Fairer Than Day: Hear The Secret Sisters’ 78s “In the Sweet By and By” and “Little Again”

The Lindsley Avenue Church of Christ on a warm August day was ethereal, filled with morning light and the excitement of a new record about to be made. The Secret Sisters had a glowing loveliness brighter even than the stained glass as they warmed up to make their 78. While we set up, the girls took out the hymnal and sang their way through it.  They knew every song, and their voices from so many years of praise and practice, were like perfectly tuned church bells ringing from their happiness.

Lydia and Laura were raised in the church at home in Alabama.  So singing a hymn brought back memories of their childhood. But their flipside, “Little Again” is an even more personal tune, sung by the two little girls who grew up together, running in rivers, scraping their knees, and building a sweet sisterly closeness into a lifelong musical bond.

Thank you to the Lindsley Avenue Church of Christ in Nashville for generously letting us in and lending us their beautiful space.

Louisiana Bound: Our last road trip to make The 78 Project movie

A Sunday in the Bayou is as perfect as it sounds. Bright sun, fresh eggs from the chickens outside, and music all through the house. We made it to Louisiana!

It’s been an eventful first couple of days on the road, and this trip feels filled with excitement and promise.  We started out with a visit to the Library of Congress Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, VA.  Built into the side of a mountain, the building is a beautiful sight coming up the road.  And inside, it’s filled with treasures. Matt Barton, Brad McCoy, and Bryan Hoffa were kind enough to show us around and demonstrate some of their process. They played us a 7″ shellac disc from 1905 to show us how they capture the sound, and taught us their tried and true trick for centering a disc punched with an off-center hole. It involves a pencil.

Rare recordings and recording gear, and expert archivists working hard to make the material available to the public.  The history of our nation’s recordings are being preserved in Culpeper, and it was inspiring to see the wonderful work that they’re doing. And in fact, about 10,000 of the historical recordings they’ve transferred are available to stream on their National Jukebox.

A quick stop in Lynchburg, VA and the lovely hospitality of some new friends Joan and George recharged our batteries for the long drive to Nashville.  We crossed state lines at the Birthplace of Country Music: Bristol, TN/VA and we took in the sites for a few.  It’s not every town that can lay claim to the first recordings of Jimmie Rogers and The Carter Family as well as count Clarence Ashley, Tennessee Ernie Ford and Uncle Charlie Osborne as one-time residents.  If you find yourself there, might we suggest you eat at Eatz?

 

Nashville was as warm and welcoming as always, and it was wonderful to be there exactly one year to the week since we last came this way. But we couldn’t stay long, we were Louisiana bound!

Since this is our last movie trip, it’s a great opportunity to support The 78 Project. We have vintage Louisiana postcards in hand, ready to mail out to thank you for your generosity. And it won’t be a long journey now from road to screen for the film.  We’d love to see your name in the credits, and to see you in person at a screening. And if you donate to The 78 Project through our fiscal sponsorship with IFP your donation is tax-deductible. Donations we receive now will go to our post-production fund and will be essential in giving the film a beautiful finish!

Donate to The 78 Project

Episode #15: The warmth of our spirits: Dylan LeBlanc “Innocent Sinner” video clip and acetate

We’ve been hard at work in the editing room since returning home in January from our California road trip. And though we sit in the same room every day as we sort the hours of footage we’ve shot so far for The 78 Project movie, there’s no possibility of sameness or fatigue. Each day we are transported to another room, any of the many different and beautiful rooms all around the country we’ve been invited into to film and make 78s.

This week as scenes from our Southern journey emerged on our editing monitors, the drudgery of winter had disappeared and suddenly summer was bearing down with the last of its might. We were transported to a sunny high-ceilinged room in Nashville mesmerized by a sultry and spectacular sound: the voice of Dylan LeBlanc.

We wanted to show it to you the moment we saw it.  Haunting and reverent and filled with purity and magic, it called to us like the endless roads of our journey, reminded us of the warmth of your support, made us want to say thank you right now and always.

How Sweet the Sound: Hear Holly Williams & Chris Coleman sing “Amazing Grace”

Tomorrow is a family day.  Not that every day isn’t, it’s just that this week in particular we make such an effort to gather together our loved ones.  Putting aside the stress and distance, it’s a wonderful thing to find that we are all joined in such a profound bond; that we are not the first, nor will we be the last to experience the world.  It’s not our sole responsibility to navigate it.

Holly Williams’ family has a vibrant musical story.  As Hank Williams’ granddaughter, she has a birthright of song.  And because her husband, Chris Coleman, is a musician, singing and playing guitar is something they can share as a family. When we visited them in Nashville, they sang “Amazing Grace,” together in their home with their dogs at their feet.  It was the picture and sound of togetherness and warmth.

Fire Burns so Bright: Hear Ella Mae Bowen’s Flipside “Heart Locked Out”

In the spirit of the freewheelin’ freedom that comes with the weekend, today feels like the perfect day to share Ella Mae Bowen’s rockin’ flipside “Heart Locked Out.”

We recorded with Ella Mae in the house in Nashville that inspired her songwriting, and we felt so freewheelin’ that day that we set up on the staircase instead of in a room.  Her voice and her presence were bright and strong.  And when she sang, she turned the excitement of youth into something beautiful and vital we can all understand.

 

 

 

Cheatin’, Longing and Family Legacy: The 78 Project spends a week in Nashville

We hit Nasvhille in the afternoon on Tuesday, and went straight over to record with Dylan LeBlanc in Franklin, TN.  While he was warming up, we discovered he is a part of a family legacy of beautiful whistling, and he genially agreed to do some whistling on the song.  Dylan told us stories both sad and triumphant, and performed a haunting version of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.”

