LISTEN: Sam Rae, “Strangest Thing”

Artist: Sam Rae
Hometown: Charleston, South Carolina
Song: “Strangest Thing”
Album: Ten Thousand Years
Release Date: August 7, 2020

In Their Words: “The two words life and death live under the same roof, but if they were a texture or a rhythm they would be much different, both with their own groove. The content of this song sifts through my thoughts on life and death and present thought, which weave in and out of the record. ‘Strangest Thing’ is a gesture, like the tipping of one’s hat, prompting us to pull our eyes and minds out from behind the blindfold and remember what’s important.” — Sam Rae


Photo credit: Sophia Lou

BGS Long Reads of the Week // April 3

We all tell ourselves we want to read more, now is the chance! Our #longreadoftheday series looks back into the BGS archives for some of our favorite reporting, videos, interviews, and more — featured every day throughout the week. You can follow along on social media [on FacebookTwitter, and Instagram] and right here, where we’ll wrap up each week’s stories in one place.

Our long reads this week say goodbye to March and hello to April, they look to the stars and to family members for inspiration, and above all else they spread the joy of music far and wide. Check ’em out:

“The Rainbow Connection” at 40: Paul Williams Reflects on Kermit the Frog’s Banjo Classic

One day we’ll find it, the rainbow connection. It’s a song of dreaming, of looking to the stars at night for guidance and inspiration. To mark the 40th anniversary of this iconic song, we spoke to its songwriter, Paul Williams, for an edition of our column, Roots On Screen. For many viewers, Kermit the Frog would have been their introduction not only to this modern classic, but the banjo, too. [Read about “The Rainbow Connection”]


June Carter Cash Connects the Classic Eras of Country Music

To say goodbye to Women’s History Month we spent a day going back to each of the stories in our Women’s History series, starting with this history of June Carter Cash’s career. Known often as an addendum to others — including her era-defining husband Johnny Cash and her genre-creating family — June was a consummate performer, musician, and something of a comedian herself. [Read the story and watch June perform]


Ranky Tanky Takes Gullah Culture Around the Globe

South Carolina quintet Ranky Tanky won a Grammy Award for their latest album, Good Time, a project that took Gullah music and culture around the world. Not familiar with Gullah? Don’t worry, that’s kind of the point. While many fans of American roots music are familiar with zydeco, Cajun, creole, and other cultures, Gullah remains largely unknown — a music of the African diaspora that’s peppered up and down the coasts and sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia, where it’s known as Geechee culture. [Read more and introduce yourself to Gullah]


Why “Cover Me Up” Is the Truest Love Song Jason Isbell Will Ever Write

Month after month, year after year, this is one of our all-time best-performing stories on BGS. And it’s no wonder; “Cover Me Up” speaks to folks. It’s a wedding song, a break up song, an anniversary song, a first love song. (It’s also not so bad for your isolation playlist, either.) Until more recent Isbell-penned treasures like “If We Were Vampires” came along, it was unparalleled. Even so, it still stands apart. Find out why music fans the world over keep flocking to this particular piece of writing. [Read the feature on BGS]


The Haden Triplets Share Their Musical Legacy in The Family Songbook


Here’s a piece that keeps it all in the family! Calling The Haden Triplets a family band is definitely an understatement. The three sisters channel cross-generational musical inspiration on their most recent album,
The Family Songbook. While they’re looking back, their idea was not to recreate the old days, but to interpret and pay homage. [Read more]


 

Ranky Tanky Takes Gullah Culture Around the Globe

You don’t need to know the first thing about Gullah culture to appreciate Good Time, the second album by the South Carolina quintet Ranky Tanky. But each song provides a short lesson on this little-known corner of American music.

Take “Sometime,” an absolute jam that’s so fast, so breakneck that you have to wonder how the musicians can keep up with it. The rhythm section sets the white-knuckle pace, with drummer Quentin Baxter playing his snare like he’s an entire fife-and-drum band and Kevin Hamilton’s nimble bass adding a percolating low end. Vocalist Quiana Parler instigates a boisterous call and response with her bandmates, hitting high notes like she’s in church. Charlton Singleton’s trumpet snakes fluidly around the other instruments, while Clay Ross interjects a quick guitar solo that sound like New Orleans by way of Mali.

