Tag: traditional music

Carolyn Kendrick Takes on the Devil, Moral Panics on Her New Album

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Carolyn Kendrick is known among folk and roots fans as a fiddler with legitimate trad bona fides and as a singer-songwriter prone to introspective, observational songwriting. In the podcast zone she has carved a place as producer, researcher, and composer for several shows, including the award-winning You’re Wrong About podcast hosted by Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes.

In fact, it was while Kendrick was researching the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s for an episode of You’re Wrong About that she became obsessed with cultural panics in general. That obsession ultimately led to her haunting new album, Each Machine, which released December 6 on Occulture Records.

Last month, from her home in Los Angeles, Kendrick explained the album’s genesis.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about lineage and tradition lately,” she says. “… I’ve been thinking of all of these songs that have these deep traditional roots, that I’ve been listening to and learning and singing around campfires with, you know, friends at bluegrass festivals and folk festivals for years and years and years.”

The songs that were standing out to her all carried some darkness, a little shadow of the devil. She started wondering what might happen if she decided to reinterpret some of them in a way that asserted her personal instincts. “That includes things like more electric instrumentation, more sound design, more world building,” she says. “Not for it to sound inflated, but what if it was part of a more extended concept rather than just, you know, individual songs?”

To explore these curiosities, she enlisted the collaboration of her friend, multi-instrumentalist, and fellow Berklee grad Isa Burke (Aoife O’Donovan, Mountain Goats) to help her flesh out the sonic landscapes that are sure to envelop Each Machine’s listeners in a creepy, devilish fog.

Indeed, the album’s swallowing darkness even pervades on deceptively welcoming songs like “Sumer (Sing Cuckoo)” –sung here in the traditional round, a cappella except for some decidedly spooky timpani wallops. As a result, and in the context of so many songs about the devil, the duo’s approach feels particularly untouchable, like the story of a photograph of a memory of lighter times.

Then again, Kendrick felt compelled to include it amid her exploration of panic. As if to say: Perhaps the light is gone for now, but the nature of summer is that it returns.

To that end, she notes: “It was really, really fun to be able to take these older songs that have such a rich lineage and reinterpret them with the lens of … the issues that we’re going through as a people right now.”

This side of the 2024 election, most topical interpretations are probably incidental – she wrote the album long before votes were cast. But, while Each Machine implies a general warning about what happens when humans become wrapped up in an historical moment, it also becomes specific, for at least one track, on the topic of women’s health.

Track nine is a spoken-word piece Kendrick has titled “Sugar and Spice.” For fifty-five seconds, the listener is treated to a collection of recordings about what it is to be a woman in America. From the nursery school rhyme from which the track gets its name to a news report about the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the track ends with a distant crowd of protestors chanting about abortion. This is followed by the artist’s take on the trad song “Wind and Rain,” about a pair of sisters competing for a man’s attention: In pursuit of her prize, the one shoves the other into a river to drown.

Kendrick isn’t wasting anyone’s time being subtle about her views here. Then again, where’s the room for subtlety amidst panic?

As The New York Times reported in 1994, the Satanic Panic encompassed “12,000 accusations of group cult sexual abuse based on satanic ritual.” The same Times article clarified that none of these events seem to have actually occurred, but the fear they provoked in the public was definitely real. As a folk singer drawn to moments of cultural import, digging into the Satanic Panic caused Kendrick to consider the way these “panics” might be connected.

That she tied in songs about the devil; ruminations on a view of Earth from space; what womanhood requires of us; and even the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke means this is not an album meant to be background music. To be sure, the musicianship and arrangements are lovely, but the spoken word bits are necessarily jarring.

Over and over, the disc interrupts itself with interludes that pull one’s attention back – from feeling to meaning – before moving into another song. This tennis match between the heart and the head reaches its apex about halfway in, when Kendrick pivots between two separate recordings, “Are You Washed” and “In the Blood.” Between them sits a spoken word piece (the title track) which feels intimidating and disorienting.

