Tag: Old-time

Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor Learned This From ‘Country Music’ (Part 2 of 2)

Posted on by Editor

In Ken Burns’ documentary opus Country Music, a weaving path from the hollers of Appalachia to Garth Brooks’ theatrical stadium concerts was laid out for all to see. But mapping that trail has always been a complicated, cumbersome task.

The sheer number of influences at play required 16 hours of footage for Burns to tell the story – and lots of help from the artists themselves. One of those artists was Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, who gladly jumped in to tackle the unwieldy narrative of his favorite subject.

Secor had a two important roles to play in the series. Most obviously, he related a lifetime’s study of country’s earliest touchstones and how they combined into something uniquely American. But the outspoken frontman was also tapped in the beginning of Burns’ process as a behind-the-scenes consultant, helping guide the project’s tone and ultimately delivering one of its final and most powerful lines.

“It’s almost like [country music] needs to be exhumed, and new life breathed into it,” Secor proclaimed. “The part that is the songs of the people, the hopes and aspirations of the people — the pain and suffering of the people — that needs to remain embedded in country music. If it isn’t there, I’m out.”

Backstage at the Grand Ole Opry House on the night the series premiered, Secor explained what the project meant to a history buff like himself, and how Burns unwittingly played a role in Old Crow’s founding.

BGS: Old Crow Medicine Show’s music has always shined a light on the past. What made you interested in that to begin with?

Secor: I was always interested in history, and I really attribute that to Ken Burns – I saw The Civil War when I was 11 years old. I lived in the Shenandoah Valley, and I wondered why the kids went to Robert E. Lee High School and why we played Stonewall Jackson, why the name of the shopping mall and the subdivision and the motel was what it was — it was all the war. It was everywhere, and we took some field trips but I didn’t really understand it. I could feel this echo, though. Seeing that movie on PBS really helped me to take this tour of my own backyard and see how history was alive. I credit that to him.

Knowing how deeply you care about country music’s history, what did you think when you found out Burns was going to present it?

I thought immediately, “Thank God. Finally somebody is going to tell our story and get it right.” I don’t trust any of these people to our story [gestures to photos Opry stars dotting the dressing room walls] because they’re all right in the middle of it. Everyone here has a very, very different story, and everybody has “The True Story” — but only their truth. Country music is richer than any one truth, so it takes an outsider’s perspective because of Nashville’s tendency toward this clan-ishness, the good ol’ boys network and these sorts of forces.

I mean, we’re the genre that has told its own history ever since it started. The radio charts today are full of songs about the good old days — and they’re talking about the ‘90s. That’s the good old days now. But it doesn’t matter, whatever the good old days were, the ethos here is that times ain’t like they used to be, they used to be better. That’s what they’ve been selling from the start, but they can’t tell our history without making it a commodity. So it takes this outsider, and you can’t ask for a better outsider than America’s most beloved documentarian, because he was the outsider who told us how jazz was born and flourished, how baseball was created, the Roosevelts, the National Parks, the Brooklyn Bridge. Country music is just as important as all that.

What did they actually ask of you?

I talked about slavery and the plantation system, the penal system — because incarceration was a great cultural conversationalist. It kept people locked up in isolation, which is one of the keys to making country music so rich. How long did the Scotch-Irish people live in Appalachia before being disturbed? Well, the great disturbance comes in Bristol in 1927. The record companies came in and said “Whaddya got?” And what they had was so specific to one region that it might sound different one holler over.

Then I talked about the Opry, and then I tried to talk about more New Age-y hip-fangled things, but they didn’t use any of that [laughs]. The other way I’ve been involved is by being an advisor to the film, so I read all the early scripts for the past eight years. But it was great, they just asked me, “How would you tell the story? Where was the birth? Who was important to mention?”

This has been in the works for eight years?

Yeah, he conducted like 140 interviews, and of that maybe 50 or 60 of his interviewees have died. See, the other thing about Ken is he knows when it’s time to tell a story, and by doing the story when he did, he was able to get Little Jimmy Dickens, Merle Haggard, numerous artists who wouldn’t be here — George Jones is in this film.

Did you get surprised by anything?

Oh yeah, a trove of knowledge is in this documentary, I learned a ton. And lots of things made me cry. What I learned primarily was a real self-reflective thought of, “Oh my God, this is my life.” I think almost all of these folks on the wall are in the movie, and when they watch they’ll be crying, too, because they’ll see themselves in the Bristol Sessions. They’ll see themselves at the earliest days of the Grand Ole Opry, they’ll compare themselves to the Outlaw movement and the traditional movement of the ‘80s, the development of the star system, and contextualize their own career.

You talked about isolation. We’re in this weird moment where country is more popular than ever, but rural life is changing fast. It’s easy to connect with people all over the world. How does the film address that?

One of the things that’s great about the film is that it stops around 1996, because Ken Burns isn’t a journalist, he’s a documentarian. He’s not making a movie about today, and here’s why: Historians say you’ve gotta have a generation pass before you can tell what happened. I just think it’s gonna go a lot deeper than anybody could say right now.

