Tag: shout & shine

Crys Matthews: Driving Out Hate with Love

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After she describes her multi-faceted identity, Americana and country soul singer/songwriter Crys Matthews laughs with a slight trace of self-deprecation, “I’m the poster child for intersectionality, right?!” She is.

While each and every day, on each and every media platform, we’re reminded of the division, alienation, marginalization, and divisiveness rampant in our country (and our world), we’re not often enough met with people like Matthews who exist as reminders of what beauty can occur when we bridge those divides.

A native of the South and the daughter of a preacher, this Americana-creating, Black lesbian — who is in an interracial marriage — understands and appreciates the myriad ways her background informs her ability to help others empathize with those with whom they might assume they have nothing in common. With her recent full-length album, The Imagineers, and her compassionate, politically charged EP, she is recruiting an “Army of Lovers,” despite all of the divides — real or perceived — that come between us, driving out hate not with hate, but with love.

Country or Americana or roots music fans might not expect someone described like you to fit into this music. How did you come into roots music? What’s your background in it?

I was born and raised in North Carolina — I live in Virginia now — and I went to college at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, which is a bluegrass Mecca. I never set out to really create [within] any specific genre of music or anything like that. My songwriting process, it’s very organic. The songs just come out how they come out. Living in Boone all that time, I just fell in love with the Blue Ridge and with all of that. I guess osmosis is what you would say — it just fused its way into my music and into my songwriting style. It seems like every year it just gets country-er and country-er, which is hilarious to me. [Laughs] Listening back through the newest album I was like, “Oh, my God, my grandpa would be so proud!”

Did your grandpa get you into country music?

Oh yeah, we’re so Southern. Like I said, born and raised in North Carolina, but in the southeastern part of North Carolina. It is so country over there. [Laughs] I grew up watching The Dukes of Hazzard and other stuff that you wouldn’t necessarily expect. I guess it feels foreign to people when they think about, okay, “A Black lesbian isn’t going to be watching Dukes of Hazzard with her grandpa.” But, if you grew up in southeastern North Carolina, I’m pretty sure almost everyone watched The Dukes of Hazzard no matter what, no matter who you were. I’ve never lived my life trying to fit into any specific thing. I just am who I am, and the things that I’m into are just the things I’m into. The things I think about, think are beautiful, and love in the world center so heavily around my home state.

The title track of your EP, Battle Hymn for an Army of Lovers, is an upbeat, hopeful number. It’s looking to the future and outward-facing, but it’s also very realistic and grounded. It’s not denying the realities of this moment in time. Why did you strike that balance?

I always try to be like that in life. I feel like every big moment that has ever happened in this country has happened, at the root of it, because of love. And because of somebody loving somebody else and/or not being okay with the person that they love not having fair treatment, in some regard.

My worldview is that love is always the thing that moves us forward. It always is and it probably always will be. It’s super important to me. As frustrating and hard as this moment is for me, obviously, as a triple-minority, it is terrifying for me living in this time, I trust and believe so deeply that love will move us forward. It was very important for me to use that song and use that message for rallying the army of lovers, mobilizing the army of lovers, and believing wholeheartedly in trying to live that notion of Dr. King’s, that hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

I appreciate in your music that you’re including specific calls to action. In your song “Paris Is Burning,” you sing, “Dark days call for more than profile picture overlays,” and that line resonates so much with me because we’re in a time when just showing up doesn’t really count for much anymore. You aren’t letting listeners and fans feel like just putting on your EP is taking action.

Again, growing up in the South, the history of activism, what it means, and how important it is is not lost on me. Being a singer/songwriter, having a platform, and with people actually listening to what I have to say, it would be so hypocritical to not use that platform, in some regard, to actually have a call to action, to let people know what’s happening in the world beyond their possibly limited view, let them know things that they can do to help. And people who aren’t them, who may not have whatever privilege they may have, need them to help. It was super important to have the mindset of the soundtrack of the resistance.

I went into it hoping that it would come out in a way that would motivate people, and inspire people, and make them do something. It’s so hard feeling so powerless, and I think so many of us are so frustrated right now, because we feel powerless, but we’re not. It’s important to remember that. I hope that these songs remind people that there are things that we can do. We cannot be complacent. We have to act.

As a triple-minority, like you said before, you don’t exactly have the luxury or privilege of choosing how much or how little of your identity is visible through your art, but I wonder if you think about how much you present in your songs, or if you just let that happen organically, as well?

