A Deeper Bed to Lie In: Banjo Player and Singer Evie Ladin Floats Downstream and With a Soulful, Rhythmic Old Timey Sound Evie Ladin plays old time banjo. Listen and you can hear the whomp and jive of her clawhammer style, honest to the genre's Appalachian heritage. You also hear the instrument's African roots, the polyrhythmic Heat and Funk. Now listen to Evie's resonant voice and original lyrics and you hear the push and pull of life, you hear real, contemporary stories. Evie's particular twist on traditional Americana pours like hot sunshine from her new album Float Downstream. The record reveals a fundamental soul and rhythm, supporting the poetry of modern song, inspiring Evie's rhythmic dancing that in live performance is a demonstrative, delightfully gorgeous storm. This is a girl who grew up falling asleep on a pile of coats in the corner of the music party or square dance; her childhood home in Northern New Jersey had an open door to folk musicians playing anywhere near. This is a girl who ran barefoot through muddy festivals, soaking up traditional American music and dance in the rhythm of her step, in her sleep, as the backbone of life. This is also a girl, a teenager in inner city Baltimore, with the pulsing roll of early Hip-Hop high school cafeteria, a girl drawn to Africa as a place where music and dance are social communication, the way she grew up. In Nigeria she showed people her clogging and body percussion, and it opened doors to myriad creative collaborations. Years later, she is synthesizing these deep, sometimes disparate influences into her own music grounded in tradition, emboldened by experience, flying freeform in the modern world. This becomes obvious in the first moment of the album. I Love My Honey, exhilarates the listener with soaring harmonies above a mesmerizing trance inducing banjo, all of it anchored by a funky half time rhythm on the cajn (wooden percussion box). Evie got the song off a recording of fiddler Santford Kelly released by The Field Recorder's Collective. In Kelly's original, he strums his fiddle, pizzicato style, inspiring Evie's approach. His whoops and hollers in the name of love were the selling point, and Evie gives it all she's got. I have a very strong old-timey aesthetic, I know what good stringband music sounds like, but I also listen to a lot of world music, Old and New Country, Indie Rock, Soul Music scenes that often don't overlap that much. I like a lot of interesting new treatments of Americana and traditional music; well played, well phrased music is just good. In making the album, the music that was old time had to be real old time, but I also needed to let songs stretch toward a pop aesthetic, a more contemporary aesthetic. The mix of the two can be very exciting. The songs themselves can be energetic, poignant, or downright sad like the title track. I had been away from the Eastern woods for a long time, Evie recalled. I was teaching at a camp in Tennessee and went walking in the trees. There was something so familiar about the way the sunlight came through the leaves, spilling on the forest floor, that made me feel like I was floating. It was so beautiful it was heartbreaking. The first verse of the song fell into me on that walk, and then it took me a year to figure out the rest of what happened in the story. Evie is playing a fairly traditional clawhammer banjo style here, with Mark Summer's cello swimming underneath and contemporary lyrics floating along the surface. For Evie, who started her career as a percussive dancer and choreographer until moving to Oakland and hooking up with the Stairwell Sisters, the all gal old time band with whom she still tours, writing music is a full body experience. I write a lot of songs riding my bike, she explained. Sometimes I feel like the world is just feeding me music. A lick or a line will get stuck in my head and I'll keep singing it until the story comes. Her performances are also full body experiences. Evie sets rhythms with her feet to support her banjo melodies, layering her voice on top, somet
