In keeping with Sam Bush’s Keynote admonition about supporting new music from a younger generation of bluegrass and acoustic musicians, we offer this video clip of Crooked Still.
It’s of them at the Lotus World Music & Arts Festival in Bloomington, IN earlier this month. They are performing an arrangement of When First Unto This Country, a song they recorded in 2008 and released as a single, though never on a CD project. The song is an old one, reportedly discovered by John and Alan Lomax on one of their song gathering expeditions, and subsequently recorded by Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, David Bromberg and many others.
The Crooked Still-folk give it their own unique twist. It’s a good’n.
On a related note, I heard yesterday from Crooked banjoist Greg Liszt about another of his projects, The Deadly Gentlemen. It’s Greg with a number of other Boston-area string crazies, performing a twisted mix of bluegrass, modern pop and white boy rap. That may sound odd, and perhaps it is, but it works on its own tems, and I find it very entertaining.
Stash Wyslouch is on guitar, Mike Barnett on fiddle, Dominick Leslie on mandolin, Sam Grisman on double bass and Liszt on banjo. All of them sing… or rap… as the case may be. Their new CD, Carry Me To Home, is completed and will be released soon.
They promise some free downloads to anyone who fans them up on Facebook.