It depends on certain songs. I have this song from my album, Come What May, called “You Remind Me,” that [was inspired by] the Lovings of Virginia [of the U.S. Supreme Court case on interracial marriage, Loving v. Virginia] and Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer [of the case United States v. Windsor on same-sex marriage]. It’s about how we keep having to learn the same lesson in this country about love, and how we can’t seem to let people love who they want to love. It’s a parallel of those two things and, of course, my wife and I decided we wanted to piss everybody off and be an interracial, lesbian couple. [Laughs]

The love songs, for me, I feel like those things are just so universal. Only people who don’t realize how universal they are think that they’re different and weird. People are like, “Oh my God! Gay marriage!” And I think, “If you could just see us sitting on the couch with our cats and dogs and bunny, being like, ‘Are we going to watch TV? What are we doing?’” It’s so boring! [Laughs] It’s just what everyone else is doing on their couch at the end of a work day. It’s crazy that we even have any kind of distinction between the two, because it is literally so boring.

Me, personally, I’ve been married for four years. In general, we’re just as mundane as every other person who’s been married for four years. In the love songs, I don’t try to make an effort to make them any more “normal” or any more heteronormative. That’s just the reality of it. I think that people would be better served to actually realize and know that. It’s always fun for me, when I write a song that’s about my life, and somebody’s like, “I feel the exact same way about my husband!” or “I feel the exact same way about my wife!” Because inside I’m like, “Yes. That’s the point.”

That’s what it means to be human.

Exactly. The best line I think Jason Mraz ever wrote was in regard to humanity. He says, “Our name is our virtue.” That’s so much it. If we could just be more human, that’s all we ever need to do.

How do you think we can bridge the gap that divides all of us right now? Do you think it’s just playing these songs and letting it filter in for people?

I do. I really do. The hard thing for us to do is engage one another. It’s a scary thing — rejection is a scary thing, being the butt of somebody’s anger is a very scary thing — but we have to engage each other. I sing the songs that are a little more difficult in places where it’s not necessarily the most advisable thing for me to do. Ultimately, if I don’t make those people think, if I can’t make them feel something or think something, they’re not going to do it on their own, because they’re only going to be hanging out with the same type of people. I feel like we have a responsibility to put ourselves in those uncomfortable situations for the good of the whole. We have to do it.

It’s very difficult traversing this world with a limited worldview. It’s so easy, for so many of us, to just be comfortable. If you’re a 30-year-old white guy, with all of your 30-year-old white guy friends, it’s not that you’re a bad person; it’s not that you don’t care about anyone else’s issues or their daily life. It’s just not your reality because it’s not something you see every day. Worldviews are so different. Simple things can help people think, but it’s so much easier to be comfortable. Whereas, with me, I don’t really have a choice. I’m always in various multi-cultural situations. If more of us did that, it would just be second nature to realize what somebody else’s walk through life looks like because you aren’t just having to imagine it; you’re literally standing there watching it.

Photo credit: Sarah Stuart

Hardened & Tempered: From the Inside Out

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Shout & Shine conversations revolve around expectations: expectations about roots music and its constituent genres and to whom they belong; expectations about what artists and fans want and need; expectations about representation, visibility, community, tradition, history, politics, and so on.

One of the aspects of these interviews that is most compelling is how, even among just the artists of marginalized and underrepresented identities, a relatively small group of people in roots music, the variety of expectations — and perspectives and approaches — is astounding. Each interview has the potential to remind us that we all bring our own presuppositions, biases, and expectations into every conversation we have, even when we are doing our best to be cognizant of them.

Kristin Davidson and Carolyn Phillips, the folk/country duo Hardened & Tempered, most certainly illuminated the baggage of expectations brought to the table, but it also put a spotlight on how all human beings would benefit from stopping to appraise our assumptions from time to time. We could all stand to loosen our grips on our beliefs and dogmas, on the stereotypes we feel are valid, on the narratives we cling to — whether consciously or subconsciously. After all, the strongest steel isn’t rigid, unwavering, and hard. It’s flexible, it’s malleable, it’s giving. That kind of softness makes it stronger. It can make us stronger, too.

Your name, itself — Hardened & Tempered — and the first line of your bio, “Hard enough to hold an edge, soft enough not to break,” sounds like the LGBTQ+ experience distilled. How much of your identities went into the name?

Kristin Davidson: There are a couple of different meanings that went into the name. One is, quite literally, the reference to steel. Because I play the pedal steel, one of my favorite pastimes has been rebuilding old motorcycles, and I also know how to weld. So there’s literally a steel reference in that. But we also liked it as …

Carolyn Phillips: … a metaphor.

KD: Yeah, a kind of metaphor for the balance that we always try to aspire to. We’re both pretty intense individuals, and we do intense things, but certainly, learning how to soften up over the years has taught us to be a little stronger, too.

