Jeni Hankins & Billy Kemp: Journal

Hello from Jeni & Billy!

We are proud to announce that we have mastered our new record "Jewell
Ridge Coal" and we are planning to release it in July. We are now
working on shining up our packaging and getting everything just right
so we can bring you something really special this summer. We are very
grateful for all of the help and advice we had during the recording
process from truly great musicians and producers Bil VornDick, Buddy
Miller, Dirk Powell, Gary Paczosa, Jim Reilley and Randy Kohrs. We
hope that you will look them up on their websites and support their
work too!

www.bilvorndick.com
www.buddyandjulie.com
www.garypaczosa.com
www.dirkpowell.com
www.jimreilley.com
www.randykohrs.com

We were also blessed when recording Jewell Ridge Coal to have visits
from several wonderful artists. Jim Lauderdale and Randy Kohrs both
sing harmony. Shad Cobb of the John Cowan Band plays some great
old-timey and country fiddle. And Kim Peery Sherman (one of the
wonderful proprietresses of Cotten Music here in Nashville) sings
gorgeous alto harmony and plays sweet guitar.

www.jimlauderdale.com
www.myspace.com/shadcobb
www.cottenmusic.com

We have just returned from the first leg of our summer tour and have
a whole summer of touring planned. We are also working on dates for
the early fall and the winter of 2009. So we hope that you'll check
our calendar and come out and see us. We want to give some advance
notice to all of the folks in the DC/Baltimore area who have been
asking us when we're going to play up there again: We will be playing
at the Columbia Lakefront on Sunday, July 27, from 6:30-8:30.
http://www.lakefrontfestival.com/wordp/?m=20080727&cat=3 We'll be
recording the show live and we'll have the new CD with us, so we hope
to see you there!

Lastly, we are happy to announce our collaboration with Jim
Lauderdale on a track for an upcoming tribute album of Sacred Harp
music. The two CD set is a companion to a fine documentary film
called "Awake, My Soul." You can learn more about the film at
www.awakemysoul.com The CD is slated for release in the fall/early
winter and will also include performances by the Carolina Chocolate
Drops, John Paul Jones & Rayna Gellert (of Uncle Earl), Tim Erickson,
the Innocence Mission, and many others.

We are truly looking forward to sharing our music with you out on the
road and on "Jewell Ridge Coal" and we hope to hear from you soon!

Our best to all of you,

Jeni & Billy

www.jeniandbilly.com

We hope everyone’s new year is off to a great start and that you all found true love for Valentine’s day!

We have a lot of exciting news for this year. We are working again on our record. As you may remember, last February we recorded some tracks with Bil VornDick at Oceanway here in Nashville. Some of those tracks will be on our upcoming record, “Jewell Ridge Coal,” while others are in the works. If you’ve been following our news, you know that we went on a big summer tour of fiddler’s conventions last year. Well, when we got home, we were full of ideas for songs for the record and we wrote several new ones. So, we’re looking forward to sharing those with you all!

We’ll be heading to a few fiddler’s conventions this summer as well as playing a concert at UNC-Asheville for the Bread Loaf School of English on July 1. We hope to see all of our Asheville friends there. We’re also playing our first Nashville concert at Norm’s River Road House on April 8. We are very excited because the venue is cozy and the sound is great. We’ll be adding dates as time goes on, so please check the website for all of the details and please come out!

We’ve also been working with composer Stuart Saunders Smith on two New Music pieces which he wrote especially for us. These pieces are an attempt to bring Appalachian and New Music together and we are enjoying our work on them tremendously. There are plans in the works for us to perform them and our material too at the University of Maryland Baltimore County in the fall or spring, so we’ll be looking forward to seeing our Baltimore community then.

We’ve just had a visit from some really special folks, Rebecca Hall and Ken Anderson, the talented husband and wife duo Hungrytown. They have a new album out called Hungrytown and it’s full of great songwriting and musicianship. Their guests include The Virginia Ramblers and Michael Merenda and Ruth Ungar of the Mammals. So please check them out at www.hungrytown.net and read more about them on our links page.

