#joseph decosimo

Three Appalachian traditionalists infuse old songs (and one new one) with a sprightly freshness in this joyful outing. The fiddles wail, the banjo stings, the pump organ drones in a dense mesh of music that lives and breathes as if it was just dreamed up, though of course, it wasn’t.

While You Were Slumbering by Joseph Decosimo

Joseph Decosimo takes his bluegrass neat. A champion banjo player and a blue-ribbon winning fiddler, he knows the genre in and out. And yet unlike many of the young guns—Jake Xerxes Fussell, Daniel Bachman, Sam Amidon, Mike Gangloff and others—he seems to not be in any hurry to update or invert or, in general, fuck with the old stuff. It is what it is. He delivers it with precision and liveliness and a soft burnished depth, but mostly without gimmicks.

Been a real nice time for non-corporatized new music lately, I can tell you that much.

It goes without saying that I've been listening to the new @wednesdaygurl LP on repeat and that it's basically locked into pole position for my AOTY — this essay kicked my ass a little bit, didn't expect to tear up at my desk today but that's the way love goes. The band sounds so locked in and Karly's songwriting is as strong and vividly realized as ever; I cannot wait to catch my sixth set of theirs at the Fonda next week. "Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)" is still my ultimate go-to, but I'm digging the new arrangement of "Phish Pepsi" (my favorite track from the band's early days), revisiting Twin Plagues' "Gary," and the most visceral 1:26 of their catalogue to date.

And now, some other guys I wanna tell you about. I just finished my first listen of the new Zach Romeo record, Little Action. Zach is part of the seemingly endless extended Wednesdayverse, having done some video work for the band as well as making an appearance on their 2022 covers album. Little Action is (somewhat unfortunately) a testament to keeping tabs on your favorite musicians' social media pages or various internet presences, because without a recommendation from someone in that circle, I'd have no idea it existed, and the songs are simply too good to stay hidden. To me, this is news.

This album gave me that rush that comes with unearthing something new, a little obscure but obviously special from track one. I'll develop more cogent thoughts with additional listens but for now, this is one of the best alt-country albums of the year.

Another fresh discovery is Dogwood Tales (love it when a band drops a new single mere days after I find them, feeling very in tune and on schedule here). "Electric Lines" builds on last year's excellent sending EP, which alternated between starry-eyed tendercountry and indie rock bangers like this new one (I'd like to suggest they do a tour run with Tombstone Poetry, hearing this and "Bear Down" at the same gig would slap.)

One of last week's most compelling releases was Weirs' Diamond Grove, a neo-traditionalist exploration of Americana that veers from naturalistic ambient soundscapes to group acapella singalongs to genuinely avant-garde folk experimentations. Credited instrumentation includes bowed dulcimer, pump organ, sheet metal, mouth harp, buck and turkey calls, weissenborn (I digress)...sounds like a lot, but it all adds up to an incredibly cohesive whole and one of the most strikingly beautiful projects in some time.

Not quite as fresh, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention their Dear Life labelmate Joseph Decosimo, whose Fiery Gizzard dropped a couple months back and has remained a constant in my rotation. It's another remarkable exploration into/deconstruction of traditional Americana songs, specifically Appalachian fiddle and banjo music. It doesn't sound much like Weirs at all, but I'm equally floored by Decosimo's deep knowledge of and reverence for the region's musical history and his ability to reshape these songs into something new and incredibly alive.

Photo by Libby Rodenbough

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Count multi-instrumentalist Joseph Decosimo as another in the great line of contemporary players making old music for modern times. Like his friend and collaborator Jake Xerxes Fussell, duo Anna & Elizabeth, or even James Yorkston, Decosimo constantly thinks about what traditional folk songs mean to him--and us--today. The fiddler, banjo player, pump organist, and phD-holding folklorist, like Fussell, has had the opportunity to study with legendary trad players. For Decosimo, that’s the likes of Clyde Davenport and others in areas of Tennessee and Kentucky where he grew up. At the same time, Decosimo has surrounded himself with some of yesterday and today’s most exciting players from the thriving scene in Durham, North Carolina, where he lives, from Fussell and Hiss Golden Messenger’s MC Taylor to legendary singer/multi-instrumentalist Alice Gerrard. These influences combine to find a bridge between the past and the present on his upcoming album While You Were Slumbering, out next Friday via Sleepy Cat Records.

