Tag: shout & shine

46 Years Later, Japan’s First Female Singer/Songwriter Reissues Her Debut

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Being a “first” — a trailblazer, a pioneer, a renegade, an innovator — is an impossibly heavy mantle to take up. That being said, it’s not surprising that, when it is accurately applied, the term is almost never opted into or self-ascribed. It’s a fascination. A sort of voyeuristic moniker given by the media, by fans, by historians, by anyone who notices, or attempts to commodify, the importance of fresh offerings from new voices. In musical spaces, “firsts” tend to get more and more granular as they become more and more rare, necessitating countless modifiers and descriptors to lend accuracy to the idea that being on the edge, being an outlier in this way, is a selling point. Or, that it’s a merit in and of itself.

Guitarist, singer/songwriter, and performer Sachiko Kanenobu‘s claim to firstdom is no ball-and-chain, however. It is truly inconsequential to her — despite its legitimacy. And as for intricate modifiers? Just one. Kanenobu is considered Japan’s first female singer/songwriter. In an age when writers and artists alike are attempting to retire “female” as a pertinent adjective in music journalism, the designation does give pause. Though, 46 years after her debut album, Misora, was released in Japan, it’s important to remember that being a woman permitted to take up space — in these cultures that champion masculinity above all else, and in artistic spaces historically reserved for men — is still significant. And the circumstances that prohibited other women from going before Kanenobu were not that long ago. And not unique to Japan.

Misora is a stunning work. Singular in its musical aesthetic, its production values, its amalgamation of European pop stylings and folk revival influences, and most of all in the fact that despite being sung entirely in Japanese, the songs are shockingly accessible, evocative, and relatable. Reissued by Light in The Attic Records in July of this year, the album has followed Kanenobu through her decades living in the states, her forays into other genres and musical phenotypes with other bands and artists, and her absolute tirelessness as a songwriter and adept guitarist — even if she may not consider herself “a picker.” New generations of fans continually trip over and into this gorgeous record, and now, hopefully, countless others will have their eyes opened to this true masterpiece — and to a musician who deserves her place in the pantheon of folk singer/songwriter and guitarist greats.

Being designated as a “first” anything is kind of an enormous responsibility to bear. Do you see your role as one of Japan’s first women singer/songwriters in that way? How has it felt to blaze that trail? Or did it not feel like that at all?

Kanenobu: No, I don’t feel responsible, but it is exciting when I hear myself being referred to as the first Japanese woman singer/songwriter. I’m very grateful for the recognition. In the late 1960s there were no women who wrote their own songs and played guitar in Japan. I was the first one to do it on URC (Japan’s first independent record label). Thinking back, it felt good to be in that position. At that time, I was really young so I always wanted to be different from other musicians. I didn’t mind being the only woman doing what I was doing.

Part of why conversations about “firsts” can be stumbling blocks is because, often, these “firsts” are just examples of the first visible examples of X, Y, or Z. I wonder, are there artists, women or otherwise, that influenced you? That showed you there was a path forward for your music and your art? 

I grew up in a family (with three sisters and two brothers) that loved music and sang, which obviously had a big influence on me.

My oldest sister (18 year age difference between us) was a big star in Takarazuka, a famous woman’s theatre in Osaka, Japan where she performed in musicals such as The Sound of Music and The King and I. My mother would take me to all her performances. My second sister probably had the biggest influence on me as she played Western records (such as Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, Doris Day, Nat King Cole, and others) in our house, loved classical music (Beethoven, Mozart, etc.), and also introduced me to some music coming out of France at the time. My third sister would also go onto to become a singer/songwriter. She wrote Enka Japanese country music and can play the piano even though she’s blind.

So, yes, my family was my biggest influence on my musical path.

At least stateside (but almost certainly pervasively, across the globe) general attitudes toward women in music often result in women being considered songwriters or singers before instrumentalists, but your guitar playing is clearly foundational to what you do — and so distinct. How did you develop your playing style, you are totally self-taught, yes? 

Yes, self-taught. One of my brothers learned how to play classical guitar and I would watch him play. Eventually, he got tired of playing so I asked him if I could borrow his guitar to try and teach myself to play. This was the beginning of my lifelong friendship with the guitar.

Later, during my high school years, my friend and I would sneak into the folk club on the campus of Kansai University. At that time American folk music was really popular among college students. Luckily, I met some great guitar players during that time who showed me how to fingerpick and play some simple chords.

Eventually I would meet film score composer Ichizo Seo, who introduced me to Donovan and The Pentangle, and I would try to copy their simpler songs, but it wasn’t easy so I would simplify the scale and created my own style. Even now I can’t tell you which chords I’m playing. I have to ask someone, “What chord am I playing?” I love Pentangle’s guitarists Bart Jansch and John Renbourn, who created a unique style with their duet guitar playing. Their playing still inspires me.

Do you find that people automatically consider you more of a singer or songwriter, rather than a picker? Or has your experience been different?

No one labeled me a guitar player back then and even I considered myself a singer/songwriter who used the guitar to create the tone first and the words would follow. It wasn’t until recently did I get the recognition as a guitarist and singer/songwriter.

This new recognition started when Misora first got reissued in Australia in 2006 by Guy Blackman of Chapter Records. Around that release the album started getting radio play in the Western world. Brian Tuner, former music director and DJ at New Jersey’s WFMU, was a big supporter. My first long-form radio interview for the Misora reissue was in 2007 with WFMU’s DJ Joe McGasko. At that time, it had been over ten years since I had performed any tracks off Misora but Joe took me seriously as an artist and encouraged me to start performing again. He had me on his show “Surface Noise” to perform four songs off Misora and two new songs. After that performance I started getting recognized as a guitarist and singer/songwriter, but before then I wasn’t confident enough to even consider myself “a picker.”

That WFMU performance was an amazing experience because it had been so long, that even I was really surprised that I had remembered all the guitar chords and lyrics off Misora. I remember thinking it was a miracle I pulled it off.

All of the tracks on Misora are sung in Japanese, but the music is still so accessible and immediate and touching, even with the language barrier. How do you accomplish that? Do you think that’s a product of the integrity of the music, or intention you put into writing and performing it, or something else? 

Thank you for that. I put a lot of my love and soul into Misora but I thought it was going to be my first and last album, because in the middle of recording it I made the decision to marry Paul Williams [music writer and founder of Crawdaddy Magazine] and leave Japan. Three songs from the album were written after I met Paul and when I’m in love songs pour out of me.

When I first heard The Beatles and Bob Dylan I didn’t understand the words but I totally connected with how they were expressing emotions. This feeling of connection and bringing people together was a goal of mind when making Misora.

Plus, the album was heavily influenced by the Japanese band Happy End and the melodies you hear were influenced by the Western music I grew up on… so seeing the music be reintroduced to Western youth is really nice for me.

In the time since blazing this trail, how has the scene for folk singer/songwriters — especially women — in Japan grown? What has excited you about the progress that’s been made?

I can’t really say, but I know that after I left Japan, I learned of so many singer/songwriters that became very famous in Japan such as Akiko Yano, Minako Yoshida, etc. and they were not afraid to express themselves. Friends have told me if I didn’t leave Japan after recording Misora it might have impacted the singer/songwriter scene there but I don’t know if that’s true.

Are there artists here, in the U.S. that you are listening to right now? Any that get your creative juices flowing?  

I listen to all kinds of music: folk, rock, country, world, classical, jazz, blues, space, and classic movie soundtracks.

Right now, I enjoy listening to Steve Gunn. I love his originality and guitar playing. Steve and I have become very good friends and his playing inspires me to play my guitar more. I love the creative sounds that he makes with his guitar. He has a lot of passion and love of playing; I can both see and hear it. He is a very calm solo performer that plays so naturally I can’t tell when the tuning ends and the song begins. He is one of my favorite musicians right now. He invited me to open for his Bay Area tour earlier this year. He and his band, plus James McNew from Yo La Tengo, backed me up as we performed at SummerStage in Central Park, and Union Pool in New York. I hope someday to perform again with Steve and make a record.

I also still love listening to Joe McGasko’s show “Surface Noise” because he brings interesting new and old artists on, which is how I was introduced to Steve Gunn.

I would love to collaborate again with Mr. Hosono Haroumi, who co-produced Misora.

What do you think are the biggest differences you’ve felt between the scene here, in the U.S., and that in Japan? 

Biggest differences are language and culture. There is more freedom of speech here in United States. People express themselves more openly and say things more directly. It can be seen in American music as well.  I have become more Californian than Japanese over the years, because I have lived in America much longer than in Japan.