Her decision to include two interpretations of the one song was inspired by Naomi Klein’s Doppleganger. That book, Kendrick explains, “really changed how I’m thinking about how we receive information.”

“As Americans,” she adds, “our media diets are so different and atomized from one another. And there’s also this confusion within the conspiracy landscape that we live in right now. … How can we be receiving the same information and interpreting it so differently? … [So that song is] an experiment. How do I approach one thing and look at it from all different angles? And how will that make me feel differently?”

Indeed, Each Machine is clearly trying to get through a whole lot of questions. And in just eight songs, it somehow achieves its goal. In addition to the questions already mentioned, there’s the Satanic Panic of it all. What, then, does fear – of the devil, of freedom, of technology, of one another – teach us?

As she sends Each Machine out into the world, Kendrick is clear that the lesson she learned is that she’s grateful to have a creative outlet to help her find light in darkness.

“I had been going through all of this really difficult subject matter,” she says. “… I had so many feelings of distress and worry – and also of hope. [I was in] this flurry of all the big emotions that we go through [when] we’re dealing with reality. I needed a place to put all of my feelings about moral panics, I guess.”

Photo Credit: Alex Steed

An All-Star Lineup Salutes Folk Legend Tom Paxton On ‘Bluegrass Sings Paxton’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

There is no disputing that Tom Paxton is a living music legend. In the early 1960s, he was a major player in the vibrant Greenwich Village folk scene, along with the likes of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, and Peter, Paul & Mary. The writer of such classic tunes as “Last Thing On My Mind,” “Bottle Of Wine,” “I Can’t Help To Wonder (Where I’m Bound),” and “Ramblin’ Boy,” Paxton has earned Lifetime Achievement Awards from the GRAMMYs, ASCAP, and the BBC. The beloved songwriter has had his tunes covered by a wide spectrum of acts, ranging from Harry Belafonte and Neil Diamond to the Pogues and Norah Jones. While several fellow singer-songwriters (notably Carolyn Hester and Anne Hills) have devoted entire albums to Paxton music, it took a group of admiring bluegrass musicians to deliver the first multi-artist tribute album of his songs.

Bluegrass Sings Paxton, which came out August 30 on Mountain Home Music Company, offers an impressive lineup of contributors that cuts across several generations of bluegrass musicians. Performers include celebrated acts, such as Alice Gerrard, Claire Lynch, Laurie Lewis, and Tim O’Brien along with younger stars, like Sister Sadie, Della Mae, Steep Canyon Rangers’ singer/guitarist Aaron Burdett, Unspoken Tradition’s Sav Sankaran, and current IBMA Male Vocalist of the Year Greg Blake.

Paxton, speaking to BGS from his home in Virginia, said that he had a mostly hands-off role in the making of Bluegrass Sings Paxton. “I just sat on the sidelines in amazement”; however, he confided, “I was just blown away” after listening to the entire album for the first time. The 86-year-old singer-songwriter was also being a little modest about his own contributions. This collection contains two new Paxton tunes, and he sings on a pair of tracks as well.

The genesis for Bluegrass Sings Paxton started with a conversation that GRAMMY-winning musician/producer Cathy Fink had some years ago with Paxton, who she has worked with since the early 1980s and has known even longer. “I know Tom’s catalog really well and have often thought there was great material there for bluegrass,” she shared with BGS. “I could hear this album before we even began.” The idea further evolved a while later when Fink brought up the idea to award-winning songwriter, producer, and Mountain Home executive Jon Weisberger at IBMA a few years back, and he immediately came aboard.

