Tag: Tommy Jarrell

Japanese Musician Bosco Maintains the Tradition of Old-Time Fiddle and Banjo

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Takaki Kosuke, affectionately known as Bosco, has long been part of the tapestry of old-time music. Growing up in Japan, he found American folk music and began traveling to the United States as a teenager. Now 62, Bosco holds a deep respect for the stories and the people behind the tunes, which is evident in every note he plays. A light heart full of memories and passion infuses his music with flow, solidity, and earthiness. His fiddle style is impeccably drawn from the very best of the “old-timers” yet uniquely marked by his own empathetic nature, making him one of the inimitable old-time musicians of his generation.

Could you introduce yourself?

My real name is Kosuke. Born the 8th of January, 1961. One of my first trips to the States, I stayed with Mike Ross in Michigan. He took me to the Wheatland Festival where he introduced me to his wife Mary: “This is Kosuke from Japan.” We both said hi, nice to meet you, we shook hands and then Mary asks Mike: “Is his name Bosco???” The other people there loved it. And then someone gave me a baseball cap which says BOSCO. It just stuck!

Is your family musical?

My mother’s aunt was a professional singer. She was quite popular in Japan. My mother loves music, she sings a lot. I have an older brother and I got his old guitar when I was 12, 13 years old. Then on my first trip to the States…I wasn’t into music so much around that time, but somehow I picked up the dulcimer.

How did you discover old-time music?

New Lost City Ramblers. The Carter Family. I listened to Japanese contemporary folk music, which is influenced by American folk music, and I started listening to Bob Dylan and Jack Elliot and then I found the Carter Family, Woody Guthrie, the blues…

How did you start playing fiddle?

I started playing fiddle tunes on the dulcimer. And I got a mountain-style banjo and started going to a small coffeehouse in Tokyo. My uncle wanted to be a violinist. He bought a violin, but he just couldn’t play it. So he gave it to me! It was a cheap Suzuki, but I started to learn on that. I already knew some fiddle tunes on dulcimer and banjo, so I started to play the melodies on fiddle.

When did you start coming to America?

My first trip to the States was when I was in high school. I was interested in American pop culture. Then John Herrmann came to Japan. That was BIG. I was 17 when I met John, he didn’t fiddle much, not the way he fiddles now, but it was my first time to be with an old-time musician from the States. After he went back to the States I decided to visit. That’s how it started. I went to the States almost every year in the ‘80s. In the ‘90s I got out of school — I’m an acupuncturist — and then I met my guru of acupuncture and I didn’t go to the States in the ‘90s at all. In ‘02 or ‘01, Alice [Gerrard] put on an International Old Time Music event at Merlefest. Then my coming to the States started again.

Tell me about your early experiences with old-time music in the States.

Old-time music found me. It suits me! Early on I took a fiddle class at Augusta with Gerry Milnes and he brought some real old-time fiddlers like Melvin [Wines] and Ernie [Carpenter], and the first time I heard Ernie: WOWWWWWWW!!!! Oh, Ernest! Totally different from New Lost City Ramblers! The banjo instructor was Dwight Diller. After Augusta he asked me to stay with him and took me to see Hammonses. Hammonses, they’re very poor. I was a kid from Tokyo, and all my images of America were like San Francisco and New York…and this…wow, this is REAL. Where they live. Not only the music. The landscape, and how they live…it just got me.

And then I met someone who took me to see Tommy Jarrell. Tommy…POW!!! So powerful, so energetic. Really different from Hammonses. Hammonses are more laid-back, real country people. But Tommy’s like someone from New York! His sense of humor, and he welcomes everybody. Grandfather to all of us from outside Southern Appalachian culture. Talking about culture is a very deep subject. On the surface, Japan is much like Western culture, not like other parts of Asia. Because Japan lost the War, then all the Western culture changed Japan, covered all the stuff beneath. All of us on the internet now, I don’t feel any difference as far as I am here and you are over there. I stay with old-time friends; it’s community. It feels more comfortable to stay with them than with a stranger in Japan. I visit old-time friends in Europe, and feel very comfortable with them, too. It’s like a lost family.