CP: We were actually talking to one of our close friends in Sante Fe, as we were trying to figure out our name, and he mentioned how he thought of us in this way (hardened and tempered) as individuals, but also as a couple. “Soft,” tempered steel is actually stronger than the hard stuff. That softness makes us stronger. I think that it’s a life lesson from growing up, in general. I think, in every aspect of my life, that rigidity hasn’t been a strong point. When I can meet others with kindness, I actually get that back.

What did your individual journeys to roots music look like?

KD: My deep dive into music, especially lyrically based music, started as far back as I can remember. As I grew up playing the guitar, I always had guitar teachers pointing me in the direction of blues. I definitely gravitated towards folk as a genre. I probably became most aware of it in my early 20s. Lucinda Williams was a culmination of that journey — she was a gateway for me, in a lot of ways. That sophisticated simplicity in her writing, with the blues and the roots influences, led me to explore the different sub-genres that supported her in a more detailed way.

CP: I was more of a late bloomer to all of it. I grew up in a small town in rural Nebraska and graduated with a class of 19 people. My music exposure at that time was pretty limited. I didn’t start getting into roots music until I met Kristin, which was in my 20s, as well.

The first song on your album, The Trailer Sessions, is “My Wildest Ride” and, in the first verse, we hear a woman singing female pronouns, “… The prettiest girl I’d seen.” What’s the story behind that?

KD: I like to step into the shoes of whoever the character is, regardless of gender. “My Wildest Ride” is a song I wrote for a friend and his wife, so they’re actually male and female characters in the song, because I wanted to write a song that honored them. What I think is fun is my voice giving voice to both characters.

In my experience in bluegrass, women will sing classic songs without changing the pronouns, and no one bats an eye at it. But if a man happens to sing a song from a female perspective, they’re almost always changing the pronouns. I like that you’re keeping the song central there.

KD: That’s one of my pet peeves! When I hear a male song covered by a female artist, it always irritates me if she were to change the pronouns. Occasionally, you run across artists who don’t. There’s something more magical that happens when the pronouns don’t change. I don’t know — it’s more fun and it’s transcendent, in a way.

Do you feel like queerness makes you more likely to appreciate that or to do that in your own music?

CP: I think so.

KD: Yeah, sure!

CP: We never want to be boxed into anything. That’s how we both live our lives. We just let “us” be who we are. Because we’ve had to explore that all of our lives, we’ve gained this freedom to live this way.

So the songs on your record range from being total story songs to totally personal.

KD: Oh, definitely. The first song, like we said, is about friends of ours. But then, going into track two, with “Heartbreak Transit Line,” that is a character and a set of circumstances I imagined, versus “Centerville,” which is very much written from my experience. I think, even when I have a movie-like image that develops in my brain, when I’m invested in developing a certain character, I always ask myself, “What about this character is something that I can relate to personally?” That’s a great exercise, because usually I create these characters in circumstances that I have not lived myself. I guess it’s an exercise in empathy.

Where does “Family Secrets” fall on the story song to personal song scale? I hear that line in there, “I can’t fall in love without reminding you of your regrets.” It makes me think of my family — and the families of so many LGBTQ+ people out there — who will never be fully supportive of queer love and the happiness we gain from it.

CP: [Laughs] That’s a loaded question!

KD: [Laughs]

CP: This came from, quite literally, a family secret that we’re not sure we should tell, because it involves a still-living family member. [Laughs]

KD: But yes, you’re absolutely right. Those couple of lines and down through the hook, “You can’t deny what you won’t confess about the family secrets …”

See, that sounds like the closet to me.

KD: And part of it is. That factored into it. But I had been reading a lot about epigenetics and considering my own family secrets. My mom found this old newspaper article about some great-great-great grandfather of ours that committed a triple murder/suicide type of situation, and it made national news in like, 1906. You could probably mine I don’t know how many country songs from it. That was one of the things that I grew up knowing, because my dad didn’t consider it something to keep secret from me, but then I’m not sure my cousins knew.

Then, of course, our own experiences falling in love factored in — that’s an intense enough thing on its own, to be falling in love without adding in the external dynamics and reactions. You don’t always know where that external influence is coming from or why. It could have something totally different driving it. Like a family secret. There was a whole bunch of information bouncing around in my head [while writing “Family Secrets”]. But I have to say, that chorus was one of those things that just popped out, and I’m not sure how.

I think the important thing here is representation. LGBTQ+ people who listen to your music see themselves reflected in it — where they don’t normally see themselves in Americana or country at all. For instance, I keep finding these bits and pieces of your songs that I can relate to as a gay man, that may or may not be coming from a LGBTQ+ starting point at all, but your visibility allows listeners to connect those dots, if they so wish. Do you consider that while you write and perform?

