Tag: Shout and Shine

Basic Folk – Willi Carlisle

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

It’s hard to not fall a little in love with Willi Carlisle. The former high school football captain (he’ll tell you it was just for his junior year), poet, madrigals singer and freaky dreamer is irresistible on stage and on record. He grew up an outsider and the feeling remains in his adult life.

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In writing about his intense life, he’s found an outlet and in his music we, the others, feel seen. His history is filled with complex experiences like having a musician father, singing in punk bands, getting a masters in poetry and finding true home and community at square dances in the Ozarks.

I got Willi to talk about a couple of notable contradictions in his life including his unflinching willingness to lay it all out for his music, living alongside not trusting himself or believing that he can do this. He also loves high-brow poetry and punk rock, but “I don’t want to come across as too heady, but I also don’t want to be so punk rock that I lack polish.” We talk about those contradictions and, of course, the music. His new album, Peculiar, Missouri, is filled with songs that seem very hopeful and these songs, even the protest songs, are coming from a place of love. Willi’s not reached a state of queer joy, which he’ll freely tell you, but he’s working on it. Meanwhile, his honesty, curiosity and big heart have us hooked.

Photo Credit: Mike Vanata

BGS Top 50 Moments: Shout & Shine

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

It was late 2016 when the world first learned of North Carolina’s HB2 – the “bathroom bill” – prohibiting trans folk from using bathrooms and locker rooms that aligned with their gender identity. The International Bluegrass Music Association was having its conference in Raleigh that autumn, and we at BGS were feeling restless about wanting to do something at the conference to create a safe space for marginalized artists who were already not feeling welcome at the annual event. And thus the first ever Shout & Shine was conceived and held at the Pour House in Raleigh on September 27, 2016.

In the years since its inception, Shout & Shine has taken on multiple forms – from a one-night showcase, to a day-long stage, to an ongoing editorial column and video series on the BGS homepage, Shout & Shine continues to create a dedicated space for diverse and underrepresented talent in the roots music world.

“Shout & Shine began with a simple mission, to create a space for marginalized and underrepresented folks in bluegrass to be celebrated for who they are, unencumbered by their identities,” explained Shout & Shine co-creator Justin Hiltner. “Since 2016, it’s grown into so much more but above all else, it continues to be exactly what we created it to be first and foremost: a community. Our Shout & Shine community demonstrates that these roots music genres are for everyone; they always have been and they will be in the future, too.”

Past lineups have included Amythyst Kiah, Nic Gareiss, Kaia Kater, Alice Gerrard, Jackie Venson, Lakota John, The Ebony Hillbillies, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, Yasmin Williams, and many more.

You can read about the first Shout & Shine event from 2016 here and more Shout & Shine video sessions and features here.

Afro-Indigenous Songwriter Julian Taylor Connects Family and Folk on ‘The Ridge’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Canadian singer-songwriter Julian Taylor didn’t set out to make a country record with The Ridge, but the album oozes with authentic tinges of the vibrant, pan-Canadian roots music scene. Based for most of his career in Toronto, it’s not surprising that the album (produced by Saam Hashemi) feels crisp, modern, and listenable, but its inextricable linkage to place — namely, the titular Maple Ridge, British Columbia, where Taylor summered on his grandparents’ farm as a child — ensures the folky, rootsy facets of the album feel entirely intuitive, raw, and perfectly placed.

Of course, Taylor is quick to point out that the pre-genre, elemental quality of The Ridge not only stems from his decades in music or geography alone, but from his family, their shared musical connections, and his Indigenous roots. His grandparents and family members feature heavily across the eight original songs’ lyrics, and cousins Gene and Barry Diabo join the band on drums and bass, respectively, literally underpinning the entire project with a sonic connection to Taylor’s Mohawk and West Indian roots. That The Ridge is a critically-acclaimed, stunning work of country-folk is due entirely to his commitment to compassion, empathy, family, and letting all of the above stand on their own merits. 

BGS connected with Taylor via phone ahead of his Shout & Shine livestream performance, available to watch live on BGS, our Facebook page, and YouTube channel on November 11 at 7pm ET / 4pm PT. 

Watch Julian Taylor’s Shout & Shine performance above.

BGS: I wanted to start by asking you about The Ridge’s connection to place, because it sounds like your story is a pretty classic, roots music/country story — spending your summers on your grandparents’ farm in British Columbia — and the title track evokes the western wild of Canada. Can you talk about the geographical spaces you’re evoking on the album and the longing I hear for them?

Taylor: When I think about Maple Ridge, BC, we’re going back now probably thirty-five years. It’s almost as if, when I close my eyes, I can see the road leading up to the house. There’s a big hill, and my grandfather used to like old cars — it’s funny, I say “old cars,” but I suppose back then they weren’t. So there’d be a big old Buick, a Mustang, and I remember taking the Buick up that hill. You’d have to get the mail way down the driveway, literally a city block’s distance, where everybody had a mailbox and you’d grab the mail, go back up the path, past these two huge trees. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to British Columbia, but I came from Toronto going to visit my grandparents, and I was always in awe of how big everything was. The trees were bigger, the mountains were there, everything was bigger. Even the slugs were bigger! [Laughs]

[My grandparents] lived in a wonderful house, a couple of wonderful places actually, one of them backed up to the Alouette River and you could see the salmon spawn. They had farmland where they had horses and a chicken coop by the horse’s stables, fields where the horses could graze, and in the basement of the house they bred boxers — the dogs. My life would’ve been composed of getting up in the morning with my grandmother, taking care of the horses, my grandfather would take me swimming because he liked to do that at the community pool in town. After that it’d be fishing, hiking, farming, and just a lot of nature. That’s what we did. 

To me, the way you’re describing it with so much imagery, it’s really clear that these memories are indelible for you. I think that comes through the music — it’s not just that you’re text-painting to check the boxes of what a country aesthetic is, you’re painting a literal picture you see in your head. 

This is true, I didn’t set out to create a country record. I didn’t, I just wrote these words and those were the melodies and arrangements that came to my mind. It was certainly, for me, more of a folk element than a country one. 