Has the internet and social media changed the way you connect with the community?

It makes it deeper. Like David Bragger, who produced my CD. The first time I met him: Oh, I know this guy! I felt close to him. And some I met back in the ‘80s, back when I started music…even some I never talked with, we saw each other at festivals, played a couple of tunes…we never talked, but we feel close now.

How would you describe your playing style?

In the ‘80s young people played “hippie style”…what they call “festival style” now. At that time everybody stood up. Now people will sit down, but back then, NEVER. They’d stand in a tight circle and play and play and play. So I was more into that kind of stuff. I almost forgot how Hammonses played. Even the tunes from Hammonses I played in hippie style. Even back in Japan, Round Peak/hippie style. But then! Jimmy Triplett came to Japan one summer to study in Kyoto. We got together almost every week to play. When I heard his fiddle: WOW. This is the kind of music I wanted to play at the beginning, when I was with Hammonses and with Ernie. So now I listen to more of the old stuff, old field recordings…

How did the Tiki Parlour project come about?

I played Quarantine Happy Hour. After the show I had a high time, I really enjoyed the comments. Some people I’ve not seen for 20 years, or people I saw at festivals back in the ‘80s and thought wow, these people, they sound great…They made good comments and so I got really excited. Then David asked me to make a solo CD and I’m like YES! OK! So I recorded it here in my home, straightaway.

It’s just you, solo?

Just me. I got to listen to my own recording and judge it. That’s hard. One day: Oh, this is great! And other days: God, it sucks! Pretty good! Oh, no! This is awful! The hardest part was writing the liner notes in English.

Memory and connection are a big part of the notes.

When I met Maggie Hammons she couldn’t sing or play banjo anymore. But my one and only banjo instruction book had Maggie on the cover…Maggie! There are lots of pictures in the liner notes, photos I took on those first trips. And another thing! When I met Hammonses, Tommy, other old people back then, I couldn’t speak much English. And I had just started fiddle. If I could meet them now I could ask more, not only about the music but about their life. And learn more by watching them. So sometimes I feel: Oh, I wish I could meet them now! But on the other hand, I meet the young people and they’re like: WOW! You met Tommy?!?! You met Burl [Hammons]?!?! You met Hammonses?!?! So I think: I am one of the last generations who met those old-timers who learned the music before the radio days. And I feel lucky to have met them before it was too late.

Is there a message you hope to send with this project?

We talked about community. It’s not divided by nationality. It’s more like something above. Above those individual groups of the nations, groups of the nationalities, groups of the colors. Something above these things. You can connect up there. I can’t be friends with everybody, everybody in the world. I hate some people, some hate me. It’s normal, you can’t be friends with everybody. But you can connect with other people on some level. Maybe if I get older and spiritually if I get much higher I can connect with more people. But now…it’s…steps.

Do you ever wish you had moved to America?

That’s the reason I became an acupuncturist. Ray Alden asked me what my father does. I said, he’s a doctor. “Eastern medicine?” No, Western. “Ohhhh….with Eastern medicine you can make a living here.” That’s when I was still in college. Aha! So I checked out the acupuncture school here. Ray Alden made me an acupuncturist. But then I finished acupuncture school and got licensed and then I met my acupuncture guru and decided to study with him. So moving to the States never happened.

You have an interesting story.

Most people expect a more interesting story, how I found old-time music. But it’s much the same story as people in New York, how they find old-time music, people in Boston, how they find old-time music. It’s just…met the right people at the right time. If old-time didn’t find me I would be a totally different person now. A totally different life, without the music. But it’s not just the music. It’s community.