To your average music listener (whatever that means these days), many of the songs on While You Were Slumbering do sound from another time. The album starts with recently released single “The Fox Chase”, based on a field recording of Dee Hicks calling up foxhounds, bolstered by the warmth of Decosimo’s nasally vocals and the fiddle, banjo, and strings. It ends with the instrumental “Bob Wills Stomp/Wild Goose Chase”, a two-part song of melancholy fiddle and, yes, a jaunty soundtrack for running amongst waterfowl. Throughout the record, Decosimo conjures Appalachia, with tunes of lost dogs, fruited alcohol, possums and racoons running amok. On the video for first single “Will Davenport’s Tune”, a 19th century banjo piece he learned from visits with Clyde, Decosimo's vivacious plucking is laid atop impressionistic images of nature, interspersed with rippling, yet grainy watercolor, a hazy mirror to a location only folks who have been there will be familiar with.

At the same time, on the album’s best songs, Decosimo’s interpretations offer newfound clarity to tunes etched in a former time. “Man of Constant Sorrow”, which most listeners will know for better or for worse due to its inclusion in Joel and Ethan Coen’s O’ Brother, Where Art Thou?, is presented not as a prickly, nonnative bounce, but as a solemn hymn appropriate for today. Just as prescient is “Trouble”, though the hopefulness inherent in the song’s beautiful harmonies is rooted in the idea that bad things, like everything, will inevitably cease to exist and be replaced by something else, perhaps something better. It’s a stunning song, the album’s emotional centerpiece.

Though Decosimo plays plenty of instruments on While You Were Slumbering, the album is certainly bolstered by his chosen collaborators: Joe and Matt O’Connell of Elephant Micah, fiddler and singer Stephanie Coleman, composer/fiddler/pump organist Cleek Schrey, bass clarinetist Alec Spiegelman (who also mixed the record), and Gerrard. He wouldn’t say this, but to my ears, While You Were Sleeping represents a sort of sharing of the torch moment from Gerrard to Decosimo. This isn’t to say that Gerrard is done--quite the opposite, actually--but that Decosimo’s record has the same connection to the traditional repertoire that so much of Gerrard’s music does, precisely why he wanted her to play and sing on the record. “She’s a national treasure, as far as I’m concerned,” Decosimo told me over the phone in September. “She’s a force of nature.”

During our conversation, Decosimo, somewhat sleep deprived as a result of his newborn baby, nonetheless thoughtfully contemplated where he fits in the music world as a result of his new record, from academia to traditional circles to Durham. Read our interview below, edited for length and clarity.

Cover Art by Gabe Anderson using watercolor assets by Larissa Wood

Since I Left You: Do you feel a kinship with other players, arrangers, and scholars who adapt to contemporary sounds the traditional tunes they’ve learned from various historical channels?

Joseph Decosimo: I think so. I’ve lived most of my musical life in this hardcore traditional world. There [were] opportunities along the way--especially living in Durham--to play with Mike Taylor on the early Hiss [Golden Messenger] stuff. In some way, what I’m doing is different from what Jake [Xerxes Fussell] does, but it’s coming from a similar place of tradition, and the question of, “How can I make this translate for people who are not folks who spend their time listening to field recordings?” This album is me asking that question and figuring out a way to do it. In some way, it probably registers to most ears as pretty traditional, but to me, it feels different. [laughs]

Because I’ve spent so much of my life in traditional places of music-making and artistry, what’s happening here is me trying to do right by that but also something that feels musical and approachable and accessible to normal people. It’s a tall order. We’ll see how it lands. Jake’s approach totally works and does right by those camps.