This record feels like it bridges the gap between your life in Toronto and your experiences in British Columbia, and I mean in the way it sounds, its production, its arrangements. The music is crisp and clean and feels very polished, but there’s still this raw, sort of natural element that I feel like is the mixing of rural and city. Do you agree or disagree? 

Now that you mention it, I can hear it and I know what you’re talking about. Before you had mentioned it, I didn’t. It’s a very interesting thing, because I would say the rawness of it is because these are takes that are completely right off the floor, there’s no overdubs except for when we added the fiddle, the pedal steel, and the girls’ voices. Those were the only overdubs, because we couldn’t fit everybody in the room. My cousins Gene and Barry, they’re from Kahnawake, the Indian reservation close to Montréal, so we’d go and play, jam at the campfire, jam on the back porch, jam in the garage, and we’ve been doing that for years.

So when I asked them to be part of this record, I deliberately only sent them songs that were acoustic-based, and didn’t really tell them what I wanted, because I wanted this rawness and I wanted to sing the songs as they were. That’s why I think that particular [sound is evident], it’s a family affair, there’s a conversation between the core band that’s happening anyways. Saam Hashemi, who co-produced and engineered the record, he’s from the UK originally, he’s now Canadian, and we’ve worked together before. His production style is very pristine, the way that he captured it. That’s not deliberate, but it’s a wonderful hybrid for you to pick up on it. I hope others did and after this I hope that more do!

To me, part of this record sounding so country comes out of that Western Canada, American Midwest, Great Plains tradition of Indigenous country music and country bands that come from that region. Is that a community you operate in or interact with? Was that an influence for you, pulling from the generations-long tradition of hardscrabble, garage band, Saturday-night-at-the-local-bar Indigenous country bands of the rural Canadian and American west? 

Absolutely, I wouldn’t say that it’s the West or Midwest, for me, because it directly comes from the East, actually, oddly enough! My family are East Coast Indigenous people, my mom’s family is from Kahnawake. It does come from that kitchen party, grab-your-guitar, grab-whatever-you-got — doesn’t matter if it’s a pot or a pan. It comes from that aesthetic, for sure. Absolutely! When you research that aesthetic, it’s not necessarily a country feel, either. It has elements of country and blues. Blues is very big in that, too. The way that my cousins are playing on The Ridge, there’s a gentle sort of shuffle that’s very indicative of what we’re talking about, yet it has this kind of swing to it at the same time. It’s like a country swing. That happens on a lot of the tracks where you can really feel it. On “Ballad of the Young Troubadour,” on the conga and upright bass you can feel it really strongly, as well. It’s a garage band aesthetic, for sure. 

It’s a very Indigenous thing! If you go back and watch movies like Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World it’s interesting because the history of American roots music — in my personal opinion, I’ve read books on this and stuff, I know others think differently — without Indigenous people and without Black people we wouldn’t have roots music at all. 

Yep. Full stop. It’s that simple. 

[Laughs] Yes! Full stop. Exactly. It’s interesting to see so many new Americana artists that are Indigenous and Black, I’m really so honored to be even considered in that group of people!

I wanted to ask you about “Human Race,” because I think that song pretty clearly lays out a framework for creating empathy and understanding and I wanted to ask you where that comes from, within you, specifically. Empathy is such an individual thing, I’m always interested in how people take it from being intensely individual and personal and turn it into something universal and relatable. What is that process like for you? Especially in writing “Human Race?” 

That empathy comes across and feels universal because I know someone who is deeply close to me that has suffered from mental disabilities and mental illness and it has affected me and my family. You learn from a very young age, even before you know exactly what it is, that you have to be quiet and patient. You have to be strong, yet at the same time very gentle. You have to allow these loved ones’ triumphs and their dreams to be bigger than anything that you can possibly imagine, just so that they have an opportunity to express themselves in a way that makes them feel important. In writing the song, my message to this particular person was that I believe in them, their strength, and their pain — and to acknowledge that I go through all of those feelings too, just like they do. That’s how that song became so universal, by allowing myself to let go and also praise someone that I absolutely adore. 

What have listeners’ or fans’ reactions to “Human Race” been like? 

When I first posted it I think people really were shocked and gravitated to it in such a way that I didn’t realize would happen. This is the song that led me to believe I had to put this record out earlier than I was intending to. It was around the time the pandemic lockdown here in Canada started, so it touched a lot of souls. I was very pleased that it did. I think the aspects of the song about inner peace and overcoming challenges resonate with people. 

It feels like “It’s Not Enough” is a song about grace, about how we all are enough, but through the opposite lens. So I wanted to ask you about the idea of applying grace to ourselves, especially right now when that feels so much more difficult. 

Applying grace to ourselves is such a difficult thing to do, but such a necessary thing to do. People who think and think a lot, other people don’t realize just how much work that is and how tiring it is to try to figure out what’s on your mind, just as simple as that. I’m a person who feels compassion for other people and myself, but I’m also extremely difficult on myself and hard on myself — as most people would say, we are our own worst critics in a lot of ways. I’m trying to be a little less critical with myself and, in turn, with others. I’m trying to accept what is. I think this song, “It’s Not Enough,” in a way is insinuating that for humans to not to believe that is kind of an insidious frame of mind. 

Can you tell me about the final track, “Ola Let’s Dance?” There’s a meditative quality to the refrain that resonates with me, the way it’s almost like a mantra, really intentional in the way you’re delivering it. Where does that song come from? 

Well, I was thinking about beats in my attic where I do a lot of my demos. The beat came first, I just held onto it forever and ever and ever and ever and ever, just sitting. When my grandmother had passed away, and my grandfather had passed years before, we had to go out and collect all of her stuff. I was the one that inherited most of it. It’s sitting in my attic as we speak. Just rummaging through memories and stuff I found poetry that was written by my grandfather. The poem I recite in “Ola Let’s Dance” was not written by me; it was written by my grandfather, John Thomas Skanks. I just loved it so much, I had to try to write it into a song. I came up with the guitar part — it was very tribal, I wanted the whole thing to feel very tribal. It’s probably the furthest thing from a country or folk song on the record, yet it comes out like that anyway. [Laughs] It’s really bizarre! 

