At Home with the Barnraisers
April 16, 2008
Interview by David Howell
MP3: intro | part 1 | part 2 | Barnraiser song Shirley Bell |
The Barnraisers are:
- Adam Forsythe, guitar and vocals
- Tiffany Reece, banjo and lead vocals
- Benji Smith, upright bass and vocals
After several emails, a couple of phone calls, and a weekend spent listening to their new self-titled demo, I had the chance to sit down with Adam Forsythe and Tiffany Reece of Wilmington’s own Barnraisers.
It was a good evening, and though you won’t hear this question in the sound-file, or read it in the transcription of our conversation below, Adam and Tiffany asked me at the conclusion of our chat why I wanted to interview them. I said, quite simply, that it was because they were more than a local band. They are, in no less certain terms, a local entity.
In the sound-file of our conversation, the listener will hear that some minor anomalies on the recording persist, and see that the copy has been edited for conciseness.
Last but not least, on the sound files attached, you will also find an extra half-hour of conversation with The Barnraisers, including conversations about country/bluegrass stereotypes, performance, attitudes and intellect in the Wilmington music scene, and, finally, two takes of a new song, “Wake up Shirley Bell.” Enjoy!
Artistically, Wilmington is a sort of a microcosm of sub-cultures. There’s “hip”, “tattoo-sheik” “heroin-sheik”, “metal”, “punk,” “pop”, “frat-pop,” “hip-hop,” you name it—all subcultures that fall under a “progressive” cultural banner. Among the various performance and visual arts, however, the artistic minorities seem to be jam-bands and folk musicians. That is, Wilmington seems a bit short on Folk Art. Do you think this is an accurate depiction of Wilmington’s music scene?
TR: I think when people think of “folk music” in Wilmington they automatically think of jam-bands. There are other bands out there that are doing something different, but I think being so close to the beach you get a lot of jam bands, you know.
AF: But they’re not straight-ahead bluegrass
TR: They aren’t. And we’re not either. I guess I prefer the “get in get out” kind of songs, you know? I don’t particularly want a six-minute long song, but I think do we have a lot of jam bands—I guess that’s the best way to describe it.
Is that who you find yourself playing out with?
TR: We get lumped into that category a lot because, first, we’re good friends with people that play that kind of music. And I think, too, that bands we’re meant fit in with all the time…are bands we open up for.
Take Larry Keel for example. I don’t think we necessarily match. I’m not sure it’s a good pairing…
What would you say is the difference?
TR: That’s a hard one…(chuckles)
AF: I think we’re more country and honky-tonk and they’re more “hippied,” or more hippies listen to them, or that genre of listener. And they do jam out. I think Larry Keel’s an awesome guitar player. I like to listen to him. But it’s not really what we do at all.
TR: Yeah, I think if people are looking for something like that…like a Larry Keel kind of band to open up a show, they’re going to be disappointed when they hear us… because our songs are two and half minutes…
AF: And the other band will have at least one extraordinary player…
TR: Yeah, we’re just two and half minute songs…
AF: And I think what we play is more like the Rose Maddux and Wanda Jackson type stuff we listen to. It’s more our speed… I mean, we just have a banjo in the band so…
TR: People assume that because there’s a banjo…
AF: It’s always bluegrass… and that’s not always the case.
So what would you say is the reason why the band has done so well here? …because you have.
TR: Well I think we’re older than most band members here, and so we practice a lot because we feel like we were having to play catch-up… and Adam is really a workhorse when it comes to the guitar. He plays everyday, hours a day… and so he has been the engine to keep us going…
AF: I think another thing too is that we didn’t start playing shows until I was 29… I think she was 27, so we’ve been audience members for the longest time. We know what we like to see in bands, and—I’m not knocking anybody—but we’ve seen a lot of bands that seem a little lazy when they get on stage and they’re not performing. I think that’s what a lot of local bands miss… the performing aspect. It’s not about just strumming a guitar and singing. But, you know, if it’s a correct venue, in a strict music venue, they’re there to entertain. And it’s just right up there with the musicianship to me.