Western culture and music influence each other, it is interesting how everything comes together. Music comes around full circle in Japan and America, Eastern and Western worlds vibrate. We influence each other. That is what is happening now and it’s a wonderful thing.

To wrap up, here’s the obligatory, “What’s next?” question: What’s next? This reissue of Misora, decades later, is such a testament to your longevity and your impact — how are you planning to take that further into the future? Are you? 

First, I’d like to say thank you to the label, Light in The Attic Records, who put out a beautiful reissue of Misora this year on vinyl and CD.

I’ve been performing Misora over the last two years and I just performed the whole album in Tokyo for the first time in 46 years since I left Japan. For that Tokyo performance I remixed some of the songs, adding and rearranging some parts. Someday, I would like to make a new version of Misora, applying some of the ideas Mr. Hosono and I couldn’t use in the original 1972 recording.

I’m still writing new songs, but putting out a new version of Misora would be so wonderful. I’m 71 years old now and I’m in the last chapter of my life so as long as I stay well I would love to continue performing for others. To my family, my dear old and new friends, and to Misora fans in the East and West, I love you all and I’m so thankful for your support and love.

Color photos: Yosuke Kitazawa
Black & white photo: Takashi Yamamoto

Lakota John Laces Native Lineage with North Carolina Roots

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy of Music Maker Relief Foundation

ANNOUNCING: BGS and PineCone Present Shout & Shine 2019

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Along with our partners at PineCone, the Piedmont Council of Traditional Music, we are proud to announce our Fourth Annual Shout & Shine: A Celebration of Diversity in Bluegrass. The 2019 iteration will be the event’s biggest year yet, taking over the Dance Tent during IBMA’s Wide Open Bluegrass festival in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday, September 27, from 12 noon to 11pm. (See full schedule below.)

In 2016 Shout & Shine became the first event of its kind at the week-long bluegrass business conference and festival. Born as a direct response to the North Carolina General Assembly’s controversial “bathroom bill,” HB2, Shout & Shine’s fourth year continues the showcase’s growth and strengthens its mission of highlighting and reincorporating the voices and perspectives of underrepresented and marginalized artists, musicians, and performers — not only at the showcase, but throughout the convention and festival.

Headlining the year is the Shout & Shine Square Dance Party, led by banjoist and ethnomusicologist Jake Blount and jaw-dropping fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves. The dance will feature Michigan-based square dance caller Boo Radley (AKA Brad Baughman), who specializes in using gender neutral directions for dancers, opening up the square dance — traditionally regarded as a conservative, white, heteronormative space — to non-binary and non-heterosexual participants. All are welcome to participate, with no prior experience or partner required!

The day will kick off with Crying Uncle Bluegrass Band, prodigies from the Bay Area led by Asian American brothers Teo and Miles Quale, who have just returned from a tour of Finland and are fresh off an appearance on the Grand Ole Opry. Percussive dancer and ethnochoreologist Nic Gareiss will give a step dancing performance with old-time banjoist Allison de Groot, followed by a set of music from Hubby Jenkins, who is a blues and old-time multi-instrumentalist, Grammy winner, and veteran of the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

Prolific folk, children’s music, and bluegrass stalwarts Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer bring their Grassabilly Rockets, featuring Jon Weisberger and George Jackson, to the dance tent as well, followed by their friends, compatriots, and IBMA Momentum Award nominees Cane Mill Road — North Carolina natives who will be joined by Williette Hinton, buckdancer and son of acclaimed blues musician and dancer Algia Mae Hinton.

Realizing a longtime goal of Shout & Shine’s producers, the showcase will feature an Indigenous artist for the first time, Lakota John, a local North Carolinian and his trio with deep roots in Piedmont blues and old-time, down-home acoustic music. Finally, bluegrass legend and trailblazer Laurie Lewis will headline the evening with her band, the Right Hands, before the night’s rollicking, square dance conclusion.

Shout & Shine is made possible by these partners: the Raleigh Convention Center, the Greater Raleigh Convention Center and Visitors Bureau, and IVPR. Shout & Shine 2019 presenting sponsors are Ear Trumpet Labs, Jamie Dawson of ERA Dream Living Realty, Pre-War Guitars, and Straight Up Strings. The Dance Tent is sponsored by WakeMed, FOX50, and Golden Road.

Shout & Shine 2019 is dedicated to the memory of dancer, choreographer, innovator, and roots music luminary Eileen Carson Schatz. Admission is FREE. More information can be found through IBMA at worldofbluegrass.org.

Full Schedule:

12:00-12:45pm – Crying Uncle Bluegrass Band (open dance)

1:15-2:15pm – Nic Gareiss & Allison de Groot (step dance demonstration)

2:45-3:30pm – Hubby Jenkins (open dance)

4:00-4:45pm – Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer and the Grassabilly Rockets (open dance)

5:15-6:15pm – Cane Mill Road with Williette Hinton (open dance, buckdancing demonstration)

6:45-7:30pm – Lakota John (open dance)

8:00-9:00pm – Laurie Lewis & the Right Hands (open dance)

9:30-11:00pm – Shout & Shine Square Dance Party with Jake Blount, Tatiana Hargreaves,
Boo Radley (caller), and friends (inclusive square dance)

 

For Mandolinist Andy Statman, Music Is the Great Unifier

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Mandolinist Andy Statman is quick to deny that his identity — he’s a devout modern Orthodox Jew — has anything to do with his music. “To tell you the truth,” he says, “it never entered the picture. I was just into the music…”

However, his latest album, Monroe Bus — an exploration of traditional mandolin techniques utilized in contexts as familiar as Bill Monroe standards and as far-reaching as klezmer and jazz-infused originals — belies that denial. And, as we converse about his history in music and the harlequin nature of the album it becomes obvious that his work isn’t devoid of his identity at all. In fact, the opposite is demonstrable.

Statman’s music is, of course, archetypically and idiosyncratically his own. He, as much or more so than any other mandolinist on the scene today, is truly original. He’s reached this destination not through purposeful attempts in his music to express his identity — religious, cultural, and otherwise. Instead he simply focuses on playing the most meaningful music he can, while remaining in the moment and establishing human connection with his fellow musicians. The rest, his whole identity, shines through his art organically and effortlessly as a result. Statman is a testament to roots music’s ability — whether consciously or subconsciously, overtly or covertly — to allow its purveyors’ souls to be the keystones on which entire albums, catalogs, and genres are built.

BGS: Your record strikes me as “melting pot” music. Whether you’re playing more jazzy music or bluegrass or klezmer, you’ve always considered your music to be quintessentially American. Why is that?

Statman: First of all, I’m an American, so the culture I grew up in was an American culture. I heard things through an American ear, I saw things from an American eye, and while there might be certain regional differences, all in all it’s all pretty much the same. I grew up right after World War II, my father was a veteran. I was born in 1950, so I grew up in the early 1950s in an area in Queens, New York called Jackson Heights. It was a diverse neighborhood. Everyone got along. Everyone grew up together. The other kids were just other kids, and it didn’t matter what their background was. The music played at this time was classical music, or jazz, or square dance music, or other stuff. As a kid we used to have square dances every week in public school. I remember every year we used to have a Lebanese American come and play songs for us. At that era you were able to sort of culturally imbue almost all of the last one hundred years of American culture. It was all there to be touched and heard and seen and lived. It was there, in the air, but it was America so it was live and let live.

What was your entry point to bluegrass, then?

My brother is about eight years older than me. He went to college in the ‘60s — 1960 I guess was his first year. He got very involved in listening to like the Kingston Trio, the Limeliters, the beginning of the folk revival. Then he started bringing home records of Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez. That wasn’t really so much for me, but then he started bringing home some New Lost City Ramblers records and this other record that Mike Seeger was involved in, Mountain Music Bluegrass Style, which basically was recordings of the incredible bluegrass scene in Baltimore, Maryand, and Washington D.C. in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s — people like Earl Taylor and Smiley Hobbs, just an amazing collection. I really gravitated to that. I remember for my birthday he got me Foggy Mountain Jamboree, a compilation of the early, classic Flatt & Scruggs Columbia 45s. He was also involved in what they used to call jug and skiffle bands and they used to rehearse at the house. He played guitar and sang and there was a banjo player in the band who played some bluegrass and I was just very excited by that whole thing. That just did it for me. All I wanted to do was play bluegrass.

What was it about the music that grabbed your ear?

