5 Artists Shaking Up Old-Time Music
By Devon Leger
There’s a popular Appalachian string band tune called “Shaking Down the Acorns.” It comes from the other-worldly, deep-holler music of the Hammonds Family, whose fiddle tunes, to this day, sound almost primordial. The fiddle and banjo music of Appalachia — most commonly referred to colloquially as “old-time music” — lives as much in the eerie world of the Hammonds as it does in the hands of today’s super groups like Old Crow Medicine Show.
This music lies at the heart of many forms of popular folk music, though it’s hard to think of many bands actively working to push the tradition into new places despite the fact that arguably the largest community of people playing old-time are young, radical progressives — a younger generation looking for folk/roots music that you can play all-night while drinking around a campfire with your friends, these are the people pushing old-time forward. But, more often than not they seem content to recycle common songs, or to just base their music on the aural stamp of Round Peak old-time players like Tommy Jarrell, Fred Cockerham, or Wade Ward.
Who out there is blasting apart the staid world of old-time fiddling and looking for something new in the roots of the music? Here are some new albums from 2015 that have been shaking the old-time tree!
Dirk Powell & Riley Baugus: Tomorrow Morn
It’s no exaggeration to call Dirk Powell and Riley Baugus two of the most visionary old-time musicians today. Powell has recorded a number of great old-time albums for Rounder and has worked extensively with T Bone Burnett. In fact, Powell and Baugus collaborated on the amazing soundtrack to the film Cold Mountain. Now they’re back together for a much-anticipated duo album, and it’s just as strange and compelling. Baugus is the quintessential mountain musician, with a voice dripping in North Carolina drawl and the kind of all-too-rare-today vocals that came out of the old primitive Baptist churches in the South. (Ralph Stanley’s voice is from there, as well.) On their duo album, Baugus slips easily into Appalachian music — like the great “Katie Morey” from Doc Watson — while Powell dips into old-time, too — try his “Jack of Diamonds” for a LEGIT old-time cover. What’s surprising are the edges of this album — Baugus covering a Lucero song with a deep twang that completely works, or a cover of the super-harsh bluegrass outlaw song “One Loaf of Bread” from the great Dave Evans that’s so stripped back it almost sounds like acoustic grunge instead of old-time, or a blistering accordion blues cover of Ray Charles’s “Drifting Blues.” The album’s raw, intimate, and clearly recorded by two old friends on a long evening … or two or three. It’s a joy to listen to and discover, and it has the kind of depth that is so often lacking these days in any genre.
Nathan Bowles: Nansemond
Nathan Bowles has long been known from his innovative work with the Black Twig Pickers, a kind of indie-old-time stringband that billed themselves as Appalachian trance. And, yeah, there are some really cool trance elements in old-time tunes that are called “droolers.” Huddled in a circle with some good friends, no breaks, no solos, and off to a pretty trancy place you go. But Bowles’ music is a bit more complex than that and, on his new album, Nansemond, from underground label Paradise of Bachelors, he mixes old-time clawhammer banjo from his home state of Virginia with droned electronic explorations. His album is named for the ghost swamp of Nansemond in Virginia, once home to the Native American tribe of the same name and escaped slaves in hiding. And that’s kind of what his music sounds like — echoes of the old ghosts of Virginia channeled through old-time clawhammer banjo and gruff vocals.
Squirrel Butter: Chestnuts
Seattle old-time/country duo Squirrel Butter have been making great music for some time now, but honestly, they just keep getting better. Banjo player/vocalist/songwriter Charlie Beck and his musical life partner Charmaine Slaven (guitar/fiddle/clogging/vocals) mesh together so nicely with super-tight harmonies and charming performance personas. But their new album, Chestnuts, brings up an important point about old-time music: STOP PLAYING THE SAME TUNES OVER AND OVER AGAIN PEOPLE! Beck and Slaven dig deep on this album, pulling out tunes from all kinds of different sources — from classic folks like Clyde Davenport and Lotus Dickey to rarer finds like African-American songster Jimmy Struthers, Moonshine Kate (daughter of Fiddlin’ John Carson), Burnett & Rutherford, and Ozark fiddler Bob Holt. Some tunes were learned in-person from the sources, some twice-removed, and some taken from recordings. The point is, there are heaps and heaps of great resources for old-time music today — the archives at Berea, reissues, free sites of old 78s, and the Field Recorders’ Collective which gathers a huge number of field recordings of great old-time players into CDs. It’s not hard to find new tunes. Also, special props to Beck and Slaven for making their own, too. Beck’s a wonderful songwriter and songs like “Cabin in the Pines” could easily be new classics.
Jake Xerxes Fussell: Jake Xerxes Fussell
Jake Xerxes Fussell is not a name that comes up in discussions of today’s best old-time musicians, and that’s part of the problem. His self-titled album on outsider folk label Paradise of Bachelors dropped this year and garnered huge reviews from indie press and major outlets, and he still didn’t cause chatter within the insider circles. Too bad, because Fussell plays this music like he owns it, and why shouldn’t he? Born in Georgia, living in the holy triangle of Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill that’s been churning out super-fascinating interpretations of Appalachian traditions from a plethora of artists, Fussell grew up deep in the traditions thanks to his folklorist father. Like most old-time artists of a younger generation, he’s happy to source Georgia Sea Island songs like his great version of “Raggy Levy,” but unlike most younger old-time artists, he learned these from the source — Georgia Sea Island singers Frankie and Doug Quimby who used to pal around with his dad when he was a kid. All the songs on his self-titled album are drawn from archival or older sources, but with a personal touch. He cites Ola Belle Reed for the classic “Boat’s Up the River,” but it’s from an Art Rosenbaum field recording and Rosenbaum was another friend of his dad’s that he grew up with. The liner notes of the album, short though they are, are as dense as any academic folklore release and perhaps patterned off that. There’s an easiness to the album that belies the academic roots and points more to the family roots. Fussell is clearly having a great time coming up with his own versions of these old songs, and well he should. This is his music, after all.
Hog-Eyed Man: Hog-Eyed Man 2
Named for an Appalachian folk legend that keeps popping up in old-time songs, Hog-Eyed Man is the duo of young fiddler Jason Cade and mandolin/dulcimer player Rob McMaken. Hog-Eyed Man 2 is their second volume of raw, stripped-back fiddle tunes, culled from deeply obscure sources and brought into the light with a kind of post-modern minimalism that still manages to be appropriate to the tradition. It help that Cade grew up next to the great fiddler, folklorist, and tune catcher Bruce Greene in North Carolina. Like Greene, Cade has a taste for the arcane, pulling up tunes that are strange, eerie, and crooked. McMaken is a great old-time mandolin player and plays in a style which is quite different from bluegrass mandolin. No breaks, of course, since this is old-time, and the mandolin hacks out the melody at the same breakneck pace as the fiddle. Aside from the great old tunes — some of which sound otherworldly — what’s wonderful about Hog-Eyed Man 2 is that it’s moving to the traditional minimalism that’s become so important in Irish traditions. In Ireland, fiddlers like Martin Hayes and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh have dived so deep into the tradition that it’s become something else entirely, almost improvisational. When you strip the music away to the bone, you realize how much is at the core of the tradition.
Photo courtesy of whitney waller / Foter.com / CC BY-SA
Originally published at www.thebluegrasssituation.com on December 10, 2015.
