Black Twig Pickers: Jack Rose & the Black Twig Pickers
From Clinch Mountain to Blacksburg
The late November view from A.P. and Sara's headstones is as mythic as you'd expect. Resting in a cemetery behind the family's longtime church, Mount Vernon United Methodist, itself at the foot of Clinch Mountain, the Carters overlook Virginia State Secondary 614, the primary road cutting through Poor Valley. To the south rise mountain peaks drenched in mist, stray cloud circling like formless ghosts. Trees are bare save for a few stubborn patches of deep rust. In the woods beyond the church lurks a procession of gutted shacks and decayed cabins.
Before trekking up this hill I was down the road mile or two, touring the Carter Fold, an immaculate stained-wood performance space and shrine dedicated to the Carter Family and the string-band tradition they helped immortalize. The Fold is all about the present bowing before the past, which is kind of what I'm doing on this road trip: wandering Appalachia and paying my respects to its musical heritage before driving a few hours north to Blacksburg to catch Jack Rose and the Black Twig Pickers, two of my modern faves.
These guys have played a handful shows as a single unit, but I've yet to see them, and all I've heard from this burgeoning union is a CD-R of six tracks to appear on an album in 2009, plus a 7-inch released last year on the Great Pop Supplement imprint. Not a lot of material, but it has me thinking the collaboration might be exceptional.
Rose and the Twigs' Mike Gangloff spent a good chunk of the 1990s several hours east, in Richmond, where they explored psychedelic drones in the underground band Pelt. The last eight years, however, the two have undergone radical transformations while traveling separate paths. Relocating to Philadelphia, Rose now plays was commonly referred to as progressive folk guitar, a maverick blend of rural blues, ragtime, some Indian classical, just that anything else he can weave into his instrument compositions. Gangloff, meanwhile, morphed into a banjo player and fiddler obsessed with old-time music. The Black Twig Pickers (also featuring guitarist Isak Howell and washboard player Nathan Bowles) have become one of Appalachia's best young bands. In addition to releasing five albums -- the newest conveniently always better than the last -- the trio is a regular on Southwest Virginia's festival/jamboree circuit.
When I think about where Rose and his pals and Twigs have been and where they're headed, it blows my mind. Apart from former Bad Livers banjoist Ralph White, they're the only contemporary musicians I know of who've explored both American folk and avante-garde -- and sound as if they're card-carrying members of both.
A necessary detour
Jack Rose and the Black Twig Pickers are anomalies in the modern era. To understand why, we need to survey the times. About a month before this trip I wrote an acid little piece for Seattle Weekly titled "Indie Rockers Are Planned Americana, They're Playing Dress-Up." It's me taking on all the shaggy hippies and underground freakers out there dabbling in Appalachian folk, country music, and roots rock. America in case you haven't noticed, has been inundated with their kind of the last several years.
I'm going to grossly overgeneralize here and say that most of these bearded dilettantes fall into one of two categories: they're either suburbanites weaned on alternative pop who now yearn for a sense of "roots" based in large part on the rustic mythology surrounding The Band/Basement Tapes, or they're post-hard-core free-improv types who now yearn for sense of "roots" based in large part on the rustic mythology surrounding the Anthology of American Folk Music.
Take Dr. Dog for example: Track down the July 2008 issue of *Relix* and how this Philly group loves to dress all 19th-century railroad, as if they'd been born in the rolling hills around Big Pink. Yet their sound is way more Brit-pop and country rock; they would have been the ideal house band at the Elton John's Honky Chateau.
Then there's Daniel Higgs of Lungfish. His idea of American folk music entails playing the crazy shaman card. He beats his banjo and hand anti-rhythmic pulp while coughing up ancient hermetic text. Fans think he's deep specifically because he's not concerned with songwriting or musicianship; he's too primitive, to "real" for that stuff.
These two obviously run in different circles (blogosphere pop versus outsider/free folk), but both embody the number-one problem I have with most indie and underground musicians currently interested in folk music: they never practice full immersion. They're content to raid country, blues, hillbilly, etc., for a gunnysack of vintage instruments, cool sounds, and fashion tips. This is probably their intent, of course, but to me the work that emerges is deeply unsatisfying.