SILY: I don’t know if you’re referring to Greil Marcus, but when you talk in the liner notes about an “older, weirder America,” I feel like that quality has encapsulated the folk scene for some time. Over the past decade or so, though, there’s been a concentration on more of the expansive qualities of folk instruments--whether you want to call it cosmic Americana or not. I think this record touches on both worlds. Do you think those two worlds can exist in conjunction, or are they at odds?

JD: That term “old weird America” is convenient, but it goes a little overboard and [exoticizes folk]. I grew up in Appalachia, and talking to people around the region, there’s a little bit of cringiness around it. It’s just another form of vernacular music. What I was interested in was working with a traditional repertoire. The way I play is a departure from other folk artists at the moment. A lot of stuff is coming out of the Berklee School of Music’s American Roots Music Program. People who go through there have incredible chops, but a lot of the time there’s a similarity of sound that has to do with bigger trends in traditional string music. I was lucky enough to be able to encounter it, brush against it, and see it firsthand. The weirdness, to me, can be with the texture of how the older players sounded. If you go through a conservatory program, you’re going to be learning different techniques. The funkiness, [on the other hand,] there’s so much depth and beauty there.

I don’t know that I’m pushing towards the cosmic thing. I think it has more to do with Enya or something. [laughs] Using traditional instruments to create something layered and lush. The pump organ’s been around for a while. People used it in vernacular Southern music for a century, creating new sounds with it. I don’t know what the relationship between those two things is, but it feels like a lot of times maybe the way the old weird stuff gets treated is [that] it’s stuck on a 78, and that’s the performance mode. That can be amazing. I’ve seen incredible performances of people lifting material out of 78s and interpreting it beautifully and in a very faithful way to the old recordings. I think there’s something pretty wild in that, too, that’s pretty expansive, the creative uses and tunings of instruments that could register in that cosmic space.

SILY: Speaking of the cringe-inducing nature of the term “old, weird America,” a very Hollywood-ized manifestation of that idea is O’ Brother Where Art Thou?, which obviously made “Man of Constant Sorrow” well-known.

JD: Oh. Oh.

SILY: I can hear you cringing.

JD: A lot of people rode that wave. [laughs] Norman Blake, who is a phenomenal musician, probably made a lot of money from being involved in that movie, and certainly deserved to. The version on [the record] is learned from a field recording. It was kind of fun to dive into that, to be like, “This is not like this other thing.” It feels like it hits in a completely different way.

SILY: To me, the song on the album that’s most timeless because of its sentiment is “Trouble”. Can you talk about that track and why you included it?

JD: One of my favorite banjo players of all time is Virgil Anderson, who lived on the Tennessee-Kentucky line of the Cumberland Plateau, which is the Western edge of what we’d call Appalachia. I grew up on the Southern end, near Chattanooga, TN, but I’d been obsessed with Virgil Anderson forever. There’s a beautiful LP release by County Records in the early 80s, [On The Tennessee Line]. I never got to meet the guy. I love his playing. [“Trouble” is something he learned as a young man in his 20s when he played with two African-American musicians, the Bertrams. They would play in these little camps and communities in that area. [So] it’s a piece that a white player learned from the Black repertoire of Appalachia. He sings it in a chipper way, which is cool and works, but during July 2020, I had been playing it for a while, and it started to resonate in a very different way. I think we were all dealing with things in different ways in that moment. That song started feeling less like a chipper banjo piece. It’s incredibly simple, but it has a kind of power. It was a time when you couldn’t hang out with people who weren’t in your house. I sent it to Joe O’Connell, who is in Elephant Micah and writes great songs and has a great way of arranging stuff. He added this pump organ and harmony part and sent it back to me. My friend Stephanie Coleman added the fiddle part and vocal part. It went from this old field recording of Virgil Anderson and became something that felt way more powerful. My friend Alec Spiegelman said it was making him cry as he was wrapping it up, which was unexpected, to end up with something so direct.