Like if you told the story of why Randy Travis mattered in 1986, it would be a lot different. And also the forces that are at play in country music, they need time to gestate for us to understand what they’re saying. Who’s gonna last? Who are we going to be talking about in 25 years? Blanco Brown? Chris Stapleton? Who’s gonna have their picture on this wall in 25 years? I don’t know.

Editor’s Note: Read Part 1 of our interview with Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor.

Photo credit: Crackerfarm

Laurel Premo, “Polly Put The Kettle On”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

If you haven’t been paying close enough attention you may have missed the fact that the absolute cutting edge of American roots music these days — some of the most exciting art to be born out of this latest renaissance in Americana, bluegrass, and folk — is old-time. Artists like Rhiannon Giddens, Allison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves, Victor Furtado, Amythyst Kiah, Jontavious Willis, Dom Flemons, and so many more are utilizing this moment to demonstrate that old-time music is expansive. It has relatively low barriers to entry, it’s representative, it’s queer, it’s Black, it’s Indigenous, it demands egalitarianism, it’s woven into the fabric of all genres downstream of it, and most importantly, it’s ceaselessly relevant. In our attention economy, which requires all of this and more from any pastime worth its merit, old-time delivers. 

A new album from fiddler, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Laurel Premo perfectly reinforces these points, in content, intention, and certainly execution. The Iron Trios is a collection of nine more or less traditional old-time fiddle tunes and two Premo originals, the majority of which are played by a trio: fiddle, upright bass, and electric guitar. For an album demonstrably unconcerned with even the basic premise of the construct of “authenticity,” it accomplishes that squishy term impeccably and effortlessly. 

Yes, with electric guitar. Tunes such as “Old Time Sally Goodin” and “The Original Grey Eagle” nod to string band settings that beg us to play these games surrounding legitimacy and “authenticity” while turning them all on their ears. With bassist Evan Premo, guitarists Owen Marshall and Joshua Davis, and an appearance here and there by fiddler Aaron Jonah Lewis, Premo takes old-time fiddle, melodies, and rhythms into spaces usually dominated by electronics. 

It’s trance, it’s dreamscape, it’s meditative, it code switches with ease, sometimes sounding like a film score, or a square dance, or public radio at one in the morning (“Echoes” with John Diliberto, anyone?), or modern chamber strings, or the soundbed for an abandoned-warehouse-turned-cooperative-art-space. At the same time, it refuses to be any more complicated than good, old-time fiddle music. And that simple fact is another compelling reason why old-time is truly the most exciting space in the Americana, folk, and bluegrass realms today.

Old Crow Medicine Show: “Time to Start Doing Exactly What We Feel Like Doing” (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on by Editor

I can still remember the first time I saw Old Crow Medicine Show live. It was a sweltering summer night in Nashville around 2008 (back before the bachelorettes and Bird scooters) and they played from a massive barge moored at Riverfront Park. The thing was huge — far too big for six skinny street musicians to budge — but I swear it moved while they stomped and hollered, the Cumberland rolling by lazily behind them.

I was familiar with the band and already loved the unapologetic mix of tradition and edgy intensity, but that live show was revelatory. It gave me a new appreciation for the sense of community Old Crow was trying to forge, so it’s always surprised me that they didn’t record live albums. That has finally changed with this month’s release of Live at the Ryman.

Backstage at the Grand Ole Opry House on another hot summer night, front man Ketch Secor spoke with BGS about the project, why Old Crow is just now getting around to a live album, and what their style of music needs most right now.

BGS: Part of the idea of this album is that Old Crow has played the Ryman over 40 times. For a band that started out busking in the Northeast, how does it feel wrap your head around that?

Ketch Secor: Actually, I wish I had a real count because Lord knows I’ve played there more than 40 times. I think that’s how many times we’ve headlined, but if you add them all up I bet it’s a triple-digit number. We’ve been openers there for Dolly Parton back in 2002 for, like, a daytime show. We’ve done a lot of film and television there, all kinds of awards shows. It always felt like the place to shoot for — it’s the moon, the Ryman Auditorium, and we were always a shoot-for-the-moon kind of band because we figured “Well, we’re not supposed to be here anyway, so we might as well try and go as far with it as we can.”

You self-released one live album in 2001, and then nothing else until now. Why did it take 18 years to do another, since the live show has always been the foundation of what you guys do?

Oh, I think because we’ve always tried to put out a new studio record every couple of years, and here at the 21-year mark it’s probably time to start doing exactly what we feel like doing.

You haven’t been doing that the whole time?

Nah, not with those studio records. There’s a lot of stuff you’ve gotta do. Yeah, we always did it “our way” in the fact that we always played our own music. But just being in the music business means doing it everybody else’s way.

So you had to make a few compromises here and there?

Oh yeah, there was a lot of playing the game in ways that never seemed to pan out, but it never stopped us. That was just the way it was, and we were impressionable, so that’s what we did. We did it the way we were advised to do it.