On a very simple level, emotionally, I was excited and moved by the music. It really spoke to me. The singing, the harmonies, the instrumental playing. There was an excitement to it that I really liked. I was very moved by the slower, ballad types of things, also. I started listening on the AM radio to WWVA out of Wheeling, West Virginia, which was a bastion of country music back at that time. We had a guitar in the house, my brother’s guitar, so I started learning the Doc Williams guitar method, I learned some chords, but I really wanted to learn banjo. I finally was able to get a banjo and started taking lessons.

On Sundays back then in Washington Square Park people would go down and play outside in different groups. There’d be a group playing bluegrass, a group doing topical songs, a group doing blues, so I started meeting people doing bluegrass. On these records that I liked I was getting more and more moved by the mandolin playing — it was really exciting me. Earl Taylor’s playing and I think on the Scruggs records it was Everett Lilly playing one or two solos that were just like, wow. I was getting chills from hearing this stuff. I decided I would make the switch and become a mandolinist. I had already been playing banjo and guitar for a few years. I was still in my early teens, so when I stepped into the mandolin role I already had some muscles developed and some understanding of the music.

The record, Monroe Bus, really clearly illustrates the value and the beauty that comes from allowing our musical art forms to reflect our identities. How do you think we can help foster the idea that any background or identity is valid and can be showcased through these art forms?

You know, I don’t think that way. Forgive me. I’m just into playing music, playing the best music that I can, and I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been able to study with a lot of musicians of different cultures and different backgrounds, both playing American music and music that maybe isn’t played here so much. To me, it’s all about the music. When I’m playing, I’m just playing. Identity or background is really meaningless to me. It was always like that, but at this point in my life even more so. When I’m playing I’m just looking to play the most meaningful music I can play. Those are my only real concerns.

 

Bill Monroe (foreground) and Andy Statman at Fincastle Bluegrass 1966. Photo by Fred Robbins

You are always blending different musical forms in these crazy, unexpected ways. How do you respond to folks that are worried that that dilutes bluegrass or that it will kill the genre in the long run? What’s your response to the typical, “That ain’t bluegrass” kind of gripe? Do you have one?

First of all, this is not a bluegrass record, obviously.

But there are undeniable bluegrass threads throughout.

Of course, but I’m not presenting myself as [pure bluegrass.] I spent a lot of time studying bluegrass, and there are always new insights and things to learn, but for me, the original blossoming of bluegrass is where it’s at, where it reached its fullest expression. If I’m going to listen to bluegrass, I’m probably going to listen to bluegrass from before 1970. Not to say that what came after is bad, this is just my preference. The feelings and creativity of that particular period, to me, are really unsurpassed. And while the technical level might have gotten better, this doesn’t necessarily make for a more meaningful, deeper music, it just makes for a more athletic music. [Laughs]

Listen, people have to be who they are. It’s just music. There are always going to be people who hear things differently, who want to add or subtract things, and if you don’t like it, then you don’t like it. I can see that there’s a strong core of people who are really interested in playing music in the mode of what was played in the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. I think there isn’t any danger of that not continuing.

I do believe, though, that it’s important for musicians to really try and master a traditional style. Because, if you’re going to try to build on something, you really need to understand where it’s coming from, to be able to relate to that music on its own terms. Which is getting back to the roots of all this music and being able to speak that language naturally, in your own way and find your own voice in it. You’ll understand phrasing, variation, improvisation, how to play melodies, how to bring out what’s in the melody, how to play rhythm. Without that firm grounding in a particular style, particularly when we’re talking about folk music, it won’t click.

It’s interesting that you say that, because I think that a song that perfectly illustrates what you’re talking about on the record is “Raw Ride,” a sort of version of Bill Monroe’s “Rawhide.” I love this version because the song is so iconic, but you’re still turning it on its ear. You’re demonstrating that foundation that you’re talking about, but you’re finding your own voice in it. How did you come up with this arrangement?

Well, I’ve been playing the tune for years. “Rawhide” is one of those tunes that, if played in the traditional Monroe manner, requires a lot of energy. It’s always a question of is it worth the energy for the payoff? [Laughs] It usually is. There’s obvious extensions of the melody or the chords that you hear if you’ve been involved in playing other types of music. So I just sort of followed those. As with all of these things, it reflects who I am, my musical experiences, and my studies.

…When you’re writing music and playing music it really just reflects who you are and what your experiences are and how you live. It’s a reflection of that. That’s what Bill Monroe did. His music was a synthesis, an ongoing synthesis, and he developed a certain kind of aesthetic.

When I came out of the closet and was going through that process of coming to terms with my identity as a gay man, I had a moment where I doubted my place in bluegrass. I thought maybe bluegrass wasn’t the place for me, it wasn’t a place where I could belong. Did you ever feel like your Jewishness made you question your place in bluegrass?

Not really, no. To me, it was all about the music. All the musicians I know are wonderful, thoughtful, and kind people — in the bluegrass scene and in others as well. We’re all in this together and we all have a common passion for the music. It’s a uniting force. It has a real life of its own, and we’re just sort of passing through it, so to speak. If you’re worried about the thoughts or beliefs of the people you’re playing music with, then you can’t really be playing music. Music, in its essence, is the great unifier. It can unify people in terms of ideas and feelings and speak to the commonality of everyone. At that point, all of these other things melt away.

It really has to do with heart. It’s a spiritual thing. In Hasidic teachings they say that music, particularly instrumental music, can go higher than anything. A song without words isn’t even bound by the concepts of those words. In certain ways, it’s a universal heartbeat. You can see the tremendous life force that music carries. To me it’s something that’s very sacred.

Photo credit:Bradley Klein 

Addressing Indigenous Rights and Hometown Shame, Lula Wiles Look for Nuance

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Folky string band Lula Wiles’ brand new album immediately asks What Will We Do? The project’s title is the first of many thought-provoking questions and prompts sprinkled throughout the album, like tasty musical morsels that lead listeners to explore our culture’s social norms, power structures, and political realities.

But the three women — Isa Burke, Ellie Buckland, and Mali Obomsawin — aren’t being needlessly combative, pushing buttons or grinding gears to elicit equally combative and grinding responses. The goal, evident throughout the album, isn’t protest. It’s empathy. These conversations tease out the slight nuances that define each of us, rather than hiding them away for the sake of convenience and tidy generalisms.

What Will We Do has a quiet, introspective, power to provoke — or perhaps more accurately, evoke — a reality that is stripped of its normative, predictable infrastructures and replaced with person-to-person, human-to-human connection as its keystone. And without condescending even the least to offer a paramount answer to the album’s titular question, the music — and the nuances within — will guide open-minded and open-eared listeners to the answers.

BGS: In the press materials for the album, it’s described as “provocative,” but when I listen to it I don’t find it… incendiary. You aren’t necessarily just sticking a poker into the fire or fanning the flames; you’re trying to accomplish something more productive than that. In the writing process and the creative process what went into striking that balance? Was it conscious or subconscious? Was it overt or covert?

Mali Obomsawin: We had a lot of conversations about how to write political songs, or songs that capture certain elements of the political climate right now and the cultural climate in general. It is a really delicate thing to confront current issues that people aren’t agreeing on. It’s not like we’re talking about World War II. Yes, Germany was in the wrong, everybody knows that. I think we have a lot of listeners that agree with us politically, so to speak, but we still wanted to write about topics that have nuance. We didn’t want to be reductive. The most incendiary approach to talking about current issues is being reductive, deleting and erasing that nuance. We aren’t interested in doing that because that doesn’t get anything done.

“Hometown” feels like it’s painting a picture of a pretty normative, small-town America, but then you have lines like “Flip a coin and choose pride or shame” that really stick out to me. That’s the difference between a marginalized person and a privileged person growing up in the same place — it’s a coin toss whether they’ll feel that hometown pride or shame. How does that song relate to each of you? Where did that idea come from? What’s the connection or nuance in that line?

EB: First of all, “Hometown,” the whole song, is deeply personal to me. I think it was originally inspired by specific people in my family and the fact that I vote differently than a lot of people in my family, that I love. Then, as a lot of writers do, there are a lot of characters in the song that are not coming from my exact life, but come from my experience growing up in this place, going to high school with people who were using drugs and becoming addicted to drugs, girls who were having kids when they were fifteen or sixteen, and just a lot of working class people as well.