And that’s what is so good about Tiff… she is so animated up there. She does the lead role very well… I couldn’t do it…
TR:I think too that’s me compensating for what I might lack when it comes to instrumentation, because I’ve been playing for just now four years… so I guess maybe I’m trying to distract people from what kind of banjo player I really am… (laughs)
AF: But the strong-suit is also vocals and voice.
AF/TR: (laughing) Was that answered?
Yeah that was fine… I think Wilmington often gets compared to places like Asheville and Charlotte. Do you feel like Wilmington as a community is as open to new forms of entertainment as these other NC cities? Perhaps more so even?
AF: I’ve been here since 1997, and I never performed live—I played guitar 13 years before I finally did play live. But for some reason I was always afraid to play out in Wilmington. Wilmington seems to have this fickle opinion about performance… I mean they like you for a bit and then they don’t like you. But from what I’ve seen now, it’s not really that way. I thought Wilmington would not treat us this good…I just didn’t know. But they have, and that’s been pretty surprising now. It was like “Wow! I should have been doing this five years before we did!”
TR: But I think too that everything goes in cycles. You have a scene for awhile, and it seems right now that Wilmington has a pretty strong folk/Americana thing—which is kind of a blanket-term I guess. There are lots of bands that are playing this kind of music, and seems like you’ll get a couple of bands that will play it… then all of a sudden more will pop up playing that sort of music. Or you might get a rockabilly feel for a little while where you’ll get a couple local bands, then suddenly you’ve got half a dozen bands playing rockabilly. So I think it goes in phases. But I also think Wilmington audiences can be starved for something new… So, when something new does come along they’re excited and receptive.
AF: It does have a big heavy metal scene… though I think they call it Rock n’ Roll (laughter…), and those bands have done really well.
I know that you guys (Adam particularly) come from a familial background steeped in traditional music. Few of questions on this… Tiff, you’re front and center in this group (which is the way many most likely guess should be…) what female vocalists do you model yourself after?
TR: Wanda Jackson, I really love. Rose Maddux. Those are probably the two that I listen to the most… and I’m not going to lie… the two I emulate—the way they sing and the way they growl. They don’t sound like, you know, Alison Krauss, and that kind of whispy sound. I just don’t have that kind of voice, so I really couldn’t sound pretty if I tried. But there’s something really ballsy about them, and so I kind of attach myself to that.
Where do you think “traditional music” fits into a community as artistically “progressive” as Wilmington?
TR: I don’t know… maybe I’m skeptical. But I don’t think there are many completely original artists anymore. I think they all draw from somewhere, and it almost seems like the further you go back the more original it seems—
AF: But Old Crow Medicine Show is “new,” and they play stuff from the 20s.
TR: Yeah, if you go back to the 20’s and 30’s… or, if a musician were to get up and do something like that now, they would seem like the most original thing in local music right now, I think. So the further you go back, the more edgy it seems.
AF: I think, with this type of music especially, you can go really far back. I would call what Old Crow Medicine Show does “old time.” They probably play songs as old as the 1700’s that carried all the way up to the twentieth century… these songs are from before our time…
Where in songwriting does “traditional” influence collide with contemporary subject matter?
TR: In our music or in any music?
Either, Or…
AF: I think I try simply to write about what I know, but in a way that I think is timeless as I can get it. I don’t really listen to anything new. Everything is old—Bill Monroe or Rose Maddux… old country, old bluegrass—Dexter Romweber is probably the most modern music I listen to right now… So my style does mimic their style. Tiff tries to sing like that. I try to write like that, and I think I gain a lot of ideas. But, things like love and lost love and cheating are going to be around forever, so that stuff does crop up a lot.
Do you think other folk musicians feel that same collision in their songwriting?
AF: Well, first, I think songwriting’s just hard. It’s something you have to do every single day. I write every single day just like I practice guitar every day. It’s like exercise, which you have to do to get better at, and come up with analogies and rhymes and stuff like that… and, I don’t know… To come up with any kind of subject matter that hasn’t already been done, or to try to put a different spin on it, or do it a better way, or just a different way… that’s really rough. So songs aren’t just coming out every week or nothing, but they’ll go in spurts.