The amalgamation of my maternal grandparents is what that song exemplifies, to me. I was trying to sing it, trying to put a melody to it, ‘til one day I just said, “Why don’t I just recite it and see what happens?” [Laughs] I did it and everyone was like, “YUP! That’s how it’s going to go.” My maternal grandmother’s name was Ola. She taught dance at the University of Buffalo for a little while. She raised four girls on her own, doing what she could to survive, and ended up teaching dance. So the song, in my heart, is both the meeting and separation of my grandparents, which brought me to life. 

Photo credit: Lisa MacIntosh

Shout & Shine is proudly supported by Preston Thompson Guitars.

Fingerstyle Guitarist Sunny War Wants Punk’s Honesty Back in Music

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Guitarist and singer/songwriter Sunny War doesn’t necessarily miss performing live, in-person shows — she’s not even sure she ever really liked playing shows that much in the “before COVID-19” times at all. But, as she connects with BGS over the phone in preparation for another pandemic-tailored event, her Shout & Shine livestream show on Wednesday, September 16 (live on BGS, Facebook, and YouTube at 7pm ET / 4pm PT) her general feelings regarding the pandemic and its far-reaching impact on the music industry are very clear: It’s all just really weird.

She, like many creators in the March-and-April maelstrom that swallowed up any/all meaningful work for an interminable period of time, became depressed, distant, and took some time to work her way back into a creative mode that feels respondent to our harsh everyday without being bogged down in it. A punk-influenced and inflected lyricist, she’s once again turning to her songwriting pen as an outlet. 

While her peers turn to that same outlet to process many of the myriad daily tragedies and injustices we’re all so attuned to in this global moment, War instead pauses. “I kinda don’t like protest songs from people who didn’t do it before,” she explains, calling to task the frantic and frenzied rush to pivot records, releases, and pressers into more “appropriate,” digestible bits for a newly awakened, activist reality — and consumer. 

(Watch Sunny War’s complete Shout & Shine performance above.)

But War’s identity, her selfhood, as evidenced through every note of her idiosyncratically finger-plucked songs and through her carefully chosen words in her lyrical poetry and our conversation, calls upon her to challenge that propriety. “[Democracy] actually is working” she explains, noting hypocrisy and/or tone deafness in our roots music communities. “It’s working, it’s always been working. It just hasn’t ever been in our favor.” 

BGS: I’m a banjo player, I came up through bluegrass, and there’s something about your right hand in your guitar playing that’s really entrancing and relatable to me. It conjures bluegrass and fingerstyle, but it is so unique to you, it’s idiosyncratic. Where did your style come from? What influenced your right hand technique, how did it develop? 

SW: I think it came from mimicking banjo, actually. My stepdad’s friend played banjo, so I was around a banjo player sometimes growing up. The first fingerpicking thing I learned was “Blackbird” by the Beatles and that was the first time I thought I sounded kinda good. When I was a kid, I thought, “Wow! This [fingerpicking] sounds way better than just strumming a chord.” I never really learned a lot of chords, I still just play a lot of chords in first position. I was just playing C and G and D open and I thought, “Well now I sound like I’m really playing something.” 

I didn’t listen to blues until I was in high school and then I was kind of imitating country, blues, and my stepdad’s friend on banjo. Later, I was trying to be like Mississippi John Hurt; and I kinda wanted to be like Chet Atkins. But I couldn’t ever figure that out. 

I see plenty of folks in the scene who idolize Derek Trucks or Joe Bonamassa or even Molly Tuttle and Billy Strings who are coming up. There are these guitar fans that just idolize and adore them. Have you seen guitar fans trying to capture what you’re doing with your playing?

Not really? I don’t know. There are some people on Facebook and Instagram who message [me] and want to talk about my guitar style, but they’re usually just into old-timey blues stuff. Then we just talk about that. Sometimes they ask who I listen to. But I think [the implication is], “You’re really close to maybe being like this person I know of.” 

I can think of a lot of shredders out there, but I do the same kind of riffs in every key that I play in. I feel like I can say I really do fingerpick well, but I know people that really do it and can play as well with their left hand as their right. I’m not quite there. [Laughs]

It’s hard to talk about music and performing right now without acknowledging the giant, COVID-19 elephant in the room. It’s interesting to me that this moment of pausing, of stopping everything, especially in the music industry, has given artists a chance to refocus or realign their priorities – have you been thinking about the future? Thinking about the present? How has the pandemic felt to you? 

The first three months I was just depressed and drinking a lot and not doing anything. Then recently, I’ve been trying to write. I’ve been jamming with my friend Milo, who plays a lot of lead guitar on two of my albums, and we’re going to make some demos together. I’ve also been thinking about going to school, trying to get into some kind of two-year program. Since music might not [come back], there might not be live music for two more years. I’m thinking about getting a job. [Laughs] 

It’s daunting to wake up every day like, “I’m going to keep doing this now, because I believe — I think — it’s going to happen in the future.” It’s a lot! 

Yeah, it’s like, “Maybe music is just not essential…” You know? [Sad chuckle] 

Then, with the whole Zoom thing and the livestream thing, I’m just not really into it. I’m not enjoying it at all, it feels weird. It’s just like, sitting in a room by yourself, trying to make a video, and then you think, “Should I look into the camera? Should there be talking in between?” You’re trying to imitate a set at a venue, but you’re just sitting by yourself. It just feels weird! I would rather just play by myself, without a camera. 

I liked playing shows [before] kind of, but I almost didn’t even like that. At least it felt like there was a reason for doing it. I was talking to my mom and we both realized we used to watch concerts before, too. Just then it was an actual concert on film. Even that would be better! If there were somehow an audience in the livestream… I guess that can’t be, but it’s just awkward [without them.] Seeing a band play off of the energy of the room is more what it’s about.