I remember thinking about the divide that people feel about being on welfare. Specifically, this idea that of the people who are so critical of welfare and feel that it is just people mooching off the government, in fact, a lot of those people would greatly benefit from welfare because they are struggling financially. But they feel a sense of pride on their own. Like, “I will pull myself up by the bootstraps. I will follow all of these sort of rules that will create. I am the American dream, I am the future millionaire.” They’re critical, they think it’s shameful to accept these benefits.

IB: Also, I think a lot of the time pride is like armor against shame. The force of pride can be, “I’m choosing to be proud of this thing, because I’ve been made to feel ashamed of it.”

MO: Right now, for instance, there’s a lot of Indian mascot drama going on in Maine. We Natives almost have a superiority complex in that we’re so proud of who we are and where we come from. We have to be, because we’re so shamed by things like mascots. I think a lot of marginalized people feel this way. It’s a form of self-protection.

I do want to spend a little time talking about Indigenous rights and issues, because it’s been a topic that through the lifespan of this column we haven’t been able to cover yet. I think that in itself is indicative of what I want to talk about, which is — and I wanted to say Indigenous rights are the “final frontier” of intersectionality, but even that is colonialism! This is how deeply entrenched colonialism is. How would you like to see the music community respond to these issues that you’ve brought up in the music and on the album?

MO: It is so entrenched in American society to be anti-Indigenous. It’s in so many of our colloquial, everyday phrases even. Like, “the final frontier” or “have a pow-wow.” Even smaller things like, “lower on the totem pole.” Natives are used as tropes… which just adds to the erasure. This is all a product of the erasure we’re taught by textbooks: “Indians are history, Indigenous people don’t exist anymore, it’s not even something you need to think about anymore.” It’s to a point that if you bring up any Indigenous rights topic, or address any issue, you instantly become the most radical person in the room. You end up disassembling the whole house of cards of social norms in which we exist.

[In] the folk scene, the songwriter scene, there are things to be done. Maybe someone wants to do a land acknowledgement in a new town. That’s fine, that’s good, I encourage it, but also just look at your colloquialisms and the tropes you use in your lyrics. There are so many! Natives are used for imagery and turns of phrase to give your lyrics a little hip touch.

Authenticity signaling.

MO: Yeah. People use it so much! And all of my favorite artists do it! Every time it happens I’m just like, it’s Tom Petty with, “Til an Indian shot out the lights” and Joni Mitchell with “Little Indian kids on a bridge.” It happens all the time, when we’re just driving in the car, like, “Oh shit, damnit. Paul Simon’s out, too?”

I want to end with “Shaking As It Turns” and make it our call to action for this column. How do we take an album like this, and a song like “Shaking As It Turns,” and help people understand that this poor fucking world has been shaking all along? We’re just at the point where we’re feeling it shake more and more and so intensely. What do we do now that we have this awareness? What do we do now that our thoughts have been provoked?

IB: What will we do?! [All laugh]

EB: What will we do? It’s almost like this is what the record is about!

IB: I feel like the last verse is the closest we get to protest music, to that galvanizing call to action type of thing. That’s the “Don’t talk about love if your love won’t burn” verse. I wrote the song in July of 2017, right after the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where [Heather Heyer] was murdered. That verse was kind of a response to all of the “love trumps hate” rhetoric that was going around at the time. That phrase always rang hollow to me, especially when it was in response to something like murderous neo-Nazis. I think sometimes you can’t just respond by saying, “Well, just be loving to them and that will fix it.” Because it won’t fix it!

That verse is trying to say that love is a good response to hate, but it has to be the kind of love that calls you to do something. The “love trumps hate” thing always felt like a cop out. [We’re] trying to get people to not disengage, but to go deeper into these issues, get down to the very foundation of why things are the way they are. If confronting Indigenous rights means questioning the very nature of reality, then do that. Ask those tough questions. Ask them of the people that you love, ask them of people you disagree with, and do it in a way that’s honest and isn’t disingenuous.

Photo credit: Laura E. Partain

Missy Raines: A Traveller Through Generations of Bluegrass

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Bassist and singer/songwriter Missy Raines has spent the majority of her life on the road — she began professionally touring with bluegrass bands as a teenager. Early on, she supplied the low end to acts like Eddie and Martha Adcock and Claire Lynch Band, but the greater part of her past musical decade has been spent fronting her own band, the New Hip, and exploring genre-bending terrain on the fringes of bluegrass. Royal Traveller, her brand new album, sheds the New Hip moniker, but keeps the exploration, inspired by the handle of a suitcase and her ever-nomadic life.

But this isn’t an album that you’d simply file away as a musical fulfillment of the “it’s about the journey, not the destination” cliche. It’s an open and honest telling of the realities of a life in transit, a life in flux, in constant motion. The countless miles Raines has traveled are a gorgeous, weathered patina on her songwriting as well as the careful, intentional arrangements — and rearrangements — of these songs. That patina — which we temporarily coined “haggardness,” clearly  the word of the day during our conversation earlier this month — is balanced by a hopeful message, youthful joy, and the feeling that, despite that weariness, the album ultimately still looks ahead to what’s next.

There’s a beautiful kind of — and I don’t want this to sound insulting at all — haggardness or road-weariness, this totally relatable human feeling of, “wow we’re still doing this,” in the record. It’s kind of beautiful because it doesn’t feel depressing or downtrodden, it doesn’t drag you down, it feels like a musical sigh of relief. How intentional were you in fostering that feeling — or were you? Do you feel that in the record?

I don’t think it was an intentional “sigh of relief,” but I definitely chose these songs intentionally to say the same thing, hopefully in different ways, which is, “I’m still here. I’ve endured.” And, not just “I’ve Endured” — I chose that song specifically because I’ve always loved the words, I’ve always loved it, and wanted to do some kind of different version of it, but also, I wanted to be able to say, “Here’s a little bit about what’s happened to me through these years.” It’s that feeling like, “It is what it is.” I’m not going to sugarcoat it, it is what it is.

The guests on the album demonstrate, once again, how far your musical travels have taken you. Whether it’s 10 String Symphony or Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls, or your husband, Ben, singing harmony with you. You also collaborate so much across generations. It’s such an important part of bluegrass as a community, but it’s just as important to these sorts of conversations, right? What shaped the process of bringing all these collaborators together on the album?

A lot of it came from different configurations of the band and people I’ve worked with before. A lot of those guys are a generation below me at least. I just wanted them to be part of it. I do enjoy collaborating with people from different generations, I really do. I don’t know that we thought about it like, “Let’s get you paired up with somebody who’s not in your age bracket.” I don’t think we did that in that regard, specifically. I know that I do think about wanting to play music with different people just based on how much I like whatever it is they do.

10 String Symphony was just the obvious choice to do this sort of bowed effect we did on “I’ve Endured.” I get so much out of playing with younger people. It’s a kick in the butt. It makes me want to keep playing. I feed off of that, I feed off of the people I’m around, the band that I tour with, when they have this freshness and this eagerness and joy. I still have joy, but I know that I can’t help but be jaded in certain ways and maybe cynical about certain things that they aren’t. It’s interesting to hear from their perspective and it helps me to maintain what I’m doing every day, because I’m getting this input.

Touring with those younger, joyful people is the perfect balance to that haggardness we were talking about, so the music doesn’t strike listeners as beleaguering or at the end of a long, tiring road. Even at the end of all these journeys, the music still sounds like it’s not retiring, it’s asking, “What’s next?”

That’s how I feel. I’m at the point in my life where I have definitely done a lot of miles and done a lot of things, but I’m in no way finished. It feels exciting to think about what the next thing is. I’m thinking about that and excited by that and ready for it. Yes, being around younger people feeds that, to me. I want to learn from them, I want to know who they’re listening to, I want to be turned onto things that I normally might miss, because I just can’t keep up.

We’re all in our little bubbles. I want to hear what their bubbles are. And on the flipside, I like hearing how young people are viewing how they’re struggling. I don’t mean to say just because they’re young doesn’t mean they don’t have struggles, I like hearing how they deal with their struggles. It helps me keep my shit in perspective. We’re still all fighting and we’re all moving in the same direction and that’s really empowering.

I hear your activism in the album as well; it’s simply you, your ethos, and your worldview coming through the music. You’re not only collaborating with all these women, but your deep pride in Appalachia shines through as well. You don’t fall into the trope of a downtrodden, helpless, bleak Appalachia and South. I wonder if this has been a conscious decision, to opt for this sort of hyper-personal approach to your activism, or is it subconscious, just you being you?