Several of Paxton’s tunes have been very popular in bluegrass circles over the years. A half century ago, Kentucky Mountain Boys covered “Ramblin Boy” while the Dillards and the Kentucky Colonels were among those who have recorded “The Last Thing On My Mind.” More recently, “I Can’t Help But Wonder (Where I’m Bound)” was a hit for Ashby Frank and “Leavin’ London” is a live staple of Billy Strings’ concerts. However, both Fink and Weisberger thought the project was a terrific way to get Paxton’s deep songbook better known in the bluegrass world. As Weisberger explained, “I had no doubt that there were more [songs] – both already written and yet to be written – that would work well within bluegrass, and that bringing them to light would encourage artists looking for songs to look to his catalog.”

Several acts came into the project with specific songs that they wanted to do. Blake, who fatefully was sitting at the same table with Weisberger and Fink at IBMA, quickly put dibs on “Leaving London.” Danny Paisley, who remembered his dad, ’80s bluegrass star Bob Paisley, taking him to the Philadelphia Folk Festival as a child and seeing Paxton play there, requested “Ramblin’ Boy,” because it was a song his father had performed. “I Can’t Help But Wonder (Where I’m Bound)” was already part of Della Mae’s live repertoire, so doing that tune was a natural fit for them.

When it came to what songs other acts took on, Fink gave the performers a lot of free rein to delve into Paxton’s vast treasury of tunes, a decision that worked out wonderfully. “Each artist made the song their own and it really worked,” she confided. Claire Lynch chose “I Give You The Morning” and Alice Gerrard selected “The Things I Notice Now” from Paxton’s 1969 The Things I Notice Now album. Chris Jones picked “The Last Hobo” from 1986’s And Loving You. Paxton’s 2002 album, Lookin’ for The Moon, was the source for both Aaron Burdett’s selection of and Sav Sankaran’s rendition of the title track. Laurie Lewis, meanwhile, found “Central Square” from 2015’s Redemption Road. In case you haven’t done the math, these songs alone cover nearly 50 years of Paxton’s recordings.

Paxton, too, was thrilled with the selections, proclaiming “I liked every one of the songs that they chose.” While he expected tunes like “Can’t Help But Wonder,” “Ramblin’ Boy,” and “The Last Thing On My Mind” would be part of the set, Paxton said he “was just tickled to death” over the inclusion of such lesser known numbers as “Central Square,” “The Same River Twice,” and “The Last Hobo.”

Chris Jones revealed to BGS that he picked “The Last Hobo” because the tune “felt like a classic Tom Paxton third-person story song, sort of in the spirit of ‘Ramblin’ Boy,’ in a way. It has a kind of tenderness that is so often present in Tom’s songs.”

Jones was also a member of the de facto “house band” that played on the majority of Bluegrass Sings Paxton’s tracks. A secret weapon behind the album, this team of bluegrass all-stars includes IBMA award-winners banjo player Kristin Scott Benson (the Grascals), fiddler Deanie Richardson (Sister Sadie), and Jones on guitar, along with mandolinist Darren Nicholson (formerly of Balsam Range), bassist Nelson Williams (Chris Jones & the Night Drivers, New Dangerfield) and harmony singers Travis Book (The Infamous Stringdusters) and Wendy Hickman.

Jones felt that everyone “clicked well together” and gave the music “a natural sound, which helped give the impression that these were bluegrass songs to begin with, even if they weren’t.” He also credited producers Weisberger and Fink for “coming up with arrangements that really fostered that feeling, too.”

Bluegrass Sings Paxton opens with one of the tunes that Paxton sings on. He was able to join Della Mae on “I Can’t Help But Wonder (Where I’m Bound)” as the band was recording in Maryland, not too far away from Paxton’s home base in Virginia.

“We did it live in the studio. No overdubs or anything,” he revealed. “I had a ball doing that track with them.” Paxton also sang with long-time collaborators Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer – the three did a double album, All New, together in 2022 – on the up-tempo love tune, “All I Want,” which is also one of the two of new Paxton tunes on the project. The other new number, “You Took Me In” is a co-write with Tim O’Brien and his wife Jan Fabricius. One of the first tunes he wrote with the couple, Paxton said that “it had to be chosen. It’s such a good song.” He described it as “gospel without being gospel,” adding, “I took the literal gospel out of it and kept everything else.”