Well, for your Shout & Shine livestream performance we’ll have to ask our audience to be “loud” in the comments! Use that clapping hands emoji! [Laughs] Who would you like to see as a guest on Shout & Shine? Whose music is inspiring you right now and getting you through the day-to-day?

I like Tré Burt! Amythyst Kiah, too. 

Have you heard of Yes Ma’am? They’re from New Orleans – the singer sometimes plays solo, but also has a band. They used to busk on the street in New Orleans. It’s just really good, a great kinda folky string band. 

I like the new Run The Jewels album. I listen to Elliott Smith still, and a lot of ‘90s music. I like Black Pumas a lot.

What would you like to see from the music community, as far as a response to this moment in our culture’s history — not only the racial injustice and righteous rebellions against police brutality, but also how divided and polarized our musical community is now. It’s like half people who want music to “remain apolitical” and half folks who are like, “Music has always been political, where the fuck have you been all along?” What do you see as the urgent need of our community to reconcile all of this? I know that’s a huge question.

I think it just needs to become about honesty again. That’s something I would like to see. I’m not really that into “Americana” music, but even so I feel like [Americana] musicians are going to be faced with not being able to let these issues go unaddressed anymore. I think that’s interesting. At this point, you can’t just put out your weird corny love song that’s not even about anything that happened in your life, but is actually just something that makes sense pop-wise and hit-wise. You should have to really be honest. People don’t necessarily have to be “political,” they can just write about all the emotions they’re going through. We’re all dealing with the pandemic and with Trump and with police brutality — it’s a lot. Even if people don’t want to write a song about why we should get rid of the police, they could at least write about how scared they are. I don’t know, there’s a different, new kind of folk that could happen about just being freaked out and unsure of your future. I love shit like that. 

I kinda don’t like protest songs from people who didn’t do it before. It’s just not hitting right. I don’t want your protest music if you weren’t writing it before. Whatever issue is being highlighted, it’s always like, “Yeah, we’ve BEEN talking about that.” [Expectant pause] This has been the conversation. I’m into punk, I’ve always liked protest music. As far as folk, I do like its protest music, but I mostly like punk or really politically-charged hip-hop. It’s kind of annoying when say, a really poppy country person who’s never said anything about anything is writing a protest song. It’s just cashing in. It’s corny. It’s weird. 

And another thing, a lot of people who are going out to these Black Lives Matter protests and stuff, I still don’t feel like they would treat me any differently than they normally would. I saw people posing and taking pictures. This is a weird thing to just be a trend. 

Like Breonna Taylor now being a meme.

Yeah. It’s offensive, it’s too much. 

And how many times they show those videos [of Black people being murdered by police]. There’s a lot of murder porn going around! People are saying one thing, but showing someone die every day. I was kind of like, “You know, I don’t think they would show a video of a white person being killed, over and over again.” A lot of things happening right now are really dehumanizing and I don’t think people can see it unless they really, really think about it. Or maybe put themselves in that position. It’s murder porn.

I know what happened. I don’t want to see this over and over again. I don’t need to physically see it to be angry about it. Think of all the bad this is doing to our psyches on top of everything else, seeing people murdered every day. 

But, a lot of musicians are “activists” now, I guess. I just… don’t really know what that means. They were going to put out a song anyway. That’s what they do for a living. Obviously they can’t just put out the typical love song — that’s what people always write about, love. That would be “offensive.” Or, it wouldn’t be “appropriate.” So they all have to change and pretend to be “activists.” It’s just a reflection of what’s trending right now. 

I just want to know: Are they actually going to change in a year? I’m curious to know how long the Black Lives Matter profile pictures are going to stay up. 

Photo credit: Randi Steinberger

Gospel According to Kyshona: Be a Reflection

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Everyone is making political records. Everyone is making albums that speak to “this moment.” Too few of them are making music that speaks to the people who inhabit this moment. 

Kyshona does. The explorations on her brand new album, Listen — which are synopsized neatly on the title track — by many other artists could have easily and offhandedly devolved into a reactionary, “woke” gasp into the void. Kyshona (surname Armstrong), though, is a deft and empathetic songwriter, a storyteller with a penchant for shameless self expression and graceful introspection. Listen is not an admonishment. It’s not an imperative, or an oracle-given ultimatum. Kyshona does not implore her audience to hear her, but each other. 

Over ten original and co-written songs the album carries on this mission with empathy, connection, community, and spirituality (but not proselytizing.) It’s a remarkable feat that though society systemically attempts to render her and women like her invisible, assuming that they’ll stand aside or allow themselves to be tokenized, Kyshona compassionately defies those expectations and opts to design her selfhood — and thereby, her art — to interact with the world on her terms and not the world’s. 

BGS connected with Kyshona over the phone while she created still more music and community on the road in Los Angeles in early February.

BGS: It feels like you’re trying to hold listeners to task here, but there’s also so much grace on the record and there’s so much understanding in the lyrics. How did this idea of grace permeate the album? It feels so tangible to me. 

 Kyshona: Maybe a year and a half ago I had to come up with a mission statement for myself, to help me focus on what my point and purpose is. We all get caught up in the glamor, the whole shiny music business. That mission statement was, “To be a voice and a vessel to those that feel lost, forgotten, silenced, and are hurting.” There is no “right” or “left” to that statement. Those that might feel incarcerated — even if it’s not behind bars, but by their fears, their worries, the rules that they have been taught to live by — everyone has that in common, somehow.

 What I tried to set forth in this album is just: Listen. From every corner that you look at it, we’re all just screaming at each other. Nobody’s really listening. The thing about “Listen.” is that it’s a whole sentence. It’s the most difficult thing to do. When we’re listening to someone share their story we automatically want to relate to them, “I have a story similar to that!” Or, “I know what I can do to help them!” That takes us out the moment with another person. 

Something I learned as a therapist was how to be a reflection for someone else and we’re not really doing that [enough]. A mirror doesn’t try to fix anything.  I wanted this album to be like a mirror. The icky stuff, we’ve all got fears we’re walking in. We all know life can get heavy sometimes. We’re all walking around with some sort of baggage we carry with us from place to place. We all hit moments where we can’t go on.