Also our good friend Jim Lauderdale just won a Grammy for his “Bluegrass Diaries” CD and is releasing a country CD this week called “Honey Songs.” His band is none other than The Dream Players, some of whom were Elvis band members, and there are guest vocals from the likes of Emmylou Harris and Patty Loveless. www.jimlauderdale.com

Finally, we are really glad to offer you a listen to some early mixes of the tracks for our upcoming CD. If you listen to “Sweetness Keen as Pain” you’ll hear Jim Lauderdale on harmony vocals.

We look forward to seeing you out and about this year and we appreciate all of the encouragement that everyone has sent our way regarding the record. As always your suggestions on venues are welcome and we would be pleased to do a house concert if anyone has some ideas.

Our best to you,

Jeni & Billy

Hello from Jeni & Billy!

Well, we’re finally home in Nashville and staying put for a while after an eight week tour of fiddler’s conventions and festivals. Our journey began on the 30th of June as we left for Jewell Ridge to play at the Jewell Ridge 4th of July Festival and ended this past weekend as we did some song catching and banjo trading with banjoist and ballad singer George Gibson (www.banjohistory.com) at the Kentucky Folklife Festival. You’ll find links to the fiddler’s conventions in the tour section of our website under “past dates.” We were proud to bring home three ribbons from the Johnson County Tennessee Old-time Music Festival in Guitar, Folk Song, and Duet Singing! (http://www.oldtimeherald.org/archive/back_issues/volume-10/10-10/laurel-bloomery.html)

We want to say a special thank you to all of the folks who welcomed us so warmly into the fiddler’s convention and festival fold this summer. We met some very fine musicians, some of whom have myspaces and websites and we hope that if you haven’t heard of these artists that you look them up and support their work: Matt Kinman (http://www.myspace.com/mattkinmanthelittlehobo ) is a former original member of the Old Crow Medicine Show. His repertoire consists largely of songs written before the 1930s. Though he is a brilliant old-time instrumentalist, he will part your hair with his otherworldly ballad singing numbers. The Old 78s (http://theold78s.com) were our favorite act at Merlefest and we had the happy chance to spend some time with them at Clifftop. They play classic parlor tunes on banjo -- imagine an Egyptian influenced piano number from the late 1800s adapted for three banjos -- very strange and mesmerizing. The Orpheus Supertones (http://www.mudthumper.com/) were one of our favorite contemporary old-time string bands -- not afraid to throw in a vocal number or swing tune.

Now that we’re back in Nashville, we are getting into the record again, writing some new songs to fill out the album and looking forward to some more recording. We will be working with some special guests over the next few months and we look forward to releasing the record over the winter.

We have a very special concert coming up next summer at the Bread Loaf School of English’s UNC-Ashville campus. We were invited by Professor John Elder (http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/ump/majors/english/hours/elder.htm) of Middlebury College Vermont to add some live music to his course on Ballads. We will also be playing for the whole campus. We really love the idea of bringing old-time music and ballad singing into the classroom and we’d be glad to hear from any of you who might have a need for that.

Finally, we have received several letters over the last year from fans who had hoped that we would be playing at one festival or another only to discover that we were there to enjoy the music or play informally. We wondered if any of you would consider writing a snail mail letter suggesting that the festival organizers book us and speaking briefly about what you like about our music. One of the festivals that we would most like to play is Bristol Rhythm & Roots (http://www.bristolrhythm.com) which takes place in Bristol, TN/VA, during the third weekend of September every year. Now is the time when they begin pre-booking for next year and we would love to have your support! You can send letters to Leah Ross, Festival Director, P.O. Box 1927, Bristol, VA 24203. If you do decide to send in a letter, we would love to know what you said.

We hope that you will go to our website and read more about our experiences this summer as we post them on the journal page or you can read about them on our MySpace blog. If you have MySpace, we’d love to have you as our friend.

Happy Fall!

Jeni & Billy

From everything we’d heard Clifftop is the Old-time experience not to be missed, so we decided to continue our travels by heading to West Virginia to experience the jamming, workshops, and contests. One of our favorite bands, Polecat Creek, won the Neo-Traditional band contest last year, so we thought we would give that a try. Also, the marvelous Lonesome Sisters were awarded the best original song ribbon. We enjoy entering the contests even if total newcomers rarely place, just because the preparation gets us very serious about our songs and we feel more a part of things. We were fortunate to have Matt Kinman join us on fiddle and we played “Land of the Pharaohs,” a song from our upcoming Jewell Ridge Coal CD. But this year’s awards went to big string bands with the top honor going to a group of very talented and politically outspoken youths. Though, we were made very happy by all of the folks who came out to hear us play and by the strangers who came up to us to say how much our song moved them.