Can you elaborate a little?

Like playing Napster. Doing shows for radio programmers in L.A. who never played us. Trying to make videos for CMT that were never in rotation, ever. …Opening up for Carrie Underwood at [Country Radio Seminar], it’s like, “What were we doing there?” Those guys, they might have liked it, but they were never gonna play it. And I don’t care if they like it, I want them to fucking play it, or I don’t want to play that show.

So now that you feel freed up to do it your way, what’s that look like?

Live at the Ryman. Here we are singing a Merle Travis song! Here we are singing our songs or selling popcorn and tickets and people brought their buck-dance shoes! I mean, we’ve set beer records at the Ryman. I’d rather sell beer at the Ryman than sell records! …I’d rather sell beer at the Ryman than digital streams! What’s the fun in that?

“Tell it to Me,” “Methamphetamine,” those are interesting songs to present because rural America has a new drug problem going on with opioids. Why is it important for you guys to sing songs like that, especially at the Ryman?

Well, “Tell It to Me” was recorded in Johnson City in 1928 I think. The band that brought that song to the studio had been an original backing band for Jimmie Rodgers… Anyway, I’m just saying this because if you like country music, you should probably know that drug songs have been part of the canon since recording studios first illuminated a red light bulb and said, “You’re on.”

I don’t think people do know that. We’re just now starting to get radio songs with pot references that people don’t flip out over.

Yeah, I mean it was blow in the ‘20s and now it’s pot in the 2010s. And then “Meth” is a really different kind of song because it’s more topical. We recorded it a long time ago but it seemed important to bring it back and revamp it, make it more intense, and Charlie Worsham plays some really great electric guitar on it. It just feels like it’s knocking on your door, like a hurricane.

Tell me about doing “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man” with Margo Price.

We were down in Oxford, Mississippi, doing a show with Margo. She was opening up for us down there near Ole Miss, and we were looking for a song that seemed to fit, so we tried that one. Our duo thing felt really good, and I feel like I’m a little bit in the Conway range — and she’s definitely in the Loretta range — so it worked out pretty good. We heard the playback we thought it sounded great so we wanted to put it out. I saw her at the grocery store the other day and she said she loved it.

Why did you include a song like “C.C. Rider,” which has Lee Oskar playing harmonica?

I really love his band War. We did “Lowrider” onstage at the Ryman, too, maybe that will come out on Volume 2. But what I really loved about that moment on the Ryman recording is that it has twin harps. You know the old guys don’t have their pictures up here [gestures at photos of Opry stars on the dressing room wall]. …But the story of the twin harp playing of the Crook Brothers — Herman and Louis Crook — lives a long time, because Herman and Louis lived, like, into their 90s. What they were great at was two harmonicas playing in unison.

That’s interesting. In your music you’re often looking to the past for inspiration, but what do you think is the future of string bean …. er, string band music, Americana?

You just answered it, man. We need a new Stringbean. Nobody’s acting like that and that’s what’s missing. Who’s gonna be the clown? What happened to the kind of entertainment that’s self-effacing? Everybody on this wall loves the clowns, but none of them are. They’re “the vocalists” and we’re supposed to take them seriously. I’d love to see this genre — whether it’s country or Americana or whatever — just not take itself so damn seriously. Let’s just have a grand ole time. Let’s poke some fun at each other, and especially at ourselves. I’d love to see that.

Editor’s Note: Read part 2 of our interview with Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor.

Illustration: Zachary Johnson

Dori Freeman: From Appalachian Roots to ‘Every Single Star’

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Dori Freeman has been hurt and felt torn. We know because she’s told us so, always with unblinking frankness in crisp pop songs with deep Appalachian roots. But even if we couldn’t understand her words, we’d hear the pain in her soprano, which rings out with melancholy strength only gained from living.

In her new album Every Single Star, the Galax, Virginia, native pushes her blend of familial mountain grit and mid-century-inspired polish even further into its own creative territory. Never one to shy away from truth, Freeman writes about motherhood, expectations, and relationships from a distinctly female perspective.

BGS: In the songs on Every Single Star we seem to hear real contentment. While there’s still some conflict, especially when it comes to having to be away from your daughters, there is peace, too. Was writing these songs a different experience than writing your first two albums?

Dori Freeman: Definitely. I had recently been married when I started writing a lot of the songs on this record. It was the first time I’d been in a happy, stable relationship, which obviously will have an effect on the themes in the songs you write. I was in a different headspace. For the previous two records, I was in different phases. Whether it was getting over a particularly difficult relationship or looking back on that and thinking what I didn’t want to have. With this one, I was with someone that I really love. So the songwriting was different.

I did a lot of imagining scenarios, which I didn’t do as much with the first two records. Those were based more on very direct experiences. On Every Single Star, the songs about my daughter are very direct and personal, but some of the other ones, like “Of Me and You” — that was a song that I wrote for a friend of mine who’d had a relationship that didn’t work out so well. I’ve had to look for different sources of inspiration this time around. When you’re happy, it definitely makes songwriting harder. [Laughs]

I’m happy you have that problem.

