Uncle Earl Archives - Page 2 of 3

The Banjo in Beijing

CBS recently ran a short piece on Abigail Washburn and her banjo. What makes Abigail newsworthy is the fact that she’s playing, and singing, American music in China.

The video shows footage of her performing at the Beijing Jazz Festival, and in the studio. There is even a short segment of her singing the bluegrass tune “Winter’s Come And Gone” in Chinese.

During the course of the interview segments, Washburn explains how she became interested in the banjo.

It was actually spending all this time living in China and feeling awkward in a different country that led me to look back to my own roots and discover what it was about my country that made me feel like I belonged. And that’s when I found the banjo.

I feel like the attraction for me is that it really leads me back home… And it makes home clearly greater than anything one could possibly put into words.

Washburn plays old-time style clawhammer banjo, not Scruggs style three-finger banjo. She performs with the all girl, old-time band, Uncle Earl, as well as engagements as a solo artist.

The clip is only two and half minutes long, though you will have to sit through an advertisement before getting to the content.

Uncle Earl video online

The new music video from Uncle Earl can be viewed online, at www.stereogum.com. The video is for the tune, Streak o’ Lean, Streak o’ Fat from their current CD, Waterloo, Tennessee.

It is a comical and quirky take on the tune, with the g’earls finding their dinner at a Chinese restaurant interrupted by a West Side Story-like step battle between kung fu fighters and step and clog dancers – complete with classic fight scene audio clichés from the Bruce Lee genre.

Throughout the set-to, the ladies play an old time tune, which has no apparent effect on the combatants. Fiddler Casey Driessen and Waterloo producer John Paul Jones have cameo appearances.

Watch the full video at stereogum.com.

2007 Americana Award nominees announced

The Americana Music Association has announced the nominees for their 2007 Honors and Awards, with the winners to be announced on November 1 during their 6th Annual Americana Music Association’s Honors and Awards Show in Nashville.

Several of the nominees will be familiar to readers of Bluegrass Today, including Sam Bush for Instrumentalist, Uncle Earl for New and Emerging Artist, and both The Duhks and Old Crow Medicine Show for Group/Duo.

You can see the complete list of 2007 AMA nominees on their official web site, where you can also find details about the Americana Music Conference, October 31 through November 3, 2007.

Bonnaroo fest streaming video at AT&T blueroom

The AT&T blueroom is offering a live video stream from the Bonnaroo festival this weekend (6/15/17) online. You can see the performance schedule they will carry on the Bonnaroo site.

This isn’t a bluegrass event by any stretch, but a number of acts are slated to appear who may be of interest to our readers.

Uncle Earl kicks things off on Friday afternoon at 1:30 p.m. (EDT) with a show from Gillian Welch later this evening. Saturday has Old Crow Medicine Show and String Cheese Incident.

Catch the stream at www.blueroom.att.com.

Uncle Earl at Bonnaroo

We’ve just learned that bluegrass/old-time band Uncle Earl will be performing at the 2007 Bonnaroo music festival. The festival takes place mid June in Manchester, TN and has become a large and very popular festival in the last few years.

Bonnaroo primarily books rock, alternative (to what?), and jamband acts. Occasionally bluegrass or old-time will be represented by one or two bands during the four days. I’m sure it’s quite an honor for the girls of Uncle Earl to be on the ticket this year.

Other bluegrass/old-time artists on the bill for this year include The String Cheese Incident, Old Crow Medicine Show, and the venerable Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys.

Tickets can be purchased online at bonnaroo.com.

Weekend print news update

We found a number of feature pieces on bluegrass/acoustic artists in various print publications this past few days.

Friday’s Knoxville News Sentinel ran an interview with Abby Washburn of Uncle Earl. She talked about their upcoming CD, Waterloo, Tennessee, and having it produced by John Paul Jones, former bass player with Led Zeppelin. The discussion also turned to the notion of performing with an all-female string band.

“Everybody has a different perception of what it means to be an all-female band,” says Washburn. “Sometimes it works in our favor. And sometimes bluegrass festivals will hire us, it seems like, as a way to fill a quota.”

However, Washburn says that women, especially, seem to appreciate the group.

“I think we make it more accessible to them ‚Äî especially since we haven’t all been playing this music since we were 4 years old,” she says.

Read the whole piece on the News Sentinel site.

Sunday’s edition of The Tennessean, Nashville’s hometown paper, had a piece on The Grascals’ recent appearance with Dierks Bentley on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Staff writer Peter Cooper accompanied the band to Los Angeles for the show, and recounts their day at the CBS studio. He also spoke with Ferguson about his appreciation for American country music, and his desire to include it in The Late Late Show programming.

