Tag: Old-time

Rhiannon Giddens, “Following the North Star”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Rhiannon Giddens is not only our Artist of the Month, she’s roots music’s renaissance woman. She’s an outspoken activist, a MacArthur Genius grant winner, a veritable music historian, and opera-oriented podcast host who has scored and staged a ballet, acted on a major television series, given her fair share of keynote addresses, and has helmed more than one supergroup. Somehow that list only begins to scratch the surface of Giddens’ contributions to our roots music communities. Who knows what other incredible ideas will come from her mind, her pen, and her banjo in the months and years to come.

Here’s the thing. In the flurry of credits Giddens’ bio will inevitably spit at you it’s easy to forget what might be the most important line item in her IMDb or Wikipedia profiles: she’s a damn fine picker. “Following the North Star,” an amuse-bouche of an instrumental from her 2017 release, Freedom Highway, is an excellent reminder of that fact. The bouncing, clawhammer banjo is stark against just percussion and bones, a percussive folk instrument played by hand, similar to playing the spoons. It’s a shockingly simple, but never simplistic production. Each note drips with Giddens’ understated virtuosity. Her understanding of the music’s past, present, and future is translated effortlessly by buttery fretless banjo, which retains every ounce of its haunting, melancholy potential in defiance of the tune’s forward-leaning tempo.

‘Tis sweet to be reminded that, no matter where her creative compass may take her, she’ll always have the chops — she’ll always be a killer banjo player. And, from this banjo player’s perspective, that’s what’s most important anyway!!

Kacey Musgraves is Country’s Queer Icon, but These Roots Artists are Actually Queer

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Kacey Musgraves’ dominance during Sunday’s 61st Annual Grammy Awards has certainly solidified her place as country music’s newest queer icon. She offered simply stunning, near-perfect performances during the primetime broadcast and took home four trophies: Best Country Solo Performance, Best Country Song, Best Country Album, and one of the most prestigious awards of the night, Album of the Year. So-called “Gay Twitter” devolved into a tizzy as the show unfolded through the afternoon and evening with Musgraves decidedly at the top.

Said Album of the Year, Golden Hour, saw a critical mass of LGBTQ+ fans embracing Musgraves’ music, but her relationship to the broader gay community has been percolating since her debut album, especially given its overt “Follow Your Arrow” message. All combined, her eye for gratuitous-yet-effortless glamour, her acid-steeped, anime-meets-California-meets-trailer park aesthetics, and her singular, pop-influenced countrypolitan sounds are gay country manna from heaven. And it’s not just in the music. This year, she made an appearance as a guest judge on VH1’s RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars and she routinely advocates for LGBTQ+ fans and their causes on her social media feeds.

To be sure, Musgraves fits the diva-idolized-by-gays criteria impeccably, but there’s a certain passive erasure that can occur when fans consciously or subconsciously become myopic in their praise of and infatuation with straight, cisgendered, female artists. It’s true that Musgraves has played an important role in expanding country music’s borders — musically, socially, and otherwise — but at the same time a burgeoning community of LGBTQ+ writers, artists, musicians, and creators are carving out their own space within country, Americana, folk, and even bluegrass and old-time.

This writer would never go so far as to suggest that one ought not squeal with delight at Musgraves’ fierce-as-fuck costumes, her tear-jerking solo performance of “Rainbow,” or her impossibly long and flowy Cher-callback, bump-it wig. Rather, if you love Kacey Musgraves and Golden Hour — because queer identities can be seen and reflected within her work, because she opens the door to the idea that country isn’t a forbidding place for these identities, and/or because she’s unabashed and unapologetic in her pursuit of these goals — you’re going to love these eleven badass, talented, inspirational, openly queer roots musicians, too.

Time to get stanning:

Brandi Carlile

After last night’s show this name should no longer need mentioning or introduction, as Carlile and her twin collaborators, Tim and Phil Hanseroth, absolutely brought down the Staples Center with one of the most moving performances of the night, the soaring, galvanizing, overtly queer, and now Grammy-winning masterpiece, “The Joke.” Carlile is openly gay, married, a mother of two daughters, and a tireless voice for representation and progress in Americana and its offshoot genres. If “The Joke” resonates with you (i.e. if it makes you sob uncontrollably, as it does this writer), check out “That Wasn’t Me,” “Hurricane,” and, of course, “The Story.”

Mary Gauthier

Gauthier’s latest, Rifles & Rosary Beads, was nominated for Best Folk Album this year and though it didn’t take home the prize, the album has received universal acclaim for its message of hope, empathy, and visibility for members of our armed services and the struggles they face during and after their service. Gauthier collaborated with veterans of the military in writing all of the record’s heart wrenching, honest, raw songs — which might seem counterintuitive given gays’ historically tenuous relationship with the military writ large. But Gauthier’s own life story, and the trials she’s faced, make her the perfect writer to prioritize empathy above all else in these songs.

Don’t sleep on the rest of her discography, though. The simple profundity of her writing is consistently awe-inspiring. Check out “Mercy Now” after you’ve given Rifles & Rosary Beads a listen.

Karen & the Sorrows

Jewish New York City native Karen Pittelman may seem like an unlikely frontwoman of a country band, especially when you factor in her past punk and queercore experiences, but it turns out she grew up bathed in the country compilation albums her father produced and sold for a living. Her voice recalls country mavens of bygone eras — it’s delicate yet powerful, with a pin-up girl quality that’s as subversive as it is natural. Also check out “Take Me for a Ride,” a Pittelman original that plays like a trad-country, queer version of Sam Hunt’s smash hit, “Body Like a Back Road,” but without the cheese.