KD: I don’t think I think about it overtly, but I take what you just said as a tremendously high compliment. It’s such an inside-out process, to start with the seed of creation and then watch it launch into something that can exist on its own. When I first started writing, I didn’t sing, so I was used to writing words that were brought to life by someone else’s voice. I’m more grounded with the songs now, but it’s still such an inside-out experience for me. I just hope people listen and like the songs. I’m always so complimented by the fact that people relate to them.

What is the dynamic in Austin, Texas, and in the music scene and in your communities? How does it feel playing regionally, going from the progressive echelon of Austin to the deep red areas surrounding it?

KD: We haven’t been in Austin that long, so it’s hard to provide any sort of global context to it, but Austin has been very good to us. I’d say it’s a very relaxed and open community.

CP: It feels pretty fluid to me. That’s been our experience even on tour.

KD: In, like, rural Nebraska.

CP. Yeah. Again, I take it back to, you know, how I have survived in this world is by just being myself and being kind, and that’s usually what I’m met with, fortunately. Being out there, being in different rural communities, playing music, and being gay gives [our audiences] exposure to different types of people that they maybe otherwise wouldn’t have had. I hope by us being out there, being who we are, and being good people, we can continue to help represent and show who our community is. There are fewer barriers in place than we hear about sometimes.

Never Be Lonesome: The Bluegrass Inclusion Movement Sweeps Raleigh

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Well after midnight on Thursday at World of Bluegrass in Raleigh, North Carolina, Molly Tuttle and her quartet took the stage of the Lincoln Theater for a surprise show. The room quivered with anticipation because, a few hours before, Tuttle had been named the IBMA Guitar Player of the Year — the first woman to ever be nominated for the prize.

Women have won in the instrumental categories of banjo, bass, fiddle, and mandolin (Sierra Hull earned her second trophy on the same September night). But lead guitar felt like a bluegrass Rubicon. Weighing against Tuttle, and fellow feminine flatpickers like Courtney Hartman and Rebecca Frazier, are decades of societal coding of guitar in rock ‘n’ roll as a phallic proxy for masculine sexuality. But even beyond that, the bluegrass world, as good as it’s been cultivating its youth, has strongly suggested that girls coming of age should play rhythm and sing. Playing machine gun solos a la Tony Rice or daredevil cross-picking like David Grier seemed anathema for way too long. Where there reasons for this? Anything physical, emotional, or intellectual? Uh, no.

Tuttle’s win coincided with a few other signifiers of progress in the long slog toward full inclusion for women in the music. Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard were inducted last week (belatedly) into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame. A smart display in the foyer of the Raleigh Convention Center depicted the history of women in bluegrass, from Sally Ann Forrester to Alison Krauss and the abundant riches of today’s scene.

Feminism was bluegrass music’s first go at civil rights and inclusion, and it took a long, grinding time to arrive at something resembling parity in the modern world. As Murphy Hicks Henry points out in her 2013 book, Pretty Good for a Girl: Women In Bluegrass, one early scholarly work on the genre literally defined the bluegrass band as “four to seven male musicians (Henry’s emphasis) who play non-electrified stringed instruments.” And that was after Bessie Lee Mauldin played bass for Bill Monroe for eight years. Henry’s definitive history set out, she wrote, “to lay that tired myth of bluegrass being ‘man’s music’ to rest. Bluegrass was and is no more ‘man’s music’ than country music was ‘man’s music,’ than jazz was ‘man’s music,’ than this globe is a ‘man’s world.’”

Carry that to its logical and uproariously banal conclusion, and one might dare to propose that bluegrass is everybody’s music. And, in fact, that premise is being put to the test nationally, including in the hothouse environment of IBMA. The most pressing issue and exciting conversations at World of Bluegrass 2017 were about inclusion and diversity in a genre that has, for decades, presented an almost uniformly white, straight, Christian face to the world. Ain’t nothing wrong with any of those things. I’m two of them and love many who are all three. But that is clearly not everybody, and it would be cool if LGBTQ+ people and people of color could, you know, skip ahead to the good part without the decades of hand-wringing and foot dragging that women endured. Hazel & Alice didn’t go the distance for themselves alone or for women alone, after all. They bid the stranger, per the Carter Family, to “put your lovin’ hand in mine.” They sang for the marginalized, all of them.

