Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth LaPrelle took the folk music world by storm with their 2014 self-titled album. It made my Top 10 for the year and was similarly honored by media from American Songwriter to No Depression to NPR to Rolling Stone. They’ve been busy since then, touring North America, Europe and the U.K., and appearing on radio shows and podcasts and festivals, too.
Now their 2012 debut recording Sun to Sun, which had gone out of print, has been remastered and reissued, to feed the demand for more music from this talented duo.
Anna & Elizabeth make music in the old-time Appalachian tradition, singing close harmonies in the style they’ve learned from recordings and musical mentors. Anna sings in a craggy and powerful alto and plays fiddle, guitar and banjo, while Elizabeth’s vocals are a bit lighter and sweeter, and she plays banjo. It’s an arresting and lovely experience, listening to this music.
This CD includes 13 ballads, lullabies and dance tunes from the Southern tradition, plus a video of one of their “crankie” performances. This one’s called “The Lost Gander,” an instrumental banjo tune that accompanies the shadow-puppet show of a goose — OK, a gander — flying over a variety of landscapes and through daytime and nighttime skies. It’s enchanting as all of their crankie shows are, evidence that singing is just one facet of their creative devotion to Appalachian folkways.
The CD is accompanied by a booklet with notes about the songs’ and tunes’ provenance, always helpful in the case of these old-time songs that have passed through many incarnations and are known by many different names. Most of these songs come from the Virginia balladeer Texas Gladden, who was recorded several times by Alan Lomax and Moses Asch; and her brother Hobart Smith. A few are traditional, and some are from the likes of Mike Seeger and Kentucky singer Addie Graham. Worth noting is that Hobart Smith was an inspiration to Seeger and his compatriots in the 1950s and ’60s folk revival, and now his legacy as well as Seeger’s is being passed along once again by the likes of Anna & Elizabeth.
Some will be very familiar to many listeners, such as the opener, here called “Heap of Horses,” which they have from Gladden and which is better known as “All The Pretty Little Horses”; the lullaby “Mockingbird”; and “The Letter Song,” a sad ballad purportedly taken from a letter written by a missionary in the Cumberland Mountains to his betrothed in New England. The song here called “Old Kimball” about a race horse is set to a tune (and uses some of the lyrics from) a tune better known as “The Coo-Coo Bird.”
My favorites are the upbeat gospel song “Ooh My My!” a duet sung to accompaniment from Anna on guitar; “Green Icy Mountain,” a guitar-banjo song with duet vocals about how hard it was courting in the mountains before good roads; and the title song, compiled from versions by Addie Graham and Mance Lipscomb, about the injustices faced by working people.
Listening to this debut alongside their popular 2014 record, you can definitely hear progress in these musicians and their performances from one to the next, which is as it should be. This was a remarkably self-assured debut recording by this talented duo who so obviously love their musical heritage.
(Free Dirt, 2012, reissued 2016)