We were very happy to meet The Lonsesome Sisters at Clifftop as well as Rayna Gellert from Uncle Earl, all of whom were very down to earth and friendly. They performed together in the Neo-traditional band competition as well. There were a couple of celebrity sightings, with Mike Seeger, Carol Elizabeth Jones, and Tim O’Brien making appearances here and there. We also met banjo expert Bob Carlin, who gave an incredibly funny and informative showcase. We would highly recommend attending any Bob Carlin event, you will not be disappointed. One of the highlights of the festival was meeting Curly Miller and Carol Anne Rose from the Old 78s. We could hear their version of Swamp Cat Rag clear across Hobo holler in our Airstream.

We were also very happy to see some folks who we seemed to have followed to all of the previous fiddlers conventions, Julie Shepherd, dancer and clawhammer banjoist, and her sweetheart, Adrian Powell, fiddler. These people are two very fine musicians and Julie is glad to pass on flatfooting steps. They will both be teaching at Appalshop’s Old-time String Band Day (http://www.appalshop.com).

Of all the many splendored merchants at Clifftop our favorite was the guys from Old Groove, a graphic design company, who offered all sorts of wear to suit the old time fan. They are based out of Bel Air, Maryland, and are some of the nicest people you will meet.

Our favorite activity was learning to flatfoot dance. Our teacher was Charlie Burton, a gentleman in his early eighties whose energy put us to shame. We were ready to fall over by the end of the hour workshop everyday and he looked like he was just getting started. But the lessons seem to have stuck to us, though it may be some years before we catch the hang of the Tennessee walking step.

All in all we had a great time and the airstream held up very well in Hobo Holler down in the trees.

We are really grateful to all of the folks who helped us to feel so welcome during our first year.

http://www.myspace.com/moreoldtime

Morehead was the first stop in our non-stop tour of fiddler’s conventions that will keep us on the road in our Airstream for about four weeks. We were told about it by some folks we met at the Tazewell County Fiddler’s Convention, the Clack Mountain String Band (http://www.clackmountain.com). Clack Mountain’s Brett & Jesse had a lot to do with organizing this very young festival.

The music of George Gibson, a Kentucky native in his seventies who sustains the tradition of singing while playing banjo, moved us especially (www.banjohistory.com). George has had a tremendous influence on the playing of Matt Kinman, the little hobo, a former member of the Old Crow Medicine Show and a well loved artist on the fiddler’s convention circuit (www.myspace.com/mattkinmanthelittlehobo).

We also met up with artist John Haywood, his wife Kelly and their daughter (www.haywoodart.com). John’s depicts Appalachian scenes with a realism that will remind you of Thomas Hart Benton, but darkly. He is also one of the finest banjo players we’ve heard on our tour this far.

The festival was very small, less than a hundred people, but that added to its beauty. The rain poured relentlessly on Friday night adding a music of its own and in lieu of stage lights the musicians strung Christmas lights around the inside of the tent. Add the music of Clack Mountain and the magic was complete.

http://www.alleghanyfiddlers.com/

We’ve just returned from the Allegheny Fiddler’s Convention in Sparta, NC, where we competed in the Folk Song and Guitar competitions. Many of these Fiddler’s Conventions include both Bluegrass and Old-time music. To Billy & I, Sparta had more of a Bluegrass leaning, though we heard some great Old-time played by Jim Lloyd of Rural Retreat, VA, and his band which also included one of the best harmonica players anywhere, Eddie Ogle. Both of these fine fellas can be found on recordings by Mountain Fling, John & Kathie Hollandsworth’s Old-time band. (John happens to be the maker of my Autoharp.)

We also exchanged CDs with Elizabeth Laprelle ( http://www.myspace.com/elizabethlaprelle ). Elizabeth is a young ballad singer who has a vast knowledge of the Ballad tradition and can be seen songcatching with her digital recorder at many local fiddler’s conventions. She has a new record out called “Lizard in the Spring.”

This was our first experience with dry camping in our 16 foot Airstream Travel Trailer, Bambi, and it went super smoothly. We had a lot of curiosity over the trailer and gave quite a few tours.