Alice Gerrard, flanked by Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer, at Shout & Shine

Over the past 12 months, the inclusion movement has been on a forward roll. The most talked about event at the 2016 IBMA convention was the semi-sanctioned, upstart Shout & Shine diversity showcase, with musicians who were Black, brown, and queer throwing down on banjos and fiddles. If any one thing put a new face on bluegrass music in modern times, it was this. Organizer Justin Hiltner (the BGS’s social media director) stepped up in a leadership role, not only by example as an openly gay banjo-playing dude from Nashville, but by challenging the IBMA institutionally and professionally to be explicitly and publicly inclusive, or risk leaving new generations of potential members uninterested.

Minor controversy broke out last spring when members of the California Bluegrass Association sponsored a float in the June San Francisco Pride Parade. A thread on the association’s forum is full of respectful conversation and overwhelming support for putting a float with a live bluegrass band in one of the Bay Area’s biggest public gatherings. While there seem to be no reports of outright hostile homophobia, a minority of the membership took the more oblique path of objecting to their music and association being tied to “religion and politics.” One fellow wrote, “I see the gay pride parade as a promotional event for the gay lifestyle and the in-your-face display of that lifestyle.”

The CBA contingent went ahead, of course, and besides having a triumphant day, the float went on to win the SF Pride Best of the Best Overall Award, the highest honor for Pride participants. In the end, a small handful of people resigned from the CBA, but even more appear to have joined. And Bluegrass Pride’s rainbow forward t-shirts and buttons became the hot thing to wear at Raleigh’s World of Bluegrass.

Likewise, this year’s second Shout & Shine concert was a hit, with performers that included the African-American string band the Ebony Hillbillies and openly gay Kentucky folk singer Sam Gleaves, plus his mentors, married folk duo Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer. Gleaves told me he found the event “heartening and really fabulous,” but this most humble gentleman tends to emphasize the aspirations of others more than his own identity, be it a more prominent place for people of color or old-time folk music itself.

Melody Walker, whose band Front Country led the show-closing super jam, said that the “Shout and Shine showcase was the most diverse stage and audience I’ve ever seen at IBMA. It was really beautiful and it kind of feels like a window into the future of what IBMA could be, if we express love and openness to the world and let people know that it’s safe to fall in love with bluegrass and they have a place here.”

Justin Hiltner and Sam Gleaves join Front Country for the Shout & Shine super jam

I kept looking for somebody to break out in hives. Because, seriously, people in bluegrass will do that over the wrong kind of banjo tone ring. But even amid the hustle and bustle of the convention center and town hall meeting, I heard not a discouraging word. Somehow, with a mixture of diplomacy, facts, humanity, and appropriate assertiveness, the Bluegrass Pride movement made its impression and the ecosystem took it in stride.

Likewise, for the Thursday afternoon keynote address by Rhiannon Giddens, founding former member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops and the 2016 winner of the Steve Martin Banjo Prize. IBMA officials who conceived of and worked on the invitation described some board members as wary, for reasons that are hard to discern. Nobody went public. Nobody’s come up to me and said, “What’s she doing here?” But was IBMA truly ready for an authoritative African-American figure with a major label deal, an acting role on CMT, and other high-profile platforms to come to their stage and talk candidly about bluegrass and race?

Apparently so. Reaction to the Tuesday afternoon speech was, spitballing here, 90 percent rapture and 8 percent relief. (I’ll assume 2 percent unspoken upset or non-attendance.) Sounding for all the world like Barack Obama, with her biracial family story and her sense of only-in-America (for good and otherwise), she spoke of bluegrass music as honestly and completely as I’ve heard it told. I expect that fans, musicians, and scholars will replay and review its layers for years to come because it was dense with truth and a powerful revision of our standard origin story. She offered her own account of growing up in and near Greensboro, North Carolina with a white uncle who played bluegrass and a Black grandmother who simply adored Hee Haw. Her carefully documented recounting of Black string bands and the appropriation of the banjo were full of similar counter-intuitive revelations.

“In order to understand the history of the banjo and the history of bluegrass,” she said, “we need to move beyond the narratives we’ve inherited, beyond generalizations that ‘bluegrass is mostly derived from a Scots-Irish tradition with influences from Africa.’ It is, actually, a complex Creole music that comes from multiple cultures, African and European and Native — the full truth that is so much more interesting and truly American.”

This was the wind-up to the line that’s been most widely quoted, the thesis sentence, if you will: “Are we going to acknowledge the question is not ‘How do we get diversity into bluegrass?’ but ‘How do we get diversity back into bluegrass?’” This line resulted in one of a half-dozen of rounds of mid-speech applause that led to the ultimate standing ovation.