I’m glad you brought it up, because it felt to me like the redemptive empathy — the listening — you’re trying to inspire with these songs is definitely informed by your therapy experience. How else does the music therapy filter in here?

I teach songwriting now at a women’s jail back in Nashville and when I walk into these classes with these women, they all say, “I don’t have a voice. I don’t have a story. I can’t sing.” That’s something they’ve been told since they were young and they believe it. 

When I’m writing with someone who doesn’t consider themselves a songwriter, I remove myself from the situation. I try to put their words into it. It can be very uncomfortable if I try to put something the way I would say it in there. I’m always battling myself. I have to remember, this is their story, their words. I’m just there to be a reflection. As I learned in my practice, years ago, I was always there to lead people to finding their voice, to lead people to finding their story, and to lead them to finding how their story can help others. That they can take the torch and carry it on. 

When people say they don’t have a story, when they don’t have a voice, I wonder if your experience as a Black woman — someone who is told by society writ large that you don’t own your own story or even have one worth telling — is that what you channel to show other people that they do? Do you feel that connection at all? 

Man. Yeah… 

First, I feel as though I have to walk into a room in a very specific way, because of the way I look. Especially if I’m playing intimate rooms, like house concerts. I have to come in welcoming, as if I’m not a threat: I’m kind — I promise. I’m not going to say anything to put anyone off. When I start my shows I have to find something that all of us have in common, which for me is that we all come from someone. We come from somewhere. I talk about my grandparents and what they’ve instilled in me. I feel like a lot of people — not everyone, but a lot — can relate to that. Someone in their lives has given them guidelines to live by. 

Then, eventually, I get into incarceration, what it’s like being incarcerated, how do we bring light into the darkness. I bring in the heavy stuff. I tell stories of the places I’ve been, the people I’ve seen.

Also, as a black woman, I feel like it’s expected of me to be the “oracle” that’s telling everyone– I don’t want to say it’s a responsibility, but there’s an expectation. 

It’s almost projection, right? That black women are always strong, or magical, or spiritual guides–

Yes, and caretakers. People don’t understand even the complexity of what I’m coming in front of them with. They don’t understand all the different levels of who I am, because I can only really present this one side, which is, “I promise I’m not a threat.” It doesn’t matter where I’m walking into, even when I’m walking behind bars I have to do the same thing. “I’m not a threat. I’m not here to judge you.” 

I notice if I have a guitar on my back people do move out of the way, I get a little bit more respect. If I don’t, it’s amazing how invisible I can be and how I am perceived by others. Carrying a tool, carrying an instrument on our backs, can change or affect the way someone perceives us, off-the-bat, right away. Walking anywhere with a guitar on my back, it’s like, “Huh…” Cause that’s not common, to see a black woman with a guitar. 

It’s always expected of me too, “You must have grown up singing in the church!” No, I did not. I was not leading choirs — people have an automatic story when they see me do what I do! — I was an oboe player and I played piano. That’s what I did. 

This is actually another question I had! I wanted to ask you how gospel influences your music, but I don’t mean doctrine and I don’t just mean genre, either. Maybe the middle space between those two ideas, because that’s what I hear in your music. I hear the activist tinge of gospel, the civil rights aspect of gospel. So what does the gospel thread in the album feel like to you? I did wonder if people projected “gospel” onto you, like I did just now! 

I grew up in a house with gospel music. My dad and my grandpa played in gospel quartets, so I was hearing it all the time. But what I loved about the gospel music that I was surrounded by was the ideas that were given by it: Joy. You’re not alone. The burden is not all yours. And I loved hearing voices blend. There’s something about voices being together, creating this one sound.

My faith doesn’t come into this. My faith is in people. My faith is in the fact that we can be better. [At] shows, people walk up to me like, “You’re a believer, aren’t you?” I’m not here to point anyone to God or guide anyone anywhere, I’m here just to be a reflection.

I have faith in a higher power. That’s what gets me through. But I also know that that’s not how everybody comes at life. Not everybody has the foundation that I do. I’m just here to let people know: I see you. You’re not alone. I know it doesn’t feel good right now, but somebody is out here. You might not even know them, but they get it. And let someone else know that you see them, too. 

I’m glad you brought up being immersed in harmony, because I especially wanted to talk about your background singers on the album, Maureen Murphy and Christina Harrison. You’ve been singing with them for a while, right?

Yes! Well, Christina left us, she moved to Seattle, but yes! Christina and Maureen are who I started out with — like, if I could have a dream team that’s it. 

What I hear in the vocals is almost sibling-harmonies level tight. You’re so in sync, on the same wavelength, and so much of that to me seems like it’s stemming directly from the community you have with these singers and musicians as well. These aren’t just studio musicians to you. 

I consider these women my family. These are my sisters. These are women that I feel can read my looks, I can read theirs, we can say what we need to say and be done. I feel like they lift me up and support me — because I’m not a vocalist! I’m not a singer, I’m a storyteller. I don’t see myself as a singer. People say, “Surround yourself by people that are greater than you.” [Laughs]

Outside of that, these women believe in the message that the music carries. They also know the mission and they’re there for that. They’re ready to walk in it. And, both of these women wrote on the record. Maureen and I wrote “Fallen People” with our friend Jenn Bostic and Christina and I wrote “We the People.” It’s not only my voice, these are also [ideas] that they’ve been carrying around and feeling. 

Photo credit: Hannah Miller

IBMA 2019: The Top 5 Reasons to Go

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It’s September. Festival season is going strong — music conference season, too! — and it seems, just about everywhere you turn, roots music is being made and enjoyed.