TR: He’ll write some real crappy ones… (chuckles…) I mean, he knows they’re not up to par but he’ll just finish it to finish and move on to the next one.
AF: The last song I wrote that I’m proud of is “Wake Up Shirley Bell.” It’s about my grandma, and she died of lung cancer, and the song is basically a call…
TR: But it’s written in a way that’s not…and I don’t know how he does this exactly… but it’s a song about death that’s written in a spunky, sassy, fiery way where you’re not listening to it and thinking ‘Oh… doom and gloom and dustbowl poverty’ and, you know… It’s real fast, and if you weren’t really listening, you’d want to go out and take a shot and have fun with your friends and dance a little bit. He does that a lot with songs…
AF: It’s also the type of music we play. We only have three instruments so I have to write more up-beat songs… and it’s kind of hard for us to slow it down at times, and the crowd is always ready to just go. They don’t want it slowed down… they just want it faster and faster.
A lot of people lump bluegrass, gospel, and folk music into the same genre. Which would you say best represents your sound from an influential standpoint?
TR: I would say bluegrass…
AF: …me too…
TR: …if it came down to those three…and a lot of times I think we find ourselves in a bit of a trap when people book us as a bluegrass band. What they really want is bluegrass-gospel, which is totally different. That’s not what we are, though we appreciate it. We don’t do it justice. We know a few gospel tunes…
AF: In my opinion, I don’t think we’re folk at all. When I think of folk I think of Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seger… but I don’t listen to them…
TR: Yeah, I don’t know anything about them… I don’t study them. So if we are influenced it’s accidental.
AF: Yeah… and as far as gospel… We’re not that either.
TR: We appreciate it, listen to it occasionally…
AF: It’s part of bluegrass. Definitely.
How do you feel about the stereotypes commonly associated with the music you play… and I mean really, how do you feel?
TR: I think that sometimes people think we’re trying to be different and cool when we say we’re not really folk or specifically bluegrass. But I just think we’re not. I mean we have a banjo, and we have an upright bass and a guitar. If those were electric instruments, you wouldn’t say we’re bluegrass. Do I listen to it in the car? No… Adam does. Adam is probably the most influenced by bluegrass… but maybe the fact that we have different musical tastes melding together makes our music something a little bit different. I mean, I don’t even identify with female bluegrass singers or male bluegrass singers. Now if I could open my mouth and sound like Ralph Stanley… like an 80 year old man, I’d take it any day… but as far as female bluegrass singers… doesn’t really do anything for me. Rhonda Vincent. Alison Krauss. I just don’t feel inspired so much by them.
AF: Yeah… I don’t think it’s all Deliverance either. I don’t think we or anyone else who plays bluegrass are rednecks. I think if people would actually learn about it, they would see its very hard music to play.
TR: I think if we went to the mountains and tried to sell ourselves as a bluegrass band we’d probably just get run out of town. You have to respect it.
In an article on you guys (this is before Benji joined you) from October of ‘06, there’s a comment saying that your voice is as “delectable as a glass of iced tea on a hot day or a piece of sweet potato pie on Thanksgiving.”[1] The rest of the piece is filled with similar down-home metaphors and even uses a written dialect that’s borderline backwoods. How do you feel about this type of characterization?
AF: I think there’s Country compared to red-neck, and there’s two differences there. I think we’re country folks.
TR: I don’t mind a sort of backwoods metaphor…I don’t even mind that stereotype. I grew up in a family that is really Southern, and country, and rural, and I’m proud of it. I’m not embarrassed by the fact that I love collards, or that I’ll eat pork-rinds (laughs)… and I think it’s a culture just like anything else. Mick Jagger was actually quoted once as saying the only place in the United States where you could find interesting food was in the deep rural south. And I think it’s a really rich culture. So I’m not offended if people use those phrases.
Had you the choice, how would you want listeners to view you?
TR: I’ll let you answer I’m hogging…
AF: No… you’re the leader!
TR: Maybe it appears that way but you know…
(laughter..)
For the rest of the interview, which is at 22:14 in Part 1, listen to the sound files below.