My favorite mergers/fusions/marriages, call them what you will, featured musicians who' ve explored folk music just as thoroughly as they have rock. *American Beauty* and *Workingman's Dead* could only be made because Jerry Garcia was a serious student of bluegrass and jug band music. The same is true of Muleskinner's lone LP from 1973. Its mixture of bluegrass and hard-rock heft works in large part because the band (Peter Rowan, Clarence White, David Grossman, Richard Greene, and Bill Keith) spent years learning their trade with the likes of Bill Monroe, the Kentucky Colonels, Red Allen, and the Even Dozen Jug Band. They were mostly hippie types who loved breaking rules -- but they knew those rules had to be learned first. Genres like bluegrass and old-time are comparable to an esoteric practice or spiritual discipline. Their powers can't be harnessed through detached experimentation; first you have to submit yourself to the demands of the craft.
The Cellar
Those who live in Appalachia often obsess over the subtle changes the country undergoes from county to county, state to state. I live in Asheville, North Carolina, where the vertical and horizontal rarely find a happy compromise. Things are different up here. Rolling hills carpeted in sharp green pasture land together deep narrow valleys and their accompanying ridges. The descent into Blacksburg from U.S. Route 460 is particularly awesome. Massive cloud shadows creep along the bulging earth. But the nightfall comes, and within those mountain wins, making it as good a time as any to be inside, drinking and listening to music
The Cellar is a two-story tavern across from Virginia Tech's sprawling campus. Tonight's show is free, believe it or not (Rose's obsessive fanbase most certainly won't). In fact, few of the patrons are here to see Rose and the Twigs, who are basically providing "live entertainment" for a roomful of garrulous college kids. That's fine with them. This gig is largely an excuse to rehearse and knock back a beer or four. Tomorrow they'll head over to Gangloff's toolshed studio in Ironto to record more tracks for a debut full-length tentatively titled Black/Jack.
The idea of a collaboration grew out of sessions for Rose's *Dr. Ragtime and His Pals* LP, recorded in 2007. Wanting to flesh out the ragtime/Piedmont blues hybrid he'd first introduced on his previous album, the guitarist rang up his former Pelt cohort, who brought along Bowles. The trio worked so well together they soon added Howell on guitar and harmonica. "One great aspect of working with Jack is that it frees Isak to play much more harp," says Gangloff while we're gathered around a couple pitchers of beer. "I love listening to him play. The [upcoming] record will be Isak's harp record as much as anything else."
Rose, whose blunt honesty stands at odds with his graceful and introspective finger picking, expands on these comments. "I think we're doing something that's not heard in the Twigs' local scene or in the contemporary underground scene," he adds. "We're not dabbling with folk forms trying to make them sound contemporary or psychedelic. We can actually play our instruments without the 'free folk' label, which I think lots of other musicians use to cover up their lack of musical skill. Plus, we swing like a motherfucker."
After Rose and the Twigs each play a set of their own, they come together and tear into some killer old-time, including a wonderfully rickety version of "Hand Me Down My Walking Cane." And now it's time to refine those comparisons I made to Muleskinner and the Grateful Dead. My fundamental point still holds true, but this music is of a far older vintage, more akin to the great fusions of the 1920s -- say, banjoist Charlie Poole adding a dash of ragtime to his hillbilly.
"Jack/Black music is on the traditional side of things," Gangloff tells me. "But you can hear where we've been."
Permeating every song is an understanding of how music can be constructed and shaped. This knowledge, a welcomed byproduct of all those years spent exploring the actual physics of sound, is something these four would never have had access to if they'd grown up playing only traditional folk. As a result, their tunes feel far more textural and three-dimensional than those of your average Appalachian string band. Consideration is given to every note.
As for the grooves, they're well-oiled but never sloppy or needlessly rambunctious. Earlier in the evening, Gangloff seemed almost nerdy, but he undergoes a transformation when he's making music. His back hunched, a pair of glasses teetering on the tip of his nose, he plucks the banjo or saws the fiddle while stomping his feet and croaking like a true mountain musician. Bowles, meanwhile, is a percussive monster on the washboard, all four limbs snaking about like chrome-plated rattlers. Howell, clean-cut like Gangloff, fills out the middle with a sturdy strum. He's a killer rhythm player and in many ways serves as the group's anchor: head down and head for home. Rose takes up the rear, buttressing the doglegs with a combination of subtle licks and thorny details. His fingers never stop moving in and out of those strings.
"Innovation is cool," he'd said earlier, just after finishing his solo set. "But you have to be humble about it.One of the things that's unique about me and the Twigs is, you don't hear a lot of finger picking in old-time bands. My favorite pre-war music is jug-band music, so playing with these guys gives me a chance to play some of my favorite classic blues riffs that I don't get to play solo too often."
To see this guy shift into cog-in-the-machine mode takes some getting used to. For me, as well as a lot of fans, he is *the* Jack Rose, one of the modern era's great soloists. When he plays it's just him and his guitar -- which is how he likes it for the most part. A hardnosed individualist, he's outspoken, direct, and always up for a debate.
