One of Molly Tuttle’s strongest suits is her fluency in an array of instruments and styles. Using her experience as an excellent clawhammer banjo player and a masterful guitarist, she has forged a unique style of clawhammer guitar-playing. Similarly, Tuttle is at home in old-time music, traditional bluegrass, and more modern roots styles. Already an artist who seemingly can do it all, the California native’s newest endeavor is showcasing an even broader range of musicianship.
Her 2020 album, titled …but i’d rather be with you, is made completely of cover songs by artists from many different genres, including the National, the Rolling Stones, and Grateful Dead. In her interpretation of Rancid’s “Olympia, WA,” Tuttle’s ability to match her voice to the energy of the song speaks volumes of the caliber of musician that she is. In her trademark effortless way, she brings an acoustic guitar to a punk rock song and somehow still delivers an inspiring performance. Watch the video here.
On October 3, 2020, during IBMA’s Virtual World of Bluegrass, I watched the Bluegrass Situation‘s presentation of Shout & Shine Online, the fifth annual showcasecelebrating equity and inclusion in bluegrass and roots music. This year it featured Black performers, including Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton, the blues, folk, bluegrass, and jazz multi-instrumentalist and vocalist from South Los Angeles. Not only do I enjoy his music, I also relish his asides and introductions. He knows a lot about musical sources, histories and meanings.
Introducing his music, Paxton explained that “ragtime” was the word people in his home community used to describe what others might call “old-time” or “traditional” — music that rekindled a shared past. At neighborhood and family social gatherings, he said, people would ask for his music by saying, “Play some of that ragtime music!”
For many people ragtime evokes the aural image of a piano played in the style of early 20th century composer Scott Joplin, an African American whose “Maple Leaf Rag” starred in the soundtrack of the 1973 hit film The Sting. (Paxton performed an arrangement of “Maple Leaf Rag” on five-string banjo for his Shout & Shine Online set.) The basic structure of this solo piano music involves the left hand keeping the rhythm often with large leaps in the bass register — often referred to as “stride” — while the right hand plays syncopated melody on the upper register.
In this form, ragtime is thought of as an urban phenomenon, straddling the border between popular and classical, and as the musical precursor of jazz. Joplin, for instance, composed an opera in 1911, and Julliard piano professor Joshua Rifkin’s 1971 LP of Joplin’s works earned a Grammy nomination. Pioneer jazz pianists like Jelly Roll Morton included ragtime in their repertoires.
Ragtime had another manifestation in the southeast, where Black musicians adapted it to the guitar in a fingerpicking style. Here, the right hand did all the work: the thumb picking the rhythm on the bass strings while the index and middle fingers ragged the tune on the higher strings.
The guitar was more affordable and portable than the piano. Ragtime guitar was featured by early 20th century itinerant musicians like Arnold Shultz in western Kentucky and Blind Boy Fuller in North Carolina. But it was not just the music of popular entertainment, it was also, as Paxton explained, social community music, performed for friends and neighbors.
In 1957, ragtime fingerpicking was a “new thing” within the folk music world that I was becoming acquainted with as a college student. I switched from nylon- to steel-string guitar and started wearing picks on my right hand. One of the recordings popular with us at Oberlin College was a track Peggy Seeger fingerpicked and sang on her 1955 Folkways LP, Songs of Courting and Complaint: “Freight Train.” She’d learned the song and its guitar accompaniment from the Black woman who worked as her family’s maid, North Carolinian Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten, its composer.
In 1958 Peggy’s brother Mike Seeger produced Cotten’s first album for Folkways. “Freight Train,” already her best-known song, was on it:
Another tune we were trying to fingerpick in our dorm rooms and dining hall jam sessions was “Railroad Bill.” That song had been recorded by Virginia multi-instrumentalist and virtuoso Hobart Smith back in the ’40s.
“Discovered” at the White Top (Virginia) folk festival in 1936, Smith and his sister, singer Texas Gladden, subsequently performed at the White House and were recorded for the Library of Congress by Alan Lomax in 1942. In 1946, Lomax introduced Hobart to New York record company owner Moses Asch. One of Asch’s new Disc label 78s launched Smith’s version of “Railroad Bill” into aural tradition among ’50s fingerpickers. Lomax recorded Smith again in 1959:
Smith had studied and learned fiddle and banjo with African American musician neighbors at a time when the realities of segregation forced him and his friends to visit them surreptitiously. He was inspired to take up the guitar when he saw an itinerant Black bluesman, whom he identified as Blind Lemon Jefferson.
“Railroad Bill” was a well-known song in the southeast. Another song with a similar melody was “The Cannon Ball,” which Maybelle Carter of the famous Carter Family learned from Burnsville, North Carolina, native Lesley Riddle. In the late twenties and early thirties Riddle, an African American, accompanied A.P. Carter on song collecting trips and taught the family several songs they later recorded. Here’s a 1936 radio transcription of Maybelle singing and picking “The Cannon Ball”:
Mike Seeger recorded Riddle several times between 1965 and 1978; in 1993 Rounder issued a CD with 14 performances, including “The Cannon Ball”:
Riddle’s version, with its C to E chord change, is even closer to “Railroad Bill” than Maybelle’s. But in the mid-’50s, when I first became interested in this tune, no LP recordings of it were available.