Little Bandit

All of the hollerin’, barn-burning, hell-raising country soul of your favorite outlaw country rockers, but with lacy gay edges, Little Bandit (AKA Alex Caress, et. al.) is as honky-tonk as it gets. It’s a beautiful balancing act, presenting as an impossibly big-voiced, piano-smashing, charismatic frontman while singing male pronouns without hesitation. He leans into a beautifully paradoxical queerness that equally embraces diamonds, Waffle House allusions, platform shoes, and plain ol drinkin’. If you like it — and you will — check out “Diamonds,” too.

Sarah Shook & the Disarmers

Outspoken outlaws in a crop of alt-country artists who align with that eponymous country movement of the 70s, Sarah Shook & the Disarmers are a road-dogging band that would seemingly fit that mold, excepting Shook’s deliberate efforts to challenge the inherent heteronormativity of country music at every turn. For Shook it’s not necessarily about having a political message, as she put it in a 2018 interview with BGS, “I feel like doing what I’m doing — touring relentlessly, putting out records, and being unapologetically myself — is a very powerful and political maneuver as well… I’ve never been concerned about that because I feel it’s important to be honest and forthright as a human being, and as an artist and certainly lyrically as well.”

Indigo Girls

Both Amy Ray and Emily Saliers — the two halves that make up the absolutely iconic Indigo Girls — have released solo albums in the past year, both of which draw heavily on folk, Americana, and country influences. This should be no surprise to even the most casual IG fans. Banjos, mandolins, ukuleles, and so many other hallmarks of roots music have been integral to the Indigo Girls’ sound all along. But the songwriting, devastating and personal and oh so very real, is the real takeaway from both projects.

kd lang

This list might as well not exist if it excluded kd lang. Before her crossover to more mainstream genre designations, kd pretty much originated the role of badass queer making unimpeachably trad country music that refused to shy away from its queer touchpoints. Just take a look at this video! “Honky Tonk Angels,” sung with Loretta Lynn, Brenda Lee, Kitty Wells, and finally, kd in all of her butch, gender-bending, binary-eschewing glory — complete with a Minnie Pearl cameo! Country has always been (more than) a little queer, y’all.

Lavender Country

A man well, well ahead of his time, Patrick Haggerty (AKA Lavender Country), released his debut, self-titled album in 1973. It was a groundbreaking work, but the world, let alone the country music community and its commercial machine, were not ready for it. A Seattle DJ was fired for playing “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears” on the airwaves, only one thousand copies of the album were printed, and the band was relegated to performing exclusively at LGBTQ+ events and programs. But, despite being largely shut out of the industry, Haggerty and Lavender Country never ceased. In 2018, at the age of 74, Haggerty took part in AmericanaFest’s very first queer-focused showcase.

Amythyst Kiah

Amythyst Kiah’s booming, captivating voice, and her haunting, Southern gothic approach to Americana, bluegrass, and old-time set her apart from almost anyone else on the scene at this moment. Her reimagination of Dolly Parton’s magnum opus, “Jolene,” is a perfect example of how she carefully turns tradition on its ear. Based in East Tennessee herself, she draws on the rich musical heritage of the region, adding her own spin, creating space to allow herself to soar. And there’s plenty more soaring in her future, as she has opened shows for artists such as Rhiannon Giddens and Indigo Girls across the country and in Europe, and her collaboration album with Giddens, Allison Russell (Birds of Chicago), and Leyla McCalla, Songs of Our Native Daughters, is set to drop February 22.

Alynda Segarra

Singer/songwriter, activist, and Hurray for the Riff Raff frontwoman Alynda Segarra entrances with The Navigator, a concept project that focuses on the life and times of a fictitious Puerto Rican youth living in New York City. Themes of immigration, identity politics, displacement, disenfranchisement, and capitalistic overreach are threaded throughout the album, which offers its songs as tableaus of this girl’s — Navita’s — reality. It’s a stunning reminder that the intricacies and nuances that define us, and by doing so, separate us, are not so difficult for us to overcome with empathy and understanding. “Pa’lante!” (which translates to “forward!”) is the album’s battle cry, a song that turns utter despondency, grief, and a sore lack of humanity into a glimmer of hope.

Trixie Mattel

While almost all other drag queens who delve into the music scene release dance tracks, rap albums, or similar club-ready jams, Trixie Mattel (AKA Brian Firkus) draws upon her rural Wisconsin roots on two folk-adjacent, country-ish albums, Two Birds and One Stone. (Get it?) This isn’t just an opportunist attempt to punch up Trixie’s Dolly Parton-esque, country barbie aesthetic, she’s really got the chops. Not only is she a talented humorous-while-poignant songwriter, her technical skills on guitar and autoharp (yes, autoharp) are precisely honed to showcase her original music. This is no gimmick — though the Doves in Flight Gibson guitar and the custom, pink d’Aigle autoharp are jaw-droppingly perfect additions to Trixie’s lookbook.

 

Allison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves, “Eighth Of January”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It’s become something of an unofficial tradition here at BGS to celebrate the eighth day of the first of the month of the year with a nod to one of old-time’s finest instrumentals, to be sure: “Eighth Of January.” This year, the stars and calendars have aligned, allowing the first ever Tunesday Tuesday + “Eighth Of January” celebratory post. Hoorah!