I’m just inspired by the fact that there are so many amazing women, both in my generation and coming up behind us, and the ones who came before, too. I’m inspired by the young women, by the women who are my age and kicking ass, and the women who are older than me who keep kicking ass. I’m also so encouraged and feel positive and excited and happy — I can’t find the right word… content. Not content with the way things are, exactly, but content with the fact that it is changing. I’m content that we are on a path. Things are changing. And that my nieces and grandnieces that I have are not going to be in the same world that I grew up in.

And I think it’s just me being me. I don’t think I’ve ever had anything together enough to make a plan that could’ve been contrived that well. [Laughs]

But see, I think that that’s why your music, and that more subtle activism, is so effective, because it’s not overwrought.

I appreciate that, I had tried to make those kinds of important decisions come from my gut. It sounds cliche, but it’s really true. The times that I haven’t done that, when I’ve done things that I’ve felt were what I should do or what would go over better, I’ve always regretted those decisions. When I’ve leaned back and allowed my gut to take me, it’s always been a better feeling and it’s always worked out better in the long run.

It’s interesting that you bring up the heritage and the Appalachian thing, because a few people have said this to me anecdotally or from fans, they’ll come up to me and say, “I can tell you’re such a proud person from Appalachia from this record.” I can tell you that that is the absolute last thing that I was going for. I feel that I am that [proud] person, it’s not disingenuous, but that wasn’t in my thoughts at all. All I was trying to do was to capture a bit of my story.

With “Allegheny Town” I just went to the feelings I get when I go back home, because I get all these really weird feelings when I go back home. I was trying to capture all of that in all of this — in “Royal Traveller,” in “So Good.” I leaned on a lot of visual images [of home] while I was writing this stuff. It’s fascinating to me that people are getting this from this! I’m thrilled, because when you’re not actively trying to get something across, but it is part of what you feel and part of who you are, it feels good when it’s worked.

You’ve played our Shout & Shine showcase at IBMA twice now. It’s not the first or only movement there’s ever been for inclusion in bluegrass, which is important for the record to reflect, but there is this new movement for diversity and inclusion in bluegrass and I wonder what you think, watching this unfold and being a part of it, after being in this community for your entire life and your entire career?

It fills my heart with joy. It’s like the fulfillment of something. Something that had been so missing is now being filled. It’s not completely full, you know–

But the spigot is on.

The spigot is on and I’m just thankful that I’m still alive and that it happened within my lifetime. I’ll hopefully be around for a lot longer, but to know that it’s happening feels like — you know, I’ve often talked about bluegrass is my family. It’s more than just music, it’s literally the family and community that I have chosen to be in. I don’t know where I leave off and where bluegrass begins, I really don’t. Despite all of my explorations into other kinds of music and my fascination with other kinds of music, I say I am bluegrass. I am of bluegrass.

It’s not where I end, but it does define the core of me. Without the community it’s nothing. It’s like being at a family reunion that lasts all year long. You’re at the family reunion and you’re sitting there, and you’ve just eaten a bunch of things, and you’re sitting with all your favorite people, but then you look over here and you see that two facets of the family that haven’t been speaking are now talking to each other. And you’re just filled with joy cause the family’s coming together more, becoming stronger.

All of a sudden it’s like a Fellini movie, people are hanging off of chandeliers and riding Ferris wheels that weren’t there a second ago, and we’re all just playing together. Because another link just got connected. That’s how I feel. We’re all in this family reunion where in the past, people wouldn’t have been connecting, and now that’s all starting to change. It makes me very, very happy. It’s an inexplicable feeling because it’s so important to me. I’m just happy to be a part of it.

Photo credit: Stacie Huckeba

Che Apalache: Connection Through Context

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

As a column, Shout & Shine tends to hinge on unpacking, refuting, and/or subverting expectations about who does and doesn’t  “own” American roots music and its constituent genres. So it’s interesting that, in a conversation with Joe Troop, frontman of Argentina-based, bluegrass-flavored, Latin-infused string band Che Apalache, not only would we come up against those sorts of expectations — and how the band refuses to fit any molds set forth by them — but also in certain cases, we realize they fit quite tidily into the norm, the tradition, and the heritage of the music. Despite however far or wide a band may stray from what we may automatically suppose these genres ought to look like, feel like, and sound, roots music will almost always demonstrate that we are more connected and more similar than we’ve been led to believe.

We connected with Troop on the phone ahead of Che Apalache’s performance headlining our Third Annual Shout & Shine: A Celebration of Diversity in Bluegrass — the namesake of this column — at the International Bluegrass Music Association’s World of Bluegrass conference and Wide Open Bluegrass festival in Raleigh, North Carolina, next week.

This whole slew of unspoken, subtle expectations about who has a claim to roots music is already being subverted by just the existence of Che Apalache, so I wonder, as you tour — especially right now, as you tour the U.S. — how have you felt yourselves coming up against those expectations with your audiences, or perhaps anyone who wouldn’t ever suppose someone from a different hemisphere would even want to play bluegrass?

I fell in love with bluegrass because it’s amazing music, really. It’s such a beautiful thing to have happened in the world. This instrumentation, this ensemble, I tend to think of it also outside of bluegrass, but bluegrass is what gave it technique, there’s a lot of evolution that came from bluegrass. Don’t get me wrong, I love bluegrass, but there are some social issues in the bluegrass world — but there are also things that are understandable, because it’s an extension of American society. As American society continues to evolve and change, bluegrass is naturally going to do the exact same thing. It’s kind of a self-evident history. Being historically accurate is something that bluegrass musicians were never good at. They took something that wasn’t an Anglo-Saxon “pow-wow” and they made it into that.

Americans are not good at historical accuracy; our culture is predicated upon the exact opposite.

America’s perhaps the most hyper-nationalized country in the world right now. That’s something that you get to reflect upon a lot when you spend years — I, personally, have been out of the country for thirteen years of my life, so I’ve thought about that a lot, how nationalism seeps into every nook and cranny of your construct of identity. It’s pretty frightening. I would say bluegrass never escaped from that. Because of advertising and marketing and corporate dominance, Americans basically just want sunshine shoved up their asses 24/7. They just want to be told how great they are.

Not only because you come from South America, but the array of backgrounds and starting points for all of you in the band, I wonder how you feel you are working to deconstruct that paradigm? Is that an active thing?

Yes. Absolutely. It’s 100 percent intentional. I’m also cognizant of the fact that I’m privileged, regardless of the fact that I’m gay. I’m a middle-class American, that puts me way ahead of almost anyone anywhere else in the world, as far as having economic ability and being able to go to college without breaking a sweat, all that. My parents were not privileged growing up. They’re baby boomers, they had this idea of what they wanted for their children, that’s what they procured for us, but that gave me a different view than most of my family, who were blue collar. I grew up between two worlds and my parents were the segue between those worlds. Back then, identity was constructed very differently and there wasn’t much wiggle room.

So why be intentional through art? Personally, I developed an empathetic point of view because I had multigenerational friendships, and bluegrass is a brilliant genre because it does — unlike almost any genre in the United States — allow you to intermingle with people of different social statuses. Bluegrass is more of a launching pad than almost anything else, contrary to the very conservative ties it may have. If not the best, it’s one of the best musical forms with which to cultivate a greater sense of empathy. Then, when you want to make a greater artistic statement, you know how to untangle that mess a little bit more. Che Apalache tries to put out things that are very intentional, to help people reflect who may not have had any exposure to certain belief systems before — and I’m referring to my own belief systems as well. I have an agenda, clearly. Mainly that’s to help this process [of breaking down these paradigms] along in some sort of way where people are obligated to think.

I want people who hate these things — immigrants’ rights and gay people — to first fall in love with us almost like someone would as a child, because art has that innocence and beauty that’s primordial. If we can hook them in with artistic prowess and then challenge them to grow, that’s social art. That’s what we’re going for.

Musically then, what are the similarities and differences in your approach to string band music coming from the perspective of Argentina and South America, rather than North Carolina or Appalachia?

So we’re in Latin America, and in the 1970s, the United States backed Operation Condor, which was an intentional ousting of and/or assassination of democratically-elected governments in the southern cone of South America. They were replaced by very violent dictatorships. American intermingling in Latin America has led to the basic destruction of young intellectuals in the ‘70s, their baby boomers, who were pressing very important social issues. All of this led to some serious bullshit down in South America. Our histories are very intertwined. Talk about Americans needing sunshine shoved up their asses — to deny the fact that America and the CIA were directly responsible for what happened in South America would be equivalent to saying that Hitler and the Third Reich weren’t responsible for the Holocaust. It’s an important thing to understand when presenting a string band in South America, because most people are going to simply reject it. A lot of people would not look favorably on anything iconically American. That’s just part of what you have to understand before you even start to understand what an Argentinian string band means. You have to have context to know what you’re doing in the world. That’s what Americans are so pitiful at, having context. The inherent symbolism of a string band in South America is something that we’re conscious of both there and here.

