“Streak O’ Lean, Streak O’ Fat” (played as “Hell Broke Loose In Georgia” by the Skillet Lickers) puts Washburn’s fluent Chinese to work. A recording by Seven Foot Dillie & His Dill Pickles featured Dillie monologuing over the music, and when Washburn brought the music to the band, says Gellert, “I was just missing that kind of patter. It just cracked me up to think of having that patter in Mandarin, and Abby just ran with the idea.” It just so happens that Mao Zedong’s favorite dish, hongshou rou, features a small streak of lean meat and a big streak of fat. At first listen, it’s not clear that Washburn’s hollering is in Mandarin.
The group was compelled by the title of one of Gellert’s favorite raging fiddle tunes, “Wish I Had My Time Again”, so they wrote lyrics about wrongful imprisonment. Gellert composed “D & P Blues” (drinking and promiscuity) and a classic bluegrass song, “Drinker Born”. The closing meditation, “I May Never”, is a collaboration between Groves and her mother; Groves says it’s an outgrowth of being raised reading and memorizing Robert Frost. “Poetry from that era has meter and these perfect rhymes,” she says.
The bulk of Waterloo is original writing and arranging, but there’s also a raw, aching version of Ola Belle Reed’s “Epitaph”, belted by Washburn, and an old-time, Cajun-triangle treatment of Bob Dylan’s waltz “Wallflower”. King Wilkie’s Ted Pitney wrote a wistful tune for the band, “The Last Goodbye”, that they recorded with Gillian Welch on drums.
For their low end, Uncle Earl keeps a roster of favorite bass players, including Erin Youngberg, who has toured with the group and played on Waterloo. Jones also played bass on the record, as well as adding some piano and mandola. Sharon Gilchrist, who played on their first album, lately has been playing mandolin with the Peter Rowan and Tony Rice Quartet. For Uncle Earl’s spring release tour, Mary Lucey of the Biscuit Burners traveled with them.
The band is surprised to find themselves amidst what some characterize as an exploding old-timey movement fueled by young bands. “I certainly didn’t start playing this kind of music because it was any kind of fad,” says Andreassen. “I was the youngest person in the room usually. I feel like this band started before there was a craze, before it was a trend. We are lucky right now, because we seem to be finding an audience that thinks this music is a trend.” She attributes it to young people who grew up with overproduced electric music becoming intrigued by music that “maybe feels a little more real or more participatory.”
That may be Andreassen’s experience as a former rocker kid, but her bandmates all came to traditional music from different places. Gellert grew up with it; her father is old-time fiddle, banjo and guitar player Dan Gellert, and she’s an authority in the old-time fiddle world. Groves comes from a bluegrass background and is active in the Colorado acoustic music scene. She grew up listening to country music and visiting her grandmother’s church in West Virginia, where the singing was unaccompanied. Andreassen became interested in traditional music when she moved from Oregon to Cape Breton Island (in Nova Scotia, Canada) and encountered Scottish music and stepdancing. Washburn lived in China and became intrigued by the idea of cultural traditions there; then she heard an LP of Doc Watson playing clawhammer.
Yet sometimes Uncle Earl’s members feel like elders in this new old-time-influenced community. Groves remembers being strangely downhearted at one Yonder Mountain String Band show as she surveyed the college-age crowd. She realized she wasn’t bummed because she was feeling old; rather, “I was bummed out because when I was their age, that didn’t exist. What I would have done for a scene like that when I was like 20, or early part of college, because that’s the kind of music I loved back then. But man, I was a freak show…there were very few people, and they were all like 40-year-old dudes.”
For Gellert, it’s like her peers are finally coming around. “It’s been astonishing to watch…this explosion of younger people playing,” she marvels. “It’s something I never thought I would get to have. I was always jealous of the experience of my parents’ generation…the ’70s was this fantasy land in my mind of all of these young people playing this music and having wild parties and traveling around the country — you know, the whole Highwood String Band thing. I have that now. I have a peer group of people my age and younger who are playing this music and traveling around, and there’s a real sense of community.”
Katy June-Friesen has been sitting next to 40-year-old dudes at concerts for years. She is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.