Now, those same stars and calendar have aligned even further, allowing Tunesday, January 8, and a brand new collection of fiddle/banjo tunes from clawhammerist Allison de Groot (Molksy’s Mountain Drifters) and fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves (Laurie Lewis & the Right Hands) to coincide so perfectly that we’re able to premiere de Groot’s and Hargreaves’ rendition of “Eighth Of January” on its namesake day. Fortuitous, indeed.

Even more fortuitous is the care, attention, and finesse given the often-rowdy, haphazard old-time melody. This duo, despite their youth — and often because of their youth — are two of the foremost old-time virtuosos on the scene today, executing these timeless songs and melodies with a clean and straightforward approach that sacrifices neither innovative thought nor modern embellishments to do so.

Furthermore, de Groot and Hargreaves are committed to making music that tells the full, unrevised, unabridged history of American roots music, with overt attribution to the amazingly diverse humans who pioneered these vernacular art forms. An old-time standard isn’t just an old-time standard, after all, and this fantastically talented pair of pickers demonstrate that and more on their upcoming self-titled album (out March 22 on Free Dirt Records) and this, its lead-off track.

LISTEN: Ashleigh Caudill, “The Road Rolls On”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Ashleigh Caudill
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “The Road Rolls On”
Album: The Road Rolls On, Songwriter Sessions Volume II
Release Date: February 1, 2019

In Their Words: “Life is pretty uncertain and there aren’t always neat endings to the stories that make up our lives. You never really know what’s coming next and sometimes things don’t turn out the way you planned, but the wheels keep turning and the road rolls on. In that spirit, this track was captured live at Sound Wave Studio by engineer and co-producer Daniel Rice. I played guitar and sang, along with John Mailander on the fiddle and Colin O’Brien on the percussive dancing. I overdubbed the upright and electric bass later on.” — Ashleigh Caudill

Photo credit: Scott Simontacchi

Kaia Kater’s Banjo Carves a Space and Opens Doors on ‘Grenades’

Posted on by Editor

Sometimes self-exploration doesn’t yield the answers we seek. For those patient enough to keep prodding, the real truths emerge in the process, rather than the culmination of examining who we are. Kaia Kater learned as much on her third album, Grenades, which stretches across generations, hemispheres, and textures, and left the singer-songwriter “swimming in her own shadow.”

Born in Canada, Kater grew up hearing about her father’s life in Grenada before he fled at age 14 when the United States invaded the small island country in 1983. As a result, a part of her always existed in a land that lay far away. With the banjo as her guiding force on Grenades, Kater strings a tightrope between her Canadian sense of self and her Grenadian heritage, in order to find a balance between those two poles.

Why did it feel like the right time not only to turn inwards, but to seek a connection back through the generations?

I think it was a multitude of things. I’d been two years out of school, and I found I had more time and space. I’d also had more conversations with my dad, and at a certain point he was like, “You’ve got to go back. You can’t keep putting it off. You’ve got to do it.” I came to agree with him. What started this whole thing is last Christmas I interviewed him in the basement of his house about growing up in Grenada and coming to Canada as a refugee.

And at the age of 14.

I know! It’s kind of crazy. I was 24 at the time I was interviewing him, so just to think about where I was at 14 — it’s kind of terrifying to think about becoming an adult that quickly. It’s kind of unbelievable. But he didn’t really talk about it a lot. I think that’s the thing, people do extraordinary things in order to lead very normal lives.

That’s a beautiful way to put it.

Yes, it’s the story of immigration and the story of refugees. I don’t think my dad ever hid his story, but I don’t think he ever thought it was an extraordinary story. He thought it was his path on the way to doing what he wants to.

It’s fantastic, then, that in addition to fitting your own voice into this musical genealogy you were able to include his voice three times on this album.

Those were from those interviews at Christmas. So much of the music and the emotion was born from that conversation that it felt like an imperative for me to include them. They were not only contextualizing the music, but they were also serving as these light posts for a pretty complicated storyline.

You’ve described Grenades as a lifeline to the South, and yet you grew up in the North. North and South have long existed as such stark dichotomies. Do you think, speaking about your identity, reconciliation is possible, or have you come to accept that there will always be a tension?

I do think it’s like being a hyphenated Canadian. I think there’s a certain cognitive dissonance that happens. This album is really great because it’s given me the space and the time to start to talk to more first and second generation Canadians about “What does being Canadian mean?” In comparison to Grenada, which is 95 percent black, Canada is a multi-ethnic place. It is richer for that. We acknowledge the richness that comes with diversity, but I think it also creates these problems of identity.

I have a friend whose parents are Ghanaian. She’s black and she grew up going to a Ghanaian church in Toronto, and then she went back to Ghana after she got her journalism degree. She was faced with this thing of like, “I have Ghanaian roots, but there’s a part of me that…my accent and the words I use are very Canadian.” I feel a little bit all over the place. Even the nature of exploring all these things is how I feel about it, which is like, I haven’t particularly arrived to a conclusion.

Nor should you. That’s the beauty of any creative form—it allows you to keep exploring. Turning to the album itself, you said you wrote the songs across winter and summer?

I started writing this album really in earnest after I’d had that conversation with my dad at Christmas. Then I went to Grenada in April, and obviously it’s very warm and it’s very beautiful, so it did feel, more than the natural course of the seasons in Canada, like I went suddenly from winter — this gray March — to summer. That’s why I feel it as this change between seasons, but also like we’ve been talking about, it’s a change in hemisphere too.