It’s a great problem to have. [Laughs]

Do you have a favorite memory of playing one of these new songs live over the past several months?

Nothing too specific stands out, but one of my favorite songs on the record is “All I Ever Wanted.” One of the things that’s nice about performing that song is almost every time I’ve done it, I’ve had women come up to me afterwards and say how much they enjoyed the song. That was the intention: to write a song fully from a woman’s perspective that other women could relate to. So it’s nice to have girls come up and tell me they liked it.

You’ve said you admire Peggy Lee and the mid-century aesthetic. What is it about the ’50s and ’60s sound that you like?

Peggy Lee is one of my favorite singers of all time. I don’t know what it is. I think for one thing, they still recorded in a more live situation, in a bigger room, so everything sounded a lot fuller on records back then. I also like the style people sang in in that era. My dad played a lot of that music for me growing up. Actually, he just made a record with mandolin, playing a bunch of swing tunes, so he’s really drawn to that music too. I think that it’s that I always listened to it, and I can’t help but have it influence what I do.

You grew up in such a musical family. When you were a kid, did y’all just sit around and play music together?

Yeah, definitely. I was always in choir in school. I didn’t really start to play guitar and sing in front of people by myself until I was about 15 or 16, but even when I was little, I would go jam at parties and festivals with my dad and grandpa, and then sit around and watch people play music.

As I got older, I started to perform with my dad and grandpa on stage. They used to have a little show on Friday nights at the frame shop that my family runs. So that’s one of the first places I really got some good practice performing in front of people. We still do shows together. We still play together as a trio with my husband as well, who plays drums with us now. So yeah, it’s still very much a family thing.

You’ve said that people don’t really talk about motherhood in the music industry. Are there specific experiences you’ve had or witnessed that made the great motherhood omission personally more evident to you?

Yeah, I can think of one in particular, when my daughter was not quite a baby, but not quite 2 years old — so she was still pretty little and motherhood was still a pretty new thing to me. It was also around the same time I was putting out my first record, so it was hard to manage all those things and to figure out how to balance them. I was at a music conference. I won’t say which one. They had this thing where they wanted a bunch of women to get together and talk about problems they faced in the industry as women. So people were raising their hands, going around, and sharing their experiences.

There was a lot we’d all been through, with sexism and dealing with men being inappropriate in a whole variety of ways. That is obviously a huge issue too. But I remember raising my hand and saying, “You know, it’s hard being a mom on tour, especially if there’s no green room, or you don’t have a babysitter to look after your child while you’re playing and then figuring out logistics — you can’t just stay anywhere after a show.”

I just remember crickets in the room. It got overlooked so quickly — everyone moved on. No one really seemed to care. And this was in a group of women. I think most of them, if not all of them, probably didn’t have children. I can understand why it didn’t seem important. But it was not a good feeling to share something personal and important to me and have it seemingly immediately overlooked and dismissed.

I can imagine. You’ve said it was cathartic to write songs about your daughter for this album. What kind of healing do you experience when you write songs about her?

I feel like she becomes more a part of what I’m doing, especially when she’s not physically present. If I can perform on stage and sing songs that are about her, I feel like she’s involved in some way. That makes me feel better because sometimes I’m on the road for four or five days at a time, which I know is not that long, but when you have a child — especially a young one — it starts to feel like a long time after a while.

It was really important for me with this record to write a couple of songs about her, and also to make sure that people knew when I was performing them on stage that they were about her. I always introduce the songs as being about my daughter. I want the audience to know she is an important part of my life. I want to feel like my daughter is involved, even when she’s not there. I guess it helps me feel better about missing her.

It helps you, but it also seems like talking about it openly — just saying, “This song is for my daughter” — could go a long way toward normalizing motherhood in music. Many women artists are also mothers.

Absolutely. I feel like in most industries, it’s hard to be a working mother, but being a musician brings a very specific set of challenges. One of the questions I get so often — and it’s one of my least favorite questions — is, “Do you travel with your daughter?” or “How come your daughter’s not with you?”

I just think, “Well, do you bring your daughter to a board meeting? Do you bring your child on your business trips?” I realize that music seems like fun and not a lot of work, but it is a lot of work. It’s a job, as much as I love it. So it doesn’t always make sense to have my child there, and I don’t think it’s fair to be judged for that.

You’ve stepped confidently into this tradition of strong Appalachian women — strong Appalachian women artists, in particular. Instead of me assigning a definition to what that means, how would you describe the particular strength of an Appalachian woman?

Oh gosh. That’s a tough one. I can give you one example: When I think of a strong, Appalachian woman, I think of my great grandmother. She was from eastern Kentucky and had seven or eight siblings that were younger than she was. She raised them from the time she was 13 on. When she was an adult, she went right into having her own children. She took care of everything. She did the housework. She raised the children. She killed the chickens to cook. It was classic, what you imagine when you think of Appalachia 70 years ago.