That changed in 1956, when a new version of “Railroad Bill” was released on an album, Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians. The first piece on the “B” side, it was fingerpicked by Mrs. Etta Baker:
By the time I arrived at Oberlin College in 1957 it was an underground favorite; the hip older students spoke about trying to play like Mrs. Etta Baker. Copies of the album were passed around.
This album was on the new folk music label Tradition. Based in New York, Tradition hit the ground running in 1956 with at least 14 albums representing Greenwich Village trends in the mid-’50s folk revival: lots of ballads, plenty of Irish and English singers, popular radio performers, folklore collectors, flamenco artists, new concert sensations, and two albums of field recordings in the style of Folkways — one from Ireland, and this one from Appalachia. The recordings for Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians were made by Tradition owner Diane Hamilton along with Liam Clancy and Paul Clayton in the summer of 1956.
Diane Hamilton was the pseudonym of Diane Guggenheim (1924–1991), an American mining heiress with a lifelong interest in traditional music, particularly Irish. At the time of the recording, Liam Clancy, soon to become part of the famous Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, had just arrived in New York, following an attachment with Hamilton. His brother Paddy was president of her new company.
New Englander Paul Clayton had studied folklore at the University of Virginia while pursuing a career as a folksinger. He recorded many albums from the mid-’50s until his troubled life ended in 1967 at the age of 36. Today he’s perhaps best known as a songwriter. His “Gotta Travel On” was a country hit in 1958, and his friend Bob Dylan borrowed from one of his songs to compose “Don’t Think Twice.” In 1956 Tradition had just released Paul’s album, Whaling and Sailing Songs from the Days of Moby Dick.
In his notes for Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians, Clayton described the album as “the result of a folk-song collecting trip during the Summer of 1956.” Hamilton and Clancy had recently arrived in New York from Ireland; Clancy was keen on collecting southern folk songs, and Clayton, who’d done a lot of that, was the obvious choice for expert guide.
The three met in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and headed west for a collecting trip to Appalachia. Their exact itinerary is unknown, but they went as far west as Beech Mountain, the highest point in the eastern U.S., well-known for its folk traditions. There they recorded folktale collector and performer Richard Chase doing three old-time dance tunes on the harmonica. In nearby Banner Elk, Mrs. Edd Presnell played three old-time tunes on her Appalachian dulcimer — an instrument then rarely heard on recordings that Clayton had studied and used in his performances.
The trio also visited Hobart Smith in his Saltville, Virginia, home, seventy miles north of Beech Mountain, recording four fiddle tunes and one banjo piece.
Their travel also took them to Blowing Rock, about a 25 mile drive from Beech Mountain, where they stopped in at the Moses H. Cone Mansion (also known as Flat Top Manor) a popular regional park on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Etta Baker, her father Boone Reid, and other family members were vacationing in the area, visiting the mansion. Reid, a musician himself, noticed Clayton was toting a guitar. He told Clayton of Baker’s musical talent and asked him to listen to Etta play her signature, “One Dime Blues.” According to Baker, “Paul was amazed. He got directions to our home and he was over the next day with his tape-recorder along with Liam Clancy and Diane Hamilton.”
They recorded five pieces. “Later,” says Clayton, “We met more of… a very talented family living in Morganton or Gamewell,” and they recorded two banjo pieces each by Boone Reid, then 79 years old, and Etta’s brother-in-law, her sister Cora Phillips’ husband Lacey.
Clayton’s notes indicate that they recorded “considerable instrumental material,” from which they chose “typical and best-performed” examples. This considerable material subsequently disappeared, leaving us today with only the album’s 20 tracks.
These include many familiar pieces from the local old-time repertoire. By following Harry Smith’s precedent in not identifying the color of performers’ skin, Clayton made the point that these musical traditions were regional, not racial. Perhaps since dulcimer player Mrs. Presnell’s first name was not given, all of the musicians were identified on the album notes as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” This lent an air of respect to the names of people often described elsewhere as “informants.”
Because of her fine guitar playing Mrs. Etta Baker was, for us, the most memorable performer on the album. A word of explanation — Mr. Hobart Smith was a fine fiddler, but in 1956 the fiddle hadn’t caught on in the folk revival. That wouldn’t start to happen until a few years later when the New Lost City Ramblers appeared.
With the exception of Smith, who led a string band for a while, the folks on this album made music as part of their social life, playing for their own enjoyment and that of family and friends. Sometimes they provided music for dancing — square dancing, and solo step dancing.
Here’s a good example of ragtime guitar used for solo step dancing: Earl Scruggs playing “Georgia Buck” live in 1961.
Another version was released in 1964 on the The Fabulous Sound of Flatt & Scruggs (Col CL 2255/CS 9055). The album notes say: “Georgia Buck, played by Scruggs on the guitar, represents the rhythmic beat of the old-time buck dancers.”
According to NCPedia, “buck dancing is a folk dance that originated among African Americans during the era of slavery. It was largely associated with the North Carolina Piedmont and, later, with the blues. The original buck dance, or ‘buck and wing,’ referred to a specific step performed by solo dancers, usually men; today the term encompasses a broad variety of improvisational dance steps.”
The Traditional Tune Archive describes “Georgia Buck” as “a black Southern banjo song,” so it’s interesting that Earl played it on the guitar in a style resembling that of Baker, Smith, Riddle and Carter. Where did he learn it that way? We don’t know, but Lester makes a point of describing his music as “hot” during the video and other musicians can be heard saying the same thing off-camera, seemingly endorsing the idea that this is good ragtime.