The organizers and festival workers who largely consisted of the local Firefighters were incredibly friendly and helpful. Everyone was so appreciative that we had come all the way from Nashville to compete, but where else could we meet a family from Norway in the competition line and join their old-time band on stage?

On Sunday morning after the festival, Billy and I weren’t quite ready to go and decided to play a few tunes. Some Old-time musicians were taking a break from packing up and throwing a frisbee around. Every time we visited the porta-loo we had heard them playing with a fascinating meditative energy and we’d try to guess the tune. We never knew their names, just their sound. As we played our song “While I Stay at Home and Weep” and moved into the harmony singing of the second chorus they began to move away from their game, their hands slack at their sides. They moved in a little closer as we continued to play and as we finished, we heard their applause -- a sound which lifted us all the way home to Nashville.

Hello out there!

Well, we had a great time up on Jewell Ridge for the 4th of July. One thing that made it better than last year was that it didn’t rain. That was a lovely start.

We’re writing to let you know that this August we will be entering the Folk Song Competition at the Galax Fiddler’s Convention performing that perennial Carter family favorite about a pretty girl who will not marry the boy who is mooning over her, “Lulu Wall.” We will also be attending our first Clifftop Festival, http://www.wvculture.org/stringband. We are hoping to find a couple of other musicians there and enter the Neo-traditional Band contest. Last year’s winner was Polecat Creek, a favorite band of Jeni’s. You can learn more about them on our Links page at www.jeniandbilly.com and at www.polecatcreek.net.

We have been inspired to pursue this sort of touring by our recent success at the Tazewell Old-time and Bluegrass Fiddler’s Convention this past weekend. We won fifth place for Old-Time Band and Billy won second place in the guitar competition! We were very excited about Billy’s win because we played one of our original compositions and Jeni backed him up on Autoharp. So, as entrants we were a bit atypical, but the judges seemed to like it!

We’re heading to the Allegheny County Fiddler’s Convention in Sparta, NC, this weekend to compete in the Guitar and Folk Song contests. We hope to see lots of you there! We are also planning to compete in contests at the Fries Fiddler’s convention in Grayson County in mid-August. Please check our website for more details. We would really encourage you to come and see what these Conventions are all about. We met so many nice people and felt tremendously encouraged by our experience in Tazewell.

If you visit the website, and we hope you do, you might notice a different look to it. We’ve been doing a little updating as part of getting ready to release our new record, “Jewell Ridge Coal.” We’ve started calling our music “New-Old Music” because truly our music is about writing new songs that make a sincere connection with old sounds, words, and rhythms.

Once again, we want to invite you to respond with any thoughts you might have on venues in your area that might be interested in our act. We were very happy to hear from those of you who responded to the last newsletter. We also hope that those of you with some size to your houses and an inclination to be hosts would consider having us for a house concert over the winter months or next spring.

We continue to work on the record little by little. We will be getting back into mixing mode full time in September and October. We just couldn’t resist a little travel and the thrill of sharing our music at these festivals this summer. So keep your fingers crossed for us.

Love and Happiness to you all,

Jeni & Billy

mailbag@jeniandbilly.com
www.jeniandbilly.com

Hello wonderful folks out there in the world!

It's been a while since we've sent news out into the world and we'd like to catch you up on what we've been up to.

Last year we moved on down to Nashville, Tennessee, to pursue our Grand Ole Opry Dreams. Longtime Billy Kemp fans will remember his stint on the Opry with Jeanne Pruett, but we are determined to be up on that stage as a duo one day. We love Nashville and spend a lot of time at The Country Music Hall of Fame. We are also very thankful for our new friends here. We are especially glad to have found a friend in Jim Lauderdale. If you don't know Jim's music, we would highly recommend that you make a beeline to your favorite physical or virtual record emporium to pick up one of his CDs. He has written with Greatful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter and also recorded two albums with Dr. Ralph Stanley. He recently released two new CDs and one of them, "Bluegrass", was nominated for a Grammy. You can find Jim at www.jimlauderdale.com.

