On today’s show I speak with Eastern Kentucky banjo player, fiddler and singer Brett Ratliff and with Cambridge fiddler Sylvia Ryerson. Brett and Sylvia were en route through New York and stopped in to play a set at the Roots ‘n’ Ruckus show at the Jalopy Theater in Redhook, Brooklyn. I recorded their set and interviewed them out on the street afterwords (you will hear some trucks going by). Sylvia, a student at Wesleyan University in CT, spent the summer working at the radio station of the Appal Shop, a community arts organization in Whitesburg, KY that preserves and promotes old time music, the indigenous music of the area. Brett lives in Whitesburg and has just released a CD of banjo and fiddle tunes and ballads called “Cold Icy Mountain,” on June Appal records, the Appal Shop label. We’ll hear about all this in the interview, plus a few songs from the new CD and Brett & Sylvia’s live show that night.
Brett Ratliff is returning to Brooklyn on October 3rd to play a show at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture, and a square dance the next night up in Greenpoint. Be sure to check that out, should be awesome! I’m definitely gonna go.
Brett Ratliff & Sylvia Ryerson at Jalopy August 6th 2008
Bill Ackerbauer
These two are great! His banjo playing and singing reminds me of Dirk Powell and Riley Baugus. Great tunes, too. Man, just when I thought I’d heard them all …