released September 3, 2018

“These songs all go down the same road,” Coolidge Winesett liked to say. “But each one takes a little different turn.” Coolidge was a fiddler and a storyteller who lived nearly all his life in Ivanhoe, on the border
of Virginia's Wythe and Carroll counties. A decade ago, when he welcomed me into his home and his music for a couple years of
visits, he’d tell great tales of him and a cousin riding their horse home after performing at house parties in the years before World War II, the mountain roads so dark that he couldn’t see his cousin sitting directly in front of him and trusted the horse to know its way. And he described
how when the train brought in a weekly shipment of livestock, someone was always playing fiddle or banjo at the depot, music in the air.
That sort of street old-time is where we've hitched ourselves in recent years. We haven’t found a weekly livestock shipment, but we’ve busked on sidewalks and streets –and piers and parking lots – and next to a
sno-cone stand on the Outer Banks. Taking the sound out into the world, into the air, has helped us find our own place in this music of so many spheres.

It’s about the music, but here’s who we are:
Black Twig Pickers
Isak Howell: Guitar, harp, rattletrap, vocals
Mike Gangloff: Fiddle, banjo, resonator guitar, vocals
Nathan Bowles: Washboard, washtub, fiddlesticks, kazoogle, vocals

With Amy Shea, Chris Howell, Tim
Thornton, Charlie Parr & Lane Prekker

Sound as time machine: Playing on the Charlottesville mall, a washboard, guitar and banjo thumping hopefully along behind an open case, flash of realization that we could be at any point in the last century or before.

Sound as personal archaeology: Trying to trace via fiddle and banjo a branch of my family’s wanderings through Southwest Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky; tracking the songs once common to the counties around us, giving them another breath.

Sound as compass: lodestar for the made-at-home, non-prepackaged, non-standardized, not-for-(much)-profit, everyone join in. Brothers and sisters. Playing the people's jazz.

Coolidge: saw the music as a highway or a railroad or a river that connected almost everything -- his stories of the animals who danced in his barn or the woman who could change the weather with her clawhammer banjo playing, countless festivals, shows and porch sessions, the living and dead, and even me, a struggling banjo-er who'd just arrived from out of town.

Instruments: I played an old fiddle that Pete Ross of Glasgow, Va., restored to life. "It was in pieces," he told me, and truly, the more I look
at it, the more of Pete's handiwork I see. It's a marvelous instrument. On Twin Sisters I played a late 19th-/early 20th century Tyrolean fiddle that Amy Nichols lent me. I played a fretless banjo, one of Lo Gordon's Cedar Mountain creations from his workshop in Brevard, N.C.; a resonator guitar put together by Bill Blue of New Smyrna Beach, Fla.; and a gutstrung, tackhead baritone banjo that Steve Salay and I built awhile back. Isak played a Martin dreadnought whose sound has never been adequately captured on tape. For the songs with Charlie, Isak borrowed Tim's smaller-bodied parlor guitar Martin, thinking it would record more clearly. Tim warned him it had a few buzzes, and it did. Isak's rattletrap is a custom model that Isak continues to modify, adding and subtracting nails from the boards, putting a layer of foam rubber between the planks for cushioning, switching the ties for the tambourine, and other tweaks that occur to him late at night. Nathan's washtub came from Farmer's Supply in Floyd, Va. His kazoogle is something Isak found somewhere. His washboard came down through Amy's family. It's a Sunnyland model made by the Columbus Washboard Co. back before they started printing
their web address on the boards.

Thank you
Willa, Tycho, Ivy, Elsa, Emily, Mikel (for help with recording, etc.), Emily, Alex Clayden, Bill, Kevin Long & Cellar staff, Woody Crenshaw and everyone at the Floyd Country Store (especially the dancers, which takes in nearly everybody), Laurie Lewis & Green Dolphinians, WPAQ, Sam Linkous, Aaron Rosenblum, Chip & Ashley & family (a new record for attending Black Twig shows), Thorntons, Sue, Tom, Eric Langston, Vinton convention folks, Hope Hollingsworth, Jeyon,
Casey Elder, Frances West, Ralph & Ruth & Lucy, Purple Fiddlers, Phil & Kelly, Jumpin' Jim & Brenda, Jack, Patrick, Amy Nichols & family, Richard Bowman for thoughts on local repertoires, and Glenn Jones for inspiration and example re: extreme liner notes -- I haven't matched you on clarity or insight, but I'm clearly catching up on length.