenbough

Cover Story: Hogslop String Band Went From “We Are Not A Band” To the Opry

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Few bands have benefitted from the same type of steady, organic growth as the Hogslop String Band. Originally formed in 2009 as a pickup band for a square dance, the group played together for 10 years before releasing their first album. In that time, their camaraderie strengthened – as did their songwriting, performance style, and fanbase.

Following their 2019 self-titled album, the group – Gabriel Kelley, Daniel Binkley, Kevin Martin, Will Harrison, and Pickle – has been hard at work on their next record (expected spring 2024). Produced by Kelley at his own Mobile Traveler Studios in Bells Bend, 10 miles west of Nashville, the record illuminates the purely original sound that the Hogslop String Band has found over nearly 15 years of making music together.

BGS caught up with Gabriel Kelley and Daniel Binkley to talk about the new music, the formations of the band, and where it’s all headed.

You formed in 2009, but it was 10 more years before your first album came out. What has the journey been like, coming from such casual origins to debuting on the Opry in 2022 and looking ahead to releasing your sophomore record?

Gabriel Kelley: We sure did. We were, to be honest, just a rag-tag bunch of buddies. Most of us had grown up playing old-time music or found it in our early years. For a very long time, our motto was a little more on the punk rock side: “We are not a band” is what we said for the first 10 years of the band. It was just a way to get together and have a good time. It wasn’t until a few years ago that we started taking it more seriously. One thing that’s cool about our Opry debut – and Binkley can fill you in – is that his family has been a part of the Opry since the ’20s.

Daniel Binkley: My family has been in Nashville forever – my great-grandfather, Amos, he had a band called the Binkley Brothers’ Dixie Cloghoppers, and they were a part of the very first Opry cast in 1926. Backstage they have a placard for every member and I found my family back there. That was a very special moment for me. They mentioned it during the broadcast, and we actually ended up playing one of the Binkley Brothers’ songs on the Opry.

For a band with a foundation in traditional music, i.e, fiddle tunes, where do you find the balance between introducing your own original material and digging from the old-time repertoire?

DB: Old-time music is sort of the school that we come from. So when we write original stuff, it’s gonna come through that lens. Once you run it through the “hogslop filter,” it’s gonna sound like hogslop. There’s just something about that foundation, and our knowledge of each other as musicians, that makes it come together – whether it’s traditional tunes or original material.

GK: We absolutely don’t ever want to lose the component of old-time string music and we’re currently in a time where that music seems a lot more accessible and is getting thrown under the big umbrella that everyone is calling Americana. We don’t do a show without old-time tunes in there. A lot of the other music we take influence from – blues, rock and roll – they were actually getting inspiration from early country and old-time music. So for us, it all goes in the same bucket.

You’re definitely known for that high energy string band sound, but this new album has quite a range of pace. How do you stay true to that sound while incorporating softer material like “Mississippi Queen?”

GK: We’re very much a live band and in that setting it’s about that high energy, rowdy thing. We love that, but amongst us in the band, three to four of us are songwriters and have very different approaches to songwriting. We’re very lucky to have Daniel in the band, he’s one of my favorite songwriters and has an ability to write some of that intimate, close to the chest material, like “Mississippi Queen.” And you need that delicate stuff just as much as you need the fast, hard hitting, and fun stuff. We feel that it’s very important to show audiences (and ourselves) that we have those dynamics.

DB: A lot of our shows at festivals are late night, midnight shows and it’s almost more like a punk-rock show. But there are also theaters or other venues where you can really showcase more of that dynamic. Kevin Martin has a few tunes on the album and he writes totally different that I do. He’s more rock and roll and I guess I’m the softy. It’s nice to have a little variety – especially on a record.

What’s special to you about this upcoming album, compared to music you’ve released in the past?

GK: Personally, watching this band shift and develop over 15 years has been pretty wild. This is the first record of the band’s that I’ve produced, and what’s special to me is (and I’m not saying that we’re reinventing the wheel), I’ve never heard quite the blend of genres that we’ve thrown together. It’s cool that Hogslop is still shifting and mutating and we’re still discovering that. And that we’re embracing our songwriting – everything on this record is our own material, and I’m really proud of that.