Delirious and joyous, “Sometime” presents all the individual elements of Gullah music, tracing a lineage through the U.S. and back to Africa. Never as popular as zydeco in Louisiana or rural blues in the Delta, it nevertheless has a unique sound, at once fresh and familiar as the instruments interact energetically with each other. Gullah culture developed along the South Carolina coast and on the Sea Islands, extending down into Georgia where it became known as Geechee culture.

It is a culture weighted with history, but perhaps the most remarkable thing about Ranky Tanky is how they work around that history, taking it into account but never letting their music settle into a revivalist vein. Good Time lives up to its title by sounding perfectly present tense. “We have a good time, as a band,” says Quiana Parler. “When I deliver these songs, I’m having so much fun onstage.”

They have taken that joy around the world, too. When they spoke to the Bluegrass Situation, the band was sitting in a hotel lobby in Madrid, where they were enjoying a day off from touring and getting ready to take in the sites of Spain.

BGS: Do audiences respond differently to your music in Europe than they do in America?

Clay Ross: Our experiences at festivals in Europe have probably been among our best gigs ever. The audiences are engaged on a different level. They’re really invested. We’re a band that maybe they’ve never heard of or seen, because in a lot of cases it’s the first time we’re playing that city. But when we do a crowd participation thing in our show, you can see every person engaging with the music, from the front of the stage all the way to the back of the room. It might be 5,000 people, but they’re all right there with you. It’s been a pretty powerful thing. I don’t know if there’s a greater cultural appreciation for music here or perhaps we’re more novel here than we are in our own country.

Quiana Parler: The support at home has been unbelievable, but overseas it’s completely different. They appreciate you differently. We don’t take any of it for granted, though. We’ve played only five or six times at home in the past five or six years because we’ve been so busy. What a blessing.

CR: By far the vast majority of our performances have been in the U.S., so we don’t have as much to compare it to. But the two dozen concerts that we have done over here, every single one of them has been sold out. And every single one of them has been met with an overwhelming response. We try to make our live shows exciting. We’re a touring band, after all. We’re live performers and improvisers, so every concert is a different event.

That seems to make the music very urgent and immediate. The new album doesn’t sound like a revivalist project.

QP: That’s our duty, I like to say. It’s a way of life for us. We went into this with good intentions — to get the message of the Gullah people out there internationally — and I think when you go into a project like this with something positive, you really get what you put into it. When Clay brought the idea for this band to us, we decided that we had to figure out a way to get the message across and have it be relatable. It couldn’t get lost in translation. So we had to remain true to the Gullah culture. We couldn’t sugarcoat anything. We had to make it very authentic.

CR: One thing I think is very special about this band is that we have different perspectives on that culture. Four of the group members are descendants of the culture and have their own unique cultural experiences growing up. I myself grew up around it and consider myself a disciple of the music, but I’m not a Gullah descendant and I’m not integrated into it the same way. I think that process has been special for us, because it allows us to see things in fresh ways and to qualify those ideas against actual experiences. But most of all we just want to make sure we honor and respect the Gullah culture.

Do you find that people are familiar with Gullah culture? Do they know where you’re coming from?

QP: Not really. People know about zydeco and other cultures, but we’ve never had much focus on the Gullah community, which is the root. But people are very open to it and very intrigued by it. They want to know more, which is a good thing. It’s been received very well, thank you Jesus.

Why do you think Gullah culture has been ignored?

QP: I have no idea. I don’t know. It’s not in history books either. I didn’t learn about this in school. Somehow it got put away. It’s sad.

On both of your albums, you’re going back and finding older songs to add to your repertoire. What is that process like?

CR: I brought a lot of that repertoire to the group for their consideration. I’ll bring in a field recording or some ideas based on research that I’ve done. We’ve studied the music of Bessie Jones, the field recordings of people like Alan Lomax. He and other folklorists visited the Sea Islands in Georgia and South Carolina and created books and recordings of that material.