Member of Bluegrass 45 lead the Japanese Jam

For years, my joke about bluegrass is that it’s very diverse. It attracts all kinds of white people. The serious sentiment behind that veil is is my early and ongoing impression that, besides being an exciting and powerful musical form with an American heartbeat, bluegrass attracts what pundit and podcaster Ana Marie Cox calls an “uneasy coalition.” Bluegrass festivals are one of the rare places I’ve seen rural Red Staters and urbane Blue Staters enjoying life and mingling together. The scene is somewhat like Willie Nelson’s ecumenical shows of the 1970s, with Christians and hippies and farmers and nerds. This variety show can also be found in sports, but frankly at NBA or NFL or MLB contests, you can easily arrive, cheer, and leave without engaging with anybody not of your tribe. In the musically charged environment of bluegrass, that’s far less likely. We go to church apart. We vote apart. But we all love Flatt & Scruggs and Sam Bush.

This is more than merely cool. It’s important. Immediately outside IBMA’s confines, as all this was going on, in real time, President Trump was fanning flames of anger over peaceful, protected protest of police brutality. Issues of LGBTQ+ inclusion regularly produce cascades of vitriol and culture war, where all that was hoped for was the same thing artists hope for on stage — listening — and maybe some empathy and vulnerability for good measure.

Shout & Shine takes its name from a Christian hymn written in the 1950s that’s been covered by gospel groups and bluegrass bands. The first verse is heavy-handed with its promise of being issued a robe and crown upon entry into paradise. But the second and final verse has a nicer prophesy for the musically minded:

I’ll never be lonesome in that city so fair

And all will be so divine.

Many of my loved ones and neighbors will be there.

In heaven, we’ll shout and shine.

We want people to sing about being lonesome in bluegrass. But actually being lonesome? Not so much.

Photo credit: Willa Stein. Lede image: The Ebony Hillbillies headline Shout & Shine.

Craig Havighurst is music news director and host of The String at WMOT Roots Radio in Nashville. Follow him on Twitter @chavighurst
 

The Ebony Hillbillies: Becoming a Part of the Music

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For most listeners of bluegrass, the history of the music begins (and often ends) in December of 1945, when Bill Monroe brought his Blue Grass Boys — Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt, included — on stage at the Grand Ole Opry. Bluegrass was created by the men on that historic stage, straight from their brains through their fingertips. Right?

For roots musicians whose identities don’t fit the proverbial mold, this telling of history is not nearly so convenient. Henrique Prince and Gloria Thomas Gassaway, of the New York-based Black string band the Ebony Hillbillies, tell a much different story. When the Hillbillies headline our Shout & Shine showcase at the International Bluegrass Music Association’s World of Bluegrass conference, there will almost undoubtedly be attendees questioning the band’s place beneath the umbrella of “bluegrass.” But omitting or excluding any pieces of the music — and its history — deprives us all of some of its best parts … like the music, tradition, and dances of the Ebony Hillbillies.

How did roots music and string band music come into your lives?

Gloria Thomas Gassaway: I grew up with parents from the South who played this music and knew the history and roots of it. My dad played banjo and he knew all this music; he knew where it came from and how it evolved. I did move into other music genres, but I always had those roots from South Carolina.

Henrique Prince: My parents were Caribbean. My father’s parents were a bunch of musicians. They had bands and they played old folk music from their culture. I wanted to learn how to play violin pretty young, but nobody could afford lessons and nobody knew what to do. I was really precocious about it. Little folk tunes were what I could do and play. I started to learn everything I could about that music. That’s how I sort of learned to play — learning those old folk melodies. I learned a lot of the history. I tried to find out everything I could. There’s a whole connection to Caribbean music, as well, in the mainstream of American folk music.

Why do you think a bluegrass fan or roots music fan might look at the Ebony Hillbillies and think that you’re a novelty or that you don’t have equal claim to string band music as a traditional, Appalachian bluegrass band does?

HP: It’s because people have been fed a convenient story that makes it seem like it’s all about themselves. The history is told so people won’t have a lot of strange feelings about the past. The truth is that the banjo is an instrument that is generations removed from the original instruments that came out of Africa. The most likely history of the word “fiddle” is an erosion of a Latin word for “string,” which came about because the Romans got bowed stringed instruments out of Ethiopia 2,000 years ago. All of this stuff, this music, has been in the Black community, in the Moor and Arab community, since the 11th century. This stuff goes back, back, back, back beyond Appalachia. But it’s never been convenient here in America, for various reasons, to explain all of that.