Fink & Marxer and O’Brien & Fabricius are among the handful of musicians that the still highly-active octogenarian collaborates with via Zoom each week. Folk luminary John McCutcheon, Colorado troubadour Jackson Emmer, and the rising Pittsburgh band Buffalo Rose are also among his regular online songwriting coterie. Paxton says he sometimes writes three to five songs a week. “Lots of folks would retire to the golf course at this point in their lives,” Fink marveled, “but Tom is driven by writing the next song.”

Over the years, Paxton has penned hundreds and hundreds of songs, and more than 60 albums bear his name, beginning with 1962’s I’m the Man That Built the Bridges that was recorded live at New York City’s fabled Gaslight Club. Even from the start, Paxton filled his records predominately with originals, which wasn’t typical at that time. Dylan’s 1962 debut, for example, contained only two originals. Dave Van Ronk, in fact, famously proclaimed in his memoir that it was Paxton who kicked off the folk scene’s “New Song Movement,” not Dylan as often credited.

The best-known songs from his debut, somewhat curiously, are three tunes that might best be described as children’s music: “My Dog Is Bigger Than Your Dog,” “Marvelous Toys,” and “Going To The Zoo.” Writing and performing kids songs was not an isolated occurrence for Paxton, who went on to release several children’s albums, including the GRAMMY-nominated Your Shoes, My Shoes, and to write books for kids. Paxton very much sees himself as continuing the legacy of his heroes, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and The Weavers – artists who performed all types of songs, from story songs and ballads to children’s tunes and political songs.

“Everything I do is really rooted in traditional music,” Paxton elaborated during his phone interview. “I’m always going back to that well of traditional folk music, Appalachian music, cowboy music. It’s a wonderful tradition – great, great songs, and I just keep trying to write songs that feel the way they felt.”

Paxton cites one specific musician – the late, great Doc Watson – to explains his “best route” to bluegrass music. He saw Watson when Ralph Rinzler first brought him to play in New York City and came away so impressed. “I was very fond of him and adored his music. I think he liked me, too. Doc recorded many of my songs over the years.” He also remembered sharing a bill with Watson once in Tampa and being brought out on stage to perform “Bottle Of Wine.” Paxton was rather intimidated over Watson’s and his guitarist Jack Lawrence’s virtuosity. “Why do I feel like I’m wearing painter’s gloves,” he recalled saying while admitting “it was a lot of fun.”

Weisberger describes Paxton’s place in American music as a unique one. “He was an integral part of the transition from wholly traditional folk music to the more modern conception of the field, with its inclusion of performing songwriters, but where a lot of his contemporaries moved on in one way or another, he went deep rather than broad… I think that’s what makes so many of his songs sound so natural and organic and almost effortless. That is an artistry that is really easy to overlook or under-appreciate, so I’m happy to have put together a collection that will, I hope, bring more attention and appreciation to that still ongoing legacy.”

When asked how his songwriting has changed over the years, Paxton replied that he hopes it’s deeper and more developed, adding rather humbly that “I’m still the same writer I was when I wrote ‘Last Thing On My Mind.’ It’s like a farmer who puts in the same crop every year. It’s the same farmer.”

Photo courtesy of Fleming Artists. Album cover courtesy of Crossroads Label Group.

Nashville School of Traditional Country Music Plays It Forward

Posted on by Editor

The act of passing down traditional music through generations is as inherent to the craft as the music itself is to its region of origin. Amidst the flurry of YouTube tutorials, tuning apps, and streaming services available at the fingertips of today’s technologically advanced society, a crop of non-profits are working to ensure that traditional music continues to be shared from person to person. The Junior Appalachian Musicians program — nicknamed JAM — is one such effort. The after-school program offered in locations across North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia offers music lessons to children, focusing on Appalachian tunes and instruments like the banjo or fiddle. Singer/songwriter Meredith Watson was a fiddle instructor in the JAM program in Black Mountain, North Carolina, for three years.

