The prolific Joseph Allred has been cropping up a fair bit in our KLOF Mixtape series of late, most recently on KLOF 17 on which I featured a track from Lute Music, released last year alongside a slew of equally stunning and impressive releases.
This year, he has already released two new albums, one being a musical setting for two haiku he wrote (Thầy) and Regeneration of Time which sees him incorporate guitars, piano, mandolin, banjos, zither, jaw harp, clarinet, mountain dulcimer, fiddle, turntable and field recordings.
His forthcoming release, The Rambles and Rags of Shiloh, is out on August 5th 2022 on Worried Songs.
The Shiloh of the title is not the biblical city, but rather a namesake community in rural Overton County, Tennessee, situated in the Upper Cumberland region of the Appalachian Plateau near the Tennessee/Kentucky border. It isn’t a town, but a community made up of a church, two cemeteries, a smattering of houses, some farmland surrounded by forested hills, and a mostly gravel road that is too narrow in many stretches for two cars to pass each other. The West Fork of the Obey River tumbles through the area at a fairly leisurely pace, and Joseph’s father, who was born in the adjacent and slightly easier to access community of Allred, always called Shiloh Road “the River Road” since the road and the river often unfurl through the valley side by side.
The instrumental pieces for guitars and banjo on the album at hand mostly depict images and events, both real and imagined, that take place in Shiloh and the broader river valley it’s situated in.
“I won’t go into the details of the inspiration for each tune here,” Allred comments, “but I will say that Shiloh is a place where the distinction between past and present isn’t always clearly defined. It’s a kind of “mandorla,” a place where the spheres of past and present, dead and living, immanent and transcendent, overlap. It’s also a place that has attracted some odd characters over the years, or just people who are weary and trying to find refuge.”
“Though I grew up in a small town about 25 miles away from Shiloh and have lived in Boston since 2016, my dad’s side of the family has been in the area for over 200 years, and that valley feels a lot like the place I’ll be buried when I die.”
Here he is performing Dance of the Fair Folk, the second single from The Rambles and Rags of Shiloh.
“Each time I’ve seen Joseph Allred play a concert, I’ve choked up. Whether working in improvisation or composition, for harmonium, stringed instruments or voice, their music reveals a deep knowledge of diverse musical idioms secular and religious, with the sort of quiet force that comes from the acquisition of this knowledge, and their performances are striking and brave, simultaneously unadorned and rich as to suggest collaborations with realms beyond our own: like Basho or Rose, it’s uncompromising; like sacred musics, stately; like the music of so many American masters, it plows ahead on its terms and gives and gives.” – Eli Winter
Housed in a gatefold sleeve courtesy of the glorious folk art of Jonny Brokenbrow.
Release date: Friday 29th July
The Rambles and Rags of Shiloh is available to pre-order now via Bandcamp: https://worriedsongs.bandcamp.com/album/the-rambles-rags-of-shiloh