Nora Brown and Stephanie Coleman
Lady of the Lake (EP)
Jalopy Records
28 July 2023
Banjo player and singer Nora Brown and old-time fiddle player Stephanie Coleman are no strangers, having played together since 2017 after meeting in the tight-knit old-time music community in Brooklyn, NY, where they both live. Stephanie contributed to a few tracks on Nora’s 2019 debut album Cinnamon Tree and played at the launch of Sidetrack My Engine, Nora’s second album. For last year’s Long Time To Be Gone, Nora opted to record a set of solo banjo tunes, mostly instrumental, in St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn, New York, making the most of what she called ‘the expanse of the space’ in the church to make an album that I described as “engrossing and resonant from start to finish”.
Earlier this year, Nora collaborated with mountain dulcimer player Sarah Kate Morgan on the instrumental release Live From Bristol (Bristol, Virginia), an excellent single featuring a version of the song Down in the Willow Garden and Waynesboro. She has teamed up with Stephanie again for her latest EP, Lady of the Lake. Stephanie has built a considerable reputation as a traditional fiddle player over the last two decades (she also plays banjo and sings), having recorded and toured internationally with the all-women old-time band Uncle Earl (joining around 2010 when founding members Abigail Washburn and Rayna Gellert moved on to other things), Watchhouse’s Andrew Marlin, clawhammer banjo virtuoso Adam Hurt and recorded the track Small Revelations with Aoife O’Donovan for the 2014 Link Of Chain: A Songwriters Tribute To Chris Smither album.
Lady of the Lake, the first and title track, was also released as a single last month. Stephanie described the provenance of the version of the tune on the EP as being from a field recording (available on Bandcamp) of fiddle player Parley Parsons from Galax, Virginia, which has been described as ‘a distinct and unusual version’ of the tune. Stephanie explains, however, that Paul Brown, who was involved in making the field recording, inadvertently changed the second part of it, and it is that changed version she learnt (via her friend Eric Merrill) and that she and Nora play. The first part is clearly identifiable as the Parson’s version, as Stephanie’s plaintive, almost drone-like fiddle ebbs and flows through the melody, anchored by Nora’s unhurried, aptly unadorned banjo. Halfway through, the banjo initiates a delicious shift in tempo to much more a dance tune that is at moments hardly recognisable as the same tune at all. The playing is thoroughly entrancing.
The 4-track EP has two tunes and two songs. For the first song, You’ve Been Gone So Long, Nora returns to the same source that provided the first two tracks on her last album – a significant influence for her. She shared the background:
“I learned this Virgil Anderson tune off his album On the Tennessee Line. I’ve been listening to this album since I started playing banjo and slowly have been chipping away at my favourite tracks on it. Virgil’s unique “chording” style of playing banjo is something that really stands out in his playing – Virgil attributes this to learning from Cuge and Cooney Bertram, old-time and blues musicians in his region. This tune is very representative of that quality in his playing with lots of strong chords strung into the melody.”
The style of playing that Nora describes and sticks to for the version here (which she also sings) gives the tune substantial weight, Stephanie’s fiddle (Anderson’s version was banjo and vocal) contributing extra lift and drive to the song.
The next tune is the somewhat eerie Twin Sisters. It has a sense of menace and foreboding, in a sense, a classic Appalachian tune – atmospheric and a little melancholic. It is a close relative of the widely recorded Irish traditional hornpipe, The Boys of Bluehill (many Appalachian tunes can be traced to Irish or Scottish tunes).
In the 1960s, young musicians and musicologists visited rural Kentucky, Virginia and North Carolina to find and record old-time musicians. Amongst those musicians from whom music was collected was brothers Fulton (fiddle) and Sidna (banjo) Myers of Five Forks, Virginia. In 1962 Peter Hoover, a 22-year-old student, recorded the brothers (a collection of 25 tunes can be found on Bandcamp), including two versions of Twin Sisters, one with just banjo.
In 1965 New Lost City Ramblers member and, much later, associate music producer on Cold Mountain, John Cohen, travelled to Virginia and North Carolina to collect ballads and banjo tunes, starting with a recording of two tunes, one Twin Sisters, by Sidna Myers (Cohen had previously collected tunes and songs in Kentucky – released as Mountain Music of Kentucky – and made a film about Roscoe Holcomb, a banjo player he had recorded there). Nora and Stephanie subtly capture the mysterious, timeless essence of the tune; it is a gorgeous rendition, with exceptional depth in how the sound of the banjo and fiddle have been recorded.
Rabbit holes abound with these old songs and tunes, and the final track, a version of the song Copper Kettle is no exception. The song celebrates moonshining during the prohibition era in the United States (1920-1933) and refers to the Whiskey Rebellion at the end of the 18th century, a protest at a tax imposed by the fledgling Federal government. The song has been covered by many and featured on Joan Baez’s In Concert, recorded in 1962, and Bob Dylan’s 1970 Self Portrait (also listen to the version without overdubs on the Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait).
In my unequivocal view, you won’t hear a better version than the one Nora and Stephanie have recorded here. Moonshining during prohibition was rife in the Appalachians, so it is maybe not entirely surprising that some of the current finest exponents of music from that area have made a version of the song which rings particularly true. They slow it down, Nora’s archtop acoustic guitar scaffolding the vocal and mournful fiddle, and the singing – partly in unison, with a little deft harmonising – is exquisite. In September last year, Nora performed Copper Kettle at the Lincoln Center, New York, as part of Voices of a People’s History of the United States: Celebrating the Centenary of Howard Zinn (Zinn was a radical U.S. historian).
There is a shrewd exuberance in the way Nora and Stephanie play together on this EP, taking turns to lead and leaving plenty of space for each other to shine. They play with consistent flair and an audible mastery of their instruments. The production by Peter K. Siegel, who has also produced albums by Doc Watson and Gaither Carlton, Joseph Spence, Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard, is outstanding – there is a lovely analogue-like warmth and resonance on each track. Lady of the Lake leaves you wanting more.
Lasy of the Lake is out on Friday, July 28.
More info: https://www.jalopyrecords.org/ and https://www.norabrownmusic.com/