Photo Credit: David Bragger

MIXTAPE: Vivian Leva & Riley Calcagno’s Old-Time Deep Cuts

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We were both old-time music festival kids, showing up at our parents’ jams with dirt-covered feet, stopping for a moment to listen to the tunes and songs that would undoubtedly carry on late into the night. When we met and first played music, it wasn’t to write or sing songs, but to stay up all night playing fiddle tunes, thrilled by the parallel experiences we shared that allowed playing together to feel effortless. Though the songs on our upcoming duo record aren’t traditional and draw a wide net of inspiration, we aimed to have the groove and groundedness of string band music woven into the feeling of the album.

This playlist includes some of our favorite (deep) cuts of old-time music, at least the ones that have been published for streaming and don’t linger on a cassette or family archive. We selected these to give you a sense of how each song or tune has spun a web of connection that somehow wound its way in our direction. We chose many songs that are somehow close to us and the people we know. We chose some that, by their very existence, make clear the injustice that this music and the people who make it are grappling with and/or trying to overcome.

Old-time music isn’t any one particular thing, but is instead filled with contradictions. Even its name feels odd to write and at odds with how we view it. Yet, it is the music that feels like home to us. Come and join our tragic and raging old-time party. – Vivian Leva and Riley Calcagno

Dirk Powell – “Three Forks of Cumberland”

This is one of our favorite recorded instances of old-time music and its unique, reckless drive. This twisty tune is a rare occurrence of a melody that came from sheet music, off the Hamblon family manuscripts. Dirk Powell is joined here by the original members of Foghorn Stringband, recorded live in Eugene, Oregon. You can hear us play this tune live during a jam at the Appalachian String Band Music Festival in Clifftop, West Virginia, on this Bandcamp release.

The Renegades – “Chilly Winds”

In the ‘90s, Vivian’s parents, Carol Elizabeth Jones and James Leva, played in The Renegades with Richie Stearns and June Drucker. Their combination of old-time string band music, harmony singing, and original songs are unique and well-crafted. Riley discovered this band in his dad’s iTunes library in high school before ever meeting Viv and was instantly hooked. Here, they play a song from the Round Peak region of North Carolina called “Chilly Winds.”

Lily May Ledford – “White Oak Mountain”

Lily May Ledford of Powell County, Kentucky sings this song of a woman who has been betrayed and seeks revenge. Ledford was the leader of the Coon Creek Girls, a widely recognized string band from the ‘30s to ‘50s. Viv’s mom Carol Elizabeth Jones sings this song (with the name “44 Gun”) on the recently re-released 1991 cassette, Rambling & Wandering, by the Wandering Ramblers.

Tara Nevins – “Rocky Island”

This record from Tara Nevins is one of our favorite traditional/original fusion projects. Check out that bouncy electric guitar… wowza. This one is sung by Jim Miller, now one of our label-mates with Western Centuries.

Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard – “Let Me Fall”

Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard sing this Round Peak classic on this practice tape, recorded live in Alice’s kitchen and released by Free Dirt Records.

Tommy Jarrell – “God Gave Noah the Rainbow Sign”

The musician who arguably had the most influence on today’s old-time music scene is Tommy Jarrell of Surry County, North Carolina. Tommy welcomed younger visitors in the 1970s and ‘80s (including Viv’s dad, James, on many occasions) to his house to learn tunes, swap stories, and pass on ideas about the music. Inspiration from Tommy’s playing, especially his bowing, has spread throughout the old-time scene. For more of Tommy, check out this video of Tommy and his frequent musical partner Fred Cockerham playing on a porch in 1971.

Paul Brown – “Red Clay Country”

Paul Brown beautifully picks the banjo and sings this old song on his record of the same name. He learned it from his mom, Louise Dichman Brown, who learned it in the 1920s from two brothers, John and Harry Calloway of Bedford County, Virginia. Paul told us that there are some early recordings of this song on so-called “race records,” the name given to records released featuring Black musicians in the highly segregated and exploitative record industry. This song in particular was a work song, sung by workers on the railroads. These laborers were often wrongly convicted Black people working dangerous and sometimes deadly jobs. Kevin Kehrberg and Jeffrey A. Keith write about this in their research on Swannanoa Tunnel (both the song and construction of the tunnel), a song that is similar to “Red Clay Country.”