When it came time to stitch those halves together, what was the process like?

I challenged myself to write all original music on this album. I knew that in order to do that, I would have to push myself and get really analytical with my work. Just changing my environment and going to Grenada was a great help because it brought out different words and melodies and expressions. If all the songs were color-coded in my head, and one is blue for winter and yellow for summer, I can see them that way.

Of the arrangements on the entire album the three that most stand out are “Canyonland,” “The Right One,” and “Poets Be Buried.” Speaking of the latter, the beautiful slow-burn brass is exquisite. How did that unfold?

At this point, I should really credit my wonderful producer, Erin Costello. She is an artist herself; she’s actually releasing a record right around the same time as me. Keyboard is her main instrument, so she works mainly in R&B and soul, but she dabbled a lot in electronic music, and has a Master’s in composition. I feel like her musical tastes are really broad, and she really doesn’t shy away from a challenge, which is why I enjoyed working with her. And it’s also nice to be working with a woman.

I was going to say!

So many of them are men, so it’s nice to have a change of energy. She lives in Halifax. We recorded the album in Toronto, and the next day we flew to Halifax with the hard drive and mixed it there. I’d expressed that “Poets Be Buried” needed something more, and so the brass was actually the last musical piece that we added to the entire album before we mixed it. It was amazing. She had these players come in for an afternoon, and she wrote up the parts in 15 minutes. It sounded beautiful. It’s just French horn and trombone.

If you had to define the banjo’s power as an instrument and storyteller, what would it be?

The banjo has a very ancient quality, and I think especially when it’s played percussively like the clawhammer style, it can bring you into this trancelike, dreamlike state. I’ve found that with traditional music a lot, especially in a jam situation. It’s everybody playing the melody and chording all of the time — it’s not solo-based. When you’re in a jam, you get this trancelike quality where you’re playing this A/B pattern 50 or 60 times. I think the banjo lends itself well to this trance of storytelling. It brings me this inner peace that’s pretty indescribable. I think that’s why I was so attracted to it and why I’ve written on it for so many years.

I read that you play two or three banjos, but your grandpa made one for you?

Yeah, I’m looking at it now on my wall.

If we’re talking about generations, and how your new album encompasses all these different stories, that connection to your grandfather brings it to a whole other visceral level.

I hadn’t thought about that; that is a good point. It’s funny, at the risk of sounding too cheesy, it’s been a guiding light in my life. It’s opened the doors to so many things — not only studying in Appalachia, but also writing things that I may have been too scared to say openly. It’s a really beautiful instrument and a powerful one.

In the liner notes, you remark, “Here’s to swimming in your own shadow.” In dealing with your father’s voice and other generations, how did you create the space for your voice in the midst of intertwining these other narratives?

I think I still am. In the same way when we were talking about northern and southern hemispheres, I think that’s an ever-evolving question for me. For a long time, I’ve had an existential anxiety about having two sides to my family who both have very strong people and very strong narratives, and thinking, “Where do I fit in this picture?” That’s why I create albums, so I can give myself the time and space to explore that.

I’ve put Grenades out, and now I’m going to get to know what it’s about. The “swimming in your own shadow” thing is about getting comfortable essentially with being uncomfortable, and with having a lot of conflicting narratives, and trauma that comes from war or from being biracial, or from being a woman in the world, which people are really starting to talk about. It’s my own way of dealing with that. The album is me carving out that space for myself.

Photo credit: Raez Argulla

WATCH: Foghorn Stringband, ‘Reuben’s Train’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Foghorn Stringband
Hometown: Portland, Oregon; Pointe-à-la-Croix, Quebec
Album: Rock Island Grange
Song: “Reuben’s Train”

In Their Words: “‘Reuben’s Train’ is the first track on Foghorn Stringband’s newly-released album, Rock Island Grange. A classic in the bluegrass and old-time worlds, our version has influences from every version we’ve ever come across. It contains all the elements of the typical bad man ballad, from adultery to a train wreck to explosive dismemberment! The video was recorded last September in Santa Paula at the Deep End Sessions in front of a lovely and very lively audience. It has always been a favorite of ours to play live and we are excited to finally have captured a version of it on record!” — Foghorn Stringband

Photo credit: Emma Jervis

LISTEN: Molsky’s Mountain Drifters, “There’s a Bright Side Somewhere”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Molsky’s Mountain Drifters (Bruce Molsky, Stash Wyslouch, Allison de Groot)
Hometown: Boston, Massachusetts / Beacon, New York
Song: “There’s a Bright Side Somewhere”
Album: Closing the Gap
Release Date: February 22, 2019
Label: Tree Frog Music

In Their Words: “It started while on tour in Australia last year when Molsky’s Mountain Drifters were asked to lead a multicultural musical workshop at the wonderful Woodford Folk Festival, for all to join in a piece of music together. The band wanted to present a musical setting that offered a spark of hope and optimism in troubled times, something both beautiful and accessible that could bridge across cultures. I remembered one of my favorite songs from the great Reverend Gary Davis that I used to love and try to play as a teenager, ‘There’s a Bright Side Somewhere.’