DB: I agree with all of that! One thing I’ll add that was a major game changer – and this is thanks to Gabe – was the ability to take our time in the studio and not be under the time constraints that’d you’d be under paying for studio time somewhere.

What else is on the horizon with the release in 2024?

GK: We’ll be in the studio most of November, and then we’ve got the Ryman show [supporting the Mavericks] on December 1. As different as this new music is, we’re really woodshedding and figuring out our live show. It sounds like our ‘24 is gonna be busy – we’re mainly a festival band, so that’s where we’re headed.

Photo Credit: Josh Goleman

Watch the Zany Music Video for Willi Carlisle’s Just-Announced Album, ‘Critterland’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Arkansas-based country and old-time troubadour Willi Carlisle has announced his upcoming, Darrell Scott-produced album, Critterland, with a delightful stop-motion music video. (Watch above.) Set for release January 26, 2024 on Signature Sounds, the collection once again draws on Carlisle’s apt self-positioning as a sort of rural, countercultural, folklorist guru, crafting poetic yet down-to-earth songs that feel all at once fantastic, resplendent, whimsical, and– well, trashy. It’s a dichotomy not unknown to American roots musics, but rarely is this paradoxical construct inhabited so intentionally and subverted so artfully. It’s a language Carlisle isn’t just fluent in, it oozes from his spirit and lives in his bones.

On “Critterland,” Carlisle positions himself not as an omniscient narrator, but well within his own communities – musical and otherwise – as he examines how the “big tent” of his prior album, Peculiar, Missouri, could be put into action. And, in doing so, he demonstrates how varied, broad, deep – and sometimes ugly – open arm, open heart policies can be. But in that mundane, in that bittersweet, there is endless beauty.

With that thought in mind, Darrell Scott as producer and collaborator here isn’t merely a solid choice, but a nearly perfect one. You hear his touches in the confidence Carlisle has stepped into – with hundreds and hundreds of shows under his belt – with his soaring, passionate vocal on “Critterland,” raising its possums and raccoons and armadillos to saint-like status. Because, after all, aren’t all living beings divine? Don’t we all have something to contribute to our own, particular critterlands? Carlisle says so, and makes a compelling case.

This 2024 album will be a must-listen.

Photo Credit: Madison Hurley

BGS 5+5: Lonesome Ace Stringband

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Lonesome Ace Stringband
Hometown: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Latest Album: Try to Make it Fly

(Editor’s Note: Answers provided by Lonesome Ace Stringband banjoist Chris Coole.)

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

Although I think the answer for each of us individually would be different, I think the most obvious single influence on us as an ensemble would be John Hartford. Specifically, the last several albums he made with the “John Hartford Stringband” (which featured Bob Carlin and Mike Compton, among others). Their approach to playing old-time fiddle tunes, especially on the albums Wild Hog In the Red Brush and Speed of the Old Long Bow, was based on a highly improvised and reimagined way of playing backup that Hartford called “Windows.” Although it wasn’t a conscious decision, and we don’t follow the approach to the letter, I think the spirit of those albums really influenced the way we play and perform old-time music, especially (instrumental) fiddle tunes.

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc. — inform your music?

As a band, I think the art form outside of music that has had the biggest impact is the crank (prank) phone call. For years we’ve been listening to the Jerky Boys. We are old enough to remember the late ’80s and early ’90s when underground Jerky Boys cassette tapes were passed around organically and treasured by all who were lucky enough to possess them. About five years ago, the guys from The Henhouse Prowlers introduced us to Longmont Potion Castle, who has been anonymously releasing psychedelic crank calls since the ’80s (he’s still at it). You might think I’m being tongue in cheek when I say that these influence us as a band, but the attention to detail – especially in regard to language – and the level of improvisation are both relatable to music and inspiring. Most importantly though, it’s a great reminder that we live in a crazy world, and it’s best not to take yourself or anyone else too seriously.

What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?

We like to get our heart rates up before a show if possible and maybe a bit of stretching. This often involves us having an aerobics dance party to ’80s pop and new wave. “Betty Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes is a favorite, as is “Dance Hall Days” by Wang Chung. [John] Showman favours doing some version of the “Mountain Climber” while Max [Heineman] and I are usually doing jumping jacks, dancing on the spot, or some sort of hippie clogging. Seeing three middle-aged men dancing around in the green room to The Pretenders or Blondie seems to warm the hearts of promoters and venue staff and there are probably bootlegged videos of us doing it circulating around.