These qualities bleed into his views on Appalachian folk. Although Rose is an astute student and voracious consumer, he's a sharp critic of the music, with very little use for the culture and history surrounding it. "I love old-time, but I just want to hear the innovators, so it doesn't seem as traditional to me," explains Rose, as he puts away one of his prized possessions, a Weissenborn lap steel. "You have a vision of what you want to create, but you're just using traditional sources."
As Rose talks I think back to the Carter fold and its altar-like stage. Musicans play (worship?) with their backs to a wall that's been transformed into a jigsaw of memorabilia: framed portraits, legendary instruments, and giant murals of A.P., Sara, and Mother Maybelle. For Gangloff and company it would be an honor to play on such hallowed ground -- this is their heritage. Rose, on the other hand, continues to identify with the underground; he's too much of an iconoclast and loner for such a scene. And it's more than the genuflection that would turn him off.
"Mike listens to a lot of contemporary stuff, and he plays them for me," he says. "But honestly, I'd rather hear him play. Of course, I'm prejudiced, but I think Mike is a bad ass, and I don't need to hear these other new dudes."
Floyd
What exactly does Rose hear in the Twigs that he doesn't in their peers? Well, it's obvious he's attracted to the way they innovate within a traditional framework. Their latest album, 2008's *Hobo Handshake*, easily passes the old-time scene's litmus test for authenticity. But unlike a lot of modern folk music from Appalachia, the record isn't awash in reverence or overly insular; tracks like "Last Kind Word Blues," "Glory in the Meeting House," "Rattletrap," and the seven-minute "Train 45" are jagged and impolite. I believe this intensity dervies primarly from the Twigs' belief that old-time isn't some delicate artifact in need of a museum's protective bosom. Nor do the Twigs subscribe to folk revivalism or the faithful recreation of old 78s. Instead, they've actually explored the backroads culture of southwest Virginia, soaking up knowledge from "real deal" country musicians like Richard Bowman, Harold Hausenfluck, and Coolidge Winesett, all of them fiddlers.
Much of this firsthand contact came courtesy of the Twigs' former fiddle man, Ralph Berrier Jr., whose family's roots run deep in the regional scene. "I fell in love with this part of the country," says Gangloff, acknowledging Berrier's pivotal contributions. "Old-time is a living creature here."
Nowhere is this more apparent than at the Floyd Country Store. Two weeks after the gig at the Cellar I head up to Floyd, a happening little burg 40 minutes south of Blacksburg, not far from the Blue Ridge Parkway. About once a month, the Black Twigs play the Friday Night Jamoboree, one of Appalachia's most popular hubs for old-time and bluegrass. The Country Store is a nostalgic clapboard box packed with mountain crafts, books, CDs, candy bursting from antique barrels, and local souvenirs. There's even an ice-cream parlour. The performance space takes up the back half of the store, the backdrop of which, a faux-country storefront, resembles those seen in classic photos of the Monroe Brothers when they played barn dances in the '30s.
Over the next hour or so, the place fills up with a motley assortment of regulars (locals, along with oddball transplants who've turned into locals) and curious tourists from Southern hubs like Richmond, Atlanta and Charleston. There's not a single underground head or indie hipster to be found. Likewise, the Twigs are here neither to make "Jack/Black music" nor to get all "crooked" (more of a festival/jam circle thing). They're here to make folks get up and move -- and they're good at it, even if it's something the band had to learn. "At first we didn't get invited back for two years, because we insisted on playing the slow stuff," admits Gangloff while the Twigs warm up in a green room on the second floor. "But it's not what people want there."
A smattering of couples dance in a more conventional style, but it's the cloggers, both young and old, who dominate the floor. One pair is straight out of a 1940s honky tonk; others look more NASCAR. When the Twigs, rocking up and down like three steel pistons, lock into a particularly tight groove, the crowd hurls whoops and hollers toward the stage.
The Country Store scene is a seriously good time. It also reveals the depth of experience the Twigs bring to their collaboration with Rose. I wish I could drag all them indie folkie types here to see what it takes to truly get inside a style of music. Going far beyond genre pilfering, these guys embraced an entire culture in search of their sound. This is the stuff great fusions and mergers are made of. Near the end of the Twigs' set, the dude next to me taps his friend on the shoulder and nails exactly what I am thinking. "The fiddle player is this guy Mike Gangloff," he says in disbelief. "I first met him in Richmond in the 1980s. He used to have super long hair and play in hardcore bands, man!"