“I saw firsthand how valuable group learning can be when it comes to music, as opposed to the sort of traditional model of sheet music learning or ‘learn this to tune’ or ‘learn this piece of music on whatever instrument you’re playing and go practice for 25 minutes by yourself everyday,’” Watson says. “[That’s] a very isolated experience of learning music, but I’ve seen both from the JAM program and then also my own personal life in old-time music, music is just so much more than that. It’s so much more than practicing by yourself; it’s community.”

An accomplished musician — both solo and with her band, Locust Honey — Watson moved to Nashville nearly three years ago. Despite the lore of Music City, Watson was surprised to find that there were no organized instructional programs or gathering places for musicians.

“It’s the most welcoming community I have probably ever found, musically, so you know, everybody hangs out together and has dinner parties and plays music together, and it’s all very supportive. So it occurred to me, at some point, that there was the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago and there’s the St.Louis Folk School and there’s Jalopy [Theatre and School of Music] in Brooklyn … that makes [the music] accessible to the rest of the town, and we didn’t really have that here,” she explains. “It seems like there’s this moment happening in Nashville right now — all these people have moved to town that are world-class, absolutely top-of-the-game players of traditional country music, and there’s nowhere that’s really teaching it. There are obviously private lessons galore, but there’s nowhere that’s teaching music as a community-building art.”

Watson started brainstorming with friends about what an organization or program that filled this gap in Nashville might look like. She used her experience in the JAM program as a jumping-off point and harkened back to her childhood for more inspiration.

“I grew up going to a community theater in Cape Cod in Massachusetts, when I was a kid, and I remember the feeling of having a place outside of my own house that felt like home,” she explains. “It was a really creative place where all you did was problem solve creatively all day. It was just so many different creative minds coming together.”

Watson’s vision for bringing such a place to Nashville has been realized with the Nashville School of Traditional Country Music. Still in its seed stage, the school has about a dozen instructors and is offering a spate of winter classes for children, including fiddle, ukulele, and guitar instruction.

“Because Nashville is growing at the rate that it’s growing, there are a lot of buildings going up and there’s a lot of concrete and just like money, money, money happening, and I just wanted to make sure that everybody knew the reason that this town has the name that it has,” Watson says. “It’s because all of this music from the American countryside came through here. You know, ‘country’ is a weird word because people have very different ideas of what that means, but it’s Music City. All of this vernacular music happened out of human need in rural America and then it came through here and people got to hear it because there was a wider access from here, but it seems like that’s being forgotten. And, having lived in places where that is still celebrated, I see how important it is and I just want to make sure that this particular city doesn’t forget kind of where it came from.”

While the Nashville School is beginning with children’s programming, Watson aims to eventually pivot to gatherings that adults and professional musicians in Nashville can attend, too. The person-to-person connection is what drew Watson to traditional music in the first place. “I went to the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU and then, after college, I was living in New York playing gigs just by myself, playing a lot of old blues, pre-war blues stuff, and some of my own stuff, and I just sort of got really lonely,” Watson says.

She was working at an Irish pub and bar for supplemental income when an Irish jam session on Monday nights caught her attention.

“It had been going on for 15 years and, every Monday night, I would have these guys come in and just sit in a circle and play traditional Irish music,” she recalls. “And I was like, ‘This is what I’m missing. This is what I’m longing for: connecting with people.’”

Watson dove headfirst into the aspect of music as community.

“I [didn’t] want to just get up on a stage; that’s not what music is about,” she says. “So I fell in love with this idea of the music of a people and, through that session, I ended up finding out about old-time music and I started going to festivals, and it was really a cure for my loneliness because I realized that there are all these gatherings that happen all throughout the year of people who just get together, cook together, play music, dance. I felt like music was integral to life, as opposed to being something that you had to try to do in your spare time or make happen somehow.”