Plank Road String Band – “Sail Away / George Booker”

This band came out of Vivian’s home county, Rockbridge County, Virginia, in the 1980s and features her dad James Leva. This track was featured on The Young Fogies, a compilation of the old-time music community during the ’80s revival era. The fabulously frenetic cello, played by Michael Kott, is unique for old-time music, as is the tenor banjo played by Al Tharp. The band had a few successful and influential tours in Scandinavia.

Bruce Molsky – “Last of Harris”

John Morgan Salyer of Magoffin County, Kentucky, was a fiddler who lived from 1882-1952. Though music was never his career, he played unique, often “crooked” (meaning an unexpected number of beats in each part) versions of fiddle tunes. His family recorded him at home in the 1940s, but these recordings weren’t made publicly available until nearly 50 years later thanks in large part to the work of Vivian’s grandfather, Loyal Jones. Here is one of our favorite Salyer tunes, played by one of our favorite fiddlers, Bruce Molsky (along with his partner, Audrey Molsky) on his 1993 Yodel-Ay-Hee cassette, Warring Cats.

Foghorn Stringband – “Best Timber”

Riley grew up around the band Foghorn Stringband and absorbed their uniquely driving sound at Stickerville in Weiser, Idaho, at the Portland Old-Time Music Gathering, and in lively kitchen parties around the Pacific Northwest. They learned this tune from the great Midwestern fiddler, Garry Harrison.

Gribble, Lusk, and York – “Rolling River: Country Dance”

Murphy Gribble, John Lusk, and Albert York of Warren County, Tennessee, were one of the best string bands of the 20th century. Even so, they were never commercially recorded because they were a Black string band at a time when record companies wouldn’t record such a band. (Black musicians were essentially barred from recording string band music and their recordings were segregated into “race records” which we mention above.) Murphy Gribble’s banjo playing in this recording is especially notable as creative and exceptional three-finger picking. More resources on Black string band music is on our friend, spectacular musician, and labelmate Jake Blount’s website. More writing on Gribble, Lusk, and York in an article by Linda L. Henry here.

Roscoe Holcomb – “Hills of Mexico”

Speaking of divine picked banjo, Roscoe Holcomb of the town of Daisy in Perry County, Kentucky, sings this story, “Hills of Mexico.” Mike Seeger, at a performance at Holcomb’s nursing home in Hazard, Kentucky, said that what set him apart is “that he had that real drive, like he really meant it… he had real conviction to his playing, and of course he sing with that high voice, and he’d take a lot of those old mountain songs and make them real special.” Viv’s mom, Carol Elizabeth Jones, also sings this song on a recording with The Renegades.

Bigfoot – “The Dying Cowboy”

Susie Goehring of Northeastern Ohio sings this heartbreaker on the great album by elusive string band Bigfoot. Rhys Jones plays some appropriately mournful fiddle lines under the vocal on the recording. We aren’t entirely sure where Susie learned it but Vivian sings a version from Sloan Matthews, recorded in Pecos, Texas, in 1942.

The Onlies – “Look Up, Look Down”

We also play in an old-time string band called The Onlies that Riley started with his friends Sami Braman and Leo Shannon when they were seven years old. Viv joined in 2017 after a chance meeting during the days between Centrum’s Voice Works and Fiddle Tunes workshops in Port Townsend, Washington. This track is sung by Leo on The Onlies newest record. We learned this version from the great Gaither Carlton.

The Humdingers – “Cumberland Gap”

There is something difficult about capturing the distinct energy of a string band on a recording. Often the best music happens late at night, far off in a field, and certainly never gets uploaded to Spotify. Here is a recorded instance of a band finding the center of the groove on one of the best fiddle tunes there is, “Cumberland Gap.” This recording is of the band The Humdingers with Brad Leftwich on the fiddle, Linda Higginbotham on the banjo uke, Bob Herring on guitar, Ray Alden on banjo, and Dirk Powell on bass.

