Hear the Best New Folk Music with Fresh Cuts Friday
Ready for some of the best new music we’ve heard this week? It’s a great list as you’ll see below — and as you’ll hear when you join me for my ‘Fresh Cuts’ radio hour! Listen every Friday at 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific via the 24/7 stream on our website, app, or your smart speaker.
Or, just click on the Fresh Cuts stream whenever it’s convenient for you.
In the meantime, check out some of the best new music we’ve been listening to this week.
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Rhiannon Giddens & Justin Robinson, “Hook and Line”
Former Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmates, Rhiannon Giddens & Justin Robinson, team up for the new album What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow (out April 18). The album is a return to their roots—North Carolina fiddle and banjo music—featuring 18 traditional tunes learned from their late mentor, Joe Thompson, and recorded in deeply meaningful locations, including Thompson’s home and the former plantation Mill Prong House. They recorded entirely outdoors, accompanied only by a couple of folding chairs, microphones, and the natural world around them—one mic specifically placed to pick up the surrounding sounds of birds, wind, and the environment.
Lonesome Ace Stringband, “Elk River Blues”
The Lonesome Ace Stringband’s latest, “Elk River Blues,” was written by West Virginia fiddler Ernie Carpenter (1909-1997). The heartbreaking story behind it, about Carpenter’s attempt to save his home from the construction of the Sutton Dam, might explain the almost magical emotiveness of the melody. From the band. “This tune has gone far and wide at this point, and it’s taken on a life of its own. This version, played as a clawhammer banjo and bass duet, is how I feel it.”
Kristin Daelyn, “It Came to Me Then”
Beyond the Break (out February 28) is the second album from Philly songwriter, Kristin Daelyn. She shares: “‘It Came to Me Then’ is a song about the cyclical nature of renewal—the way life continually invites us to begin again. I started writing it while walking a looped trail I’d circled a hundred times before. But on that particular day, I saw it differently. This shift in perspective felt like crossing some threshold. I went home and quickly picked up my guitar, trying to capture the moment I knew one cycle was closing and another was beginning.”
Jason Carter & Michael Cleveland, “With A Vamp In The Middle”
A longtime in the making, Carter & Cleveland (out March 14), is the debut duo album of fiddlers Jason Carter and Michael Cleveland. The collaboration builds on the duo’s more than 30 years of friendship, a natural culmination of their frequent musical cross pollinations and collaborations across that time. They first met as teenagers, Cleveland was 13 and Carter was 19, and they were already mutual admirers of the skill, musicality, reverence for tradition, and the unique fiddle fire they each heard in the other’s playing.