There are many stories of young white southern musicians learning from older black musicians in their hometown. One example: In 1972-73, Kenny Baker, then playing fiddle with Bill Monroe, did two albums with Buck Graves of guitar fingerpicking he’d learned from his brother, who’d taken lessons from “Earnest Johnson, a blind, black guitarist who sold peanuts in Jenkins, Kentucky during the thirties.” Rebel reissued them in 1989 as The Puritan Sessions (CD 1108).
Listening to Etta Baker on Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians was as close to taking lessons in that style of guitar as most of us undergrad folkies got. After the release of the album, she was not heard again on records for many years. Like Libba Cotten, Baker was a working woman with little time for making music. By the time she retired in 1973 from the Skyland Textile mill in Morganton, North Carolina, she’d endured family tragedies — the deaths of her husband and a son. After retirement she began accepting requests to perform and her music career developed. More about that next time…
Just about every picker in bluegrass and old-time each has their own right-hand approach to their instruments. Even on the violin, a device with hundreds of years of technique and pedagogy behind its myriad bowing-arm methods, idiosyncrasies are still apparent in nearly every instrumentalist’s approach. The six-string, flat-top guitar — despite being perhaps the most common “ax” in the traditional five-piece string band — has experienced far fewer seismic shifts in playing style and technique, though its individual touches are just as varied. Clarence White and acolyte Tony Rice each reinvigorated the instrument’s role in bluegrass; and today, players like David Grier, Tommy Emmanuel, and Molly Tuttle conjure mind-bending, never before seen or heard acrobatics on their instruments. (Tuttle’s clawhammer guitar approach being a perfect example.)
Mark Harris, an Australia-born guitarist now based in Colorado, offers his own innovative right-hand style on a new album, Old Time Guitar. His debut, the fifteen-song series explores old-time fiddle tunes re-arranged and configured for solo guitar. By playing with open tunings and capitalizing on their innate resonance, Harris is able to execute each composition as if a one-man-band, supplying his own rhythm section and simultaneously picking the tune. It’s like an old-time rendering of jazz guitar studies’ chord melodies plus open-string droning seemingly plucked from the banjo. The result, like on “Lost Girl,” is a loping, driving, homey sound with a polish — or perhaps a patina. On “Lost Girl,” Harris’ guitar is tuned D G D G B E (top to bottom), giving his flat-top box a honey-like resonance somewhere between a singer-songwriter’s DADGAD happy place and an open-tuned banjo.
WithOld Time Guitar, Harris makes a compelling mark within a contemporary old-time scene hungry to demonstrate its canon isn’t just time capsule music, but relevant contextualized in the present — with production, arrangements, and outside-the-box thinking to match.
Fans of Gillian Welch have been rewarded for their customary patience with an abundance of albums released in 2020. During the earliest days of the pandemic, Welch and her partner, David Rawlings, stayed in and recorded songs from a collection of old songbooks. (The result, All the Good Times, received a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album last week.) And after literally rescuing an archive of tapes and instruments from a tornado in March — one that blew the roof off their East Nashville studio — the pair set to work on another major undertaking.
This time, the result is even more bountiful: Three albums, encompassing 48 rarely-heard songs written and recorded in 2002 to fulfill a publishing deal. Only a few compositions have seen the light of day, namely the recordings of Alison Krauss & Union Station’s “Wouldn’t Be So Bad,” Solomon Burke’s “Valley of Tears,” and I’m With Her’s “Hundred Miles.” The engaging, one-take performances remained tucked away until this year, but they’ll be compiled into a three-disc box set titled Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs in December, packaged with a book of photography and a songbook of their own. These unearthed tracks were recorded in between 2001’s Time (The Revelator) and 2003’s Soul Journey; meanwhile, Boots No. 1 was an equally satisfying 2016 collection of outtakes from her 1996 debut album, Revival.
BGS caught up with Gillian Welch by phone.
BGS: Prior to preparing these releases, how often did you revisit these recordings?
Welch: Not really, let’s see. They’re pushing 20 years old – they’re 18 years old. I’d say… twice? So, close to once a decade? What would happen is, somebody or an artist that we knew would come to us, asking if we had any songs nobody had heard. Did we have any unreleased songs? One time, Buddy Miller called us up, and I love Buddy. He’s a friend. And he said, “You guys don’t have any country R&B songs, do you?” And I said, “Funnily enough, we’ve got a couple of these that we just didn’t know what to do with.” And he said, “Well, I’m making a record on Solomon Burke!” So, that’s how Solomon came to record “Valley of Tears.”
And same, Alison Krauss heard “Wouldn’t Be So Bad” the day I turned in all these songs to the publishing company. My manager hadn’t even heard them, and my publisher was playing them for my manager, who also managed Alison. They weren’t even pitching her “Wouldn’t Be So Bad.” She was in there to listen to other people’s songs and she heard it through the wall, is what I heard, and came in and said, “What’s that one? It’s awful, that’s just pitiful, I want that one!” [Laughs] So, that’s pretty much how it went. And same thing with I’m With Her. They were looking for some tunes. But truly, man, that’s about it.
How were these recordings made? Did you record them originally on reel-to-reel?