The interesting thing for us, when we play for our own audiences, Black people are delighted that there’s a Black band that plays this because, some of this music, they’ve actually liked, but they’ve never been able to be involved in these kind of things. We’ve done these big dances, big hoedowns in Harlem where our arms want to fall off playing a reel long enough that all of the dancers can go through the arches and do all the steps, because there are so many people involved. They’re having so much fun.

If you want to teach the story so it only involves one group of people, then you’re going to leave out most of the history. If you tell more or less the truth, then the story might become more complicated or have more parts — some of which may even be uncomfortable — but it will be a much more interesting story.

GTG: And it is much more interesting. I come from a long line of musicians in my family out of South Carolina. I’ve been able to go back through the history of my dad’s family — my family is native — to trace the interaction of (my ancestors) playing this music all the way back to the 1800s. They taught people how to play the instruments and this music.

It seems like the Ebony Hillbillies found each other pretty serendipitously. How did you all come together to form the band?

HP: That would take a couple of beers! [Laughs] It all started with an idea of specializing in dance music, because I really liked the idea of the violin as a dance instrument. I thought it’s the greatest dance instrument in the world, outside of the drum. I tried to learn all different kinds of dance music to play and then began doing it as a duo with different bass players. Then, when I finally found a banjo player, it was the real deal. Banjos and bowed stringed instruments go way back. This is African. This goes back to some place in the 12th century. People would hear the music, I’d explain to them the history, and musicians would respond by coming on board. Then, suddenly, we were a band. That’s basically — to make a long story short — how it happened.

What does it mean to you to be coming back to IBMA’s World of Bluegrass conference and festival this year with the whole band, representing Black string band music at Shout & Shine: A Celebration of Diversity in Bluegrass?

HP: That’s a wonderful thing, a very wonderful thing. Sometimes you’d wish that musicians’ welcome would be more like a welcome back because, in a sense, we’re bringing back something that really hasn’t been associated on this level since the 1920s, very early on in the music, even before the recording industry started. We just hope to bring what we do, which is hopefully a joyful sound, and relate it to what other people do so they can understand it. We play the same instruments and even play some of the same songs. We play for audiences that usually never get a chance to enjoy this music with people they can connect with emotionally or culturally. So it’s interesting to be with people of different cultures because, again, the connection will be the music. We all know this music. It will be a lot of fun.

GTG: And, a lots of times, people don’t realize that they can actually get up and really dance to this music!

HP: That’s true. In so many experiences we’ve had playing nationally and outside of New York, one of the things we’ve noticed is that a lot of bluegrass audiences tend to be sit-down audiences. I don’t know how much that’s changed in the time since we started doing this. We’ve been in situations where people who never get up got up for our band and danced. Which is okay with us, because we just love to get people dancing!

Why is it that you actively, overtly work to spread dance with your music?

HP: This is one of the celebrations of diversity that you’re going to have (at Shout & Shine.) Black music has very much to do with dance.

GTG: They go hand-in-hand.

HP: It’s like a form of communication. It’s a cultural form of language. It’s always been part and parcel of the music. Movement and physical participation with the music means you dance. Slaves, displaced Africans here in America, working for this economy, they developed this music in order to give them relief from the incredible hard work and the psychologically demeaning situation they found themselves in. The only things they had were making their banjos, making their fiddles, stomping their feet, and clapping their hands. The power of music was transporting them, making them dance, giving them joy, taking them away. That’s one of the things that’s appealing about this music. It is chock-full of joy, this ancient joy from people that was put in there because it had to be. When someone played the banjo, you just had to move your feet.

That’s the way we play the music. We play the same tunes as anybody else. Ours aren’t any better than anyone else, but we have a certain attitude that makes it affect that part of you that makes you move. You could just sit down and listen, but this music has always been designed to make you react, become a part of it, and enjoy yourself. Part of the way to express and enjoy yourself is to dance and clap your hands.

If you read that poem “The Party,” where [Paul Laurence Dunbar] talks about going to a slaves’ party and, when a fiddler comes in and starts to play, nobody can stand still anymore. That’s talking about a Black fiddler. Dance is the required and sought-for reaction. [Laughs] When that’s missing, something bigger is missing. A downside of reorganizing the history is that you end up leaving some parts out that are really good for you.

I think about the “transportive” quality of this music a lot, and I try to unpack this with people in roots music communities because, to me, being gay, it makes sense that this music — which was designed and created to take people away from the hardship of their lives — would have something to offer all marginalized people, from women to LGBTQ+ individuals to people of color to immigrants and on and on. Do you feel this potential as well?

