Grant / McGuire / Flaherty – 10″

“It’s like a fever dream at a fiddlers convention when you wake up sweating in your tent at 4 in the morning. And the music outside, you can’t tell if it’s 1 old time band or 3. All the songs are blending together and you can’t make out any of them.
ps, excellent version of Turkey in the Straw” — Mike Gangloff

“If it’s fiddle music you want, reference ‘Appalachian’ beginning at the letter B. Cecil Sharpe begot. The academics, the Berk(e)le(e)(y) Postdocs and their banjos diagnosing a cultural framework; defining ‘contemporary string-band music’ writ-large. The metaphysik (sic) of Riley Puckett and the Economy of the downbeat, divisible by 2.

‘Country Blues’ – notwithstanding reference to today’s mathematics on which swing constitutes time defined as old or new.

Might we open to chapter 2, ‘The Philology of Darby & Tarlton,’ to try and get a better understanding as to what they really meant by ‘Lay-ee eh’

Yeah I remember Carter and the alligators at the ATF, the pride of Philip C. McGuire and his family born under assumed names.

I remember Cratis Williams, bless his dream, as his mummified remains roll over in the attic of the Belk Information Commons.

The deputization of Cary Curlee, Kilby Spencer’s lamentation on the Three Top Serenaders, and Burnett and Rutherford’s unpaid royalties.

Yes I’ve been to Meat Camp, down to the Fertile Crescent of the New River. And yes I remember the night that the Todd General Store burned to the ground like Thorton’s last cigarette churning out Ashe in the sacred memory of the whole county.

Yes. These dirtbags deliver, down to the right of it, one seriously jagged response to the eternal romp of Ragtime Ralph and the Backporch Drifters – which Karen Glemstek, of institutional acclaim, called ‘just-fucked-up-enough.’

Watauga county’s Grayson McGuire, Ex-Pat Liam Grant, and Devon Flaherty, all last seen trading dollars for dimes at the annex, recorded together for the first time on blaring ferric tape.

So get it in your god damn soul and fare forward, leave behind the diplomatics to the scholars at Warren-Wilson, and abandon the back-to-the-landers and their handwoven carpet freeways joining Asheville to Durham for one last pirouette on Elk Knob, before its head too is removed and placed on layaway.”

— Manfred Tragil, Annex Blues Society