Yeah, they’re on quarter-inch reel-to-reel. They were recorded on a portable Nagra. The old field recordings, when they would take tape machines out to people’s farms and record folk songs and whatnot, these were often the machines they were hauling around. They run on batteries. Just lovely tape machines. So, we had a Nagra at the house and I was singing into a SM57 duct-taped to a guitar stand. [Laughs] My guitar and vocal are going into one microphone. It was very, very minimal, because we didn’t think we were making records, honestly. We weren’t. That’s one of the things that sets this collection apart from our records, is these weren’t records! None of that self-awareness, or self-consciousness, was present. These songs were written in a marathon long weekend and each song was recorded a minute after it was done.
David Rawlings and Gillian Welch by Henry Diltz
All 48 songs were written in a weekend?!
Yes. The ideas, they had languished, unfinished, in writing notebooks. They’d been kicking around. It wasn’t like I had thought of all these things in a weekend. But, I had shortfall with my publishing deal. As we started putting out records and we started touring… I don’t write on the road. So I fell behind. It was like I was never going to be done with it. My life had changed so much, that particular deal had kind of run its course. I didn’t know what to do.
Dave was the one who had the courageous and crazy idea. He was like, “What if we just turn in all the songs?” I sort of laughed, like, “Really? 48 songs?” [Laughs] He was like, “Yeah,” and he started pulling out the old notebooks. I write in spiral-bound, college-ruled notebooks, and there were just stacks of them around. He started pulling them out and we would look for a song that had just never gotten finished.
And he said, “Whatever the song needs, to make it a song, here we go. Right now.” We’re going to do it. He would put this sheet in front of me, and I would try and finish it, and he would go try to find another. And as soon as he came back in, I was supposed to have finished the one he had handed me previously. Then we would turn the tape machine and sing it once, and then that was that. Then we would finish another one. So, yeah, all of these recordings are first vocal takes of me. And I hear it. There’s an off-the-cuff-ness.
As you were recording these songs, were you in chairs facing each other?
I was on the couch! [Laughs] It’s a funny thing, releasing these into the world. It’s strange timing, to have rescued them from a tornado, and to be confronted with them again after all these years. And to literally think, “Why are we saving these?” It was really shocking. You keep things like this, maybe notebooks or photographs or tapes, and you think, “Well, maybe I’ll do something with them someday…” Here’s the sudden realization that they may not always be available to you. A tornado could come along and pulverize the entire thing.
Now, when you say you saved them from a tornado, that’s quite literal.
Oh yeah! That is completely literal. I picked them up in my arms and ran them through a collapsing building, so yes, it is completely literal! In the dark, in cascading water and debris. We physically saved every one of our masters, and every one of our guitars and microphones and gear. … I don’t want to go through that again. It’s the closest window I’ve had to what people go through in extreme duress and trauma. It was really something. That was how our year started out.
As I was looking through some of your press materials, I saw a photograph of you – and the photographer was you. Are you interested in photography? Is that something you’ve taken up?
Yeah, actually, that’s what my degree is in. I have a Bachelor of Arts in photography that I got and promptly made no use of. But I have it! Funny enough, now that we all walk around with cameras on our person, in the form of a phone, at all times, I take more photographs these days than I have since I was an undergrad, you know? I think you’re referring to this record of folk songs that Dave and I made during lockdown, and they said, “Well, we need a picture.” [Laughs] So I took a picture of myself and I took a picture of Dave threading tape on the tape machine that lives in our bookcase.
Gillian Welch by Gillian Welch
I’ve been reading about people who have started to play banjo during the pandemic, to cheer themselves up. Has that been the case for you?
I’ve heard that too! It’s so interesting to see how people are dealing with this, and apparently guitar sales and banjo sales are way up. It’s heartening. Who would have seen that coming? People are learning to play instruments, or returning to ones that have been in the closet for many years, and it’s really a wonderful reaction. We all find our own ways. And for Dave and I, it’s been pulling out all these old folk songs book, flipping them open to a page, and singing all these folk songs. Somehow, that’s been our reaction.
How old are the books?
They’re anywhere from a hundred years old, to fifty years old, forty years old… You know, I like these folk songbooks. I started singing folk songs when I was very young and I came at them not from records, but from this tradition of songbooks and being taught them by teachers and other people. It was not a recorded medium, at first, for me. Strangely, though it sounds incredibly old-timey, it was an oral tradition. …
So, we’re just returning to it. It’s the only thing that made sense to me in April and May of this year, was to sing these songs that touched upon other songs of great upheaval and tragedy and loss. And yet, people came through it, right? It doesn’t matter how dark or tragic the material is. The fact that the song exists tells me that people made it through. That’s part of the great power of folk music. And I use folk as a really, really big word, to cover almost everything! [Laughs] As someone once said, “Folk music is just music sung by folks.”
If I have my timing right, these recordings were made between the O Brother, Where Are Thou soundtrack and Soul Journey. Looking back on that time in your career, there must have been so much happening, and so many commitments you had to honor. Where do you draw strength from, when you start to feel overwhelmed?
Well, that’s an interesting question. When I really start to get overwhelmed, and it has definitely happened this year… It’s been such a challenge to remember who we are, in the face of being separated so much from what we normally do, you know? It’s hard to remember who we are! And I found myself really, in my most dislocated moments, putting on the records that I love. And honestly, this is going to sound kind of crazy, but I’ve heard it from other people, too, who have been putting on our music. Almost to fill the social gaps, to have another person inhabit your home, right? And I did that also. Because I’ve seen no one but Dave, really, and I found myself putting on records and almost communing with them like friends.