If her life had been different — if she’d grown up somewhere else or maybe with more opportunity or more money — she would have pursued music in some way. I know she really loved music. She loved to sing and play guitar. She taught my grandfather how to play guitar.

I feel like in a roundabout way, she has some part in my choice to be a musician. My grandfather has been such a big influence on me musically, and if it wasn’t for her passing on her love of music to him, then it wouldn’t have made its way to me. Even though she couldn’t pursue those things in her own life, she wanted to make sure she passed them on so that someone eventually could.

Photo Credit: Kristina LeBlanc

You Need to Listen to More Indigenous Artists

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

American roots music wouldn’t exist without Indigenous people. Full stop.

Just as Black voices and stories largely informed the creation of these genres of music — old-time, bluegrass, blues, Americana, folk, etc. — Indigenous voices and stories often informed those black creators as well as those of greater privilege and power. Erasure prevents many examples of these cross-pollinations and accurate attributions from being readily accessible today, but Indigenous people are still here. They continually carve out spaces for themselves in these circles and these communities that directly spawned from them, though they continue to exclude Natives today.

Even as conversations surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion permeate the furthest reaches of roots music communities around the world, Indigenous identities and perspectives are still routinely left in the shadows.

We can do better.

Part of “doing better” is making a concerted effort, whenever we are able, to expand our perspectives to include as many Indigenous people and their vantage points as possible. So, let’s return to the idea that American roots music was created by Indigenous people. Such as it is, if one is a roots music fan, it’s quite easy to infuse one’s day-to-day with Indigenous folks, as evidenced by the following list of Indigenous artists, performers, instrumentalists, and musicians that you NEED to be listening to.

Cary Morin

An award-winning, renowned blues guitarist Cary Morin is a Crow tribal member who has performed around the globe. “…I could say that I’m really the only finger-style Crow guy on the entire planet,” he told BGS in a 2017 interview. “That’s unique. But we all can say that, to some degree. We all have unique things that make us who we are…” He counts David Bromberg, Norman Blake, Tony Rice, and Trey Anastasio among his influences, but his sound is truly uniquely his.

Lakota John

Lakota John (Locklear) opened his set at our 2019 iteration of Shout & Shine at IBMA with a land acknowledgment and a captivating piece on Native American flute. His music nimbly toggles between old-time blues, modern acoustic blues, folk, down home country and more, while remaining firmly rooted in and informed by his Lumbee and Lakota heritage. We interviewed Lakota John just last month, in anticipation of Shout & Shine.

R. Carlos Nakai

Possibly the world’s foremost performer on Native American flute, R. Carlos Nakai began his career in music trained in classical trumpet. He’s received eleven Grammy nominations and his iconic album, Canyon Trilogy, went platinum, becoming the first album by a solo Native American flutist to ever do so.

Lula Wiles

Folk trio Lula Wiles cover a lot of the same ground as their millennial-aged string band and Americana counterparts, but with the grounding, legitimizing force of Indigenous perspective, brought to the group by bassist Mali Obomsawin, a member of the Abenaki Nation. Obomsawin and bandmates Isa Burke and Ellie Buckland spoke to BGS about Indigenous rights and the group’s approach to writing socially conscious material earlier this year.

Celeigh Cardinal 

Z. Lupetin, host of BGS podcast The Show On The Road, called Métis musician Celeigh Cardinal “the high priestess of Canadiana soul” in a February episode. Cardinal is also the first Indigenous radio personality on Alberta’s CKUA Radio Network. “The Devil is a Blue-Eyed Man” is the lead track off of her most recent album, Stories From a Downtown Apartment.

Jeremy Dutcher

A classically-trained, Canadian, Indigenous tenor, Jeremy Dutcher creates sweeping, cinematic art-folk with pop twinges, jazz undertones, and often lofty, operatic melodies. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Dutcher’s music, however, is his overt presentation of the fact that its intended audience is first and foremost his people, the Wolastoqiyik. His representations of queerness are firmly rooted in the traditions of his tribe and his language — he is one of only around 100 people who speak Wolastoq — which has no gendered pronouns.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

Academy Award-winning singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie has been touring and performing professionally since the early ’60s. Her accolades, awards, and accomplishments are vast and varied, touching almost every nook and cranny of this content in almost every medium — and as an activist, as well. In 2015 the Americana Music Association and the First Amendment Center awarded Sainte-Marie the Spirit of Americana Free Speech in Music Award.

Raye Zaragoza

Singer/songwriter Raye Zaragoza has a message to deliver through all of her music. “In the River” was written during the violence at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline being constructed across Indigenous lands and sacred waters. Zaragoza explains in an interview with Billboard in 2018, “Being a young, brown girl who on one side of my family is immigrant (Mexican, Japanese, and Taiwanese), the other indigenous, I can help [but put] a voice and put words to the way so many people are feeling…”

Charly Lowry

In 2004 singer/songwriter Charly Lowry was a semi-finalist on American Idol, but over the past decade she rose to prominence with Dark Water Rising, a North Carolina-based, soulful blues band of Indigenous folks. Her solo music is entrancing and expansive, with an ethereal quality only matched by the conviction with which she sings. This performance of “Brownskin” is a perfect example.

