If old-time Americana and traditional Chinese music were to meld and produce a flesh-and-blood child, the result would be Abigail Washburn. Combining the two musical genres with her ethereal writing and clawhammer banjo style, Washburn has established herself as one of the most unusual and otherworldly players to hail from Nashville, Tenn.
Washburn spent the first five years of her musical career touring with the all-girl American old-time music group Uncle Earl. She went on to focus on her first solo album, Song of the Traveling Daughter, in 2005. During the making of this album, Washburn met and developed a friendship with premier banjo player Bela Fleck of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.
Together with Fleck, Washburn helped form the Sparrow Quartet, which blended East and West sounds. In 2006 — at the request of the U.S. government, the Sparrow Quartet toured Tibet, and went on to perform at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Her sound has captured the ears of Robyn Hitchcock and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones. More recently, she was a guest performer at Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday celebration.
In 2009, Washburn and Fleck married and set the stage for a banjo-playing heir that, if ever conceived, will surely be the grand ruler of all things banjo.
In 2009, Washburn and Fleck married and set the stage for a banjo-playing heir that, if ever conceived, will surely be the grand ruler of all things banjo.
Her first songs were written in Mandarin, a language that rolls off her lips as fluently as her native English. You won’t find any songs written in Chinese on her latest album, City of Refuge. What you will find is a collaboration of a diverse “village” of players and contributors, catchy grooves, electronic loops and, of course, that old-time sound.
Sue Zalokar: How would you describe your music to someone who has never heard you play before?
Abigail Washburn: Whew. That’s a hard one. I sit next to people on planes all the time and they say what do you do? And I say, “Well, I make music.” And they say, “What does it sound like?” I usually say that I play the banjo and I sing. And then I say that I speak Chinese and I sing in Chinese. And I write lots of songs in both English and Chinese, and all of my music is very much inspired by traditional music. There is also an indie, folk, pop quality to what I’m doing these days and maybe a little bit of experimentation with sounds outside of the acoustic realm.
S.Z.: You were heading to study law in Beijing and had not considered a musical career. How did your musical journey begin?
A.W.: One huge turning point was hearing Doc Watson singing and playing “Shady Grove” at a party one time near the end of college. I had been so obsessed with China. The stuff of Roman traditions that we long forgot about in our modern culture are not long forgotten there. The inertia, the sheer energy of that history and the ancestral line of tradition and culture, it is insuppressible. It is in everything, and it’s everywhere there. Even though the economy and the big city rush for wealth would try to make you think otherwise, it’s there still in a major, major way. I didn’t really know what was special about America. I couldn’t really put my finger on it, and I couldn’t find my touchstone of American greatness.
When I heard Doc Watson coming out of that record player, I was like, what is that sound? Who is that? Doc Watson was from the hills of North Carolina and he played what we call “traditional American music.” I thought, this is the soul of the sound of America. This is it right here. It’s hard to tell (by listening to his music) if he’s black or if he’s white. It was so groovy because of the syncopation of the banjo and it being, actually, an African instrument. And the words that come from probably Scotland or Ireland and then found their way into Kentucky and North Carolina and started taking on different word replacements and the melodies became more mountain. It was this phenomenal fusion of the heart of American immigrant culture and the beginnings of it’s own culture. So I decided I had to take a banjo to China.
The second thing is that before I left, I wanted to do some things in America that I wouldn’t be able to do because I was going to be living in China for so long. So I took my banjo and went to West Virginia and North Carolina in my little red truck. I ended up in Kentucky at the National Bluegrass Music Association Convention. Out of the blue, as I was sitting there participating in one of my very first jams ever with a couple of girls that I had met at the convention, and this record executive comes up and invited me to come to Nashville to cut a record. So my whole life shifted. Talk about having a little slice of Americana before I go to China, I mean, heck yeah, I’ll go to Nashville and make a record! And so I did. I went to Nashville and I’ve lived here ever since. It’s nine years later. I’ve made my home in Nashville and obviously never went back to China — to do law, at least. That highlight had a huge impact on my life, too. Now I tour China, so that’s a wonderful thing.
S.Z.: You speak fluent Mandarin, which is a tonal language with emotive expression, as is music, what was the process like for you to combine the two in your work?
A.W.: The interplay between the banjo and Chinese. I like to write music. I like to write songs in Chinese. And one of the things I noticed very quickly when I was writing my very first song in Chinese, “Song of the Traveling Daughter,” was that the pluck of a banjo string mimics the sound of a Chinese word because there are the consonants – which you can think of as the way the nail hits the string – and then there’s the resonance of the string which could be compared to the vowel – the open vowel sound at the end of most Chinese words. It’s incredibly easy to write these words over banjo plucks. (laughs) Really natural. Anybody who cares about linguistics and language could see that that’s really exciting. So there is a relationship there.