Those places were so remote, so geographically isolated, so those songs and traditions would have been passed down through a hundred years or more of oral tradition. Now things are changing with technology and those places aren’t so isolated. It’s become a little more difficult to preserve those traditions, so we want to honor the people who passed this music down through so many generations while adding our own voices.

What is your background with Gullah music?

QP: It’s the church! It’s all embedded in the church. Most of us grew up in church and that’s where we learned a lot of these songs. There might be a few differences in the words or the rhythms of a song from one church to another, but it’s still the same. That’s how it’s been for generations and generations, and I’m still passing it down to my children. My son is 11 years old and playing drums in church. They’re playing the same songs that we grew up singing. It’s a little different with the millennials, but it’s the same thing. It’s in their DNA. My son was born into Gullah culture on his dad’s side, so it’s in his blood.

CR: When I came to the band members three or four years ago, it was maybe more of an academic idea: Let’s do these specific public domain songs with these unique arrangements and put our own spin on them. It was very specific material. What I think has been the most special thing about evolution is that with this new album, we’re writing our own songs inspired by just spending time together and playing concerts together. Our goal in the writing process is to create a seamless bridge between the traditional material and our original material. If you hear it and you think something doesn’t fit, that would represent a failure on our part artistically. We’re very conscious of that during the writing process.

What is that process like? Is it something where one of you brings ideas to the band, or are you working these out together?

CR: A lot of the material — I would say the frame of the house — might start with Quiana in soundcheck. Maybe Kevin [Hamilton] starts a riff on his bass and Quiana sings a line, then from that point something that just feels good can be the flame that starts a fire. We start to shape it, and everybody contributes. Everybody designs their own parts and everyone contributes to the shape of the songs. I end up writing a lot of the words, but that’s just something I’ve always liked to do. It’s a way I can contribute.

What can you tell me about the song “Freedom”?

QP: The idea for “Freedom” is something I came up with because of something I was going through personally. And it just so happened to coincide with adversity that other people have had to deal with. African people have always dealt with adversity. We all want the same thing at the end of the day. We all want freedom. That’s something Clay emphasizes in the lyrics—that struggle for freedom.

CR: When Quiana came up with that idea for “Freedom,” I went home and wrote ten verses about that idea. Then we ended up picking up three or four that worked the best. It’s a bit like that. But everybody contributed, and that’s something I’m grateful for. We’ve had this amazing opportunity to align our powers.

Dealing with adversity and struggle seems to be a theme on the album. “Beat ‘Em Down” is a good example. It sounds like a violent phrase, but the song clarifies: “Beat ‘em down with love.”

QP: Kill ‘em with kindness. Hate is such a strong word, and I’ve always [believed] that you love someone instead of hating them. You love the hell out of them! You don’t fight fire with fire. You reciprocate with love and compassion. That’s the only thing you can do.


Lede photo credit: Sully Sullivan for Garden & Gun Magazine

Church photo credit: Peter Frank Edwards

The Ever-Shifting Dance of Shovels & Rope

On an unseasonably cool summer afternoon in Los Angeles, something very interesting happens as Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent chat with a third person at a cafe patio table, though it takes a few minutes to unfold.

The topic, at first, is how much real life is in the songs Hearst and Trent make as the sweetly rackety, Charleston, South Carolina-based duo Shovels & Rope. Does it reflect their decade’s worth of experiences as a married couple and, now, their experiences with two small kids? The material, after all, gets kind of dark at some turns.

“Yes and no,” Trent says. “I mean, we’ve always kind of been character writers. That’s just the type of writing that’s been interesting to us. And also, we’re, you know, generally happy people. We don’t need the suffering to…”

“I hate suffering,” Hearst interjects cheerfully.

“Some people feel they need to experience firsthand some kind of suffering to make art,” Trent continues. “And I’ve never really subscribed to that. We just make up the world and make up the character thing and write about it.”