I see that there’s a box set coming on vinyl and CD, and there’s a songbook, and a lot of photos. It seems like all of your passions are channeled into one big project.
You know, it was really fun to make that book, that photo-music-lyric book that is a companion to the box set. I’ve never made a book before and it was a really interesting intersection of everything I’ve ever done, with all the photography. I’d say it’s about half [composed of] found photographs, and some photographs of mine, and some photographs of Dave. As it turned out, I realized doing this, there aren’t that many pictures of Dave and I from back then. We didn’t just always have a camera. There are so many pictures to document more current times, but we did find some.
When you listen now to this collection of songs, what kinds of emotions does it bring out in you?
When I listen to them, I think about the craft of songwriting. I think that there’s almost a humbleness to them. There’s not very much ego in them, because I wasn’t writing them to be “recorded by the recording artist Gillian Welch.” I was just trying to have them be songs, and we were so focused on their song-ness. And now 20 years later, I like that about them. We just put things that we were thinking about, and things that we were seeing.
Like in “Back Turn and Swing,” Dave is from New England, and every summer up there, you can’t sit down to a meal where there’s corn on the cob without a protracted discussion about past years’ corn, and how this corn rates against the other years’ corn. It’s funny, it’s hilarious! You just talk about different years of corn! So, I like that that made it in. I like it when these little things that we notice as we go through the world make it into the songs, and this collection has a lot of that. There are a lot of little moments in there.
I’m glad it exists, and it wouldn’t have existed — all of these things would have stayed in the notebook — if it weren’t for having to satisfy my publishing deal! So, I certainly had no hard feelings about any of it. It’s amazing that we did this, and given the timing of everything, I can’t believe in the year of 2020, with all this upheaval and pain and loss and isolation, that we had all of these songs sitting in a box, to say to people, “Here you go.” We rescued them. They are lost no more.
Photo credit (lead): David Rawlings; Photo credit (pair): Henry Diltz; Photo credit (middle): Gillian Welch
Something about the simplest forms of bluegrass and old-time make them the perfectly fitting music to soundtrack autumn, with her crisp nights, warm colors, harvest treats, and seasonal drinks. The season evokes a back porch and round-the-fire pickin’, roots music in her most basic iteration, as respite and enjoyment for the long winter nights ahead. A fiddle, a banjo, a guitar, a mountain dulcimer, an autoharp – any of these would be the ideal score for summer giving way to fall.
It’s fitting then, that Bruce Molsky’s “Cider” begins with a rake. Molsky’s 2006 album, Soon Be Time, is perhaps his solo magnum opus, a no-skip, nearly perfect collection of modern interpretations of old-time classics deliciously steeped in a subtle, autumnal vibe. The project includes numerous tracks that have since grown to be regarded as seminal recordings of each, to a new generation of bluegrass and old-time pickers. Tunes like “Lazy John,” “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” “John Brown’s Dream,” and others are seemingly regarded as Molsky’s own material now, with plenty of covers referencing Soon Be Time’s versions as source recordings.
“Cider” isn’t the only fall-flavored tune on the album — see also: “Come Home” and “Forked Deer” — but its impeccable banjo tone, magnificent rakes, and jovial quality will warm you head to toe like a piping hot mug of your favorite appley drink. If you’re headed over the river and through the woods this autumn, Soon Be Time would be the perfect companion, especially with a taste of “Cider.”
Adam Hurt is a banjo player’s banjo player. This role is well known in bluegrass, where almost an entire generation of banjo players, who came up almost immediately during and after Earl Scruggs’ popularization of a three-finger approach to the banjo, continue to go largely unsung outside of five-string niches and circles of Scruggs-style acolytes. Hurt is remarkable, though, because he’s not an acrobatic, up-and-down-the-neck, barn-burning bluegrass picker on the margins of the scene. Instead he’s a clawhammerist — but the musicians and instrumentalists who count themselves followers and fans of Hurt’s pickin’ aren’t just old-time players; they’re everyone.
On his new album, Back to the Earth, Hurt strays still further from “mainstream” banjo playing by returning to its roots: the gourd banjo. Back to the Earth is a follow up to Hurt’s 2010 project, Earth Tones, an album often regarded as a seminal work on the gourd banjo. Despite largely being anchored by solo tunes played on the modern five-string’s precursor (which was brought to this continent by enslaved peoples kidnapped from West Africa), the entire new collection feels firmly rooted in the present. Raw, rustic affectations often found on old-time recordings are missing here, but not to the detriment of the final product or its “authenticity.” These twelve tunes feel simultaneously immaculate and primordial. Hurt deftly follows the gourd banjo’s microtones, warbles, wobbles, and slides as they lead him, rather than the opposite — which might be the most distinctive aspect of his playing, compared to other clawhammer players, other gourd banjo players, and five-string or four-string players alike.
Ricky Skaggs, Brittany Haas, Paul Kowert, Jordan Tice, Marshall Wilborn, and others guest on Back to the Earth in different groupings, depending on the tune, but on “The Scolding Wife,” Hurt performs solo, a man in dialogue with his ancient instrument, ringing through the millennia to land in 2020. If you aren’t already a fan of Adam Hurt and his playing, Back to the Earth is the perfect, charming, listenable introduction — and you’ll find yourself among the likes of fans including Skaggs, Haas, Kowert, Tice, Jerry Douglas, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, Molly Tuttle, Sarah Jarosz, and just about any other instrumentalist who’s ever had more than a passing interest in the banjo and her cousins on the instrument family tree.