The band got to work–changing it from Reverend Davis’ very personal bluesy guitar rendition into a fiddle/banjo stringband rendition with harmonies that everyone could sing along with. It energized the event, so much so that we have decided to include it on our second record. We’re really excited to release this song as our very first single as well.” — Bruce Molsky

https://soundcloud.com/user-746930522/theres-a-bright-side-somewhere/s-V7czs

Photo credit: Amy Fenton-Shine

Alice Gerrard: Unearthed Tapes and Unintentional Activists

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

A cursory scan of the track listing for the new Free Dirt Records release, Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard Sing Me Back Home: The DC Tapes, 1965-1969, doesn’t reveal any sort of agenda or political bent, though that might be expected. The duo has long been celebrated for their unabashed approach to not only being women in a male-dominated genre in a male-dominated world, but also for writing and recording protest songs and feminist old time anthems, performing at political and activist events, and touring the South with integrated show bills. Hazel and Alice were so impeccably equipped to lift up these working class and feminist issues, because, at their core, they were always simply expressing their own lives, their own truths, and their own stories. No overt, obvious rallying cry of a song would be necessary. (Though they do have many, many of those sorts of songs in their catalogs.)

The undeniable legacy of protest and activism and lifting up the forgotten among us, continued and propagated by Alice Gerrard still today, is a striking reminder of the limitless value of allowing personal voices, true self-expression, and individual advocacy to shine clearly and crisply through art — especially roots and vernacular musics — without editing, or shame, or fear.

We began our conversation travelling back to the ’60s, examining this set of songs, how they came to be, and how the organic activism of Hazel & Alice blossomed of its own accord through their music all along, whether they knew it or not. 

I wonder, what goes through your mind when you listen to this album? What is it like to go back and revisit those points in history when you were working up those songs, figuring out your voices, and what you wanted to accomplish musically — and how you wanted to position yourselves, musically?

You know, I had totally forgotten that I even had those tapes, I just came across them. I was giving a bunch of stuff, a bunch of tapes and stuff like that, to the folks at UNC (University of North Carolina), so in the back of my closet was this box, I pull it out, and there were these reel-to-reel tapes. Some of them said, “A&H Practice.” So, I listened, and the first thing I thought was, “Well oh my god, some of this is really nice!” Then I realized that it was a lot of stuff that we had never recorded.

 We had just agreed to go on this tour that Anne Romaine had put together, this Southern tour. She was from Gastonia, North Carolina, living in Atlanta at the time. She was very into the civil rights movement and was friends with Bernice Reagon, who was also in Atlanta. Bernice was an African American woman who was the founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock. Anne wanted to start this tour, the idea being that if a tour of traditional music went around the South, it would be kind of a new thing. And it could be political in the sense that it could be traditional musicians, it could be integrated, black and white, and it could go around and speak to the struggles of working people. At that time, a lot of these musicians, like Dock Boggs and Lily May Ledford, they were being “discovered” and taken up north — to New York, and Newport Folk Festival, Philly Folk Festival, stuff like that. They were definitely sort of underappreciated in their home regions in the South. The idea was to just stay in the South, with this tour. It was always going to be a few white and a few black musicians.

She had asked Hazel and me to be on it, but she couldn’t afford [for us] to have a band, so we were trying to figure out stuff that we could do, just the two of us. I think that’s why we were kind of messing around with me doing some breaks, and Hazel playing guitar, which she didn’t usually do. What it sort of brought back — she had moved from Baltimore to Washington and I was living in Washington. My husband had been killed in this automobile accident, so I was living in this house with my four kids and she moved in for a while, before she got an apartment. It was those years [that we made the tapes], in D.C., when I was living there. We were just practicing stuff, like, “Let’s try this, see if maybe I can play an autoharp break” or, “See if I can play the banjo.” I’d work up these little guitar breaks for some things, and it just brought all that back to me when I listened to it. Some of that stuff seems pretty good! Although, it was definitely field recording quality. [Laughs] The kids would come in, doors would slam, stuff like that.

People think of the Hazel & Alice canon of material as having that through line of activism, Southern activism, and protest. Going down the list of songs on this record, one wouldn’t necessarily feel that any one of them would jump out at you as fitting those categories. But yet, you were working up all of these songs for a tour of the South, as an act of protest and activism. This is something so important to your and Hazel’s legacy — at the time, and maybe looking back now, how did that fit into how you were making music and why you were making music? How intentionally were you making that your mission statement?

I think when we started out, it was not intentional. We were kinda clueless. I’ll take the risk of speaking for Hazel. [Chuckles] I for sure was pretty clueless and I think, to some extent, she was too. We were surprised when we’d go do a concert somewhere and there’d be a whole lot of women in the audience. You know, “What’s going on?!” I remember being at some motel, we were around the swimming pool and I had my daughter with me, and the promoter of the event there came up saying, “I just came from the women’s liberation movement! It was really great!” And I said, “What’s women’s liberation?” [Laughs] Really! I think we were kind of surprised when there was attention coming to us and we would see lots and lots of women at the concerts we’d do. The first time we did this one festival in Canada we did a workshop and I sang the “Custom Made Woman Blues” for the first time and got a standing ovation and they made me do it again!

We were a little bit clueless. I think these things were happening because we had our own feelings about things and we started to express that. I don’t think we were aware of the effect that it was having. The other thing that happened when we started going on these tours, because they were so political in nature, we were tuned into what was going on. We’d do a tour of the Mountain South, then a tour of the Deep South, and sometimes we were playing in communities for various events like an anti-strip mining thing or this biscuit place in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, that was started by some nuns, so we were sort of tuned in. For me, for sure — I read Night Comes to the Cumberlands — it was a huge learning experience. I had never been in those types of situations before.