“I got here at this show two years ago and said, ‘We need to send a message to the country community that this is a country-friendly show,'” he said. “When I was a kid in Scotland, we heard a lot of country music. It was Johnny Cash ‚Äî forever ‚Äî and then there was Hank Williams. The first Hank Williams. Country music is popular in Glasgow, Scotland. These are working-class, drinking people.”

You can read the lengthy piece online at The Tennessean site.

This morning’s edition of the Fredericksburg, VA Free Lance-Star has a feature on tomorrow’s release of Slidin’ Home by John Starling & Carolina Star. Since Fredericksburg can lay claim to Starling as a former resident, the article focuses on the fact that Starling left bluegrass to dedicate himself to medical practice, but is now back after his retirement.

Thirty years ago, the Seldom Scene bluegrass band founding member quit the cult-favorite-group-to-be to focus on ears, noses and throats in a Fredericksburg medical practice.

Now he’s retired from medicine–concentrating exclusively on ears.

Read this one online as well.

From Led Zep to The g’Earls

When we posted last week that audio samples from the upcoming Uncle Earl CD, Waterloo, Tennessee, were up on the Rounder site, we also mentioned that the new project had been produced by John Paul Jones, former bass player and keyboard man with ’70s mega-group Led Zeppelin.

Rounder has posted an interview with Jones on their site, where he talks about his own discovery of American bluegrass, how he first met Uncle Earl at Merlefest, and how he approached the production for the new CD.

“I met some friends in New York who gave me a Dillards album Backporch Bluegrass and was much taken by the energy and drive of the music. The harmonies, too, reminded me of all the Everly Brothers records I used to sing along to in my teenage years. Latterly I came across Alison Krauss and Union Station on British radio, which re-awakened my interest. I then caught concerts by Del McCoury, Nickel Creek, Tim O’Brien, and Gillian Welch and gradually sought out more and more traditional music. I have now just started on old-time fiddle!”

For some reason, Rounder has broken the brief interview into two parts, and you need to visit both here and here to read the entire thing.

Pre-orders for Waterloo, Tennessee are now available from the band, with shipping upon release on March 13, 2007.

Uncle Earl – Waterloo, Tennessee

Rounder Records has just posted audio samples from the upcoming release from Uncle Earl, Waterloo, Tennessee, their second for Rounder. It was produced by John Paul Jones (of Led Zeppelin fame) and features the same brand of raucous old time and folk music as their debut project, She Waits for Night.

The new CD is set for release on March 13, and pre-orders are being accepted on the Rounder site.

The band consists of Abigail Washburn (banjo), KC Groves (mandolin, bass and guitar), Rayna Gellert (fiddle), and Kristin Andreassen (fiddle and guitar). All four ladies contribute to the group’s vocals.

You can find the g’Earls’ (as they put it) tour schedule on the band’s web site, along with a number of live performances on video.

Peter Rowan & Tony Rice Quartet in January

Also due from Rounder in January is a new release from Peter Rowan and Tony Rice, which Brance mentioned earlier this month. Entitled Quartet, it features the group that has been performing on tour: Rice and Rowan on guitars (with Peter doing lead vocals), Bryn Davies on bass, and Sharon Gilchrist on mandolin. Both ladies share singing chores with Rowan.

The material includes some familiar songs which Rowan has recorded previously, like Dust Bowl Children, Walls Of Time, Cold Rain And Snow and Midnight Moonlight, as well as songs by such unexpected writers as Townes Van Zandt and Patti Smith, and a cut of Jimmy Martin’s Sunny Side Of The Mountain.

Rice and Rowan are surely familiar to most fans of bluegrass and acoustic music, but their Quartet cohorts perhaps less so. Gilchrist has a long pedigree in the music, having performed as a teenager with Martie and Emily Erwin of Dixie Chicks fame, and more recently as a member of the acclaimed old time band, Uncle Earl.

Davies is a relative newcomer to bluegrass, discovering it while studying jazz at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. She performed as a member of the Two High String Band before coming aboard as a member of The Tony Rice Unit and the Rice/Rowan collaboration.

The official Tony Rice web site indicates that Tony has described Quartet as “one of his favorite albums to date.” No faint praise, that.

Audio samples from all 11 tracks can be found on the Rounder web site.

January 23 is listed as the official release date for Quartet, and the group will be touring in support of the CD throughout 2007.

Banjos in China

I found an interesting piece on Xinhua online, an English language version of ChinaView.cn about a set of performances this weekend by Sparrow Quartet in Bejing. The group includes Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn on banjos, with Casey Driessen on fiddle and Ben Sollee on cello.

Washburn, who plays banjo with Uncle Earl and studied in China, has been active for several years in musical collaborations with a Sino-American synthesis. She has been touring in Asia with Sparrow Quartet off and on since late October, a tour that runs another month.

It’s worth a visit to the site to check out the show poster, with it’s 1940s vintage show poster vibe, in a mix of Chinese and English.