What I hear you saying is that you’re patently, obviously American in Argentina and Latin America, but at the same time, you’re existing in this odd middle ground where, in the U.S., folks will view you as patently foreign. How do you bridge that divide?

Through queerness! [Chuckles] That’s my guiding light. It all started because of queerness. I fell in love with bluegrass simultaneously with the recognition of my own sexuality. That was the major defining factor in the construct of my identity. Being different, while at the same time being 100 percent Anglo-Saxon, North Carolinian, banjo and fiddle player, was like trying to tame two wild, bucking mules with a rope around each, trying to pull them back together.

Something that I continually go back to is that if we, as othered folks, are able to stand in the center of disparate halves like this–

Yeah! Who else is going to do it? I think being “other” means that you’ve already had societal defeat, you’re nothing. Back when I was coming to terms with my sexuality, gay meant death. I went to Spain when I was 19 and no one gave a shit. I have to give Spain a hand, I love that place. In a personal way, queerness plus Latin culture gave me the liberty to deconstruct my own idea of my identity.

I want to be very clear in connecting all of these thoughts, for our readers, to Che Apalache’s music. Let’s talk about “The Wall.” I love how it subverts that style of song with what it talks about. I feel like it’s the perfect synergy of all of these things you’re talking about.

That song was again, very intentional. I knew it had to be about the wall. It took getting piss drunk on a bottle of whiskey and writing it all out, in my friend’s bathroom crying — it had to be exactly that. The whole mission there was to create a song inspired by Ralph Stanley and what he represented. He’s one of those luminous voices that comes once in a century, he sounded like he was a hundred years old even in his 20s. He was an amazing but also very humble guy. He campaigned for workers’ rights, unions, and workers’ syndicates. He may have fallen into the clenches of Obama, in a way — because Obama didn’t deliver on a lot of the key issues he campaigned for — but the symbolism of Ralph Stanley campaigning for Obama, that speaks for itself, regardless of what happened afterwards. The idea was to put democracy back into the hands of the people. Ralph Stanley has that legacy.

Sure, there are degrees of radicalism — it all tends to be relative.

In southwest Virginia, what he did was extremely radical. You have to contextualize it.

There’s such a history and legacy in that region of folks who would have been relegated to the forgotten pages of history being on the front lines of progressive issues.

Totally. So that song, [“The Wall,”] on a musical and ethnomusicological level, comes from that! Four-part vocal harmonies and Southern gospel unify our band. In April we even did a residency in southwest Virginia through the Crooked Road. We got to play at the Ralph Stanley Museum and his birthplace. In those regions, a lot of those folks are conservative, they identify as Trump voters. We couldn’t think of a better way besides taking that style of music and try to somehow rope them in, then when the fourth verse comes through, they’ve already fallen in love with us, but then we’re tearing their wall down.

And that act isn’t something that you’ve set out to do just because Trump is president; you’re building on what all of these artists and people have done before you, using this specific style of music to make these changes in the world.

Totally. Exactly. We performed this song at [the Old Time Fiddler’s Convention in] Galax, Virginia, and you can see a lot of people listening politely, and only a couple of folks getting angry, but most sat listening respectfully. But hopefully, when they got up the next morning, it made them think.

Once again, queer people, othered people, are the perfect example of this hot button issue of “come togetherness.” We, the othered folks, are leading the way, showing how to come together despite our differences in a way that honors ourselves and our identities, without being complicit in our own oppression. That’s the power we have, to show people what it looks like to truly come together, to start these dialogues, and conversations. Whether it’s at IBMA and Shout & Shine, or at Galax, or around the country, or in Latin America.

That’s it exactly. I made a promise to myself to fly the gay flag, the rainbow flag at Galax next year over our campsite, because it’s usually just stars and bars there. I think that it would be nice to have other folks there to be a part of that! There’s strength in numbers. I would be reticent to go in there with an overt political agenda, though. Because that’s not strategic enough. I think what people like about Che Apalache is that it’s fresh, it’s breathing new energy into something, that for a lot of people has grown stale. That’s the majority of the comments we get. There are a lot of traditional bluegrass fans that follow us because they feel that the genre is doing what it always has — a resurgence of a new kind of thing. That new kind of thing isn’t going to be tipping the hat to the past in a cheeseball, more mash sort of way. People aren’t stupid. People want symbolism. People want string band music.

Photo courtesy of the artist.  

ANNOUNCING: BGS Shout & Shine Showcase Unites Blues and Bluegrass

Posted on by Editor

The Bluegrass Situation has revealed the theme and lineup for its third annual Shout & Shine Showcase: A Celebration of Diversity in Bluegrass to be held Monday, September 24, at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, during IBMA’s World of Bluegrass.

The theme of this year’s showcase is built upon the connection between bluegrass and North Carolina’s Piedmont blues pickers. The event will pair musicians from the local Music Maker Relief Foundation with the best and brightest of bluegrass to illustrate that vernacular music from Appalachia and its offshoot genres would not exist in their current forms without people of color, African Americans, African slaves, and the influence of the music they created.

For the first time, the showcase is a ticketed, sit-down concert that will benefit the IBMA Trust Fund and the Music Maker Relief Foundation.

Headlining this year is Che Apalache, a four-man string band from Argentina founded by fiddler and songwriter Joe Troop, featured this month on NPR.  Other performers include: Farmville, North Carolina-based Glorifying Vine Sisters, who have sung together for 50 years, sharing their truth; Amythyst Kiah, a Southern Gothic songwriter based in Johnson City, Tennessee, known for her commanding stage presence and raw and powerful vocals; Danny Paisley, IBMA’s 2016 Male Vocalist of the Year, who will bring his reverent and exciting take on traditional country music and bluegrass; and as-yet-unannounced blues virtuosos from Music Maker’s stellar roster of talent.

Tickets are $25. Special discounts for members of the North Carolina Museum of History, IBMA, PineCone, and the Music Maker Relief Foundation are available through each organization.

Presented by The Bluegrass Situation and PineCone, Shout & Shine is the first event of its kind at the week-long bluegrass business conference and festival. It was launched in 2016 as a direct response to the North Carolina General Assembly’s controversial “bathroom bill,” HB2. Now in its third year, Shout & Shine is growing and refocusing its mission on highlighting and reincorporating these diverse voices not only at the showcase, but throughout the week-long convention and festival.

Shout & Shine is made possible by these partners: International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA), Music Maker Relief Foundation, and the North Carolina Museum of History and the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. Shout & Shine 2018 presenting sponsors are the Raleigh Convention Center, the Greater Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau, and The Press House.

Dom Flemons: Many Pieces to the Puzzle

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It’s fitting that Black Cowboys, the latest record from writer, storyteller, historian, and songster Dom Flemons, was released on Smithsonian Folkways, the non-profit label arm of the eponymous museum and its Center for Folklife — the album plays and reads like a museum exhibit in musical form. This collection of songs, from traditional Western folk melodies to African slaves’ field hollers to Flemons’ timeless originals, celebrates the heritage of African American cowboys in the Wild West.

The existence of black cowboys has largely been omitted from the greater historical record, relegated to forgotten dime store novels, dusty biographies, and seldom-sung songs. The commercial narratives that took the nation by storm in the last century, such as Wild West rodeo shows, singing cowboys, and myriad television shows and films, largely centered on whiteness and white heroes as the keystones of the pioneer West. Flemons understood the larger, more complicated picture — in part due to his African American and Mexican American heritage and growing up in Arizona. With this record and its exhaustive liner notes he brings these integral stories, these neatly interlocking puzzle pieces of black identities shaping the American West, out into the mainstream.

When I listen to this record and read through the liner notes it strikes me that the crux of the entire project is revisionist history and figuring out how to undo it.

One of the things I’ve found most interesting about the issue of revisionist history is that it creates even more weight to the work of people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, because you start to understand why they were working for civil rights and first-class citizenship, compared to second-class citizenship. Up to that point, no matter how far you got in the status as a citizen, you could not be considered a first-class citizen if you were an African American person. This becomes extremely prevalent when speaking of early Western history. To put a black person on the same level as a white person was taboo up until even the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Nowadays it’s really hard for people to grasp that concept. When you aren’t in control of the narrative, you’ll find there are holes in it. My notion has been to add and to elevate different parts of the narrative so that when you bring all of the narratives together you get a truer picture of what the history is supposed to be. That was part of the reason I felt that this album was very important to get out there.