Photo credit: Brendon Burton

Jake Blount Looks Deeper into the Black Traditions of Old-Time Music

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It is long known that Black artists in the twentieth century who spoke out against white supremacy often paid for it with their lives. As a Black man and a queer person, Jake Blount is intimately familiar with this history. In the liner notes of his new album Spider Tales, Blount predicts “escalating patterns of violence and ecological crises that threaten the survival of our species.” In the same breath he urges us to remember the ancestors who felt “the same grief, powerlessness, and fury” — and found a way to survive through wit and wisdom.

Spider Tales features a band of mostly queer artists, with Blount on banjo and fiddle. His tune and song choices introduce us to musicians long ignored. Familiar songs are reinterpreted, their fangs reinstated. Through this process, he takes us on a journey of rage, revolution and muffled voices made louder. We are the better for it.

BGS spoke with Blount, who grew up in Washington, D.C., but is now based in Rhode Island, about Spider Tales and his focus on the marginalized among us.

BGS: The title of Spider Tales is a nod to the trickster of Akan mythology, Anansi, who as you stated in your liner notes, weaponizes his wit and wisdom against oppressors more powerful than himself. And that’s what Black folks have had to do since the Middle Passage. Everything had to be subversive as a matter of survival. Can you speak about your process and musical choices in bringing that subversion to the forefront on this album?

Blount: For me the tricky part of bringing out these kinds of hidden meanings, and the mass significance of a lot of these songs, was that I had to pick songs that spoke in metaphors but put them together in a way that the metaphors became obvious. Finding a way to be loyal to the art form and not just be totally explicit with what was being said, but still make the message apparent to people, was really difficult.

I think a lot of that came down to how I framed things in the liner notes, but also the songs that I picked. Picking some things that were more familiar, some things that were not…some things that are more explicit and more direct and some things that are not. Being mindful of the track order helped tie things together and, I would hope, clarify the common thread between all the songs.

I want to ask you about your arrangement of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” by Leadbelly. I hear this song a lot at jams. Some people refer to it as “In the Pines” and it’s often framed as being from one embittered lover to another. Your version of the song has this kind of bereft energy, almost frightening. What drew you to interpret this song in the way you did?

It’s partially an artifact of the fact that I first heard the song from hearing Kurt Cobain play it… I’m sure there’s some Nirvana energy lingering from middle school Jake in this recording. [Laughs] But even aside from that, when I listened to the Leadbelly version, I heard that song in a vacuum before I was ever involved in traditional music in any particular depth. I never really thought of it as a love song. It’s spoken, ostensibly, from one romantic partner to another sure, but it seems like it’s about disappearing and dying.

To me, you’re losing somebody — somebody is going away from you. That resonated because I grew up hearing stories from my dad about how there were people who just disappeared. I think we have this picture in our heads of racial violence in the south as lynchings; that of course did happen, but also there’s this other narrative of people just vanishing in the woods, and everyone would kind of have to assume what had happened.

I wound up connecting to that strongly because I came up during high school and college working with LGBTQ advocacy groups, volunteering my time and organizing with other youth. Doing that, you see a lot of people lose their homes, get kicked out of their houses, get incarcerated. You see a lot of people die. That song spoke to me on that level of “these are people who are just going away.” It reminds me of all the times that a friend would just drop off the map. A week or two later, you realize “Oh, I haven’t seen this person.” That kind of thing happened frequently when I was younger. It definitely still happens to people in that age group now, so that’s where my interpretation of the song comes out of.

This version of “Boll Weevil” is one of the best I’ve heard. I always knew it as coming from Tommy Jarrell, but I read in your liner notes that he learned the tune from a Black woman at a festival backstage. He never saw fit to credit her, which is why she’s still unnamed today. Reading that made me feel some type of way about the manner in which Black people — and Black women — have been forgotten by history, forgotten now. I wonder if it was a similar feeling for you. How did you deal with emotionally processing what you were learning while you were researching these tunes?