Our dear friend Willie of The Breedings put us up for the week in his East Nasvhille home, and we got to check out some local eats and color, including getting to meet Miss Katy K in her Ranch Dressing store!

 

Chelsea Crowell invited us over to the gorgeous pre-Civil War era house where she lives, and let us take over the living room with its beautiful afternoon light.  She performed “Are You From Dixie?” like it had never been played before, with genuine longing and mesmerizing gentleness and subtlety.

 

Thursday bright and early we joined Ella Mae Bowen in another beautiful old Nashville house.  Ella Mae had written songs for her album there, finding so much inspiration in it that she knew it was the place she should make her 78.  We set up in the foyer, where the light from the upstairs window cast a glow around Ella Mae as she sang “The Love of God” with so much love in her powerful voice that we were swept away.

Holly Williams and Chris Coleman and their two happy dogs generously invited us over for our last recording afternoon in Nashville.  Holly and Chris sang a stirring version of “I Saw The Light,” a song by Holly’s grandfather Hank Williams, with pure and energetic harmonies.  The Presto got to star in a photo shoot of its own as it sat in their screened back porch, Chris pulled out his big guns camera for the occasion.

The long weekend started, and we dug in to backup our footage, enjoy the last moments of our time in Nashville, and get ready to hit the road once again.  Memphis, we can’t wait to see you!

Curators, Collectors and Carolina Banjo: The 78 Project makes it to Dixie

Has it only been a week since we left DC?  Our minds have recalibrated to the rhythm of the road.  And since we’ve come to expect at least one new place and a hundred new experiences with each new day, this trip has started to feel like it has always been our life. In a good way.

Last Thursday we were lucky enough to spend the whole day with Todd Harvey at the Library of Congress.  Todd curates the Library’s Alan Lomax Archives, and every time we visit he shows us fascinating pieces of this really comprehensive collection of recordings, correspondence, technology and stories from the life’s work of the great field recordist.  This time the highlight was a letter Lomax had written to a teenage Muddy Waters (known then as McKinley Morganfield) encouraging him to keep in practice!

Friday we drove clear across Virginia, from Alexandria to just past Charlottesville, where we had been invited for a visit with the exceptional 78 collector and producer Christopher King. He kindly shared with us some amazing recordings from Albania, Greece and the Polish mountains, took a stab at finding some Death Gospel in his collection (Washington Phillips) and played for us the record that has captivated our minds since we first heard about it: Geeshie Wiley. Chris and his family made us feel so right at home in their beautiful house, telling us wild family stories about removing snakes from in the ceiling with his grandfather’s hatchet.  And he was game enough to make a recording on our Presto of a family story with a twist that left our jaws on his kitchen floor.

WATCH: Chris plays us one of his favorite 78s

Fried Green Tomatoes

Saturday we completed our traversing of Virginia, stopping at a farmers market in Lynchburg for one last sampling of the state’s local fare. We picked up some twangy apples and some grapes we were told the raccoons love, then we hit the local diner for some homemade pimento cheese and some Eggs Virginia, which if you haven’t had it, get it soon.

Next stop was a Banjo Symposium put on by the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.  What an amazing day, especially for Alex, who is himself a banjo enthusiast. The assembled group of scholars were some of the most knowledgeable about the instrument that exist, and we had the great pleasure to meet and hear Cecelia Conway, Stephen Wade, Dom Flemons and Laurent DuBois among others.  That night we got to see Dom, Tony Trischka, and Riley Baugus with Kirk Sutphin in concert performing classic and new banjo songs.  It was inspired.  And just to give you an idea of how inspired, Dom did the splits while playing the bones.

Sunday we celebrated with our lovely Chapel Hill host, Laura Broom, the banjo aficionado Phillips Saylor, and his cool, folklore-packin’ lady Chloey.

Monday afternoon, the Southern Folklife Collection curator Steve Weiss invited us in for a tour.  Among the discoveries was a banjo under debate, is it a Frank Prophet or a Clifford Glenn?  Steve showed us an amazing wax cylinder player that adjusts for warps and we found out what three tons of 78s looks like: the collection of Eugene Earle. Just a few pounds short of being too heavy for a semi to carry it from California, where Steve went to box it up and haul it out of Earle’s garage.

We had pressing business in Nashville, so we hit the road to tackle some of the eight hour drive that night.  We waylaid in Asheville and woke up early for a sunrise drive through the Appalachian Mountains.  Goodbye North Carolina, hello Tennessee!

 

The 78 Project and the Open Road…

Our journey to make The 78 Project Feature-length documentary film starts today.  This morning the Presto will be packed in snugly with a stash of blank discs and new needles, our Canons with a cache of memory cards and lenses.  There will be no room left for anything else, so we might need to borrow your socks.

We are headed to Philadelphia, PA, Washington, DC, Durham, NC, Nashville and Memphis, TN, and points in between.  This leg of the journey goes until early September, but we’ll be traveling for the film shoots for the rest of 2012, so we’ll be visiting many, many more places.

There will be photos every day, we promise.  They’ll go straight to our Facebook, so “like” us there to see ’em!  Also follow us on Twitter for daily news.  If you’re on our Email list, we’ll catch you up each week on events and stories, and send you sounds and clips that we’ve captured.  If you’re not signed up for our list yet, enter your email in the field on our homepage sidebar.

We’ve never been so excited as we are at this moment, preparing to meet new people, hear new songs, visit hometowns and hometown haunts and seek out music where it lives. We’re grateful to have you along for this adventure!

Thank you to our amazing new friends at Stumptown Coffee Roasters for fueling our mornings on the road!