Then, as it does, the subject turns to murder ballads. They’ve done a few in the course of their time together. There’s “Evil,” a song they wrote on the 2014 album Swimmin’ Time. And their new album By Blood features “Pretty Polly,” their reinterpretation of the staple of the British-Appalachian folk canon.

“We’ve got a song like ‘Evil,’ right?” Trent says. “So we didn’t have two kids at the time. And we’ve definitely never abused them. And Cary’s still alive. So that’s obviously just a made-up story.”

“And ‘Pretty Polly,’” Hearst notes. “We’ve never gotten anyone pregnant and killed her by the river.”

But then things take an intriguing turn. They get talking about the whole nature of murder ballads, the enduring place of them in music and culture. Hearst wonders about the clearly misogynistic violence of the form still having a place in our supposedly enlightened culture: “Why is it OK in this day and age that the murder ballad is this weird, sacred musical thing that we aren’t like, ‘Cancel! Hashtag cancel’?”

As they discuss this, though, they focus on each other. They lock eyes, talk only to each other, and it’s as if the rest of the world has gone away. He defends the form, noting the relationship to and appeal of crime drama and horror stories.

“You’re right,” she concedes. “I never thought of it that way. It just feels closer to home and personal because these are songs. Maybe it’s like, ‘What are you singing this song for? Did you do that? Is that what you think?’”

Trent shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“Just occurred to me that you might have the answer,” Hearst says.

“Oh, like I’ve got some dark secrets?” Trent wonders.

And so it goes for a few minutes.

If you’ve seen them in concert, you’ve seen this. In a small L.A. club the night before this conversation, it seemed they spent the first several songs hardly looking at the audience at all, just staring into each other’s eyes as they performed before later turning things more outward.

They laugh at this notion. The truth is, they say, on stage that behavior tends to be more pragmatic than romantic.

“I think we were trying to figure out what this was,” Trent says. “We check in with each other a lot. This was a bit of a weird show in a weird place. And we also do a lot of musical communication on stage, just checking in with each other. A lot of people mistake that for us, like, lovingly looking at each other. And it’s really like, ‘Oh. I know you missed your cue…’”

“‘Are you going to miss it again?’” Hearst interjects.

Their 2008 debut, self-titled album, they say, preceded them becoming a real item in life and music. Since that time, they’ve figured out the ever-shifting dance of the personal vs. the professional, art vs. life. They’ve figured out how to put them together when necessary and keep them apart when demanded. After making 2016’s Little Seeds as new parents, they added a buffer between work and family space.

“After Little Seeds, when our first kid was born, we were like, ‘This is insane,’” Trent says. “We need a place that’s not in the house. So we just built a utilitarian building in the backyard. Now we have a place that we can separate the work by at least a few feet.”

“Being parents for the first time, everything was insane,” Hearst says. “We would have somebody come over to hold the baby while we went upstairs to record, and you can hear it, the baby’s screaming downstairs. It’s just so much better now. It’s saved everything. It felt like it was a smart move to make.”

And, touring now for the first time with two kids, they’re spending part of the summer as the opening act on fairly big shows with Tedeschi Trucks Band and Blackberry Smoke.

“First of three acts at big sheds,” Hearst says. “Great catering! On early, like around 7.”

“We’ll be able to put our kids to bed at night and then have our jammies on by 8:30,” Trent adds.

Still, they allow, there are some deeply personal things that, pardon the expression, bled through on By Blood. The opening song, “I’m Coming Out,” with its very specific birth references and their second child now having been born a mere five months ago? That’s just the start.

“There’s some pretty personal things on this record for sure,” Trent says. “Like ‘Carry Me Home.’ Is it a pretty confessional song? Yeah, that’s true, like leaning on the other person.”

And there’s “The Wire,” which opens with the line, “I’ve been a disappointment at times.”

“‘The Wire’ is very much about how nobody is the perfect partner that you want to be,” Hearst says. “If you’re accountable, and they want accounts, good enough. This whole record is people who are jussssst good enough, but want to be a little bit better.”

