LOCUST HONEY STRING BAND, HE AIN’T NO GOOD

LOCUST HONEY STRING BAND
HE AIN’T NO GOOD

No Label
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This band features Chloe Edmonstone on fiddle, vocals, and guitar, Ariel Dixon on banjo, vocals, and guitar, Meredith Watson on guitar, vocals, resonator guitar, and banjo, and Andy Deaver Edmonstone on bass.

With their opening number, Benton Flippen’s “Sally In The Turnip Patch,” they remind us that old-time music can be hard-driving dance music played with high energy and subtlety at the same time. They follow that with the Carter Family song “Jealous Hearted Me,” still driven by the fiddle on a solid rhythmic platform behind youthful voices. Their “Walking After Midnight” has the same lyrics that Patsy Cline sang, but a very different arrangement credited to Alan Block and Donn Hecht. The other songs and tunes, 15 in all, are drawn from a who’s who of old-time and classic country music: Uncle Dave Macon (“Don’t Get Weary”), the Skillet Lickers (“Hell Broke Loose In Georgia” and “Georgia Railroad”), the Coon Creek Girls, (“Banjo Picking Girl”) Johnny and Jack (“Poison Love”), Clyde Davenport (“Lost Girl”), the Mississippi Sheiks (the title number), the Louvin Brothers (“Time Goes So Slow”), the Leake County Revelers (“Johnson Gals”), Ernest Tubb (“Thanks A Lot”), and Kitty Wells (“All The Time”). Chloe Edmonstone wrote an original song, “Her Ways,” on which she switches to guitar, as Meredith Watson adds delicate slides on her resonator guitar.

These three young women, based in Asheville, N.C., have connected to the deep roots of their music and made it their own. I highly recommend that you make this CD your own,   too for lots of pleasurable listening. (www.locusthoney.com.)SAG