On the national music scene, North Carolina sets itself apart by blending the heritage of traditional roots music with the innovation of modern indie and Americana sounds. The bluegrass canon of North Carolina encompasses pioneers like Charlie Poole and Earl Scruggs, as well as groundbreaking musicians like Elizabeth Cotten, Alice Gerrard, and Doc Watson. Today’s spectrum of talent spans from modern favorites such as Darin & Brooke Aldridge, Balsam Range, and Steep Canyon Rangers, and the progressive perspective of the Avett Brothers, Rhiannon Giddens, Mandolin Orange, Hiss Golden Messenger, Mipso, and many more.
One example of how the state is merging past with present is the recent opening of North Carolina’s only vinyl pressing plant — Citizen Vinyl in Asheville.
According to press materials, the building’s third floor played host to Asheville’s historic WWNC (“Wonderful Western North Carolina”) which was once considered the most popular radio station in the United States. In 1927, the station hosted live performances by Jimmie Rodgers and made his first recordings shortly before he went to Bristol, Tennessee. In 1939, the station featured the first ever live performance by Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys during its Mountain Music Time segment. Citizen Vinyl expects to keep the live music tradition alive in this former newspaper building, too.
Here at BGS, we’ve been committed to North Carolina music from our launch, notably with our Merlefest Late Night Jams, which are always worth staying up for. And how much do we love the IBMA World of Bluegrass week in Raleigh? Looking back on our archive, we gathered these songs from the artists we’ve covered over the years — and looking ahead, you’ll see all-new interviews with the Avett Brothers and Mipso, examine the classic country stars with roots in North Carolina, and spotlight some rising talent with video performances at the state’s most scenic destinations.
In the meantime, you can discover more about the North Carolina music scene through their website and on Instagram at @comehearnc
Editor’s note: This content brought to you in part by our partners at Crossroads Label Group.
Kate Stables, principal of alternative roots outfit This Is the Kit, didn’t intend to write a pandemic album to follow her acclaimed 2017 debut, Moonshine Freeze. In fact, she wrote the entirety of Off Off On well before the term “COVID-19” entered our collective consciousness.
In the way that great art often can, though, the songs Stables wrote for Off Off On anticipated the needs of our current moment. Across 12 tracks, Stables sings of growth-inspiring personal reflection, the “two steps forward, one step back” nature of processing trauma, and continuing to move forward in the face of grief, all explored with deeply felt empathy and sharp insight.
Stables and her band recorded the bulk Off Off On prior to the COVID-19 lockdown alongside producer Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman, the Hold Steady) at Real World Studios in the U.K. Sonically, the album builds atop the lush, banjo-driven alternative folk of Moonshine Freeze, with complex, often subtle arrangements that offer thoughtful soundscapes for Stables’ striking lyrics.
BGS caught up with Stables via Skype to discuss finding sources of inspiration, writing about difficult personal moments, and living as a musician during the COVID-19 lockdown.
BGS: To start us off, everyone has had their own specific difficulties resulting from the pandemic, but musicians, especially, have been dealt a tough blow. How has that affected you and how have you adjusted to being home more, and not being able to tour this record?
Stables: At first, it was kind of novel and a bit of a relief, almost. For the first summer in living memory, I didn’t have loads of festivals to do. So it was a summer I spent with my family doing family stuff instead. So that was nice, at first. Now that the time for actual touring would have been starting soon but it isn’t starting soon, it feels a bit weird. It’s the longest amount of time I’ve ever gone without playing gigs and without touring. So it feels really weird and I miss doing gigs so much. And I really miss my band. They’re in the U.K. and I’m in France. I’ve never gone this long without seeing them.
With regard to the album, you wrote and completed the majority of it before the pandemic started. What were the origins of the album and how has its meaning evolved for you since you first began plotting it?
I don’t usually have a pre-album vision. It’s normally just me writing songs as and when they come and seeing what kind of shape it all takes along the way. One of the earliest songs that was written for this album was “Started Again.” “Started Again” is almost a bit of a bridge song from the last album to this album, because I feel like it could have gone on either, in terms of what I was thinking about. It feels like it’s connected to my past life, in a way, because I feel like everyone has a new type of life now. The world has passed through this strange portal and we’re all a bit different and have to adapt to things. It’s not an obviously key song on this album… but it’s also a bit linked to my thinking about perseverance and getting through the difficulties and coming out the other side again and again. It’s funny because that’s also what the world seems to be dealing with at the moment. Those are themes that accidentally came out while writing the album, without knowing that COVID-19 was coming.
I read the track-by-track notes that you wrote for the album, and one line that stuck out to me was, “Listening through to these recordings, I hear new COVID-19 references every day.” Could you elaborate on that? I heard some myself when I was listening, but am curious as to which resonated with you.
Partly there’s the “we’ve all got to get through this” that I was dealing with in the album, which now seems like I’m talking about COVID. There are lines like, “Try not to cough.” That is too ridiculous and coincidental. There’s a song about a hospital and the breathing apparatus in the hospital; that felt spooky, now that so many people are in hospitals than ever before. Things that were written with one story in mind and now this new situation has given them another story.