I think I’ve been so immersed in the ephemera of old-time fiddle music for long enough that it almost doesn’t surprise me anymore, which is sad, but Tommy Jarrell is someone who has a pattern of doing that. I feel like there are multiple older source musicians from that generation who would reference having learned from Black people but wouldn’t name them or wouldn’t give a complete name.

“Brown Skin Baby” is another tune like that on the album. Jabe Dillon learned it from an older Black fiddler and the only name he gave was Old Dennis. You can’t Google “Old Dennis.” There’s very specific information that oftentimes [white musicians] give with other white sources. But Black sources don’t get treated the same way.

Part of the reason I was so meticulous about the liner notes here is to avoid doing that a second time, because it still sometimes happens where people don’t credit the sources or sometimes don’t look up the sources. I’ll be the first to say that you don’t have to learn everything from a source recording — that’s not necessarily honest to the way the tradition has worked throughout history either. But I think it’s important to have a relationship with the musicians who cultivated the music we are now enjoying.

Yeah, I think especially with people like Cecil Sharpe and [John] Lomax, it’s like, Cecil Sharpe made his way through West Virginia. In his diaries he was so obsessed with this purity of old-time music, and white people, and actively refusing to record anyone else. It must have been such a sliver of what was going on at the time and of the knowledge that could have been passed down.

Exactly. Even like the later folks, there are folks who made a lot of recordings of Black people and were like “I need to find the Blackest music that I can so I’m going to go to prisons!” and it’s like, “You’re only really Black if you’re in jail for it.” [Laughs incredulously] That’s the mentality that carries through in that sort of scholarship and even today.

I always think it’s best to focus on the most marginalized among us and it’s really important that the working-class traditions be emphasized and accepted and made part of the canon. But I also think it’s really important for today’s Black people to know that there was prosperity in our communities going back that far. The Black middle class, which was ascendant at the time many of these first recordings were being made, never got examined by the folks making the recordings. It’s a tremendous loss to me because you would get to hear from people who were maybe articulating the experience of navigating how to become, in a capitalist sense, successful for a Black person in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

What would have been the songs about the Greenwood District in Tulsa? There are all of these really incredible things that happened and these really horrifying ways that white supremacists would crack down on Black people for attaining that level of success that are part of the story and ought to be told. Because we focused so narrowly for so long on Black musical traditions that were coming out of super rural country places, even though a lot of Black people had moved to the city by that time — I feel your pain that there is a great deal that is lost when we focus so narrowly on this thing that fulfills our stereotype notion of what we should be looking for.

I love the last song on the album, “Mad Mama’s Blues,” which comes from Josie Miles. That first line, “I want to set the world on fire,” is so great, the melody is flirtatious, but the lyrics are furious. Can you talk about why you chose that song as the album closer?

I feel like the album couldn’t have been timed better if we’d known about what was going to happen in Minneapolis. My whole mission with this album was to show people that this has been coming for hundreds of years. There’ve been warnings and people have been trying to speak on it and they haven’t been heard. I think putting [this song] as the closing note on the album felt perfect to me because it is very explicit in its emotional expression and what it gets across to the listener — but at the same time, it is masked in this jumpy upbeat, sort of silly presentation. It’s like the 1920s “Hey Ya!” [Both laugh] It’s like a bop, and you’re like “Yes Queen!” and then you’re like “Oh, he’s killing people.”

I think that’s a really valuable part of the Black musical tradition. To me it provides us an interesting lens to look back on the fiddle tunes. For so many people when they hear fiddle and banjo, they’re like “Oh this is a happy song! I’m going to start dancing now” and really there can be so much hidden inside of that.

People are sometimes more concerned with their expectations for what a piece of music is going to be than what it actually is. Putting this song at the close is saying: “Your musical assumptions about the content here would not be correct.” You then have to go back and examine the other [songs] with the idea in mind that perhaps you need to look more deeply than you otherwise might in order to understand what’s being said.

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

All photos: Michelle Lotker