Watson hopes to cultivate this feeling for others with the Nashville School of Traditional Country Music, whose mission lies in passing on and preserving the original sounds of American country music. Under that umbrella, she says, is generating a wider support for artists and their music.

“Because art is not valued as a necessity in America, we all struggle really hard just to even put [our music] out and have it be heard or seen,” explains Watson. “I want to make sure that all of our teachers get paid an actual living wage to teach. I don’t think music is extracurricular; I think it’s necessary for the human soul, and I want to make sure that the people who have spent thousands of hours learning how to play it, and then are kind enough to pass it along, are also taken care of.”

Photo credit: judy dean on Foter.com / CC BY

LISTEN: Donna Ulisse, ‘Back Home Feelin’ Again’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Donna Ulisse
Hometown: Lebanon, TN
Song: “Back Home Feelin’ Again”
Album: Breakin’ Easy
Release Date: September 22, 2017
Label: Mountain Home Music Company

In Their Words: “It’s an incredible mixture of excitement and calm that I have about this album. I have a new label and some new team members, and I enjoyed the remarkable experience of having Doyle Lawson as my producer. I have felt so free to concentrate on artistry, and the result is an album that makes me so happy to share.” — Donna Ulisse

LISTEN: Flatt Lonesome, ‘All My Life’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Flatt Lonesome
Hometown: Murfreesboro, TN
Song: “All My Life”
Album: Silence in These Walls
Release Date: September 29, 2017
Label: Mountain Home Music Company

In Their Words: “Looking back on six years of traveling and making music together, it’s so cool to see how each of us have matured musically — especially when reflecting on our debut album, Flatt Lonesome, to this fourth album, Silence in These Walls. This album really shows who we are — not only as a band, but also individually. It has nine original songs and seven were written or cowritten by Kelsi and Paul. They are both awesome writers, and I’m glad they’ve gotten to show that talent off with this album.

Personally, the playing and singing on this record came so easy for me. It felt so natural because it’s the music that I love so much. Over time, you learn what works and feels good for you and your band, and I think this album reflects that. I hope people enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed making it!” — Charli Robertson

Rachel Baiman: Ain’t No Shame

Posted on by Editor

The night before Rachel Baiman and I spoke about her new record, Shame, she played her Nashville album release show at the Station Inn, dressed in a Little House on the Prairie-esque dress she also wears on the album’s cover. She sang about “old white men” looking happily down on others, about sexual abuse, and about preferring jazz over heaven as a final destination after life — all unusual themes among the typical messaging of folky bluegrass-influenced songs such as hers.

The night after we spoke, she played in Chicago, Illinois. After the show, she followed up on our conversation with this message:

“During a quiet moment, someone yelled at me, ‘We don’t want your politics, just play music!’ Here’s the thing: Music doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s born of human experience. My experience right now is waking up each day worried about how I will afford healthcare, worried about what is happening to our planet as the temperature rises, and worried about the hateful rhetoric against women that our president has managed to normalize. And as much as some might enjoy the luxury of not having to think about these things, I don’t have the luxury of not being affected by these political decisions. For me, politics is personal and the personal is musical, therefore, the music is political. No, you can’t just have the music and not the politics.”

With Baiman, you know you’re going to get a healthy dose of fiery fiddling, thoughtful songwriting, and music with politics, but you won’t get a single ounce of shame.

Bluegrass, Americana … these roots music genres that are so close to all of our hearts, that we all have such strong opinions about, we end up — whether intentionally or not — shaming people for how they create their own music or how they express themselves through their music. I know there are the moral, political, and social aspects of shame that you’re calling out, but how does musical shame play into your identity as a musician and the aesthetic of your record?