On September 24, the International Bluegrass Music Association’s business conference and festival will begin in Raleigh, North Carolina. Last year more than 230,000 attendees descended upon the Triangle area to take in the bluegrassy spectacle. We’ll be there once again this year. Here are the top five reasons we think you should be, too:

1. World of Bluegrass

Starting on Tuesday, the World of Bluegrass business conference kicks off the entire week of programming in Raleigh with panels and seminars, a keynote speech by Alison Brown, IBMA constituency meetings, a gig fair, a health fair, showcases, and focused business tracks for songwriters, broadcasters, talent buyers, and more. Learn about the Music Modernization Act, engage in one-on-one songwriting mentor sessions, and don’t miss the exhibit hall! It’s not just a place to stock up on strings ‘n’ Shubbs, you’ll almost undoubtedly bump elbows with the genre’s greatest pickers and artists, too. Like this moment at the Gibson booth when luthiers and musicians Dave Harvey and Brian Christianson share an impromptu tune.

2. Bluegrass Ramble

Did we mention showcases? This year, IBMA’s showcase extravaganza, the Bluegrass Ramble, will include more than 200 sets from over 30 bands all around downtown Raleigh. Don’t miss the World of Bluegrass Kickoff Party with Special Consensus at the Lincoln Theater on Tuesday night.

Need another couple suggestions to help narrow down your options? We’re excited to see acts like California bluegrass band AJ Lee & Blue Summit, banjoist Gina Furtado’s solo effort, the Gina Furtado Project, and newcomer Jaelee Roberts. Set aside time for a new band from Clinch Mountain Boys alumnus, banjo player Alex Leach, and High Fidelity, perhaps the best truly traditional bluegrass band on the scene right now, too.

3. The Awards

The 30th Annual IBMA Awards Show will be held Thursday, September 26 at the Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts just down the block from the Raleigh Convention Center. Hosted by Del McCoury and Jim Lauderdale, bluegrass’s biggest night will see awards handed out for Gospel Performance, Collaborative Recording, Entertainer of the Year, and more — including three inductions into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.

But, this is not the only awards event during the week! BGS is proud to sponsor the Momentum Awards luncheon the day before the “big” awards show, where young, up-and-coming, and just-getting-started musicians, events, and professionals are recognized for their contributions to the bluegrass community writ large. The lunchtime presentations are peppered with showcase bands, as seen here in 2016 with Loose Strings.

The IBMA Industry Awards (formerly the Special Awards), for categories such as Event of the Year, Sound Engineer of the Year, and Broadcaster of the Year — and more — will be announced during a luncheon on Thursday, as well. It’s an awards-packed week!

4. Wide Open Bluegrass

For the first time, the entirety of IBMA’s “fan fest,” Wide Open Bluegrass, is free! Yes, you can even get into the main stage at Raleigh’s Red Hat Amphitheatre for free. (Tickets for reserved seating are still available!) This year’s lineup at the main stage includes a special tribute to Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard and a celebration of Bluegrass Hall of Famer Del McCoury.

Don’t miss the StreetFest, too! Vendors line Fayetteville St. from the capitol to the Duke Energy Center with more than a handful of stages and a world-class lineup of bluegrass, string bands, old-time, folk, and Americana. Wide Open Bluegrass is the biggest bluegrass festival east of the Mississippi, and if you’ve been you understand why.

Also, make plans to join us for our Fourth Annual Shout & Shine: A Celebration of Diversity in Bluegrass on Friday, September 27! With our friends at PineCone we’re taking over the StreetFest’s dance tent for an entire day of dance, music, and celebrating the vast array of diverse voices and creators who love bluegrass. Music starts at noon and goes til 11:00 pm! Did we mention there’s going to be a Shout & Shine Square Dance Party?

5. THE JAMMING

If you don’t spend at LEAST two to three nights out of the week staying up ‘til dawn camped out in a hallway or a hotel room enjoying some of the best off-the-cuff music the world has to offer, you just aren’t doing IBMA right. We recommend the whole enchilada, going to the business conference, the Bluegrass Ramble, the main stage at the Red Hat — but if there’s just one thing you can muster during the week of bluegrass events at World of/Wide Open Bluegrass, it should be a mosey through the Marriott for a little bit of jamming. A lotta bit of jamming. Who knows who you’ll run into on the elevator or around the corner…

Photo of Marcy Marxer, Alice Gerrard, Cathy Fink, and Tatiana Hargreaves at Shout & Shine 2017: Willa Stein

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

Nic Gareiss: The Subtle Art of Queering Traditional Dance

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

American music and dance have always gone hand-in-hand. Immigrants, bringing their folk traditions, art, and music to North America, combined and cross-pollinated with and stole and borrowed from the art and music of Native Americans, African Slaves, and African Americans. In that beautiful, conflicted, human, melting pot way we arrived at the incredible roots genres of our modern time. Dance had always been an integral part of that reckoning, of the growth, adaptation, and molding of our country’s vernacular music, but at the advent of the recording industry and the commercialization of music, musical dance and percussive dance were left by the wayside. They fell from ubiquity and popularity, largely relegated to preservationist, folklorist, familial, and rural niches.

Nic Gareiss doesn’t believe that dance belongs in those shadowed corners of our musical realms. A percussive dancer, scholar, and ethnochoreologist (think ethnomusicologist, but for dance — choreography), Gareiss devotes his creativity to bringing dance as music back into the traditional and vernacular genres that have slowly but surely lost nearly all of its influence. In the process, he explores greater ideas about his listeners’ and audiences’ expectations about the relationships of dance and melody, dancer and musician, dance partner and dance partner, song and singer, and performer and audience. Not only does he “queer” dance, by stripping it of its normative trappings, and laying its essentials bare, he also queers its heteronormativity, its patriarchal tendencies, and its binaryism — in a fashion that’s supremely gorgeous to both the ears and the eyes.  

A good starting point would just be that we’re a music site, right? We cover music, not so much dance. Some readers might need a quick briefing on your mantra that “dance is music.” Can you give people a quick 101 on your worldview that dance is something that’s essential to music, not just tangential to it?

I work as a dancer who makes sound. The traditions that I study and continue to study — and love — are dance traditions that are percussive. Whether that’s Appalachian clogging, Irish step dancing, or step dance from Canada, all of these dance forms have as their impetus rhythm-making with the feet and body. Also characteristic of these styles is the fact that they occur in environments where traditional music is being played. One might actually argue, and I would probably puckishly argue, that the soundscape that’s created by dancers is actually as much a part of the soundscape of traditional music as someone playing a fiddle or a banjo.