After much rehearsing and arranging we recorded fifteen tracks at Ocean Way Nashville. At the helm was Bil VornDick, a well respected engineer and producer, who has worked with so many amazing artists, including Dr. Ralph, Dolly Parton, Gillian Welch, Bob Dylan, and Allison Krauss. We recorded live in the studio in order to bring you all a sound that would be very much like us sitting down and playing in your living room. We have been working on the packaging with our favorite designer, Jeni's Dad, Greg Hankins, who helped us so much with "Sweet & Toxic." Right now we are in the beginning of our mixing process and we'll be recording some additional tracks and overdubs during the next month or so. If all goes as planned we're hoping to bring you the new recording in the fall.

As you might have noticed, we haven't been playing out much since our move and since we started work on the record last fall. We do have a concert this July 4th in Jewell Ridge, VA. And we hope that any of you that live near enough will make it down there. They have one of the best fireworks displays in Virginia.

Also, we wanted to let you know that we are now on MySpace and would be glad to add you as friends. So please friend us at www.myspace.com/jenihankinsbillykemp.

On a final note, we are hoping to start touring this coming fall and all of next year, so we would appreciate any tips that any of you might have on venues in your area that would suit our music. And if you're feeling like playing host, we would be glad to consider any house concert ideas you might have.

As always we are so glad to have you as fans and we are wishing you our best.

Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers as we finish this record.

Love and happiness to you all,

Jeni & Billy

This past weekend Billy & I had the great pleasure of attending the Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion in Bristol, TN/VA. Bristol is considered by many to be the birthplace of Country Music because of the historic recordings made there in 1927 by Ralph Peer. Especially notable among the musical acts were the Carter Family & Jimmy Rodgers. So, Bristol seems like the ideal place to bring together so many of the musical traditions brought under the loose category of Country.
We were particularly thrilled by The Little Country Giants, an old-time band that combines poetic lyrics with relaxed melodic playing and male/female vocals. Joseph Evans, the spokesman for the group, is a wonderful guitar player with a polite and easygoing Calhoun, Georgia southern manner. One of their best songs is "Breaking Hearts and Living Free," also quite spooky and surprising is the murder ballad "Come Go With Me." http://www.neatstripe.com/lcg/
We also enjoyed the Foghorn String Band from Portland, Oregon, a five man group that played and sang many of the old traditional fiddle tunes, including some Carter Family numbers, with great energy and sincerity. www.foghornmusic.com
The Seldom Scene, Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives, and The Del McCoury Band were all in stellar form.
We were particularly honored at Bristol this year to share the stage with Jim Lauderdale on Saturday night. He asked us to join him for "I Shouldn’t Want You So Bad," a great new song from one of his two new albums on Yep-Roc records. Jim is our Americana hero and we feel so fortunate to have been in his company at the festival. www.jimlauderdale.com. You can see the photos from our guest appearance on our photos page!

Hello from Jeni & Billy!

We've just returned from a rainy, but happy, 4th of July in Jewell Ridge, VA, and over the next couple of months we'll be writing and rehearsing as we prepare to record our new CD.

In the meantime we wanted to let you all know that our EP, "Sweet and Toxic," is for sale now at www.amazon.com! Here's the direct link:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000EWATIM/ref=sr_11_1/104-4234073-9846303?ie=UTF8
So, please stop by and check it out.

There are also some new photos on the website of our various performances in DC, VA and NC. http://www.jeniandbilly.com/photos.html

Jeni saw a performance of the all female string band Uncle Earl in late June at the Station Inn in Nashville and talks about her experience of old-timeyness in our latest journal entry. If you have a chance to see Uncle Earl, don't miss them, they are good, good, good. www.uncleearl.net and www.stationinn.com

We also wanted to let folks know that we're available and enthusiastic to do house concerts in the fall and we are happy to have the chance to travel and see new parts of the country. So, consider visiting www.jeniandbilly.com and dropping us a line. If you're not sure what a house concert is, but you're intrigued please go to www.houseconcerts.org to learn more. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, it's just a chance to have us to yourself and to share our music with your friends and acquaintances. If you know of someone who does house concerts in your area and you think they would be interested in having us then let us know and we'll send them a CD. If your local coffee house also does music then let us know and we'll get in touch with them too.

We always love to hear from friends and fans. Thanks to all of you who have written us since the last newsletter.