Led Kaapana

Grammy nominee and Native Hawaiian Led Kaapana is one of the world’s foremost experts in slack key guitar, or Kī Hō’alu, for which a guitar’s strings are detuned (til “slack”) to an open chord. His playing reminds of Chet Atkins and Phil Keaggy and references blues, ragtime, and even bluegrass flatpicking at times, too — which makes sense considering he’s worked and collaborated with Chet Atkins himself, and folks like Dolly Parton, Jerry Douglas, and Alison Krauss, too.

To wrap up we should note, this is an infinitesimal, inherently myopic attempt at a cross-section of Indigenous artists in American roots music spaces. There are so so so so many more to discover. You should poke around the Native American Music Awards website for more ideas, and a historical/archival look, too.

Photo of Celeigh Cardinal: Megan Kemshead Photography

WATCH: Rhiannon Giddens Plays the Tiny Desk

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Former Carolina Chocolate Drops leader and old-time music maven Rhiannon Giddens has the uncanny ability to sing through an audience. In May, she released her third full-length, studio album, there is no Other, with Nonesuch Records. In this new chapter, Giddens collaborated with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, who is known for his virtuosity on percussion and jazz piano. Giddens, Turrisi, and bassist Jason Sypher stopped by NPR to perform some music from the latest record; watch as they stun the audience huddled around the Tiny Desk.

Photo credit: Claire Harbage/NPR

Artist of the Month: Old Crow Medicine Show

Posted on by Editor

From their earliest days of busking and playing to capacity crowds at the Station Inn, Old Crow Medicine Show has shown they know how to pull in a crowd. Now they’ve captured that raucous, captivating energy in their newest release, Live From the Ryman, recorded during the group’s numerous headlining performances at the landmark Nashville venue.

The band has seen its share of setbacks and lineup changes over the years, but their catalog is surprisingly limber. In other words, the songs from Eutaw and O.C.M.S. blend seamlessly with tracks from newer releases like Remedy and Volunteer.

It’s a testament to the vision of band founder Ketch Secor, who tells BGS, “If they had tried to stop us a long time ago, they probably would have been able to, but they never tried. We were never curtailed. We were asked to be quiet and to clean up, but nobody ever said ‘no’ enough times for us to pay attention.”

Look for a two-part interview with Old Crow Medicine Show coming up on BGS this month, and enjoy our Essentials playlist.

Photo credit: Crackerfarm; (L-R): Charlie Worsham, Cory Younts, Critter Fuqua, Ketch Secor, Joe Andrews, Morgan Jahnig

Lakota John Laces Native Lineage with North Carolina Roots

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Born and raised in North Carolina, of course John Locklear (AKA Lakota John) could draw from strong regional and cultural influences to create his sound: old-timey, down home, acoustic blues. But his North Carolina roots aren’t his only connection to the Piedmont, and the vast, richly diverse musics that come from his home state. His Lumbee and Lakota lineage most certainly have an equal influence on his picking, his songs, and his style — especially given the huge impact Native and Indigenous Americans had on the creation of American roots music in general. It’s an impact that continues to this day, despite constant erasure and attempts at exclusion.

Ahead of Lakota John’s performance as part of BGS and PineCone’s fourth annual Shout & Shine: A Celebration of Diversity in Bluegrass — at IBMA’s Wide Open Bluegrass festival in Raleigh, North Carolina, on September 27 — we had a chat about why old-time blues isn’t just time capsule music and what folky magic must be in the water in North Carolina.

BGS: So many folks view this style of down home, old-time blues as antiquated music, as “throwback” music. What do you think blues, especially of the kind that you make and play, can bring to this modern era? What value is added to it if we allow it to be in the present?

Lakota John: Awareness of the genre itself and the fact that without roots music, many other types of music wouldn’t exist. Roots music is the foundation of other music and by bringing it into today’s musical conversation, younger generations can embrace its importance as a foundation and use it to innovate and create new styles of music.

What was your own entry point to this style of folky, vernacular music?

I grew up listening to the music of the ’60s and ’70s, because that’s what my parents listened to. Around 10 years old, I became curious about the earlier influences on the artists who produced music in the ’60s and ’70s, which led me back to blues, bluegrass, and roots music. I could see the correlation between the earlier music and later music in so many ways and found it really interesting how the music evolved.

Erasure is so prevalent in American society, many people — including historians, journalists, and ardent fans — don’t realize how fundamental Native and Indigenous influences were (and still are) to American roots music. Who influenced you? Who do you point to, to help reduce and eliminate that erasure?