Hazel, of course, grew up with it. So I think what happened with her, being on those tours, it gave her permission to speak. It encouraged her giving voice to feelings that she already had. That’s why she really started writing a lot of songs. For me, it just introduced me to and raised my consciousness about a lot of things. Those tours got us started.

There’s a beauty in that it started so organically for you, because I think the most effective and visceral and immediate way to translate these messages of politics or activism through music is when the message is as natural and intrinsic in a human being as possible. Clearly you and Hazel were just being yourselves, expressing yourselves, through your music — that in itself was political and people responded to it. I think that’s the best way to effect change: to be ourselves, true and pure, unadulterated.

That was the whole point of those tours. It wasn’t to stand up and preach to people, but if Roscoe Holcomb gets up there and sings a song — by the way, those were the people going on these tours. Roscoe Holcomb, Dock Boggs, Bessie Jones, people who had lived these lives and had been affected by whatever had been going on, politically. Strip mining ruined Roscoe’s well, you know, so he could just stand up there and live his life. It was amazing. It was a great thing. Someone should write a book on that tour and organization!

Do you ever think back and wish that you could’ve just had the musical careers and experiences of your male contemporaries without all of the rest tacked on? Without the constant clarification and added phrases like: “Important women in bluegrass.” Do you ever wish you could do it all again and do it just for the music?

Well, you are what you are. I think you have to accept that. I don’t think I’d be who I am without that. So it doesn’t really bother me. What bothers me is when people call me “spry.” Like, “She’s 84, she’s really spry.” [Laughs]

[Laughs] So the ageism is more bothersome than anything else.

You know what, in a lot of ways, it really is.

Hazel, I know that she had many, many, really bad experiences before she and I teamed up. It was the usual kind of sexist crap. She’d put up with it most of the time, but she was very aware of it. But when we started singing together, I had become a part of this whole scene around Washington D.C. — and she became a part of it, too — which was a mix of young, sort of college-educated or at least high school-educated, middle-class folks. A bunch of young people who weren’t like [sexist]. I felt when we started that we were surrounded by a very supportive community. I never felt like they didn’t want us to do anything because we were women. They were really encouraging. I didn’t experience those things. I felt like we were lucky to have guys around us that were supportive.

I do remember, before Hazel and I started singing together, I would go with my husband– boyfriend? Whatever he was at that moment. We’d go to Baltimore to listen to Hazel and whomever she was playing with, she had a band, and we’d go listen to them practice. I did feel at those times sort of compelled to join the other women in the kitchen. [Laughs] Even though I really wanted to be in the other room!

When did you start feeling that change? When you met up with those folks in D.C.?

Yeah… more so. There weren’t a lot of women in what we were doing. I think part of what was going on was these guys, who’d moved up from the South, living in these hardscrabble places in the city, there was a lot of hard work involved, there was a lot of drinking, women had a perfect right to feel shit upon a lot of the time. Their husbands ran around on them, they’d get drunk. So it felt sometimes that we were treading a fine line in trying to be part of the music in that situation and context, and yet, not make the women dislike you because of it. It was a weird little thing going on there. But that didn’t happen in the D.C. scene.

Let’s talk about the present for second — what do we do in the face of the “shut up and sing” mentality that’s so rampant right now? This idea that if somebody on stage has political views that are different than somebody in the audience, that’s a problem. Roots music has always been built upon speaking truth and speaking to the most basic, concrete, ground-level needs of humanity. How do we translate the value of that in a modern context?

That seems to be the environment these times. I feel like I don’t care — I do pay attention to where I am. At the time, I do care about the context of where I am, usually, but I feel like you need to say what you have to say. It’s easier when it’s in a friendly environment, like Shout & Shine [the showcase]. That was a no-brainer. Everybody there was right behind me, one hundred percent. But if I went to… oh, I dunno…

Fill-in-the-blank.

Yeah.

That’s something we want to be cognizant of anyways, because reaching people that are further away from our frame of reference and our point of view requires us to be aware of context and to allow nuance into the situation.

Exactly.

Now there’s this local band, the New Deal String Band, college kids from around here back in the ’70s and ’80s. They were one of the first Southern hippie bands before the other hippie Southern band — I’m blanking on the name. [Laughs] They would go to the Galax Fiddlers’ Convention back in the day. They had long hair, but they were really good players and Leroy [Savage] was a really great singer. It was a little bit of a toxic environment. People didn’t like long-haired hippies and were likely to start a fight with you as not. Leroy used to say, “We’d get in there, with our long hair, but if we could get our instruments out and start playing before a fight broke out, we’d be okay.” [Laughs] Because of their music! It really does transcend a lot of barriers. You can start with the music and then maybe you can make some inroads.

…Getting to know people — it doesn’t hurt to make friends first and then play the music or take a position or whatever. I think sometimes that goes a longer way toward more permanent changes than busting in–

And raising hell.

Yeah. [Laughs] They have something to say, too. I might not agree with everything, but… [sighs] I don’t know, you know… it’s complicated!!

