Bruce Molsky & Big Hoedown

CD Details

Product Description

Big Hoedown has been living and breathing old-time music for most of their lives and it shows in their ability to be true to the spirit of the past. Driven by their deep love of the music, they’ve each learned at the feet of the masters, experiencing first hand where the music came from. Yet this album is a great example of how they have made the music their own, thereby helping to keep it alive for all of us. It captures Big Hoedown in all their wild virtuosity, intricate syncopations, hypnotic rhythms and harmonious sonorities. Big Hoedown has produced a classic recording that we’ll be listening to again and again. This is the album we’ve been waiting for. –Jay Ungar & Molly Mason
This product is manufactured on demand using CD-R recordable media. Amazon.com’s standard return policy will apply.

Amazon.com

Bruce Molsky and Big Hoedown, the 1997 album from the Arlington, Virginia fiddler and his trio-mates, came out at a propitious time. Thanks to the media hoopla over Rounder’s reissue of the Alan Lomax recordings and the Smithsonian’s reissue of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, there’s much greater interest in the music of the pre-World War II rural South than in decades. Molsky grew up in New York City, but he got his musical education in the Southern Appalachian Mountains where he studied with such homegrown masters as Tommy Jarrell. Two decades later, Molsky became one of the genre’s veterans, and he plays these ancient Celtic-African-American tunes with the authority and patience of someone who is way past trying to impress anyone.
This old-timey music predates the bright tone and fast tempos of bluegrass as well as the sing-along melodies and rousing sentiments of ’60s folk music. This is a slower, darker music that came out of mountain communities where death was a constant threat and Saturday night a brief respite. Molsky digs his bow into his fiddle-strings as if the resulting drones and bird cries might suggest the anxiety of that threat and the yearning for that respite. The fiddler, who also sings and plays banjo, is joined by guitarist Beverly Smith and fiddler/banjo player Rafe Stefanini. Their album includes two songs from the Harry Smith Anthology–“Wagoner’s Lad” and “Train on the Island.” Songs such as “Pretty Saro” and instrumentals such as “Shove the Pig’s Foot a Little Bit Further into the Fire” are strange and powerful enough to have found a place. –Geoffrey Himes