It’s interesting that that is an extant truth about vernacular music — especially American vernacular musics — but the way that American music has grown and evolved, it’s extirpated dance from itself, and then brought it back in, in different ways.

I think that because of the commercialization of music over the years, especially because of recording technology, dance hasn’t had as prominent a role, sonically. For some reason people didn’t think that the sound of a moving body was worth recording as much as the sound of another moving body, but holding a guitar. [Chuckles] What I’m interested in doing as I work mostly with musicians, and usually musicians that come from folk music backgrounds of some kind, is creating dance for listening. That manifests in mostly concerts, but also in some recordings, some teaching, some lecturing — there are a lot of things that make up my year along those lines.

One of those things is Solo Square Dance, a show that you’ve worked up, which strips away all of the old-time music and folk music that’s a part of these forms of dance and just showcases the actual, physical dancing — the part that had been lost, perhaps due to that commercialization, like you were just saying.

Exactly. In Solo Square Dance there are no musicians, except for me! [Laughs] There are no sounds except the sounds that I create myself, using my voice, using my feet, snapping my fingers, whistling. The idea is to reference and pay homage to traditional music and dance as a symbiotic entity. Because I don’t play instruments in that show, that means that traditional music shows up almost as a specter, or as a concept of something that’s been erased, so you can still feel a trace of it. It’s not just the idea of traditional music as a nebulous canon of the music writ large. Instead, there are actually specific pieces of music that come from, say, the fiddle playing of Tommy Jarrell or a traditional Irish dance tune that shows up in a tribute to one of my Irish dance teachers. There is various music in the show, it’s just music as made through a sounding body without a prosthesis, without an instrument.

Something that you’re also digging into with Solo Square Dance is leaving behind a whole host of presuppositions and expectations about dance, but you specifically call out heteronormativity. There are so many layers here, because you have to unpack that dance is music, and that it’s always been an integral part of these musical styles, but then you have to unpack that dance is inherently heteronormative, too. That’s a lot of ground to cover!  

The interesting thing for me came out of these video clips of Bascom Lamar Lunsford dancing on the porch, in this film by David Hoffman that was shot in 1962. [In the film] Bascom is demonstrating what it would be like to be in a square dance, but he only has one body to do it, instead of the usual eight people that it takes to make up a square. I saw that and thought that that was kind of inherently lonely and beautiful. But also, it somehow simultaneously was merry and celebratory. I think Bascom’s reimagining or demonstrating of the square dance is kind of a queer thing — and by “queer,” in this moment, I mean a set of stylistics that are somehow “beyond,” somehow an outsider, that have that “crooked” or critical relationship to the normative. Making that first piece a solo square dance and building the rest of the show around it, I tried to think so much about the way that dance possibly enacts some kind of revolutionary potential. Through touch, through interaction of sound and gesture, through [considering] what it might be like to have communities that move together, and what it might be like to have an individual that a community watches.

In all those things, I kept coming up against this idea that there are, indeed, heteronormative facets of that. Like [in square dancing] when we say, “Gents, swing your corner lady.” We say only “gents” and “ladies.” We say only, “Gents do this.” So there’s also a patriarchal power there, in who does what to whom. There’s also a binary that doesn’t allow for, perhaps, the existence of something like polyamory, where there are multiple people involved in a romantic or physical connection. I started thinking about what it would be like, if instead of singing, [Sings] “I’m gonna get that, get that, get that, I’m gonna get that pretty little girl,” what is it like if someone who performs the gender that I perform sings about someone who has a similar gender as themself? That subtle switch turns more than I ever could’ve imagined. It didn’t take putting on heels and a feather boa to queer square dance, just the simple expression of speaking about intimacy, thinking about the gender dynamics of that special social form, and then creating that little shift in the reiteration of that call. Which, I’m really happy about! At first, to decide, I’m gonna “queer” traditional dance — it’s a little bit of an arduous project. I’m finding that it’s these subtle nuance shifts that maybe make the biggest strides to imagining anti-normative futures as well as pasts.

I read an interview of yours, years ago now, in which you mentioned so succinctly that straight people have always let their identities shine through their art, so why wouldn’t queer people do that, too? That was a groundbreaking moment for me, realizing that my identity has an equal right to being included in my art, because no one else is filtering out their identities, their identities just happen to be the norm. It doesn’t take a lot of effort, like you were just saying, it just takes a change in perspective to open that paradigm up. How do we help all kinds of folks to realize that anti-normative future that you see?

I think it’s important to remember that queer people are not a facet of postmodernity. Queerness has always existed.

That’s such an important point! It just hasn’t always been visible.

Right. When we think about traditional music, oftentimes we relate that not only to a particular place, but a particular time. It’s important to remember that there have always been LGBTQIA+ people in those historical moments, again, whether those people were allowed to visible or whether it was okay for them to be visible is another question. Now, some of what we’re starting to see is nascent queerness beginning to whisper, or to sing, or to dance. That feels like a very exciting time, but we’re not inventing that. Queerness [has] been around for a long time.

For example, people who sing ballads, who maybe keep the pronoun of the song the same, or maybe switch pronouns to express a sexual object choice that is somehow other than straight, this is a simple, subtle way people have always enacted some kind of queer performance. And for a long time! I don’t only think that it’s always related to romantic connections, to be honest. I really like the idea of queerness as a critical set of stylistics. For instance, my relationship to percussive dance is a little queer — or bent — because I had a teacher who always said, “There will be no scraping in our class.” That means, in percussive dance, good technique is a sharp, short, adroit connection to the floor, where you strike your foot against the ground, but you don’t leave it on the ground. That, for me, sort of became a provocation. It made me want to slide my foot, to whisper, to create this foot-to-floor fricative, for many reasons: One, it got me closer to a fiddle’s bow, sliding slowly across the strings, but secondly, simply for the pure joy of transgressing! It opens this world of other tambours I didn’t have access to before.

