Midweek Music Break: Rising Appalachia, “Swoon” and “St. James Infirmary”

My brother and I (and The respective Missuses) have, quite independently, developed great fondness for the Asheville, NC area. It’s one of those little pockets of the universe where elements of climate, scenic beauty, services, and culture have all somehow come to pool together in a broth of magic.

When he recently returned from a visit there, he shared a couple of musical discoveries. They included a group with the (to me, at first) unpromising name Rising Appalachia. Before I actually checked them out, I figured it to be a bluegrass/New Americana/mountain-music collective, maybe. What a surprise, then, to find in Rising Appalachia a duo — sisters, raised in the South — with a taste for music almost independent of genre:

• “world, folk, soul” (Wikipedia)
• “They grew up playing traditional Appalachian music and soul, kind of gospel styles of music. They play banjo, fiddle, guitar, and single two part female harmonies.” (David Block, who works with them on a joint project called the Human Experience)
• “…poetic harmonies, soul singing, spoken word rallies, banjos, fiddles, organic bass and groove rhythms, and community building through SOUND. With an array of incredible collaborators, they are joined by everything from jazz trumpet to beat boxing, Afro-cuban percussion to Appalachian fiddlers, poets to burlesque and circus art.” (Their own site)
• “Appalachian-swamp-string-sister soul album complete with live percussion and bass beats, lyrical magic and spoken word, trumpet and cello wails, and double vocals-double banjos-double fiddles. Crunk-folk as well as soothing songs to heal the global soul.” (Promotional copy at various sites (e.g., CDBaby, re: their Kickstarter-funded new release, Dirty Filthy South)

…all of which bumped them, in my mind, from “unpromising” to “unlikely.” What the heck were they, anyhow?

Herewith, to illustrate the classification (non-)problem, a couple of selections from 2010’s The Sails of Self. First up, their video for “Swoon” — whose lyrics focus not on the one swooning, I think, but on the one provoking that response.

[Lyrics]

I really like that the heart of that song switches from the overt “I seduce you” message to one more personal to the protagonist, if not the songwriter: I don’t know what it is about me, I just know that I love this sound. In a PBS interview with Billy Collins which I caught last night, he spoke of how the poet is never alone when writing a poem — at a minimum, s/he is always in dialogue with the form of the poem. This line in “Swoon” cracks open a door into songwriting and lets us see a similar conversation taking place in that medium.

Below, they put a reverb-drenched, swirling-voodoo-priestess jazz spin on a classic, “St. James Infirmary”:

[Lyrics]

If you look around the Web for photos of Rising Appalachia, you’ll encounter a lot of silvery bangles, apparent body piercings, bandannas and scarves, and (temporary) tattoos and other body art. Other than in performance, these photos often feature them in run-down urban settings like old factories, warehouses, and chain-linked dirt lots full of big corrugated-steel shipping containers. Maybe they’ve adopted this witchy-punk-queen aesthetic just for promotional purposes; I don’t know. But it’s of a piece with what seems to be their musical persona: a haunting mix of old and new sound, and of interior mental state and outer form.

Hat tip to The Brother for passing along the word.