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

The title of our new album is Try to Make it Fly. That is a line from one of the songs called “Sweeter Sound.” I’d say that song encapsulates what our mission as a band is. We are all in our 50s and have been playing music professionally (mostly full time) since we were teenagers. That song is about not giving up, even when everything might seem to be pushing you in the other direction. It’s about keeping sight of what’s important – community, friends, family, art – and letting the quality of those things in your life be the gauge of your success. With where we are in our lives and careers, that seems to be the only way forward.

Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?

There’s a song on the new album called “Smoke on the Shoulder” which is basically a recipe for smoking pork shoulder. We all love to cook and appreciate good food. We rarely miss a chance to stop at a good BBQ joint when tour routing allows. With this in mind, I’m going to say the food would be smoked brisket and pulled pork with sides of coleslaw, beans, and macaroni. The musical accompaniment to this meal would be provided by, none other than, George Jones.

Photo Credit: Joel Varjassy 

25 Years On, It’s Old Crow Medicine Show’s ‘Jubilee’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Old Crow Medicine Show co-founder and frontman Ketch Secor is always busy. In September, Secor and flatpicking master Molly Tuttle co-hosted the Annual IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards, a brief respite from the ongoing national tour Secor and Old Crow are currently on. They hit the road earlier this year after releasing Jubilee, their latest record, celebrating 25 years as a band. With a few recent lineup changes, their energy is still fresh and exciting — and in this exclusive BGS interview, Secor explains that you really just have to see them live to fully understand and appreciate the bit.

This will be the second tour with the current lineup, right? What do you think will be different with touring Jubilee?

Ketch Secor: In typical Old Crow fashion, an 11th-hour lineup change occurred as we were putting the finishing touches on this album. We’ve hired two new players, and that’s Dante’ Pope on drums and piano, and PJ George as a utility player, so with these two additional players we have yet another iteration of Old Crow that has subtle differences from any other one we’ve had before. This kind of thing just makes it fun. That fluidity of the lineup has made it a lot more palatable — it’s still Flagstaff in the fall, but getting to see it with somebody who’s never been before, and getting to share the stage with people who bring out something new in you musically.

I feel like music for the old-time string band – and maybe this is the same for bluegrass – but music is really relational. It’s about who you’re with. I play different with different people. The pitcher isn’t gonna play differently because of who the shortstop is, but in a string band, the fiddler’s following a groove that the banjo sets, and if there’s a great mandolin player with chops then the fiddler is going to weave in and out of something differently.

How did you choose the guest appearances on this album, like Sierra Ferrell and Mavis Staples?

KS: That kind of thing just evolves. Making records in the 21st century, collaborations are what’s on the menu more so than when we were kids. We didn’t think about who was going to be the guests when we were kids. For Sierra, we thought that song needed something, and we realized it was a duet. I’d been sitting on that one for a couple years. I rewrote it as a duet, and we called the best woman to sing on a cock-fighting song — we called out to West Virginia.

Why are collaborations more necessary now?

KS: If I could be frank, it’s because labels are trying to do anything they can to sell albums. It adds to social media platforms. It increases the scope in ways that are much more specific to these times than just making great music. When Lita Ford came out with Ozzy Osbourne, that probably had a different purpose to it than it does today. Independent labels are taking a cue from hip-hop artists who experiment with this all the time. Bluegrass and old-time and traditional music tends to be 10 years behind those types of styles, so it makes sense that nowadays we’re all making collaborative contributions.

Were there any surprising or touching moments working with Willie Watson in the studio again? Was the chemistry there after 12 years?

KS: Yeah, I think that having Willie back is just important to the ethos of Old Crow Medicine Show, and celebrating its 25th anniversary. We’ve been working together since COVID on some things from live streams to concert appearances, and this was sort of the next frontier for Old Crow and Willie in burying the hatchet and making music together. When you’re in a 25-year-old band you get a lot of ex-boyfriends. Hindsight is 20/20, and I just know that nowadays it’s better to be back on stage together. 