Part of this project was me turning 40 and wanting to expand, wanting my music to connect with more people. [“Trouble”] a piece I was sharing with family members who know nothing about the type of music I make. They were connecting with it.

SILY: For some of the songs on the album that are instrumentals, if somebody doesn’t take the time to learn about the song’s context--and not everyone does--and just looks at the title, and there are no lyrics to go by, they’re interacting with the quality of the arrangements and the instruments themselves. Can you talk about how you treated the instrumentals in context of the whole record?

JD: One thing Jake and I have had several conversations about is that at times, it feels like if you’ve really studied these traditions and have dedicated energy to learn your instrument and play it well, people will reduce you: “Oh, he’s just a fiddler or banjo player.” People will be glad to have you play on their album, but you can’t contribute back out [with your own varied material]. The way I was thinking about a lot of these tunes was, “How does a person in the 21st century listen to a fiddle tune or banjo tune? How does it matter to you? How does it make you feel something?” I know that when I listen to the fiddle, I can feel it. [But] how do you create a connection? One of the [challenges] is trying to find melodies that are just beautiful and stick with you even if you’re not accustomed to listening to a fiddle. A lot of these pieces were played solo for a long time and nourished people, doing the work that art does. How do you make them continue to do that work?

SILY: Take a song like “Clear Fork”. There’s that droney background hum that people like for the same reason they like to look at a Mark Rothko painting. It’s still, but it’s shimmering and rippling at the same time. Contrast that with the tangible sound of a banjo, there’s a lot to take in. People are free to interpret it the way they can, even more than the song that comes before it on the album that references 19th century European politics [“Young Rapoleon”].

JD: [laughs] So much of my musical social life is going to fiddler’s conventions and playing tunes after tunes with people. My relationship with an instrumental piece, I have no concept of how others might hear that kind of thing. I know them in a certain way. There’s a sociality to them because of where they’re played, but to imagine that it’s kind of an expanse for people to imagine their own interpretation or experience is a fun thought. I like the beginning of the “Clear Fork” piece because Stephanie has a shimmery harmonic that at first sounds like it could be a flute. One of the other things we were working with was a little bit of the ambiguity of the sound. The percussion in one spot on “Will Davenport’s Tune” tune is Matt O’Connell knocking on something. He can’t even remember what it was he was knocking on. I had sent him a field recording of a guy from Eastern North Carolina who would wrap his knuckles on a table and create these incredible rhythms that mimic percussive dance. People who know this music might think it’s somebody’s feet, but it’s sort of unclear what it is.

SILY: Can you talk about the relationship between the visuals and the music on the video for “Will Davenport’s Tune”?

JD: My friend Gabe Anderson who runs the label helping put this out, his friend Larissa [Wood] combined to work on the visuals there. There are a couple things at play; Gabe can explain more of the concept. I have a friend who is a folklorist named Sarah Bryan who has been documenting tombstones all over the South, especially North and South Carolina, for the last couple of years. She shared a picture of a tombstone from Stanly County, North Carolina. It’s a weird tombstone without a single word, but there are circles that are imperfect with weird triangles. It looks weirdly contemporary, the way people are into shapes these days. This tombstone stuck with me when I saw it. It started coming to mind when I listened to Clyde Davenport’s piece of music. Larissa made paintings built off of the crude shapes of the tombstones, and those are at play in the video in this really beautiful way over the top of nature scenes. The thing that Gabe came up with in the end feels right for the music in a way. He was hearing the different elements of the reedy, breathy pump organ, and the clackiness of it, and the woody knocking sounds of the banjo. In some of the videos, he was imagining the sound of those images. I’m really curious if I were to show the video to Clyde Davenport what he would have made of it. [laughs]

SILY: What’s the inspiration behind the record title?

JD: The 90′s romcom While You Were Sleeping.

SILY: Is that really true?!?