So then, in conclusion, if a reader and roots music fan is looking to have their ideas about traditional and percussive dance queered, where will they be able to find you in the near future?

Solo Square Dance will continue to tour, there are shows in Ireland and Scotland lined up. I have a new project called DuoDuo with cellist Natalie Haas, guitarist Yann Falquet, harpist Maeve Gilchrist, and myself. That project is out on the road. Also, my band, This Is How We Fly, is getting together to make our third record starting in November, which is very exciting. Then, in the fall, I’m touring with this incredible tap dancer, who is also interested in vernacular dance forms, vernacular jazz and swing — his name is Caleb Teicher. We have a duo dance project, again a project without any instruments! Just us, making the music with our bodies and voices.

Because dance is music, damnit.

Exactly! And, to be honest, music is dancing as well! [Laughs] I found, in my collaborations with musicians, when there’s a moving body on stage, musicians begin to consider their own bodies a little bit more. They start to think about where they stand and how they move. It’s actually an interesting metamorphosis to witness and be engaged with. It reminds everyone that if one person can cross the sound/movement divide, if a dancer can be heard, maybe a musician can be seen!

Editor’s Note: Gareiss will be featured in the Bluegrass Situation Presents: A St. Patrick’s Day Festival at New York’s New Irish Arts Center, participating in an opening night jam session with fiddler-banjoist Jake Blount, clawhammer banjoist Allison de Groot and fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves on March 17 as well as a headlining performance with Blount on March 18.

Photo credit: Darragh Kane

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

BGS Celebrates Pride 2018

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It’s June! The most rainbowy time of the year! BGS is proud to celebrate Pride this month while the world marks the anniversary of the riots that began the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, nearly 50 years ago at The Stonewall Inn in New York City, with parades, parties, protests, and loads of glitter.

Queer voices are an integral part of the roots music communities we all love — and they always have been. Let’s revisit some of our favorite pieces and stories that focus on LGBTQ+ identities, music, and perspectives as we raise up this incredibly strong, vibrant, open, and loving community.

 

Last year, we celebrated 30 years of queer goddesses The Indigo Girls by naming them our Artists of the Month. Some of our favorite songwriters — like Angaleena Presley and Becky Warren — paid them tribute as well. The Indigo Girls blazed a trail for openly queer folks to make music loud and proud. Their wide-reaching influence cannot be overstated.

 

Brandi Carlile gave the remaining 10 months of 2018 an impossibly high standard to live up to when she released her most recent record, By the Way, I Forgive You, in February. One song off of the new project, “The Joke,” is poised to become a queer anthem for our generation — and President Obama himself listed it as one of his favorite songs of 2017. It’s one of our favorites ad infinitum.

 

Southwest Virginia natives and old-time, bluegrass, and folk musicians Sam Gleaves & Tyler Hughes are helping to dispel the all too common assumption that rural communities are devoid of LGBTQ+ folks. “When We Love,” a song off of their self-titled, debut duo release made our Class of 2017 list of favorite songs from the year.

 

We were honored and proud to support the first ever Bluegrass Pride last year, partnering with the California Bluegrass Association on a float in the San Francisco Pride Parade. The float ended up winning Best Overall Contingent and brought live bluegrass music to literally hundreds of thousands of potential fans. The icing on the cake is this bluegrass version of Whitney Houston’s “Dance with Somebody” by Front Country and some fabulous friends.

 

Singer/songwriter Mary Gauthier demonstrates the incredible power of empathy on her record Rifles & Rosary Beads, a collection of songs written with veterans of the armed services. It’s an important message for this day and age — one that Gauthier delivers with, once again, empathy.

 

Americana singer/songwriter Becca Mancari may be based in Nashville, but her debut album, Good Woman, released last fall, draws inspiration from well beyond Music City. The critically-acclaimed album can thank its lyric-driven, personality-rich songs for its success — a reminder that living one’s truth and letting that truth shine is always the best plan of action.

 

Country music is for queers too, damnit! Karen Pittelman of Karen & the Sorrows believes that if we edit our own personalities, perspectives, and identities out of our art, it’s a disservice to everyone. Especially given the fact that queer people have have been making all kinds of art and all kinds of music all along.

 

She took home the crown from RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars Season 3, but last year, before her return to the iconic reality TV show, drag superstar Trixie Mattel (AKA Brian Firkus) released an album of folk-tinged country songs. This year, she released its follow up. We spoke to Trixie after her first album dropped about how a drag queen can fit into roots music communities.

 

Singer/songwriter and “poster child for intersectionality” Crys Matthews carries on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. through her music, writing relevant, hard-hitting, convicting songs that champion social justice and activism.

 

Country artist Sarah Shook is an activist just by being herself, unapologetically. It’s a classic outlaw perspective and a perfect fit for a queer voice in the country realm.

 

Folk legends, GRAMMY winners, producers, and life partners Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer released their forty-fifth recording, Get Up and Do Right, early last year. It’s no surprise that it has a social justice bent, given that the pair has spent their entire lives and careers on the front lines of the battle for LGBTQ+ rights and women’s rights.

 

Artist and Americana/soul singer Chastity Brown contemplated heartbreak and healing on her latest album, Silhouette of Sirens, released a little over a year ago. To Brown, the personal is political, “Just by me being a bi-racial, half-black, half-white woman living in America right now is political. Just being a person of color, a queer woman of color, for that matter, is freaking political.”

 

Of course, we’ve been proud to highlight diverse and underrepresented identities at the International Bluegrass Music Association’s business conference for the past two years – and continuing this year! The inclusion and diversity movement swept IBMA’s events in Raleigh last year, and we took a look at how and why.

 

And last but certainly least, how could we celebrate Pride without going back to our conversation with the most busted, washed-up, wannabe country star in the universe, Ms. Marlene Twitty-Fargo? As she would holler from stage, “Happy Pride, biscuits! Though I don’t know why all you queers love Charley Pride so much.”

Lede photo by torbakhopper on Foter.com / CC BY-ND