This is a fairly simple one. If you like modern takes on old-time fiddle music from the mid-Atlantic Appalachians, you will love the album Milkers and Hollers. If you don’t, this might change your mind.
Less simple is writing out the artists’ names: The Old-Time Snake Milkers and Hoot and Holler doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue.
The reason for the long name is that the album is a collaboration between two separate bands. The Milkers are a traditional fiddle and banjo band from Charlottesville, Virginia; Hoot and Holler are the Americana roots duo of Amy Alvey and Mark Kilianski, based in Asheville, North Carolina.
The story goes that Alvey and Kilianski came across the Milkers playing at Charlottesville’s Blue Moon Diner in summer 2016. They hit it off and decided to work together, resulting in what the bands call a split record — 19 songs with tracks either by the groups alone or together.
“Milkers and Hollers intends to capture the spirit of fiddler’s conventions in the summertime — sitting with your friends, huddled knee to knee under an E-Z Up with a bottle of something between you, reveling in the joyous nature of the music,” Alvey, currently on a tour of Australia, says.
It certainly has something of the sound of Galax, the Virginia mountain town renowned for its Old Fiddler’s Convention, but with more professional production values.
A good example is the Milkers’ knee-stomping rendition of the decidedly non-vegetarian classic “Country Ham and Red Gravy.” I, for one, immediately got rather hungry listening to it: “Oh, how the people yell / When they hear the dinner bell / Oh, how that ham meat smells / Three miles away.”
You also can’t help but smile at the band’s rag-like “Everything We Got We Stole It”.“I used to be a singer-songwriter / All my songs were original / But now the drugs have fried my brain / But I do not complain / Because I play folk songs / So I just steal it.”
Hoot and Holler are quite a bit less stompy. Their instrumental “Honeysuckle Blues,” for example, features some gentle guitar-picking and fiddle that you could almost imagine was heard on a mountain porch in the 1890s (except way more accomplished).
The duo’s “Pinnacle Mountain Silver Mine” — featuring Alvey’s gentle tones — is no less Appalachian, but more folky.
“It’s a rocky old mountain I’m a-climbing / There’s a raging rapid below / There’s a valley so beautiful a-winding / And its secret, I will never know.”
There are, meanwhile, two tracks that make some contemporary social commentary. At least, I think the Milkers’ “Mother Nature’s Way” is trying to.
It makes the not unreasonable case that the current political and social climate is such that people are looking for something “real.” But the solution apparently is to drink “snake milk.”
I looked this up and found two definitions. One is that it is slang for venom; the other is that it is cider topped with Guinness. Might be neither they are singing about, but I rather hope the band is endorsing the latter.
In “Brood of Hate,” Alvey and Kilianski are much blunter. They rail against hypocrisy, against Big Oil, and against the general rise of hate. Some of the harshest lyrics are very targeted.
“There’s a monster in that White House / And he’s doing his very best / To bonify his bankroll / And a-hide his hollow breast.”
How well that would go down under an E-Z Up at a contemporary fiddler’s convention is not for me to say. But it is a powerful song.
The album is powerful too. It is a celebration of a particular genre of music. A nice one for fans, completists, and anyone who just wants a bit of mountain joy.