Being female and not being from the South, there was sort of a decision that I made with the writing and the recording of this album to not worry about anything — to not give any fucks, essentially, about other people’s expectations or opinions or concerns. I think the reason I was able to do that is because it was such an open-ended project, because I was writing and recording purely for the sake of doing it. I wanted to see what would come about. As a result, there was a feeling of liberation behind the project and that became part of the whole concept of not being ashamed of anything, of being completely comfortable with who I am and what I have to say. There were some risks I was willing to take with this project that were sort of new for me, because of the way it all came about — the way I was feeling during the creation of it and the lack of confines around what it was supposed to be. In that respect, the idea of shame, or lack thereof, really did become a bit of a rallying cry around the whole project.

I can feel that listening to the record. Through the voice of the speaker, as it changes song to song, through the production, through the songwriting, it feels like you’re somewhat lovingly flipping off all of these presuppositions that listeners have about a record like this. I know that you have these traditional roots — you’ve studied these forms of fiddling that come from deep within the “tradition.” Where did you get that gumption?

[Laughs] It’s come full circle, in some ways. I grew up with a super-political background in my family. I was maybe brought up to be a little bit rebellious, in terms of my political, social opinions. I didn’t really embrace that for a lot of my adult life. I went down this road of playing music, studying music, and trying to learn those traditions, which I think is important. You can’t just walk in and push the envelope before you know what the envelope is. So I went down that path of trying to learn these amazing musical traditions and being a student of that.

When I was writing for this album, a lot of the writing and recording process was happening during the presidential campaign, the primaries, and continued all the way up until the general election. All of a sudden, there was this kind of reckoning between the person that I was brought up to be and the person that I was in high school, when I was more of an activist and really concerned with social justice and politics. I think, because of the state of the country right now, it came into focus for me that it was a huge priority in my life, that these things are incredibly important to me, and I needed to find a way to address them. Somehow, in this project, those two aspects of my life collided, musically, maybe for the first time.

People sometimes bristle when there are conversations about “women in bluegrass” and “women in roots music,” because their immediate response is to rattle off the names of famous female musicians as proof that women aren’t being marginalized. What is your response to those people when they truly don’t believe that these genres are not equal opportunity spaces for women?

Success stories are not an indication that there has not been an extreme challenge there. If you were to ask any of those famous female musicians about their experiences, I’m sure they’d have a lot to say about it. It’s also about giving voice to women’s issues beyond women’s issues in music. There have been many amazing female songwriters who talk about these things, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still an issue to be tackled.

One of the tough things about the bluegrass scene, specifically, is that it’s very much an instrumentalist scene. That’s an area where women haven’t seen as much success and find it much harder to break in. I don’t know why that assumption exists, but it seems like there’s acceptance and embrace of the female singer. But, for instance, even though Alison Krauss is a fantastic fiddle player, her success was about her vocals. I think that’s often the way it goes. There’s nothing wrong with a successful vocal artist, but there’s still a lot of difficulty for women who are trying to be instrumentalists.

There seems to be this strange phenomenon where people think that, if a woman writes heartbreak songs, she’s undermining the validity of her voice. Did you feel an inclination to keep the political material and the heartbreak material separate? Did you worry that writing a fluffy heartbreak song would make the activist themes less strong?

I didn’t worry about it too much, in the process. I was just writing what I wanted to write about and what felt valid and interesting to me, at the time. I did have a review come out the other day that was hilarious. It said, “Unsurprisingly, this an album of almost completely break up songs.” And I was like, “No! It’s not!” [Laughs] I think that people are hilarious with lyrics, because often they don’t listen to the lyrics. For instance, the song “Take a Stand” is not a break up song, but I would imagine that this guy listened and thought, “Ah. This is a sad love song.” It’s a song about inappropriate mentor relationships with young women, not a break up song! There are a few songs that I can see that, if you weren’t really checked in, you might think they were just break up songs.