JD: No, that’s not true. But the ballad “Man of Constant Sorrow”...ends with this line, “While you were sleeping, while you were slumbering / I am sleeping in the ground.” I pulled it out of that. I thought it was a beautiful idea. In some moment, I thought I had clarity on what the project was about: I felt like the project as a whole was emerging during this time of collective slumber. We’re all sort of checked out in our own little dazed worlds. It felt right. The music here is more dream world than real world. I liked the line in the ballad, and I liked the experience of what happens in the space of being asleep.

SILY: I’m sure you’ve played these tunes throughout your life, but are you going to change how you play them in the future based on these specific arrangements?

JD: Having a baby at home is a moment is not the most conducive to get out too much, but I’m definitely hoping to get some shows together, perhaps a little tour. I worked out a little band to perform this stuff, which has been kind of fun. Most of my public performance has been in a string band context, which is fun but has its own logic. [laughs] One of the fun pieces of this has been collaborating with people with little background in traditional music. They might listen to it but aren’t traditional musicians. Joe and Matt O’Connell have become a little bit of a local band. Joe can play pump organ, and Matt can play guitar and percussion. The arrangements are pretty straightforward, so it’s been fun to figure out how to make it work on a stage for an audience. I think it works pretty well; I’m enjoying it. I’ve slipped a little bit out of the usual string band form and context, so it feels a little more open-ended and inclusive. I can bring in sounds or people that feel pretty fresh that I haven’t worked with before. It’s open-ended enough that somebody can bring bass clarinet, and it will work with these settings. I’ve had a couple fun opportunities to play it with different people. My friend Andy Stack from Wye Oak, who can be plugged into anything, played percussion for a festival in Durham back in the summer with me. It’s very different from what Matt does.

SILY: Is there anything you’re working on in the short or long term?

JD: I have a project with my friend Cleek [Schrey], who plays on this album, and a long-time collaborator, Luke Richardson, which is more fiddles, banjos, and pump organ, which feels like very fresh interpretations of tunes. It feels a little more tune-ish, if that makes sense. I’m excited to get it out in the world.

I played a duo show with Jake Fussell back in July, which was a lot of fun. I think people enjoyed it. He was playing acoustic Spanish guitar and an old Gibson I have, and I was playing banjo and fiddle pieces. Maybe there’s more opportunity there. His approach to guitar playing, he knows the old ways of doing stuff but also has his own way. It felt good.

SILY: What material were you playing?

JD: Just a lot of traditional tunes. He occasionally writes instrumental pieces, but we were playing old folk songs from the South, and he had a song that Art Rosenbaum, the great artist and field recorder, recorded that we played. It was pretty listenable and musical. He and I have had similar paths and opportunities to spend time with older players. He’s created his own sound, and I’ve lived a little more in the traditional world, but we mesh nicely.

SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading that’s caught your attention?

JD: I don’t know if I’m enjoying this: I’m not a big Stephen King reader, but I’m reading The Dark Tower series. I’m kind of stuck in it, and I think I want a break. There are like 8 books, and they’re super long. Maybe it’s not worth mentioning.

SILY: It’s okay. I don’t think he’ll see this.

JD: Most of my waking time has been spent with my little baby. You can’t imagine what it’s gonna be like before [he’s born], and we’re in this phase now where there’s lots of smiling, and he’s making these gurgly noises. It’s very cute. I’m more interested in watching that than a lot of things.

SILY: Do you play for your child?

JD: Mmhmm. He’s gotten a good bit of exposure to the banjo already. He gets regular doses. The fiddle is a little intense. It’s loud, but it really draws his attention. You’re supposed to give babies tummy time, where you put them on their stomach and let them look at stuff. Someone gave us this book of totally psychedelic [images], like a bear with a swirl and blue eyes, pretty trippy stuff. There was a little phase where I had him listening to the Dead and looking at those images.

SILY: You’re raising him to be a Deadhead!

JD: Yeah, from the get-go. He went to his first show Friday night. Our neighbor had a poetry and music thing, and Joe O’Connell played an Elephant Micah set. It’s the perfect show for a 4-month-old. It was super chill. From all accounts, he was pretty into it.