Photo credit: Betsy Siggins

LISTEN: Bill and the Belles, ‘DreamSongs, Etc.’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Bill and the Belles
Hometown: Johnson City, Tennessee
Album: DreamSongs, Etc.
Release Date: August 24, 2018
Label: Jalopy Records

In Their Words: “DreamSongs, Etc. captures the sound we’ve worked tirelessly in developing over the past three and a half years incorporating influences from a variety of times and places that were once representative of country music. We think listeners will find these songs refreshing in their simplicity and delivery, and hope the joy we experienced in creating this record transcends to their listening experience. We hope timelines become blurred… that the music can speak for both the here and now yet remind us of our past bringing listeners a sense of comfort and familiarity in a time that’s anything but. The voices and songs of America’s past float around all of us up in the ethos and we do our best to remain conscious and aware of those sounds when they call. We try and take those sounds to turn them into something that will resonate with people today. More than anything we hope these songs lift your spirits.” — Bill and the Belles

Photo credit: Josh Littleton

Fink, Marxer & Gleaves: Connecting Songs, Connecting Stories

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Intersectionality is the keystone of activism and action. Banding together across whatever barriers our identities present strengthens and energizes the mission, stripping away the isolation that all marginalized folks feel on the day-to-day. In bluegrass and old-time, many, many activist-minded artists, creators, and songwriters have carried the banner for inclusion and an action-forward, open community since the very beginning of these genres.

Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer are a prime example of those forebears, having fought for the inclusion of queer identities and women in folk music and bluegrass for decades. Shout & Shine, their new collaboration with youngster-yet-old-soul Sam Gleaves, is a perfect illustration of cross-generational mind melds — and musical melds. Messages of social justice, feminism, working class empowerment, and activism through music are so viscerally powerful because the trio shows that anyone can connect with each other across the rifts and barriers that many would assume were insurmountable. In this case, age and experiences are most strikingly disparate, but the core concept should apply to gender, religion, orientation, cultural background, or banjo right hand playing styles, too.

BGS is proud to be a place where these intersections are encouraged and celebrated, whether editorially or, for instance, on stage at our Shout & Shine: A Celebration of Diversity in Bluegrass showcase, held in Raleigh, NC during the International Bluegrass Music Association’s business conference for the past two years. Fink, Marxer & Gleaves — before they officially donned that moniker — performed for the showcase in 2017. The theme song they penned for the event is indeed the perfect ethos for their band, their album, the showcase itself, and the types of connections we’re all trying to foster as we press ever forward.

Some folks might not know that the Bluegrass Situation is already connected to this album and its title track!

Cathy Fink: I think it’s a pretty simple connection — I would even say that the Bluegrass Situation and the Shout & Shine showcase at IBMA were the reasons that brought Cathy & Marcy back to IBMA. [It gave us] a big feeling that the door was opening wider for more inclusion in every direction at the conference. Needless to say, once I found out about the showcase I made the connection with you about having us involved. And I made some suggestions for other artists [you] could have, which turned out well. We had worked with the Ebony Hillbillies and they came.

So I was just sitting on the back porch one day and I thought, “You know, this event needs a theme song!” Sometimes you think about a song for years and sometimes it takes a couple minutes and there it is. This happened to be one of those songs. It really popped out. There were several lines that I kept working on after that time, but that’s really what happened. In all serendipity, it fit our trio perfectly, in terms of what we stand for: loving traditional music, loving contemporary music that is formed on top of traditional music, and what we want to accomplish as a trio, playing bluegrass-related music that has a deeper meaning than, “I lost my girlfriend.” [Chuckles]

It often feels like this is a newer, growing movement for inclusion and diversity in bluegrass — it’s happening across roots music genres right now — but I wonder what it looks like to you, Cathy and Marcy, since you have been on the frontlines of this fight, this battle, this dialogue, for your entire lives? It’s often difficult for younger folks to appreciate how long and hard-fought these issues have been, and you two can bring this perspective, so I wonder, too, how this influences your mentorship?

CF: I want to start by saying the mentorship of Sam is a two-way street. We learn as much from him as he learns from us. Sam is an incredible inspiration to us, because he walks the walk, not just talks the talk — in terms of the songs that he’s written, the songs that he chooses, and frankly, how he treats people. These things are all interconnected.

Historically, for us, Marcy and I started to play out in the ‘70s, in days when women didn’t really play bluegrass music. I know that there are other women who had similar experiences, even though there were amazing women in country music on the radio beginning in the 1930s. One of our friends and mentors, Patsy Montana, was the first woman in country music to sell a million records. She was really the first woman in country music to start writing songs from the female perspective. Marcy and I spent ten years performing with and working with her, but we also played a lot of bluegrass festivals where people would come up to Marcy and say, “Wow! You’re a girl and you’re playing lead guitar!” They’d come up to me and say, “Wow! You’re a girl and you’re playing bluegrass banjo.” While we’d say, “Yeah, we’re people and we each have ten fingers that work!”

Marcy helped me with a release on Rounder Records in the late ‘80s called, The Leading Role. We did a lot of songs that people didn’t know had been recorded by these amazing women, like Ola Belle Reed, the DeZurik Sisters, Lily May Ledford, the Coon Creek Girls, and the Girls of the Golden West — there was an amazing heyday of women in country. Patsy made sure that they were getting the respect that they deserved. Then, later in the ‘80s, we did the Blue Rose album. Marcy and I put that together out of a desire to highlight some of the great women who we felt had been making amazing music but not getting any recognition. That included Sally Van Meter, Laurie Lewis, and Molly Mason.