How has your fiddling changed over the years? What are some of the areas you focus on when you practice? Old-time is known for being scrubby, but there’s a lot more going on there.

KS: Well, it’s changed over the years as I’ve gotten to be a lot better and gutsier as a violin player. I play it harder and stronger and faster than I did when I was 18 when I learned. For 25 or some years it’s been my dance partner. At the quarter century mark as a violin player, I feel like I know my partner well. I know where to take it, where on the neck to go. I know how to get the sounds that I’m looking for.

But I’m not a player who practices. My practice is just playing 95 concerts a year for 25 years and making 15 records in that period of time and being a special guest on 50 other records. I’ve grown up like a plant in the window when it comes to my violin playing. I see where the light is and I’ve grown towards it, and it’s bushier and brighter than it used to be when I was just a little twig. It just keeps growing all the time, but it’s not because I’m changing anything. There’s no additive to the soil.

You play old-time, but do you ever try other genres?

KS: I’ve played a few jazz gigs, but it’s not what I do well. I listen to all manner of songs. As a fiddle player, I like to think about all of the music that I’m channeling into the way I play, and a lot of it is traditional fiddle music, but a lot of it’s not. I feel like there’s Public Enemy and Nirvana and Bosco and the Carter Family, and other things that are not fiddle playing in my playing. But mostly what there is in my fiddle playing is mileage. It’s experience. It’s rust. It’s calcified. That’s the case with people who’ve played music for a lifetime. They get better not because they’re doing something different, but because they’re doing the same thing again and again. 

You mentioned that folk music should be topical — not kept in a museum case. Do you think that kind of folk has a special place in the world right now given the political and economic hard times we’ve been seeing?

KS: I think that anybody who’s making genuine art has a reflection of the world around in that work. We the artists are sort of like poetic mirrors of what we see. There’s lot of songs now that reflect the discord, either in a lamentation or in a protest or in just a pure reflection. My music tends to talk about the plight of the people who are most associated with this music, so that can be the people of the Southern Highlands. It can be the hardship of the African American co-inventors of this music. But I’m also a real vessel for global topics, and I say that because when I read the news it’s almost like it starts riding on my back. So I’m thinking about flood waters in Libya and earthquakes in Morocco and school shootings in Nashville. To me they’re all part of a human struggle to find peace in the world. 

What change do you hope comes about from songs like “Allegheny Lullaby?” How do people take that sentiment and make it actionable?

KS: That’s a song about a limitation of choice. That’s a matter of equity or inequity. So the equitable solution is: More choice. It’s widening the spectrum of options for people who live in the coal district, and that’s a very doable action item. It’s just a hard thing to do and live the exact same way, without a change in economics, but that’s the story of the American people. We adapt. And so I think the natural adaptation cycle in the Southern Highlands is in flux right now because of some strident efforts to hold it back. The results of those actions are that you got an opioid epidemic, a fentanyl epidemic — so many dysfunctions. I’m looking forward to the people eventually standing up and getting what they need. I wouldn’t put it past the people to get that. They got it before. They unionized in those situations and fought for livable wages, and they can do it again.

You talk a lot about nature, like mountains and feral critters, in your music. Is that an intentional part of folk or where does that come from?

KS: When I think about what made [American music] so rich, I know it’s the land and the soil and the people and the stories. So to evoke the same is just a natural link in the chain forged anew. And that’s all I’m doing. I’m just singing about the rivers that mean something to me when I sing them. I don’t think you’re ever going to get tired of thinking about the Big Sandy River, no matter if it’s clean or dirty. It’s called the Big Sandy, doesn’t that sound like freedom? 

What do you hope listeners will take away from this album?

KS: You know, we make music because we’re a live band. We make albums because we’re a live act. Come and see us. If you like this record, go buy a ticket. We’re coming to your town; we have for a quarter of a century. We loved you then, and we love you even more now. And if you hear something on this record you like, then that’s just one more reason to come buy that ticket and see us when we come to your community and make a unique and special community in yours for one night. This is an age-old P.T. Barnum routine. The hat is magic, the ring is heavenly. Once you gaze on what lies behind the curtain, you will be dazzled. That’s where the magic is. The album is a big arrow.

Photo Credit: Joshua Black Wilkins