I feel Jelly Roll Morton, Rev. Gary Davis, and Charley Patton are just a few of my influences who approached music with a percussive and syncopated style which is something Native and Indigenous people have always shared through their music and traditions. With later musicians such as Muddy Waters, Link Wray, The Allman Brothers, Jesse Ed Davis and many more, the basic structure remained but they incorporated an electric sound into the blues along with other styles to create their own unique sound.

Part of that erasure is simply because most colonizers and descendants of colonizers, immigrants, etc. do not realize that Indigenous people are still here. What do you say to folks, even the most well-intentioned and progressive among us, who have this very common blind spot when it comes to Native Americans, Indigenous peoples, and Indigenous rights? 

Native peoples walk in two worlds, the traditional and contemporary; we’ve always been here and always will be. We’re more than the stereotyped “Hollywood Indian” and definitely not museum artifacts. Hopefully to clarify this common blind spot I’d say, “I had some difficulty finding my keys and a parking space for my buffalo this morning.”

Shout & Shine returns for its fourth year at the IBMA’s Wide Open Bluegrass Festival at the end of September. What does bluegrass mean to you? What, if any, of its influences have filtered into your music and art?

That’s awesome. I grew up listening to bluegrass music and I definitely incorporate some elements of the bluegrass style into my own music. Bluegrass is an interesting art form and a very important category of roots music.

IBMA being hosted in North Carolina, in Raleigh, for the past number of years seems like a perfect fit. What is it about North Carolina that makes it such a hotbed for roots music? What do you get out of living and performing in this richly musical area? 

Man, I really think there’s something in water here. The south has always been a hotbed for roots music, possibly because of the many trials and struggles the south has been through in our country’s history. Because I’m from North Carolina, I’m connected to the community and music that has been an influential piece to what I do. This place is one of the richest musical areas where I have been fortunate enough to have access to artists and mentors who were and continue to be pioneers in the development of roots music in America.

Photo courtesy of Music Maker Relief Foundation

The Po’ Ramblin’ Boys Make Old-Time Music New

Posted on by Editor

Plenty of artists find a day job while they work on their careers in music. CJ Lewandowski found a career in music while working his day job. A mandolin player and singer, he was working at Ole Smoky Distillery in Sevierville, Tennessee, and would frequently fill in as musical entertainment when a hired act fell through. Eventually, the distillery approached him about forming a band, and the Po’ Ramblin’ Boys were formed.

“There’s never really been a plan,” jokes Lewandowski, who says that regular hours on stage helped the longtime friends tighten up fast as a band. “We play the music that we like, and we happen to have some songs that we’ve written.” That no-plan plan has gotten them pretty far. In 2018, the group won Emerging Artist of the Year at the IBMA awards and in August they released their Rounder Records debut, Toils, Tears, and Trouble. They’ll also appear at Bourbon & Beyond festival in Louisville, Kentucky, on September 20.

The twelve-song album includes fan favorite “Old New Borrowed Blue,” an original, as well as inventive interpretations of songs by legends and unsung genre heroes alike. The band’s Stanley Brothers-inspired take on Roy Acuff’s “Searching for a Soldier’s Grave” is right at home alongside the Boys’ rendition of “Bidding America Goodbye,” made popular by Tanya Tucker. And “Next Train South,” originally recorded by Dub Crouch, Norman Ford & The Bluegrass Rounders in 1974, pays homage to the bluegrass tradition of Lewandowski’s native Missouri.

But as much as the Po’ Ramblin’ Boys have found solace in the bluegrass sounds of generations past, Lewandowski says he’s most inspired by the potential in the genre’s future. “I’m excited about the possibilities: the possibilities of where we can take it, the possibilities of who we can meet, and the possibilities of who we can influence,” he says. “I just hope we’ll be able to leave our mark on bluegrass as much as bluegrass has left its mark on us.”

Lewandowski opened up to The Bluegrass Situation about the role music played in his upbringing, how their days as a house band helped the Po’ Ramblin’ Boys find their footing, and why old-time music will never fade away.

BGS: What first brought you to bluegrass?

Lewandowski: I found bluegrass when I was a teenager, at a time in my life when it felt like everything was leaving me. I was a mama’s boy, and my mom passed away when I was ten. Then I had some other folks, family members, pass away. Things were changing within myself as well. I was trying to discover myself, and all this other stuff was piling up on me, too.

I found bluegrass music at that time, and along with it, I found a bunch of friends. I was never somebody with a bunch of friends in my own age bracket, and all these folks playing music around home here were thirty, forty, fifty years older than me, but I related to them. My grandpa died around that same time, too, and he was a pretty big influence on me, so I found some folks that became grandfather figures to me. They took me under their wings.

One thing I say a lot is that bluegrass has always been there for me. It’s been my medicine. It’s helped me through all those hard times, and put me in a lot of good situations, too. It’s a constant — it’s always there.

For Toil, Tears, and Trouble, you recorded several songs that were written or made popular by other artists — “Bidding America Goodbye,” “Cold Hard Truth” — as well as less-known songs by Missouri bluegrass artists. Why?

