Foghorn Stringband – Rock Island Grange
Self Released – 30 November 2018 (European Release)
Comprising Sammy Lind on fiddle, Caleb Klauder on mandolin, Reeb Willms on guitar and Nadine Landry on bass, the old-time four-piece string band Foghorn Stringband are based in Portland Oregon, but variously hail from Washington, Quebec and Minneapolis. Rock Island Grange, their ninth album, is named for and recorded at the Orcas Grange, a historic building on Orcas Island where Klauder grew up.
A 19-track collection of traditional bluegrass/mountain music songs and tunes, it opens in fine style with a razor-slashing psychopath, murder, marital disloyalty, police brutality, dismemberment and…a train in the fiddle flurrying form of Reuben’s Train (watch the live Deep End Session below), proceeding to the first of the instrumentals, a medley of Rose In The Mountain/Tennessee Girls that ably demonstrates why the quartet is regarded as among the very best exponents of their chosen genre.
Elsewhere, other equally rousing instrumentals line up to include fiddle tune Grigsby’s Hornpipe, Elly’s Got The Bellyache, Ridin’ In An Old Model T, originally recorded in 1937 by Alabama’s The Dixie Ramblers, dancefloor magnet album closer The Rose Waltz by Nebraska fiddler Bob Walters, Train On The Island, learned from Lousiana musician Dirk Powell, and, the only original number, the Klauder-penned quickstepping Going Home.
The songs are drawn from an equally wide repertoire, the Carter Family the source of the hillbilly gospel Lonesome Valley, Give Me The Roses and Lonesome Homesick Blues while, almost inevitably, the legendary Hazel Dickens is represented, here by the little covered mid-tempo waltzer Only The Lonely while love song The Violet and the Rose stems from Patsy and Scotty East, sometimes members of the Pine Ridge Boys.
Equally recognisable will be Banks of Old Tennessee/Kennesaw Mountain Rag, the latter tune a variation on Cumberland Gap, classic Lousiana two-step Mon Vieux Wagon and murder ballad Rose Connolly, albeit better known as Down in the Willow Garden, but while the melodies may be familiar, there’s some fairly obscure material here too. Pretty Fair Miss Out In The Garden is a happy ending variation of the familiar tale of a sailor going to sea and returning to his true love in disguise to test her faithfulness while Ain’t Got Time is a gospel song learned by Wllms from old-time songstress Laurel Bliss.
Highly energetic and hugely enjoyable, even if you’re not a devotee of old-time American stringband music, this is hard to resist.