[1] Carver, Shea. Encore Magazine. “As Good As Boiled Peanuts: Barnraisers Have Bluegrass in the Bag,” 10/18/06
[2] Sandala, Bryan. Currents. “Barnraisers Embrace the Traditional Sounds of Bluegrass and Mountain Music”. 12/14/06.
Fantastic interview! Thank you. I have been seeing the Barnraisers name all over town, but didn’t know much about them until this post. Now I can’t wait to see them play.
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i suppose if david howell considers sweet potato pie, boiled peanuts, the Carter family or sepia-colored pictures backwoods, well, that would be his own stereotype on the South—an interpretation he can call all his own, certainly not mine, the writer of “As Good As Boiled Peanuts…”
as ms. tiff suggests, southerners consider such “down-home” jargon a part of a culture that is rooted in love and pride, something we don’t consider “backwoods.” this always proves to be something others like to infer upon us.
so, next time i write about this tried-and-true southern band, i’ll try listening to their sounds over steak poivre with bleu cheese butter and a fine glass of chilean red … while practicing the pronunciation of words like “y’all” and “dah-lin’” and “shoog,” of course.
regardless, thanks always goes out for covering this super band; they’re what we call “good people.” or in pretentious terms: the creme de la creme.
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Wow… I guess I have to respond to Shea Carver. First, I’m sorry you’ve taken such offense to my reference to your article, which, by the way, was very enjoyable to read… enjoyable enough for me to mention in this interview.
Second, the entire point of my questions was get at what Adam and Tiff thought of Wilmington’s music scene and their effect on it. So, when I asked the BR’s about the “characterization” (not stereotype) your article does indeed portray, it was in an attempt to find out more about how they view themselves–it was not about you or your article, so there’s no need for you to defend it.
Third, having grown up in the foothills of NC, with generations of my family farming the eastern part of the state, I find your presumptions as to my heritage and my knowledge of Southern music and culture unfounded. More importantly, I find your tone ridiculously offensive and misdirected. I am in fact very aware of the history and culture from which the Barnraisers music originates and very aware of the stereotypes that go along with it. As a matter of fact, I’ve spent more of my days than most in usual attendance at bluegrass sit-ins and jug band jams on the Blue Ridge at places that range from Wall Drug to Merlefest to my moonshining neighbor’s front porch, things that are most certainly “backwoods.” You get from my interview that I’m not from the South? I grew up being the object of the very stereotypes you inanely think are cute and lovey-dovey. So please, don’t lecture me about portrayals of Southern culture and heritage with your hipper-than-thou “we” and “us” rhetoric as if I’m some wine-snob from upstate New York who doesn’t know his own culture from a hole in the ground–a southern colloquialism you forgot to mention…
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I don’t have a dog in this fight, and I haven’t read the article referred to. I will say in Shea’s defense, David, that I would certainly have taken offense, were I she, at your characterization of her “written dialect,” in the question you asked in your interview, as “borderline backwoods.” It’s not the backwoods itself that set my fine hairs on alert, it’s the “borderline,” which is a code word for something that the two parties to the communication implicitly agree is not desirable. You wouldn’t hear someone described as “borderline sane,” but as “borderline crazy,” for example. It doesn’t matter where you yourself are from, when you insult someone’s work in that way, they do take offense. In your reply, your true feelings are confirmed when you further describe ” the very stereotypes you inanely think are cute and lovey-dovey.”
That aside, I actually stopped reading the post originally when I got to the first line of the first question. I rarely find anything further of value in a piece of writing that confuses “chic” with “sheik,” not once but twice, especially in a question dripping with pretentious scenester posing - the very epitome of “hipper-than-thou.”
You may be from the South, but the original post makes you sound very much like the snob you describe, except that upstate New York necks are generally redder than those ’round these parts, so that attempted stereotypical description was just inane. And lest anyone presume, I have lived in both places as well as several others, but my roots are just as Eastern North Carolina as anyone’s can be.
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Wow again… I’m blown away by these attacks. Of course, now that it’s down to outright subjectivity, I’ll just say I disagree with you both. As I said before, I tried to conduct an interview that would find out more about how the BR’s view themselves. That question was needed, and I think they answered it honestly. You two seem to think I was trying to insult them.