Love and Happiness to you all,

Jeni & Billy

www.jeniandbilly.com

Last week while Billy was taking care of some business up in Baltimore I had the good fortune to see the all female old-time string band Uncle Earl at the Station Inn in Nashville. None of these women come from Appalachia (though Rayna Gellart on fiddle comes close being from Asheville and K.C. Groves on mandolin has family in West Virginia), but they have mined the past to create a music that Abigail Washburn called American Traditional Music from the stage and you pay no mind to where they're from because you know that they’re just from someplace old. They’re like Gillian Welch and David Rawlings or Old Crow Medicine Show, it’s not where they’re from, it’s when they’re from.

I’m thinking on this for two reasons: One is that I read in an article sometime back that in their early days in the public eye some folks gave Gill and Dave a hard time for singing “Appalachian” music since she’s a Californian and he’s from Rhode Island (I think!). Folks challenged their authenticity and wondered if they’re old-timeyness was just an act. They can write songs like “By the Mark,” but were they Christians? Gill’s answer, if I can remember, was something like you can’t write and sing a song like that and not mean it. I’m also thinking about this idea of old-timeyness in a person’s soul and where it comes from because I do come from Appalachia and folks often respond quite enthusiastically to that and, beyond that, they occasionally bestow on me a certain authenticity which I am grateful for and hope I own, but which is truly available to and alive in many brilliant musicians who are not from Appalachia. Our own Billy Kemp, though from the great city of Baltimore, mines this old-timeyness when singing harmony on “The Dominecker Hen” or picking up the banjo for “Hard-bitten.” He brings to those moments every Carter Family song he’s heard and every bit of them that’s in Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson. He brings Bob Dylan and all the Woody Guthrie in Bob Dylan and all the old melodies Woody mined from times and people before him.

I am so thankful for groups like the Virginia Tourism Board who have put together a beautiful brochure called “The Crooked Road” which maps out the musical heritage of the Southwest Virginia region from where I hail. And I am especially thankful for artists like Ralph Stanley and Wayne Henderson who represent our home with such grace and authenticity. And Billy and I aim to get the Tourism Board to rewrite their brochure and get Tazwell County and Jewell Ridge out of the gray area and into the blue “must-see” area. But I am also aware of and thankful for spiritus mundi and the fertile valleys and the dark caves of our shared American past that allows the moving, authentic, honest, and achingly old music of non-Appalachian folks like Uncle Earl to happen. These women moved together on stage with such kindness toward the audience and each other. They were generous in their laughter and storytelling. They were friendly and welcoming to meet in person. And I didn’t for a minute question their conviction or their authenticity, I just felt at home.

Howdy Everyone from Jeni Hankins & Billy Kemp!

We are so happy to announce that our first EP, "Sweet & Toxic," has arrived from the wonderful folks at Oasis and we're having a whole bunch of CD release parties to celebrate! All of the details can be found on our website at www.jeniandbilly.com!

Our first party is on Sunday, March 12, at the WestSide Cafe in Frederick, MD, from 3-7 pm. The WestSide has incredible food and is a lovely room. We'll be setting up our parlor complete with rug and pump organ again, so come and enjoy some traditional country and old-timey music with us. A special Sweet & Toxic dessert will be available. We'll have plenty copies of the new record on hand for $10 each.


Our second party is on Saturday, March 18, at the Friendly Chapel Church in Jewell Ridge, VA, starting at 7 pm. We'll be singing all of the Jewell Ridge songs as well as our new material and a few gospel numbers. The ladies of the church will provide refreshments.


Our third party takes us down to North Carolina to our favorite little venue, Medleyanna's Antique Store in West End. We'll be singing and smiling from 4-6 pm. So come along and smile with us.


"Sweet & Toxic" will be available from CD baby, Amazon.com, and Itunes in the coming month and we'll keep you posted on that development. Right now you can buy our record at shows and at the Bookshop by the Lakes in Seven Lakes, NC. You can hear clips from "Sweet & Toxic" on the web at www.jeniandbilly.com!

We're looking forward to seeing everyone starting on March 12 at the WestSide Cafe.

Our best to you all,

Jeni & Billy

Hello all,

Billy Kemp and I have two performances coming up in the next little bit. First, we’ll be playing an hour long set at Red Rocks Cafe and Tequila Bar during Ron Goad’s SAW Showcase this Saturday, Dec. 17, from 8:30 - 9:30. Then, next week we’ll be ushering in the Christmas holiday on Friday, Dec. 23, from 9-11 pm at The WestSide Cafe in Frederick, MD.