I’ve talked to a few other artists who have had similar experiences. It’s interesting, because obviously no one could have predicted where we are now, but it does make you wonder if you were intuiting that we were collectively going down this road.
Yeah, are we all tuned into something that we don’t know about? It does feel weird. I think also with writing, and you may get this in your work, you do end up with funny coincidences and predicting the future accidentally sometimes. It’s just the way it goes when you’re working with words and language and storytelling, whether it’s journalism or fiction or songwriting. These weird cosmic moments do happen.
One of my favorite tracks, both sonically and lyrically, is “This Is What You Did.” How did you write that one?
Writing it was fun because it was an example of me playing with rhythm, which is my favorite thing to do. I tried to find a banjo-picking pattern that was quite hard, something I almost couldn’t do, and worked until I got it. I tried to find a pattern where I wasn’t using the same fingers every time, something as random as possible. The beats were regular but the strings I was picking were somewhat randomly generated. Then I tried to find vocal rhythms that were difficult for me to sing at the same time. I guess it was like brain gymnastics. I like it when you can’t tell where a pattern starts and finishes. … That repetitive, cyclical nature of the music lent itself to this mind-loop approach with the lyrics.
Reading through your notes about “No Such Thing,” you reference both Jack Kornfield and Jane Austen as inspirations. How do you find inspiration? Do you always have your antenna up?
Language is the material I work in and I really enjoy exploring other people’s work with language. When I hear a phrase that makes me laugh or that sounds pleasing to say out loud, I’m always noting down little quotes of things that make a spark in my brain, even if it’s something out of Bob’s Burgers or something… So I guess I do always have a bit of a radar up for rhymes, assonance alliteration; things like that make my ears prick up.
When you reach the point in your writing process when you’re ready to fully arrange a song, what does your collaboration with your band look like? They’re such fantastic players and it sounds like you’re all quite close.
Sometimes I have a bit of an idea of the vibe or the kind of pace that I was envisaging for a song, but it’s also nice to not say anything until they’ve tried something out. Quite often they’ll find something that’s better than what I had in mind. I’ve ended up with three of my favorite musicians playing in my band, which feels like a privilege and a real kind of fluke. So it’s nice to let them do their own thing as much as possible. I’d be interested to know, though, if they think that’s what I do. Maybe they think I’m really controlling. [Laughs] What I hope I do is let them have space to do their stuff.
Prior to lockdown, you got to spend a lot of time on the road with the National. How does playing as part of someone else’s project inform your work as a solo artist?
In a few ways, but it’s hard to put your finger on one. Traveling is nutritious for me in terms of writing and wellbeing and being inspired. The act of traveling, even just looking out the window while you’re going along the road, is inspiring. But also the fact that you’re going to different places and meeting new people and having these new experiences… Also just seeing how other people work. I found it fascinating to be part of this symbiotic ecosystem that’s going around on tour. Everyone plays an important part and looks out for each other and it’s really fascinating to see how other people tour.
It’s a bit tricky to look too far ahead right now, but, in addition to getting your album out, what are you looking forward to in the coming months?
Because the gigs aren’t there to be looked forward to, I think I’m looking forward to seeing what I can get done instead. There are a lot of musical projects that I’d love to get stuck into, and I hope that I just will. This time, we’re all learning how to be ready for anything and not to assume that something is going to happen, so, ideally, I’ll just be making music instead of touring. I really hope I’ll be able to make music with people, even if it’s long-distance.
Artist:Strung Like A Horse Hometown: Chattanooga, Tennessee Song: “Lookin’ for Love” Album:WHOA! Release Date: October 30, 2020 Label: Transoceanic Records
In Their Words: “‘Lookin’ For Love’ is a tune all about that exciting feeling you only get when first falling in love. It’s meant to invoke the joy of a relationship young enough to not be complicated. I know all our longtime fans are gonna be stoked on this one. The strings were cooling off just a little, and we needed to let them open up again and meet their quota. So we took care of business the way we used to — playing live in a room all together with a few mics scattered about. This one is a helluva good time, and I think our excitement for this song made its way through the wires. We all love to fall in love, and that’s the fun part to focus on. If you’re lookin’ for heartbreak, you’re in the wrong song.” — Clay Maselle, Strung Like a Horse
Over the last few years, William Elliott Whitmore has been thinking a lot about how we – as individuals and as a society – have a tendency to repeat our mistakes, and how we’re always trying not to. Yet the tone of his new album, I’m With You, is still infused with optimism, which often stems from the wisdom he’s learned from his family.
I’m With You is Whitmore’s first album of new material in five years, though its material wouldn’t sound out of place alongside his early songs like “Old Devils” or “Don’t Need It.” As always, his banjo and guitar are central to the album’s sound, while his raspy singing voice remains an effective tool at getting his point across.
Though the album does have some heavy themes, Whitmore often points out the silver lining in a situation, and moreover, he’s comfortable chatting up a stranger — a trait not uncommon to the Midwest. He spoke with BGS by phone from his farm in Lee County, Iowa, where he’s quarantining with his wife and their six-month-old baby.
BGS: There are several family relationships that you reference in the album’s first song, “Put It to Use,” and you’ve had family members as characters in your songs for a long time. Why is that bond with your family so inspiring?