We’ve seen this happen before, like in this review of Miranda Lambert’s most recent record where the reviewer said the record is clearly intended to be enjoyed more by women than by men.

What the heck is that?!

At the same time, people think there isn’t sexism in this music, because there are artists like Miranda Lambert putting records out. How do you unpack that for somebody who might be reading this column thinking, “But … heartbreak songs are for women.”

You can’t write music for the benefit of other people. If you start to worry about people’s perception, if you’re sitting there going “I wanna write a song, but I don’t want to write a love song because I’m a girl and people will expect that” — if you feel naturally inclined, if that feels like the most genuine thing you want to write about, that’s what you should do. All you can do for people is to point out the reality of what you’re doing. I try to tell the audience what the songs are about when I’m playing them, so people know what’s important to me. There are so many ways that your music can be construed, not only with societal constructs, but with weird music “things” we all decide to put on it. [Laughs] I’ve been pretty lucky with some of the press really understanding the idea and the feeling behind the album. I’m glad that’s been more of the narrative than the “an album of break up songs.”

I also wanted to ask you about “Let Them Go to Heaven.” The ubiquitous, Judeo-Christian themes through roots music can be exclusive to people of different walks of faith or spirituality. When I listen to this song, I feel like I’m hearing you, rather than just the character of the speaker of the song, telling these more traditional, more Christian fans and musicians that they can go to heaven, but you’d rather go to jazz yourself. Is that how you feel with this song?

Absolutely. I got this idea from an Ishmael Reed poem. I love the concept of music as a spiritual or religious experience. There is this tradition of Judeo-Christian religious threads going through these music traditions and that’s just part of the tradition. I think it’s something really beautiful. I love a lot of the old gospel music and bluegrass, but it is important that this music is for everybody and inclusive of whatever belief one might embody. For me, that is a lack of belief. I’m not a religious person, I struggle a lot with religion, in general — conceptually, no matter what religion. I guess I have more experience being an “outsider,” not having belief, living in the South and not having bought into the general religious consensus that exists in the South. I honestly think that it can affect your hire-ability in certain bands. It’s an expectation that you’re going to be bought in, or people take that as an indication of your moral standing or your ability to be a good person or a good person to work with.

For a lot of people, whether or not you are religious in any way, music and art are things people do for no practical reason. These are things that exist beyond the reasonable, rational fear of human thought. In that way, they’re kind of on that religious plane. You can’t really explain to someone why music affects you the way it does or why it means what it does to you. That’s my way of saying, “I’m not religious. I don’t get it. But here’s what I get and I think you get this, too. I can understand what you talk about when you’re talking about God, because I have this experience. Here’s where we can meet and talk about things that aren’t reasonable, rational, scientific phenomena.”

Photo credit: Gina Binkley

STREAM: Lonesome River Band, ‘Mayhayley’s House’

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Artist: Lonesome River Band
Hometown: Floyd, VA
Album: Mayhayley’s House
Release Date: June 23, 2017
Label: Mountain Home Music Co.

In Their Words: “Continuing a series of projects of doing songs that we love, Mayhayley’s House is a set of songs that we collected from our favorite writers. Bordering on acoustic country with an Appalachian feel, we hope everyone will enjoy hearing these as much as we enjoyed doing them.” —  Sammy Shelor

WATCH: Sam Gleaves & Tyler Hughes, ‘When We Love’

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Artist: Sam Gleaves & Tyler Hughes
Hometown: Wytheville, VA and Big Stone Gap, VA
Song: “When We Love”
Album: Sam Gleaves & Tyler Hughes
Release Date: June 16, 2017
Label: Community Music, INC

In Their Words: “This song is our way of advocating for love in this time of divisions. Music celebrates our shared humanity. We are grateful for our friends who are doing inspiring work and especially the wonderful young people who appeared in this music video. The evidence is all around us that we can and should work together to build a more inclusive society.” — Sam Gleaves

Photo credit: Susi Lawson