Then there’s the title song, about the light and shadows of being in each other’s space all the time, of never having to be alone but never getting to be alone. Not only does the song close the album, but they put the lyrics of it in clear, can’t-miss type right on the front cover. That, and the whole album, per Hearst, serves as something of a marker in their lives and career.

“I think that we have many years of records in us,” she says. “But if this were to be the last stand, you know, of our creative output, there is a kind of timestamp with By Blood. We’re like this little baby that’s grown from making our first homemade record in the most rudimentary situation, and we got a little better at our instruments, a little better at record-making.”

But it goes deeper than that.

“I feel like we’ve become adults on records,” she continues. “Definitely we got adulted by Little Seeds. I mean, that time period after Swimmin’ Time and before Little Seeds was like, ‘Oh, you mean we’re growing older? We’re not gonna live forever? And our parents are getting old and babies are coming? Oh my God, we have to have life insurance and how come we can’t be just like, you know, freewheeling children for the rest of our lives?’ It kind of turned inward and now we’re kind of on the other side looking out and moving forward.”


Photo credit: Curtis Millard

LISTEN: Lovers Leap, “Love Is Gonna Live”

Artist: Lovers Leap
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee / Asheville, North Carolina
Song: “Love Is Gonna Live”
Album: Lovers Leap
Release Date: April 19, 2019
Label: Indidog Records

In Their Words: “This song was written by our band members Joel and Shelby during the early days of their courtship, while Joel was living on James Island, South Carolina. Joel was renting an old farm house that had fallen into disrepair, and he was noticing the similarities between his neglected home and his broken heart. The song is a hopeful plea, that love could once again inhabit that old house. The lyrics draw on a deeply personal experience, but began to feel like a political anthem during the run-up to 2018 mid-term elections, with the lonely house symbolizing our broken, loveless political system. The Lovers Leap recording captures a joyful performance with Joel and Shelby swapping lead vocals, Mary chiming in on the choruses, and Billy’s dobro taking flight during the bridge.” — Lovers Leap


Photo credit: Steve Atkins

A Minute in Charleston with SUSTO

Welcome to “A Minute In …” — a BGS feature that turns our favorite artists into hometown reporters. In our latest column, Charleston, South Carolina’s SUSTO takes us on a tour of their favorite places for rehearsals, live music, and creepy strolls through the cemetery. The band released their newest album, & I’m Fine Today, earlier this year.

AAA Downtown Storage: This is where we recorded our first two albums, plus a ton of other albums have been made there. A lot of bands have had storage/practice spaces here and it serves as a sort of epicenter for the local music scene. There are always people hanging in different units rehearsing or recording, and white vans pulling in and out, coming home and leaving for tour. Other cool folks, entrepreneurs of all types, have units there, too. Also, very good juju. Remember, though: You’ve gotta know the code to get in.


D’Allesandro’s: D’Allesandro’s (D’als) is one of our favorite local spots. It’s just around the corner from where we formed the band and recorded both of our albums. We’ve had members work there and we’ve played the semi-annual D’als Block Party a couple times, which is a celebration of the Elliotborough neighborhood arts scene.

Magnolia Cemetery: Magnolia Cemetery is a great place to visit with friends or by yourself. You can always find a new corner to walk through. It can be a bit spooky, but that’s nice sometimes. It’s beautiful always.


Philadelphia Alley: I have a special place in my memory for this place because, a few years back, when my friends and I would ride bikes around the city a lot, late at night, we would always stop here and hang out for a while, doing whatever. It’s got good juju.

Royal American: Royal is the place that kind of sparked the Charleston music renaissance. There hadn’t been a good rock club downtown for a while until it opened up. I started working the kitchen there while we were recording the first SUSTO album, and we played a lot of our first shows here. I still love to hang out at the bar when we are home.


Sullivan’s Island: Sullivan’s Island is a laid-back place. There are other great beaches in Charleston, but Sullivan’s is easy to get to from where we live downtown, plus you can still find secluded spots there (and free parking), sometimes. It’s great for swimming because there’s hardly ever any surf.


Lede photo by Paul Cheimis