Thanks to all of the folks down in North Carolina who came out to Medleyanna’s to hear Billy and I play with Greg Hankins. Dad sure does make that harmonica sound sweet. We hope to be back at Medleyanna’s in February or early March. Billy and I were especially glad to talk with you all and hear how much you like our new duo.

You might have noticed some changes to the website if you visited since this past Sunday. A few weeks ago when I was in my old neighborhood and told a neighbor who had been out of town that I’d moved he said the one thing that you can depend on is that things change. After a lot of reflection on our musical futures Billy & I have decided that we’re meant to be a duo. So we’re working on an EP to come out in February of 2006 and we’ll be working on a full length CD over the next year. I expect this will have some Jewell Ridge Girl fans and some Willbilly fans scratching their heads, but we hope that the new music we create together will make our old listeners just as happy as it makes us. Something is beckoning to us from the voices of the Carter family and from the spirits of June Carter and Johnny Cash and we know better than to ignore it. So we hope you will wish us well!

All our best to you this holiday!

Jeni & Billy


www.jeniandbilly.com
www.jenihankins.com
www.billykemp.com

In my biography on this website I talk about the stronger and sometimes meaner love that I experienced growing up in the summers on Jewell Ridge. Now my MawMaws loved me more than breath itself and if I got the littlest cut or a bee sting they would always coo over me and fix me right up with some ice cream or cornbread and milk. But there have been some rough times between the men and women of our family and our blood seems to run hot when it comes to love. There’s a streak of possessiveness and of violent attachments that comes straight from our Scottish borders ancestry. Lately I’ve been writing a lot of songs about love, unabashed hopes, broken hearts, escape fantasies and complications that ensue when sparks fly. I wrote this poem a year or so ago about my Uncle Charlie and Aunt Nannie and I think it truly captures what I’m getting at when I say the love up on Jewell Ridge can sometimes be meaner. (Just a note for those interested, the form of this poem is a Sestina which is an ancient poetic form that involves repeating five words in a different order at the end of each line in each stanza. In this poem the repeated words are time, house, gun, still, rough and devil.)

The Devil and Aunt Nannie

Old Mister Kyle said they was a pretty rough
bunch. Too much getting liquored up and packing guns
when calling on kin. Could be, keeping that still
under the thicket in the woods out back of the house
proved too much a temptation in fallow times
between slaving for the coal company, Devil

take ‘um, and churchgoing. Now the Devil’s
what got into Uncle Charley, who was rough
on PawPaw’s sister, Aunt Nannie, even when times
was good. But times was not good. And Charley had begun
to measure his days by pacing round their house
with a jar of shine and then getting real still

and spooked. Aunt Nannie just kept on -- still
hanging the wash and praying to the Lord to keep that devil’s
hands off her. Amen. But from inside the house,
he hollered for her, “I swear Nan, I won’t be rough
with you. I just wanna kiss you. I ain’t gunna
hurt you.” But Aunt Nannie had given in to his talk times

before and had the scars to prove it. And this time
she dropped the washing and took off running, still
looking behind her for any sign of Charley and his gun.
She hid out at Aunt Sarah’s for three days before that devil
Charley got wind of it. Then, he cooled his rough
throat with the shine, grabbed his gun, gave his house

a mean look, and took off over to Sarah’s house.
Nannie was inside cooking and about that time
Sarah came up outta the garden, her hands rough
from digging potatoes, which hung in her apron. Real still-
like, Charley aimed his gun through the fence and that devil
shot her in the stomach and the potatoes had begun

to roll from her apron before she fell. Charley took his gun
and ran off and hid in back of the old outhouse
behind PawPaw’s. And he knew that the Devil
was in him. And he prayed over all the times
that he had strayed from the path of righteousness. Still
he could not make his sin come clean. He felt his rough

finger on the trigger and turned the gun on himself. It weren’t much time
before they found him in back of the outhouse and, as he lay there still,
Nannie shook that devil and pressed her face to his hand, bloody and rough.