There’s a lot of great material out there. You could take a really popular song and completely change it and make it your own, or you could take a song that doesn’t even sound like it would apply to your music — the songwriter might not even know what bluegrass music was, but the song is great — and we can put our bluegrass touch to it and make it something that works. We like to pay homage to people of the past, but we want to start our own past as well, carve our own little niche out.

We’ve got songs on the album that have never been recorded before, by anyone, and that doesn’t mean they have to be written in-house by the band. “Hickory, Walnut, & Pine,” “Next Train South”– most people have never heard of them. It’s cool to dust off those songs, to pay homage to someone who might have not been in the limelight as much as Jim & Jesse, or the Osborne Brothers, and then add our own influence.

So obviously you’ve been inspired by bluegrass, but I’m sure you haven’t been entirely insulated from other kinds of music. You recorded a gospel album a few years ago, in fact. What other genres of music have impacted the way you sound?

Gospel has always been a part of all of our raisin’s. Country, of course, has influenced us too. If we all weren’t playing bluegrass music, we’d probably be out playing old country stuff. We all like steel guitar, and we all like twin fiddles. We all really like ’80s and ’90s country a whole lot, too — Alan Jackson, Randy Travis. We’ve been called honky-tonk bluegrass. And you never know where you’re gonna find something new.

With your job as the house band at the distillery, you logged more hours of stage time than most bands do in years of their careers. How do you feel like that experience benefited you?

We were playing anywhere between five to ten hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, [we] were teaching people about bluegrass music and entertaining them at the same time — and working day jobs. It was almost like a paid practice. We learned pretty quickly that imagery was a huge part of the show. We started in bib overalls, and then we’d go to summer suits, with our hair styled, and then we’d go to the cowboy hats for the springtime.

There’s always been a progression. There has to be something. You have to realize that a lot of the folks who came into that distillery didn’t know what bluegrass was, and they left with a sense of it. We were exposing new people to bluegrass music, which has always been a goal of ours. It was an education for them, but an education for us as well — all the while, we were getting tighter as a group. We spent over a year and a half solely playing at that distillery, with no intentions at all of traveling or anything. It allowed us to hone in on a lot of things together.

You often hear people describe your music as “old-time.” What does that mean to you?

The music that we play is the music that we were raised up on. There’s always been a progression to bluegrass music, since the very beginning of it. You can look at when Flatt & Scruggs came on the scene — key changes, tempo changes, five-string banjo roll, all that crazy stuff. So over the recent years of bluegrass music, it’s progressed, but it’s progressed somewhat faster than we — the band, I mean — may have wanted it to.

So we rewound the progression a little bit and found where we thought the music should be in this time. Some people would say that there’s stuff older-sounding than what we’re playing. And then a lot of people say that there’s stuff that sounds newer than what we’re playing, of course. People can take it however they want to, because everyone has a different definition of traditional, everyone has a different definition of old-time, or old-fashioned, everyone has a different definition of progressive music, as well. So we kind of keep it simple and say that we play bluegrass. [Laughs]

Are there any aspects of bluegrass music that you think it’s particularly important to try to preserve, or that you worry are vanishing?

Excuse my language, but I think that’s a big ol’ crock of shit. This music has been around for a long time, and it’s bigger than it ever has been. Yes, everywhere has their own definition of bluegrass and how they want to play it and how they want to present it. And there’s a lot of freedom in that. Just look at Bill Monroe: He evolved until the day he died. I’d tell anybody, just play the music that you love, and if you’re true to yourself and true to your music, the music can’t die. It won’t die. It’ll never die.

Photo credit: Amy Richmond

WATCH: The Chuck Wagon Gang, “Somebody’s Boy”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Chuck Wagon Gang
Hometown: Knoxville, Tennessee
Song: “Somebody’s Boy”
Album: No Depression In Heaven, The Gospel Songs of The Carter Family
Release Date: August 30, 2019
Label: Mountain Home Music Company

In Their Words:: “The Carter Family began singing about the same time frame as the Chuck Wagon Gang. Both groups shared not only the last name Carter but a very similar style of singing. We felt it would be an honor to put together an album that would pay tribute to their gospel songs. Filming this video at the Carter Family Fold was such an amazing experience. There was something so special about being out there in the humble, yet beautiful location where it all began for the Carter Family.

“The song ‘Somebody’s Boy’ is actually not considered a gospel song, but is more what the old-timers call a heart song. Its message is one that speaks to the desires of a mother’s heart for her wayward son, and, though it dates back to 1894, is as relevant today as when it was penned. The Chuck Wagon Gang has recorded other heart songs over the years, like ‘Church in the Wildwood.’ Our hope is that ‘Somebody’s Boy’ will become as meaningful for our fans!” — Shaye Smith (the alto singer who is also the granddaughter of The Chuck Wagon Gang’s original alto singer)

Photo credit: Sandlin Gaither