Moving forward now, after thirty years, the cool thing is that we have the Justin Hiltner’s, and the Sam Gleaves’s, and the Jake Blount’s, and the Amythyst Kiah’s and a long list of people who are the next generation. They’re going to bring up the generation after them in a more inclusive world.

Marcy Marxer: My view is that in the early days of country music, the music better reflected who was actually out there playing. Then, when the record business got serious — not just 78s, but smaller, independent record companies started popping up and recording people — they might have recorded, say, just one or two fiddlers in an area, and because they were the two who got the record contract, that’s what people thought was happening over that whole area, when there could have been fifty other fiddlers within a mile. One of the reasons why it went to all-male was that that’s who was getting the record contracts. It wasn’t that women weren’t playing anymore, it’s that there were companies who were successful, then other companies wanted to copy that success, and it grew into being a male-dominated field.

This issue keeps coming up as I do these interviews. The reason we’ve ended up where we are today, with these ideas of who “owns” roots music, is largely because of revisionism and erasure. What I appreciate about what you three do, and what this record stands for — at least in my eyes — is that we’re avoiding that sort of erasure as we move forward, because you two are collaborating with Sam, who is almost four decades your junior, so we aren’t losing these stories and this institutional knowledge. I see this as the most important message of this record. Do you agree?

MM: I do agree. Absolutely. I think that, additionally, the bonding of the friendships is the best part of this record and the joy that we feel from this music is an extension of [that]. What Sam brings to this project — and music in general — is that he’s done such extensive research and background. Often we’ll meet younger players and they don’t have that background at all. Sam knows all of the greats and has gone to see everybody that he can. Not that one is better than the other, because you have to start somewhere, but with Sam, we feel like we bonded immediately artistically, musically, and emotionally.

Let me bring you in Sam, I don’t mean to talk about you so much as if you aren’t also on the line. [Laughs]

Sam Gleaves: No! My nature is to listen and I’m just very honored to work with Cathy and Marcy because they really are my She-roes. It’s the truth. I’ve always admired their work promoting diversity in roots music, with their presence in the community and their advocacy.

One difficult aspect of making roots music in this day and age is that so many listeners just write it off as nostalgic and they don’t see it as something that’s present and in the here-and-now. There are so many folks primed to hear this kind of protest music or counter-cultural music right now, but they write off these genres as being for someone else. As you formed this series of songs, how consciously did you work to make this music relatable in a modern era?

SG: I think it’s very organic for us. We love playing music together and we know what sort of material is fun and exciting for us to play and what kind of messages we want to promote. We recorded a song that Maybelle Carter wrote, “Buddy’s in the Saddle”; we recorded a song from Jean Ritchie’s repertoire and Elizabeth Cotten’s repertoire. There’s a theme of matriarchs in these songs, which always feels powerful to share. I was honored to get to record three songs that I wrote, one about moonshine, one about a hot pink house trailer — which is super fun and zany — and a song called “Welcome Table,” which uses lyrics from African American spirituals. Cathy’s “Shout & Shine” is kind of the [album’s] ethos, it brings the theme all together. All of the material seems to have a balance of the joy of playing music together and messages of social justice and lifting up voices from the traditional music community.

Let me put the same question to you, Cathy.

CF: It did organically happen, but what organically happens between the three of us musically leans in the direction of wanting to make good music and speak social justice without having a hammer over people’s heads. We didn’t sit down and say, “Hey, we need to do a bluegrass album about social justice.” We sat down and said, “What are the songs we enjoy singing the most?” There was this list. There were some surprise songs, but they fit in beautifully. We knew that “Shout & Shine” was first and foremost, but the title of the album took on additional meaning when one night, after recording, I said, “Look Sam, I know you’re holding out on us, I know you have more songs and you haven’t shared them.” Sam in his usual, humble way played “Moonshine.” We said, “Bingo! Let’s figure that one out right now!” It made Shout & Shine more than just the agenda, but also just looks at real life for a lot of people and the fun — we all enjoy a little hit of ‘shine now and then! I think it shows Sam’s versatility as a songwriter. This song is just a great piece of Southern storytelling. One of the things we also did on this album is that we connected a bunch of stories that we felt drawn to. To a large extent, their about people that we know or knew.

Connecting stories is what keeps music that is focused on social justice from being bogged down by the weight of those topics.

CF: Exactly! I think you just nailed it. We try to do this in a celebratory way as opposed to a bogged down sort of way.

How do we take a message like this and connect it to people who maybe couldn’t automatically relate to a record, band, or collection of songs like this?

MM: For years I’ve felt like an icebreaker and I know that Cathy has, too, because we’re an openly gay couple and my being a woman in guitar and flatpicking, I found that by relaxing, being myself, and putting the best I have out there, people gain a glimpse of understanding and they don’t see stereotypes quite as much as they might have otherwise. One of the things that’s been on my mind is that I’ve been a cancer patient now for over three years and how that has really, totally changed my life and perspective. There’s one song called “Closer to the Light,” the last song on the record, that I really adopted. I did not write the song, but when I heard it I knew it spoke directly to me. That’s the beauty of a song. It doesn’t say “cancer.” It says, “I’m going through this dark time and I don’t mind as long as I keep moving toward the light.” That applies to everything. It applies to social justice; it reminds me of the days of the civil rights movement, when music would keep us going. There are so many individual songs that mean so much to individual people. It’s great to have open, gentle songs that just encourage us to keep going.

Photo credit: Michael G. Stewart