Being from the Southwest, I know that it’s a diverse community. The story isn’t just black and white. There are the Native American populations as well as the Mexican American populations and the different refugee groups as well. The Southwest and Western culture tends to have a very diverse population, because the open expanses of land give a lot of room for people to build a new life for themselves. Where there aren’t a lot of people, you don’t want to upset your neighbor, because they could help you in your time of need. When you read about the cowboys you start finding that the ideas of discrimination and segregation in the classic sense break down in certain situations where, because of the lack of numbers, everybody had to be working together. That called for a brotherhood and a kinship between all these different cultures, in a way that is very unique and is very reassuring, especially in modern times when it seems that the whole world is connected, but we still feel like, “Why have we never been able to get along?” But you find in different situations along the way people have figured out how to work together and get along with each other just out of necessity.

Are people surprised by the concept of the album? I can just imagine someone saying, “Black cowboys? That’s a thing?” How do you unpack for people that black folks have been everything and everywhere, just like white identities?

It’s a matter of perspective and a matter of representation in the mainstream. When it comes to cowboys, three things happened. First, you had the birth of dime store novels, sensationalized Western fiction that were written by people [back East]. They took Western stories and created a sensational picture of Western culture. It’s interesting to read about these too, because you do have several pulp novels that feature black cowboys in them, so you still have a bit of that culture in there.

The second wave was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. It was the first internationally recognized Western program. [Buffalo Bill] was definitely a Confederate-leaning individual, even though he was part of the communities in Kansas that fought against slavery. Buffalo Bill, he had black friends, he had Native American friends, he was good friends with Sitting Bull. But at the same time, ideologically, when the Wild West show went out there [on tour], it painted Buffalo Bill as a white savior, at the forefront of all of this. With it being presented at Madison Square Garden and all over the world, including Australia, Germany, England, France, and Spain it painted the picture of Western American culture being a white phenomenon and having white heroes that are in the forefront. That’s the second level.

The third thing that really cemented the image of the cowboy in place were the singing cowboys: Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, and a whole slew of other folks following behind — like Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music. That set the stage for the cowboy being a white man in a cowboy hat and chaps, saving the day. It caught on with the adults and the kids, and the kids carried on these same traditions. Once you see that sort of representation and there’s no narrative that conflicts with that, there’s no need to consider that there might be a different narrative.

Now we’re over a hundred years down the road from all three of those things. The idea that black cowboys are representative of cowboy culture is something that’s been chipped away for many years. When it comes to representation and African American culture in the West you’ll find that there are a lot of pieces to the puzzle.

How do you take an album that might come across as a “time capsule” or historic novelty music and show it’s more than just a bridge to yesteryear? How do you view this music today, in a modern context?

There was one thing that really set this off. At first I faced that problem. Of course, I had my interest in cowboy music in general; I love Willie Nelson, Marty Robbins, Riders in the Sky, etc. That interested me in general, but I came into this particular issue as I started trying to make this into a compelling narrative so that people won’t just pass it off as nostalgic music.

I was talking with my father about one of the cowboys I was reading about, a fellow by the name of Nat Love, who was one of very few black cowboys to write an autobiography. He worked out of this town called Holbrook, Arizona. Then he became a Pullman porter working on the railroad lines. The history of Pullman porters was what we would call a catalyst for the early civil rights movement. One of the main Pullman porters, a man by the name of A. Philip Randolph, started the very first all-black union called the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Black people who were Pullman porters were able to elevate themselves socially, because they began to know the most prominent white patrons from traveling with them. At first they just worked for tips, but then they wanted to work for a salary, so A. Philip Randolph helped the porters raise their wages.

The porters were also the connecting point between every black section of town in the United States. When it came to delivering the all-black newspapers and when it came to 78 RPM records, the porters had supplies that they would sell to people. They connected the North, South, East, and West of the United States. Later on, in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, Randolph was one of the people who helped Martin Luther King Jr. organize the bus boycott. My father told me that; he was a porter for a chair car, the local/regional train car.

Seeing that someone like Nat Love was a cowboy and later a Pullman porter connected this ancient story of dusty old cowboys on the range into a very modern African American context. That was how I connected the narrative so it would be modern. This gave me a strong sense of why we don’t think about black cowboys. White cowboys continued to ranch and become proprietors on their ranches. But of course in the African American community nostalgia, looking backwards, thinking about the old home place is a whole different story. Cowboy music is connected to country music and one of the biggest parts of country music is nostalgia. In the African American community, nostalgia has always been a double-edged sword.

When I hear you talk about your connection to your music, the dots seem to connect pretty directly, but you’ve put in time, done the research, given it care, and given yourself an in-depth education. How do we make it as easy as possible for people to also trace those threads without all of the rigorous work you put in? Or do you think that work is necessary and maybe something everyone should experience?

Well, I think technically everyone should work through all of that. That’s something that I would like to have happen.

Especially since there are so many of us who haven’t had a choice but to put in that work.

Absolutely. [It all started for me by] being a big fan of Texas country blues music, which is part of my grandfather’s culture. It was very natural to listen to people like Lead Belly, Henry Thomas, and Lightnin’ Hopkins even. All of that stuff is black Western culture from the descendants of these cowboys. I wanted to bring that stuff into a single room. I also went to the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, and I met several of the cowboys. Don Edwards, a legendary cowboy singer who has spent a lot of time talking about the influence of black cowboys, told me about how all the black cowboys were called black vaqueros. He told me about Mexican vaqueros and how they were the original cowboys. It opens up Spanish and Mexican culture being part of Western culture starting three hundred years before the time period we cover on the album. That’s a piece of the puzzle.

It’s obviously a very complicated and complex puzzle, but it’s not necessarily more complicated than just the narrative of America we’re already familiar with — the melting pot of cultures and backgrounds. It’s a matter of putting those pieces together. You’re adding more colorful pieces to the puzzle they already have half-built in their heads.

Overall, I really wanted to be able to give Black Cowboy 101. Like the quote from Mike Searles that I used in the introduction. When people think of the birth of the West they think of it as the birthplace of America. If you think of it as only white America, you would get the impression that only white people are true Americans and everyone else is an interloper. If you start adding these other people — Mexican vaqueros, African American cowboys, and even Native American cowboys — you get a better sense that it’s not only the birthplace of America, but it’s always been multicultural, from the beginning.

Photo by Timothy Duffy

Gaelynn Lea: Taking Away the Lens

Posted on by Editor

Before she won NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest, Gaelynn Lea was a member of the music community in northern Minnesota, where she had been playing and performing for most of her life. She never thought of her music or her songwriting as an activist statement; she simply focused on her haunting fiddle — deftly and creatively orchestrating ethereal playback with a loop pedal — and her timeless voice, using her lyrics to shape the amorphous tracks she had created. The stark, raw duet of strings and vocal hearkens back to folk and vernacular sounds from the hollers of Appalachia and the hills of Ireland and Scotland. But, as her style evolved, she realized it was something distinct and new.

Her unexpected sonic aesthetic wasn’t all that surprised the viewers of her Tiny Desk Concert, though. Lea has a congenital disability called Osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease. She uses a wheelchair and holds the violin vertically like a cello, while operating her loop station with her foot. In a split second, as the Tiny Desk title card faded from the video, revealing the the artist who was creating those mystic-sounding bow strokes, one by one, the presuppositions of 1.5 million people were shattered.

What does a musician look like? What do they sound like? How does someone’s identity or background impact their art? Most of the time, our automatic, subconscious answers to these questions go unchallenged, existing happily corroborated by the largely homogenous media that we incessantly consume. It takes someone like Lea to remind us that we are taking the identities of creators for granted and, in doing so, we are further marginalizing artists who exist on the fringes of our communities, artistic and otherwise.

Now on the cusp of releasing her third album, Lea has embraced the positive aspects of those shattered expectations, using her visibility to champion disability rights and causes. But she refuses to be taken for a novelty or utilized as a token. Like any of us, she does not reduce her entire perspective to one facet of her identity. And, like all musicians, at the end of the day, she wants it to just be about the music.

I wonder what it’s like making and performing music that’s constantly shocking people out of their preconceived notions?

