While You Were Slumbering

Expert fiddler and banjoist and scholar of southern Appalachian music, Tennessee native Joseph Decosimo bears the legacy of the Cumberland Plateau’s masters who taught him how to play and sing the deepest cuts in the repertoire – and make them his own.

On ‘Will Davenport’s Tune’, an instrumental tribute to one of Decosimo’s mentors, Clyde Davenport, an NEA Heritage Fellow who died in 2020 (Will was Clyde’s father), the subdued plucking of a clawhammer banjo traces a dreamy melodic line above a harmonium-like drone emanating from a pump organ, which ebbs and flows in time with a softly tapped dance-stepping rhythm. The mesmerising effect transports the listener into an alternate dimension inhabited by souls of the distant past. On ‘Apple Brandy’ Decosimo lends poignant banjo and harmonic vocal support to Alice Gerrard, whose rendering of the song, popularised in the 40s by Lily Mae Hicks of the famed Hicks Family singers, twangs with back holler swagger. “I feel the beauty of the little gestures in the old music: the microtonal shadings, the miniscule shifts in bow pressure, the funky tug between downbeat and backbeat in these regional banjo styles,” Decosimo has said. Therein lies the compelling art of this album.