© Jeni Hankins, 2003

A couple of weeks ago I was down in North Carolina playing a few gigs with my dad and we had a couple of free days and decided to go visit my Mawmaw on Smith Ridge. I wanted to look through my Great grandmother’s photograph box for cover art for the CD and my cousin was playing bass with a local bluegrass band called Pack ‘n the Grass up at festival at Southwest Virginia Community College. So we headed on up to the vicinity of Jewell Ridge and took the familiar brown sugar road that wound like world’s longest snake up Smith Ridge to Mawmaw’s house.

Mawmaw’s church, and mine too for a good part of my life, is about sixty feet from her front door. In fact, growing up I never really thought of her house and the church as two separate places. The same people, food, and taste in decor down to the wood paneling and carpets could be found at Mawmaw’s and the Friendly Chapel. No one spoke in tongues at Mawmaw’s house and there wasn’t as much crying, but that marked about the only difference.

As it happened, Dad and I ended up there on quilting night where a group of men and women from the congregation make quilts to raise money for Friendly projects. But the quilts and the projects aren’t quite what you would expect. The words “quilting bee” often conjure images of little old ladies bending over floral fabrics. But right now their most popular quilts are emblazoned with the Harley Davidson eagle or a big #8 for Dale Earnhardt Jr and one of the ladies quilting them is a semipro bowler. The money they makes goes to things like paving the Church parking lot and redoing the Ladies bathroom, but some of it went to buy the minister of music new teeth.

It was a hot night and Dad and I thought we’d take our guitars, banjos and harmonicas out and play some old songs for them. We did “Sunshine in the Shadows” and “Are You Washed in the Blood?” That kind of thing. But then my Aunt Princess said, “Sing that song you wrote about the penitent woman.” Now, it turns out that she meant “10th Street Rose,” a song I wrote about a prostitute who is reflecting on her life and vocation and considering a life in Christ. Apparently, this is Mawmaw and Aunt Princess’s favorite song off the website. This just goes to show how it’s no good to go making assumptions about the hearts and minds of other folks because they’re always going to give you a shock. I thought I was going to have to sort of hide this song from them like a scandal. Turns out that for them this song meant that all the Vacation Bible school and Sunday school they sent me to sank in, that I knew my Bible, and that even though I grew up in big cities all over the U.S. and lived in Paris and sent postcards from Tokyo, the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree and I was still their Jewell Ridge Girl.

_______________________

I always look forward to this time of year because of Merlefest. Merlefest is an Americana music festival which takes place in North Wilkesboro, NC, the last weekend of April every year.

Two years ago my Dad and I went to Merlefest and I came home with new ears. When my Mawmaw talks of being born again, I think of the way I felt after my first Merlefest. Though I grew up around primitive hymn singing and country music, the old-time sounds that came to me at Merlefest swept through me like a new religion. Sometimes you have to be ready to receive certain gifts and two Aprils ago I was ready.

I had a new guitar and I was writing songs and listening to a lot of Gillian Welch and Emmylou Harris. I was also writing a lot of narrative poetry from old family stories that my Mawmaw passed down to me. Just before Merlefest I had written what I considered to be my first really old sounding tune, Up On Middle Creek. This song felt more like home to me than any other I had written before because it told the story of my Great Granddad Babe in a plaintive but raw way. Still I couldn’t quite imagine a place where my new song would fit in. At Merlefest I found the answer.

In the Traditional tent Dad and I heard the singing of Kari Sickenberger and Laurelyn Dossett, two women who make up the North Carolina based duo Polecat Creek. These women sang with conviction and honesty. Their voices were beyond pretty, their voices were innervating. Hearing them made me feel like life just started over and I should jump up and shout about it, but instead I was glued to my seat. Their voices just seemed to climb up and down all over each other and then they would meet for an eerie moment. All this was happening, but it didn’t seem like a fancy trick or choral acrobatics. They just gave the song what it wanted. And then I came to find out that those old songs they were singing were new songs they wrote. Without knowing it these women became my mentors and their songs, like those of Gillian Welch and, later, Martha Scanlan, became the bar which I set my songs against.

Merlefest is a hotbed for a lot of different talent. There are bluegrass all-stars who will pick a mandolin so fast and clean it’s like a drill in your head. And there are tribe bands that will skillfully and subtly send you into a Sufi-like trance. But I go to Merlefest for the songwriting – for an immersion education in story and melody. Two years ago I was baptized in Polecat Creek. It’s time to get my feet wet again.