It happens on two levels. Obviously, part of the reason is that it isn’t that common to see someone with a disability playing the way I play the violin. My goal is to keep doing it so that it’s not something that’s so uncommon. In terms of the actual music I play, what I really like is a lot of people come to the show and don’t really get it. Unless they really understand looping — it’s done pretty subtle-y — they just have to suspend disbelief and listen, since they don’t really know how it’s happening. It’s kind of a fun experiment. I guess I like to try a sneak attack, in terms of the layers. I don’t want it to be super obvious when [the loops] come in and out. So yeah, it’s kind of two-fold.

Were there specific artists that gave you the idea to loop with a fiddle?

In some ways, yes. I think what was exciting for me and maybe why I don’t have a great answer for that question is that, when I realized you could loop fiddle music and make it sound orchestral, I was like, “I don’t think I’ve seen that before.” It probably exists, I’m sure that it does, but I, personally, didn’t know if I had ever heard it. When I started writing my own songs and trying to find ways to loop them, that was kind of out of necessity, because I don’t play guitar.

Every time I write a song, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to loop it or not. I just have to figure it out later. I write it first, then I’m like, “Okay. Is there a way to do this with a few chords and ambient loops.” What’s nice about this new album [with a full band] is that some of the songs, I can’t loop, but I don’t have to play them by myself. It’s neat to have a full band and to be able to explore new sounds. Definitely, at the beginning, the way I laid down the layers had to do with necessity.

One of my common questions for this column is about how and why each interviewee’s identity filters into their art, but people of color, or people with disabilities, or queer people — anyone who visibly doesn’t fit into any given societal norm — don’t really have the privilege of choosing how much or how little of themselves comes across in their music. Just being themselves is a political act. Do you feel that, as a performer?

I do, and it’s something I’m still figuring out. I’ve been playing for 24 years and I’ve been performing for 10. But, before I won the Tiny Desk Contest, I was just performing in my local community, so it didn’t really feel like that was a statement, because everybody knew me. When the Tiny Desk happened, all of a sudden I was like, “Holy cow. This is something that people are going to associate with me.” So I decided to try to figure out a way to balance it for myself. I definitely want to talk about disability rights issues — for the new album, I even wrote a song about the disability rights movement. Usually I don’t write explicitly about disability, because it’s not what happens, it’s not what comes out. I think the current political situation probably spurred some thoughts on it that needed to come out.

For me, I know that people are going to come in and have their own ideas and, hopefully, view me and my performance in a positive way. In terms of my actual show or the songs I write, I like to be able to choose when I talk about [disability], because I know, no matter what, just standing there is going to make people think. That’s an unavoidable thing and that’s good, I suppose, but I also just want to be seen as a musician, too. I realized I’m in a very privileged position to be able to talk about it, so when I can, when I think it fits, and I think it’s being used for the right reasons, I do like to connect my disability identity to the art and talk about what I think needs to change in our society.

How do you feel about that? I mean, I don’t really talk to anyone else [who faces this]. Do you have an answer on that?

I present very masculine, right up until I open my mouth. The way I talk and my mannerisms are pretty queer-coded, so I always do this cost/benefit analysis — and sometimes it’s subconscious — of how queer I present in any given situation based on how safe I feel in that situation and how vulnerable and how real I can be. You don’t realize you’re carrying that burden around until you’re in a situation where you don’t have it anymore.

Yeah!

When I’m able to sing my queer songs and not not worry about it, I realize that that is how it feels for every privileged person who gets up on stage and can just live their truth without actively thinking about it. I try to take that approach myself, but it’s so hard. And it’s so exhausting.

That’s the interesting thing because, listening to what you’re saying, I think we come from slightly different spots. I don’t feel unsafe, but I do feel that my story isn’t safe. There are some people who are more in line with me, who think [disability] is a natural part of the human experience. All of us are going to be disabled, at some point, if we live long enough. It’s not the biggest deal. Then there’s the other end of the spectrum where they’re like, “I don’t even know how I could live if I had a disability!” And, “I feel so bad for that person. What do I have to complain about? They have a disability and I don’t. I’m a whiner.”

Especially in interviews, I can’t force people to interpret this in a certain way. If I had a magic wand, I wouldn’t want people sitting there thinking, “Oh, man, I can’t believe someone with a disability can do this!” Because that doesn’t factor into my playing that much. I learned [to play] that way a long time ago. The whole “inspirational” idea, or pity, or whatever lens they’re viewing it from, I wish I could take that lens away.

It’s not like I wouldn’t want to talk about activism because, to me, we are so far behind. I don’t know how you feel about gay rights. I’m assuming you feel similarly.

Oh, yes.

There’s so much work to do, it would be silly for me not to talk about it. The one thing I do get weary of is realizing halfway through that someone is viewing me with a lens of pity rather than as a musician. That’s unfortunate because I’ll be thinking we’re having a regular conversation and then I read an article later and it’s like, “She didn’t think she’d be able to do anything with her life until she found music.” And I’m like, “Oh, my God. That is not what I said!”

That’s so shitty!

It’s really shitty! That happens a lot, too. That’s the kind of thing that bothers me. I try to give people, especially random people, the benefit of the doubt. What bothers me about journalism is that, obviously, they think about what they’re about to write beforehand. It’s just sad that there’s not more education on disability. You would never write a story like that, if you even had a day’s worth of education on the appropriate ways to talk about it.

It’s kind of a final frontier of intersectionality in this inclusion movement coming through the bluegrass, folk, and Americana scenes. People with disabilities are largely forgotten in that picture.

I know. Yep.

It’s everywhere. If you go down a list of showcase venues at a conference, how many are ADA compliant? Maybe one. Or festivals are often not ADA compliant. Promoters, festivals, venues, artists, conventions … it seems like every wing of the industry overlooks the importance of representation of people with disabilities.

I think there are two problems. One of them is definitely lack of awareness. I was on a panel with some festival organizers talking about accessibility once, and I was saying, “We need to represent artists with disabilities on festival lineups. I want to be able to see people with disabilities on the bill.” They were like, “Of course, we wouldn’t reject someone because they have a disability. Of course, we would accommodate them.” I said, “No. You need to seek them out. If someone had an all-male, white lineup, they would be raked over the coals, but nobody even notices if there’s no one with a disability on the lineup.”

Exactly.

I could see the light bulb go off. It was an important moment for me, realizing that they really just don’t know. That’s why I do so much speaking about it, to be honest. If they can’t even hear it, they won’t change. If they don’t know it’s a problem — and I wish they did — someone needs to tell them that it is.

I have such a hard time describing that feeling when you see yourself represented on stage. It’s more common now than it has been, for me, for LGBTQ people, but when you have that feeling, “This person gets it. This person knows what I go through,” it means the world. But most people can’t get out of their own heads to realize this is the key.

Yeah. [It’s the key to] social justice as a whole, actually. When are we going to make changes unless we realize there are people who need change? One thing that’s unique to people with disabilities that might be different for other people, like LGBTQ, is that it costs money, sometimes, to fix the things that are wrong. That is a frustrating thing.

There are creative ways that it wouldn’t cost money that people aren’t talking about. Obviously, it would cost a lot of money to build an elevator or to build a ramp. This happens a lot at small venues. Usually bigger venues can find ways to accommodate me, but the small ones are like, “Man, I wish we had enough money to build a ramp.” For a small room, with a 50-person capacity, why not just take the stage down? Is it really that big of a deal for performers to be four inches off the ground?

If you can’t afford to be accessible, you got to find a way to do it for free. It’s not like there’s suddenly no responsibility to modify at all. People aren’t thinking outside the box enough. Maybe, if you want to host a show, but your venue isn’t accessible, partner with a venue that is accessible and do it together. There have to be better answers than what we’re seeing most of the time.

So before we close, I want to ask you about looking ahead — what are you excited for in 2018?

I’m excited because I’ve been writing more than I have been in the past and playing with this [upcoming record’s] band. I’m really excited for people to hear them. I have a lot of respect for everyone I’m playing with on this project. We’re all from Minnesota, and a couple of them grew up in the same town as me. It’s a lot of fun for me. I love looping and, obviously, I’m going to continue performing that way, but it’s also fun to have this other branch where I don’t have to think about the loops. I can just sing and be really present with the music.

I’m really excited for the disability rights song, I recently played in San Francisco, and a ton of people from the disability community came out. It was kind of the first time a show like that had happened. I got to sing that song for people, and it was exactly what you’re saying, seeing someone on stage that gets you. It was neat to connect with the audience in a way that wouldn’t happen if they were able-bodied. I’m excited to release that and hopefully keep connecting with other artists and activists. It’s going to be fun to see where this new album goes.