“Brightest and Best,” the lead single from Joshua Banbury’s and Kevin Sherwin’s Forgotten Folklore, starts with the crackle of a record, a wash of strings that evokes wide open spaces, before settling into a sparse, urgent guitar pattern, a voice hovering somewhere between a warble and a chant.
“Hail the blest morn, when the great Mediator / Down from the regions of glory descends,” the singer intones. “Shepherds, go worship the babe in the manger / Lo, for His guard, the bright angels attends,” the singer intones. It’s a prayer of hope, but the music suggests something more complex, elements of fear and awe.
It’s part of the power of folk music to do this, and vocalist Banbury and the New Haven-based instrumentalist Sherwin — both musicians who work primarily in classical music — tap into that power on Forgotten Folk, an album that comes out on Aug. 5, was recorded during the pandemic shutdown of 2020, and at the same time, is the product of a lifetime of musical exploration.
Banbury.
The twist of the title is that much of the music on the album — a collection of American folk songs (in addition to original compositions) — isn’t forgotten. Musicians who play traditional American music know them, and they’re available in archives from Yale to the Smithsonian. But, as Banbury points out, “it’s forgotten in terms of who you put it in front of,” especially, in his experience, contemporary audiences for classical music. That forgetting extends to the history of the music and the people who played it.
“We decided to focus on a community of people who were largely forgotten in terms of where the music came from — that is, Black people,” Banbury said. Also, he added, “I’ve always been interested in poor White communities who have the privilege of being White, but don’t fully get to live in it.”
The questions about who created American folk music — or to put a sharper point on it, “who it belongs to, who gets to sing it,” as Banbury said — lead to a history in which Black and Indigenous people have too often been taken out of the story altogether (a problem the traditional music scene itself has, thankfully, begun to address), while rural White musicians are recognized and at the same time exploited and denigrated by wealthier Whites.
The music itself, meanwhile, suggests or is direct evidence of a lot of mixing of influences — of Black, Indigenous, and White musicians listening to one another and (sometimes) playing with one another, even as the story of musical appropriation, in which White musicians profit from the innovations of Black musicians, is as old as America itself. In short, it’s complicated, and speaks directly to our current political moment, and musicians in the 21st century interested in exploring the American folk music of the past must contend with it all, head on, even as it’s just to learn to play a few songs they love.
Sherwin.
Wrestling with the questions, however, can often yield fruitful musical results. For example, “one thing that gets overlooked a lot is that there’s a permeable membrane between blues and country music, and that is something as a guitar player that I have firsthand experience with,” Sherwin said. “When you look back into early blues recordings” from the 1920s and 1930s, to a modern ear “it sounds like country folk, or jazz, and the idea is that these genres — blues, jazz, country — were all influencing each other, and these are genres that both Blacks and Whites participated in. Musically, and artistically, if you’re ignoring the contributions of Black musicians from the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, you’re missing out in a huge way in terms of the musical possibilities,” Sherwin said.
For Banbury, a trained opera singer and composer, the exploration of folk music was also “important to me and my personal history,” he said.
“I’m seventh- or eighth-generation Texan,” he said. “My mothers’s family grew up in the Houston area and my’s father is from central Texas.” Now 26 years old, he received classical training early and emerged from the New School having studied opera performance, vocal jazz, creative writing, and arts administration. He has gone on to perform at venues across the country and is making his way as a librettist as well.
Banbury’s choice of career has made many of the questions about music and where it comes from acute for him. “I always felt pressure as a Black singer, that, when I wanted to pay tribute to my ancestors, it always had to be spirituals. I never understood why I couldn’t offer an a cappella folk tune or an Appalachian folk tune. That’s something I would like to see change — more freedom in choosing repertoire.”
“I remember when I first started discovering folk music in 2017,” he continued. He felt its pull, a force he couldn’t name. He called his mother. “Why do I listen to bluegrass in the morning?” he said. “I’m obsessed with Tommy Jarrell.” His mother wasn’t surprised; she told Banbury that his grandfather played the banjo — an instrument of African descent.
“My family here, some of them are descendants from enslaved people,” Banbury said. “I am the first generation to have the freedom to do this,” to make his way in the arts and to research his past through exploring music. “I almost felt like it was sort of my responsibility,” he said.
He’d been drawn, for example, to the songs of Jean Ritchie and her family. “That’s the music that resonated with me the most,” Banbury said, especially as the pandemic enforced an isolation from other musicians and Banbury returned home to Texas. “The beauty of folk music is that the song is complete and whole by itself. It doesn’t need anything. It just needs the body. That was really comforting to know.”
As Banbury started working on singing and arranging folk songs, he thought of Sherwin. The two had met three years before through an organization called Young Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sherwin went to see a reading of a play Banbury had written. “He came all the way down from New Haven. After the reading most people left, and he stayed,” Banbury said. “We realized we were big folk nerds,” Sherwin said. They played music together, with Sherwin playing guitar and Banbury singing and playing dulcimer. They stayed in touch. And in fall 2020, “I reached out to him to see if he’d be interested,” Banbury said of Sherwin.
Sherwin was interested. The only problem: He was in New Haven and Banbury was in Texas, and the pandemic made getting together impossible. So “it started with me sending Kevin most of the arrangements, which I’d had in my head,” Banbury said. “He sent me back recordings of him playing them on guitar over me, and we sent it back and forth a few times until we had an arrangement we could work with.” And “we would spend hours on Zoom, with me on guitar and Joshua singing,” Sherwin said. “What about this chord? Is that what we’re going for?”
It turned out to be a painstaking process, as both were perfectionists. “I did 80 takes of ‘Cuckoo’ and I went cuckoo,” Banbury said with a laugh. In addition to learning more about American folk music, it was also a chance for Sherwin to stretch out his musical chops.
“This is my first time playing the banjo,” Sherwin said. “I’m a classical guitarist, and even more historically, I play baroque guitar, which traces its roots to the Middle East and Africa.” But back in the histories of both instruments, he found a connection. “The lute in Spain was originally the oud in the Middle East,” he said. “From a very practical perspective, that technique of how you hold your hand was very similar to how to play to banjo. Talk about no distinctions between high art and folk art — and that was another thing that fascinates us.”
‘It was a beautiful collaboration,” Sherwin added.
“I wouldn’t do it again that way,” Banbury said in a way that made them both laugh; he meant the difficulties of working remotely, and how he would have preferred to work together in person. “Though there was beauty in the pain, for sure,” he said.
With the album finished, both Banbury and Sherwin are interested in seeing where the path into American folk music leads them. “There’s so much history. I just know one part of it, and we’re both at the beginning of a long journey in this area,” Sherwin said. Both of them, he said, are interested in further “trying to break down barriers between what people call high art and folk art.”
“Even what the word ‘classical’ means,” Banbury said. “Couldn’t folk music be considered that way? I’d like to see more places where folk music can be performed as a legitimate genre.”
“Our hope is to do this in person with a banjo player, and do it as a lecture series as well,” Sherwin said. “The idea of introducing new audiences to the music is exciting, too — audiences that are classical audiences, jazz audiences, indie audiences.”
They are also interested in possibly scoring some songs for strings and orchestra for Banbury to sing with. “It would be a recitative and aria and finale all in one,” Sherwin said. “So many possibilities.”
Find out more about Forgotten Folklore here.