HP: You definitely hit on something there. The mainstream culture, the narrative that’s spoken, “This is what the history is. It is what we say it is,” is the dominant culture that’s interested in being one certain way. That way excludes people who don’t fit, people who are expected by the mainstream to have certain behaviors. We don’t know which musicians were gay 200 years ago. You don’t know who people were or what they were thinking. Just because you suppress something doesn’t mean it goes away. All the evidence proves it doesn’t. You might have some hero in the past and, if you got in a time machine and found out, you would be shocked. [Laughs] These are ideas that are not only outdated, they are just wrong. You can’t leave out people — we need all hands on deck — because you don’t particularly, supposedly approve of their behavior or something about them. These people are very, very valuable people and have valuable ideas.

We’re trying. It seems like the whole community is trying. We’ve raise a real pimple recently in this whole society that’s about to bust. But it’s always been here. It’s been sitting by, unaddressed, getting bigger and bigger and uglier and uglier for years. Everybody feels like they have to tiptoe around the truth with people, or they threaten death, destruction, and mayhem if you dare say certain things. It’s always been that way, but finally, in the end, the only thing that could save us — the only thing that could organize us enough to save our own lives, our own houses, our own anything — is the truth.

GTG: It’s sad that, in this day and age, people cannot understand that all people are different and just let them be who they are. It’s sad. It sickens me. It sickens me in race, in people’s gender, and who they choose to be and love in their lives. I’m not a young chicky, but years before it became fashionable, someone came to me and asked me if I’d sign a petition for LGBT rights. I was in an upscale area of Queens, New York, and I looked at him and said, “Is water wet? Is James Brown funky? Is King Kong a great big monkey?” [Laughs] I said, “Can I sign more than once?” I was sick and tired because I know how it is to be treated a certain way. I said, “Give me another sheet of paper cause I’m going to take it around and get it signed.”

You guys will be at IBMA for the Shout & Shine showcase, but you’re also playing Bluegrass in the Schools throughout the week, and you’re playing a couple of sets at the Wide Open StreetFest, so what are your hopes for your time in Raleigh?

HP: We hope people will just love it so much they’ll be dancing around and that people like it so much that they won’t want it to stop and the cops will have to come and clear the place. [Laughs] It’s going to be a big ol’ wang-dang-doodle of a time.

GTG: Oh yeah, we’re gonna have a ball. We just hope people enjoy the party.

ANNOUNCING: The Second Annual Shout and Shine: A Celebration of Diversity in Bluegrass

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The Bluegrass Situation and PineCone are excited to announce the second annual Shout & Shine: A Celebration of Diversity in Bluegrass showcase at World of Bluegrass. The event — which was created to foster representation and encourage inclusion of the diverse artists, musicians, and professionals who love and create bluegrass and roots music — will take place at 10 pm on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 at the Pour House in Raleigh, North Carolina, and is a part of IBMA’s official showcase schedule/lineup, the Bluegrass Ramble.

Shout & Shine’s lineup includes the Tyler Williams Band, the Ebony Hillbillies, Sam Gleaves, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, the Otsuka & Watanabe Brothers’ Japanese Jam, and 2017 IBMA Hall of Fame Inductee Alice Gerrard. There will also be a SuperJam hosted by Emerging Artist of the Year nominees Front Country. Each artist was carefully chosen to celebrate and encourage diversity within the bluegrass and roots community. In addition to working toward universal inclusion of LGBTQ+ and POC (people of color), Shout & Shine recognizes the importance of representing people with disabilities and working toward universal access for all people at music events, clubs, and festivals.

The showcase was born in 2016 as a direct response to the North Carolina General Assembly’s controversial “bathroom bill,” HB2. The Bluegrass Situation and PineCone joined forces with the shared belief that celebrating folk music means supporting its rich and varied history. By amplifying diverse and underrepresented voices, we present a reminder that this music belongs to all and that inclusion strengthens our communities, our businesses and organizations, and our art. Multiple advocacy organizations will have representatives present and information available, including Equality NC, Triangle Friends of African-American Arts, and NC Asian Americans Together, who will have voter registration information available (the event falls on National Voter Registration Day).

“We are excited to have the Bluegrass Situation and PineCone producing another great Shout & Shine showcase this year, putting into practice the IBMA’s value statement around diversity and inclusion as a fundamental characteristic of our music community. Bluegrass is for all of us, and we’re stronger together than we could ever hope to be individually,” notes Paul Schiminger, Executive Director of IBMA.

Shout & Shine is made possible through the support of sponsors, which include Raleigh Convention Center, Greater Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau, VAE Raleigh (via the Ignite Fellowship), Larry’s Coffee, Montgomery Violins, and the Press House. For those who cannot attend but would like to be part of the event, the showcase will live stream on the Bluegrass Situation’s Facebook page.