folk holidays

AMERICANA SYMPHONY AS PURE BANJO SPLENDOUR

A SINGER WITH A BANJO AND PERSONALLY TUNED AMERICANA-STYLE SONGS

A banjo-playing singer-songwriter who says she can't remember a time in her life when she didn't need music. Kelly Hunt considers her albums - the first, Even The Sparrow, was released in 2019 - to be chapter books of song, which she unsparingly assembles into exquisiteness, proving that simplicity is the greatest strength. It's no surprise, then, that she ranks as one of the strongest female writers of the lush Americana genre today.

Perhaps it's because the daughter of an opera singer and a jazz saxophonist arrived at it alone on her journey from her native Memphis to her current home in New Orleans. Through piano playing, singing in church, Joni Mitchell songs, the blues and studying art. Then one day she walked into an instrument store, and without looking for a particular one, she was drawn to a tenor banjo belonging to one Ira Tamm, who played it in a dog and pony show in the 1920s. She fiddled with the strings, thought the sound was unlike anything she had heard before, and bought the banjo. "I'm self-taught, and from the beginning I just let the rhythm of the songs guide me and tried to combine the picking styles of old-time music with my own improvisation," Kelly Hunt explained how she came to the banjo and thus the future heartbeat of her songs, in which she most enjoys telling stories. Both personal and historical, like the one about Evangeline, a girl wandering from Acadia to Louisiana in the days of the Grand Dérangement to follow her boyfriend.

And if you doubt Kelly Hunt's art, try asking why Dirk Powel should produce her album. Yes, that Dirk Powel, the instrumental star of Appalachian music, turning albums by Loretta Lynn, Joan Baez or Rhiannon Giddens into gems and choosing very carefully who to put his hand in the fire for. He and Kelly Hunt met in Arkansas' Petit Jean National Park in the middle of the Ozark Mountains, entered Rock House Cave, famous for its ancient Indian paintings, and Dirk Powell, cell phone in hand, asked Kelly to sing something for him. So she launched into Over the Mountain, which she'd had in her head for a long time. In an a cappella version, accompanied only by cicadas, it closes her new album Ozark Symphony described as "pure banjo splendor."

On the Folk Holidays, the singing banjoist will be accompanied by fiddler Julie Bates with mandolinist and guitarist Andrew Morris, otherwise a member of the excellent bluegrass group The Matchsellers.