Allison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves: Allison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves

Allison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves – S/T

Free Dirt – 22 March 2019

Although not native to the culture or the region, both steeped in old-time American folk music, renowned clawhammer banjo player Allison de Groot joins forces with fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves for a debut album that draws on material sourced from the Mississippi, Missouri, the Arkansas Ozarks and Appalachian string band music.

A predominantly traditional cocktail of songs and instrumentals, it kicks off with the latter, the two instruments battling it out on Eighth of January, a tune popularised in the early 40s by African American Nashville street performers Nathan Frazier and Frank Patterson.

Hargreaves takes the lead vocals for another sprightly stomping trad number, I Don’t Want to Get Married, the last two verses being additions by Edna Poplin from 60s South Carolina outfit The Poplin Family, returning to instrumentals with Hargreaves showcasing on Farewell Whiskey, a traditional tune learned from the work of 30s avant-garde Mississippi fiddler John Hatcher.

Indeed, the bulk of the album is instrumental. Dry is a sawing fiddle tune written but previously unrecorded by Judy Hyman, the film composer and a founding member of The Horse Flies while, conversely Lonesome Blues is an old rustic waltzing tune learned from the playing of Will Gilmer, a highly influential fiddler from 20s Mississippi.

The drivingly urgent Wabash Blues comes from old-time banjo picker Hobart Smith whose recordings form part of the In Sacred Trust: The 1963 Fleming Brown Tapes collections on Smithsonian Folkways, while, another busy fiddle tune, Melinda is taken from the repertoire of acclaimed and influential Missouri fiddler Lyman Enloe.

Two familiar titles will be Buffalo Gals and Cuckoo’s Nest, although the latter isn’t the bawdy ballad that forms a trad folk circuit staple, but rather a hornpipe/reel for Ireland that also figures in the English Morris repertoire. The former, taken at a rapid banjo picking lick, is again better known in a vocal incarnation, this version being a traditional Appalachian bluegrass tune the pair learnt from a 1991 live recording by Matokie Slaughter (1919-1999) and Alice Gerrard.

Gerrard also contributes to the album with, Hargreaves on vocals, the duo’s recording of Beaufort County Jail, a song she wrote about Joan Little, a 20-year-old Black woman who, in 1974 in Washington, North Carolina, killed, in self-defence, a 62-year-old white male jail guard who was assaulting her. She was charged with first-degree murder but was finally acquitted, the first woman to be exonerated for self-defence against sexual assault.

There are two other vocal numbers. A typically tragic tale of love cut short by death, though here it’s the woman who drowns leaving the man to die of a broken heart, featuring banjo only, Willie Moore was learnt from the 1927 recording by Dick Burnett and Leonard Rutherford. Featuring twin banjos, the other is Who Wouldn’t Be Lonely, a 1938 song of rejected affections written by William Bolick who, along with brother Earl, formed the 30s Southern country duo The Blue Sky Boys. In the liner notes they add “When the Bolick brothers sang ‘Who wouldn’t be lonely, who wouldn’t be blue, when the one you care for, don’t care for you,’ they probably weren’t thinking about queer love, but you never know. We may have played with the pronouns a little on this one.”

The album ends in fine old-time form with one last fiddle and banjo instrumental, Green Valley Waltz, a tune that traces back to the 30s and Tennessee’s Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith, the girls learning it from the playing of Violet Brumley Hensley, a musician and fiddle maker known as the Stradivarius of the Ozarks, born in 1916 and, at time of writing, still going strong.

The duo dedicate the album to all the musicians who came before them and especially “those who never received the credit they deserved: the Indigenous, Black, Queer and female musicians who weren’t always visible but kept, and still keep the music moving forward. ” You can add their name to the roll of honour.