Whitmore: Yeah, the bond with my family has always been inspiring. I’m pretty lucky in that I’ve got a big family that’s close by. Aunts and uncles and cousins. My folks were great people, full of wisdom and just caring, beautiful people, but through different circumstances they passed away when I was in my teens. So, that’s when I started writing songs, and in fact, that’s what made me start doing that — to codify what they had always been teaching me. And as a way to deal with it and not just go off the deep end. They pop up in songs a lot, and have since the beginning.
I don’t have them here, so I just think about their words of wisdom and lessons. I think we all get those lessons from someone, whether it’s your folks and a grandparent or a neighbor or a cool uncle or aunt. That cool person down the block that introduced you to The Ramones when you were a kid. [Laughs] It’s like, “Hey, check out Black Sabbath!” So you go, “I should listen up.” Not just music, but lessons, and we can gather that from anywhere. “Put It to Use” is about, OK, you’ve gathered all this good information. Now, put it to use. And more than just music — let’s try to love each other.
Was it someone in your family that introduced you to banjo?
Yeah, both of my grandpas played the banjo. One of them passed away when I was one year old, so I never knew him, but I actually have his old banjo. And one died when I was in my teens, and he was a banjo picker from the Ozark Mountains down in Missouri. My folks loved country music. My mom loved Willie Nelson and Charley Pride – those were her favorites. And in fact, my parents’ first date was a Charley Pride show at a county fair.
But [my interest in] the old-time stuff, Appalachia music and Ozark mountain music, came from my grandpa, and he played the banjo. When he passed away, I got his banjo because I was into playing guitar. I was like, “Oh, the banjo… it’s not THAT different than a guitar.” And I inherited all of his old records. He loved Roy Acuff and the Stanley Brothers. Again, it’s getting that influence from wherever you can.
Were those records your gateway to bluegrass? How did you become aware of bluegrass?
Yeah, those records. … He had a lot of compilations with 15 different artists on one record. You’d find out about a bunch of different stuff, like how Bill Monroe pretty much invented bluegrass by playing old-time music faster than everybody else. [Laughs] And the subtle differences between that and the old-time, slower stuff. A lot of it does have to do with tempo. The feeling is there for all of it, but Bill Monroe kicked it into that next gear.
It’s this whole rich history that’s really cool, and there’s still a lot to learn about, too. So I took that bluegrass influence, but I also liked Minor Threat and Bad Religion and Public Enemy, growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s. There’s a theme running through all of this — punk and country and bluegrass and blues. Using simple tools to convey a message. No matter where you come from or what color you are, there’s a way to do this.
One thing you do well on this record, in my opinion, is setting the scene. While a lot of songwriters write primarily about themselves, or about love, you are writing about what’s around you. When did you become interested in environmentalism, for example?
That’s a great compliment, first of all. I’m right here on the farm I grew up on, and I’m very lucky to have that. So, the woods and nature and planting gardens — my folks were both naturalists. They wouldn’t have had the word for that, but they loved the land and they appreciated nature. That was passed on to us kids, the appreciation for the trees and the plants and the deer out in the field, and how we live among them and we’re part of it. We’re not above them. The grass in the meadow, the flora and the fauna that we see all around us, we’re just a part of that.
So it just doesn’t make sense to me, as an adult, why anyone would want to pour oil in the water, or level a whole forest, and cut every old-growth oak tree in the forest, just for the money! You want to live in harmony with nature, and sometimes you do have to cut a tree, but you want to be selective and do it in a smart way. … There are so many ways to do it mindfully. That’s my slant on it, and it all comes from living in the woods and living on a farm, and being instilled with those things at an early age.
Listening to your older records, I was struck by how much your singing voice has become more commanding. Did that come from you having to sing on stage, and use it as an instrument? At what point did you sense that your voice was becoming stronger?
That’s another great compliment. I didn’t even know if it was, but you know, it’s funny how things change over 20 years. I first started touring — gosh, it’s been over 20 years ago now. I used to smoke a lot of cigarettes and a lot of weed. … Well, maybe don’t write down “weed.” Oh, whatever, I don’t care. I just had a fucked up voice, but it was all I had. I was like, I wish I could croon like Dean Martin and Morrissey or Ralph Stanley, and have a beautiful voice, and I could never quite get there. So you just work with what you got, right?
So, I quit the cigarettes – and only the cigarettes. [Laughs] My voice changed after that, maybe, but it did come with playing a couple hundred shows a year, for years, and just being on stage, at least in the beginning, where they didn’t know who you are. It’s hard to be a presence when you’re by yourself. I was doing a lot of punk clubs and DIY spaces and bars, where they might not even care that you’re there. So you do have to make your presence known. I had to be more commanding. I am a loudmouth anyway, so it was natural. Put a microphone in front of me and I’ll make you listen! [Laughs] “I’m gonna start singing and you’re gonna wanna listen!” was my attitude, which is funny now.
But that did help me use it as almost a cudgel. Over the years, I’ve tried to sharpen that and make it more of a surgical thing and not a blunt instrument. [Laughs] I mean, I’m only dealing with guitar, banjo, and voice, and a beat — a kick drum now. Each one of them has to count. Any would singer would tell you, you take the time to write these lyrics, and in a live setting they just get lost. You’re just hollering. You have to learn to cut through. … Now it’s a bad habit to break because I’ll be singing in a quiet place, where everyone’s sitting down and listening and no one’s talking, and I’m just yelling like someone needs to hear me ten miles away. It’s those years of screaming over a bar room. I can’t shut it off.
Photo credit: Chris Casella
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