S.Z.: Can you talk a bit about recording the album Afterquake? It was in response to the massive 8.0 earthquake in China.
A.W.: That was so special, Afterquake. The idea was conceived when I went back to China to teach American traditional music at Sichuan University in 2008. I really did that because I knew about the earthquake. I was pretty heartbroken by what I was seeing in the magazines and on TV. I wanted to go see for myself how the few friends that I had left in Sichuan were doing. So that’s what I did. My ticket there was going to be teaching American traditional music. And when I went back, I was reunited with some good friends, ex-patriots who lived in Chengdu and they quickly asked me if I would want to go into a disaster zone and try to help kids. They had an organization called Sichuan Quake Relief, and immediately I thought, that’s why I’m here. So we started planning these dates to go play for kids in relocation schools in the disaster zone.
At the end of my shows, I’d have all these kids come up to me and express how sad they were to be so far away from home, and they often wanted to share songs with me from their home. I was struck so many times by these incredible interactions I’d have with kids and I kept thinking, I wonder if there is something more I could do for them. There was a lot of post traumatic stress disorder that the kids were dealing with. I saw a lot of it when I was hanging out with kids playing basketball or soccer before the shows, I’d see that there was like rage in these Chinese kids that I had never seen in Chinese students before. We are very used to violence in schools in America, but it does not happen in China. It was just such a surprise to see that happening. It was so obviously PTSD, so that was heavy on my mind.
When I came back to the states after that six weeks, I just had the thought that it would be really cool to make a record of these kids voices and their stories. But I wanted to make a record that they would like — not necessarily one that I would like. I’d love to hear just a spare field recording of just a child with an instrument singing an old folk song. But those kids are totally not interested in that. They want to sound like the Asian pop star. I knew if I was really going to do a record in honor of them, their stories, I needed it to sound like Asia pop. So luckily I had recently worked on some remixes of my own music with (DJ producer) Dave Liang of The Shanghai Restoration Project, and he had done such a good job, and he had been so easy to work with even though I’d never met him in person. I called him and I said, “Hey, I’m coming through New York and I’d love to have lunch and I’ve got an idea to discuss with you.” We met and I asked him to invest money to make a CD to help the kids in Sichuan with me. A month later, we were on a plane back to Sichuan and we spent the month there together and made a record with the kids. We came up conceptually with what we thought music and story-wise was going to be an important tale to tell in terms of selling this music back in the states and in terms of what we thought would be the most healing aspect of making music with these kids. So we ended up choosing traditional songs and stories that the children had learned from their parents or from loved ones that they had lost. We spent day in, day out with them for a week and recorded their voices, and then Dave set it to Asian pop grooves. We came up with Afterquake. Probably the highlight of the whole thing was the making of “Song for Mama” which is a track that a young boy sings. He was singing, “I’m going to give my heart to the moon because I know the moon can see you even though I can’t. And I’m going to ask the moon to shine down on you all the love that I feel for you.” We were just so touched by this. He’s crying, we’re crying. My god, he missed his mom so much. As soon as we recorded it, we knew it was so special, and we immediately tried to figure out where his mom was because we were thinking, “God if I was his mom, I’d want to hear this and I’d want to know he was doing okay.” We were quite surprised, but it only took about a seven hour van ride to find his mom. We ended up finding all the childrens’ parents throughout our time there and sharing photos of their children and also the recording of their voices singing with the parents. And then, in return, of course, they would give us a cup of tea and we would record them telling some stories about their time during the earthquake.
S.Z.: “Dreams of Nectar” is a song from your latest album, City of Refuge. To listen to it is beautiful, to watch you and Kai Welch perform it, is magical. Did the experience of recording Afterquake fell into influencing you on City of Refuge at all?
A.W.: That’s totally accurate. I really had been purely an acoustic, folk-related musician up until working with Dave Liang. After working with Dave and seeing how he did electronica, I know that my heart and mind were opened up to the idea that this could be a cool way to make music. And I hadn’t thought that before, honestly, because I thought, well, that’s not my world. And then it became my world. So when I started envisioning (my next project), I think the making of Afterquake had a huge part to do with how I envisioned my future. I can’t say that I wanted to work with somebody who looped, but I was definitely much, much more open minded about what kind of collaboratives I might be working with. By Sue Zalokar
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