Dry Branch Fire Squad - Hand Hewn
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Artist: Dry Branch Fire SquadEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2009-09-22
Music Label: Rounder
Soundtracks:
- Angelina Baker
- I Saw A Man At The Close Of Day
- I Can Go To Them
- Nazeer, Nazeer (Nazeer, Nazeer)
- Atlanta Is Burning
- Willye Brennan
- While Roving On Last Winter's Night
- Sailor's Return
- Black Lung
- The Cuckoo Is A Pretty Bird
- Two Coats
- Midnight, The Unconquered Outlaw
- I'll Live Again
- Papa's Billy Goat
- Lonesome Road Blues
Free Music Notes for Hand Hewn
Free Music Review: simply put, about as good as it gets
Hit: 5 Stars
The Dry Branch Fire Squad has been so good for so long that its relative obscurity is both a shame and a mystery. Or maybe it's because the band resists neat categorization. Though it plays the bluegrass circuit, the Squad is not exactly a bluegrass band. Its roots go deep into older folk traditions, and the usual bluegrass ensemble and the usual Scruggs-style banjo picking are employed only when they make sense. Otherwise, instrumentation may be as rudimentary as a single old-time banjo (as on band member Suzanne Thomas's reinvention of Clarence Ashley's version of "The Cuckoo Is a Pretty Bird") or as off-the-wall archaic as hambone, feet, and fiddle (Ron Thomason's take on the traditional "Papa's Billy Goat"). Sometimes it's just guitar and bass (the nearly forgotten race-horse folk song "Midnight, the Unconquered Outlaw"), or unaccompanied vocal duet (Thomason and Hazel Dickens on Dickens's wrenching "Black Lung"). And if another ostensible bluegrass band has ever recorded the highwayman ballad "Willye Brennan" (aka "Brennan on the Moor"), I have never heard it. Happily, the band eschews the standard Irish-pub version and finds a fascinating, longer variant, performing it in a sort of updated mountain string-band setting. And did I mention the Squad's ragged-but-right harmony singing, used to particularly heart-breaking effect on the Appalachian lament "While Roving on Last Winter's Night"? I suppose that if you want to characterize what's going on here, you could say it's old-time music informed by bluegrass, but then I guess the opposite is just as true. Whatever it is, it is the real deal, the true heart, the pure voice. Deceptively simple, lovingly executed, the music of the Dry Branch Fire Squad is as good as authentic American music gets.
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