Now, I don’t think the word “borderline” is a code word that always implies negativity. Read Shea’s piece and decide for yourself.
I find that the accussations of pretentiousness in both your replies are rather… pretentious.
I think where I’m from does indeed matter in this issue, b/c Shea’s reply is clearly an attempt to make a mockery of my own background.
In the future, I’ll make sure I anglicize all my word use so as not to offend any gentle vernacular senses.
That being said, I think what upsets me most is that Shea’s response actually has nothing to do with the interview itself, nor does yours. It has to do with my opinion of her writing. To that, I say get over it. To others, I say try to grasp the good of the overall interview, which Adam and Tiff told me was one of the most thought-provoking that they’ve had.
Again, I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but you can’t assume the whole thing is bad due to one writer’s opinion of my observations of her work, or b/c I spelled a word wrong in your estimation. That’s just downright ignorant.
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Part of me loves that The Grove is growing up and venturing into the bickering phase. But part of me thinks this is the kind of back and forth that has sent many a smart people away from more established community blogs.
Surely there’s another way …
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I agree, Catherine - I think the flames leapt too high and much too quickly there. Around all dogs. And as much as I enjoy the semiotics of backwoods.
It’s a paradox of growing up I wish we could skip.
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Catherine, thank you for so eloquently putting into words what I, and I imagine other GP contributors, have been thinking. The GP is an open public forum, and contributors should be prepared to accept that not every reader is going to agree with or like what they have to say. But the GP is also — no, it is primarily — a place for members within our community to connect with one another and share news, events, and cool things that are happening.
I have heard other GP contributors say they no longer want to post on the site for fear they may be ridiculed! Ouch. That makes me so sad. I want to hear from lots of fellow Wilmingtonians not just the ones brave enough to bear the threat of public censure.
Do I dare push the submit button? Have I offended anyone? Is everythhing spelled correctly? O.K. Deep breath, here I go…
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again, david, you’re making inferences that are unfounded when referring to my response: i never said you were from up north, out west, from the other side of the country or from outer space. nor was i attempting to make a “mockery of your background.” i was attempting to mock the stereotype you inferred upon my dialect: “borderline backwoods,” which are your words, not mine–which reads ostentatiously, regardless of where you live.
i simply responded to what i consider a jab. and when jabs fly, well, sometimes right hooks follow. no matter how you explain the statement, it comes across snarky. so i wouldn’t point fingers at how my response has nothing to do with the interview itself, considering your critique of my writing is leading the question—if not judging it—and does not prove objective in the overall scheme of things.
regardless, i hold no grudges. in fact, i am sure you and i could get along just fine whether we’re drinking moonshine or fine wine, eating collards or wasabi peas, sitting on the front porch in the mountains of NC or NY –if only because we do have a common ground: we both love the barnraiser’s music, and, well, that will give us something to talk about.
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God luv ya, Shea - Was going to suggest the Grovey Prize to the first dog (dawg?) in this fight to show the pink belly. Thank you very much. -ed. — and I don’t mean back-downish-ness, I mean grace.
Those Barnraisers are raisin’ some barn, boy!
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Ok ok ok… Note to bloggers: I bite when provoked… Yes, my skin is a little thin… something I’ll have to work on.
More importantly to the Grove, an interview with local jazz trio, Sci-Fi, is coming soon… (very MMW-esque with strong shades of Herbie Hancock)
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Can’t wait, D. Great, great.
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[…] folk-grass trio, the Barnraisers. You can check them out at http://www.barnraisersmusic.com, and listen to an older interview with them right here on The Grove Project. This entry by david was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 and is filed under Living, News […]
Barnraisers are rock-n-roll in a similar sense as Fogerty. Was CCR country, rock, or country-rock (southern rock)?
Rock-n-roll doesn’t have to be electric, it just has to be different. Rock originated as pop incorporating blues and soul. Barnraisers follow a similar line: modified bluegrass incorporating an added edge. They are an innovation in music, thus rock-n-roll.
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