On April 23rd, Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway came to Skully’s Music Diner on their “Through the Looking Glass” tour. Molly, a rising star in the world of bluegrass music, hit the road this spring right off of a Grammy win for this year’s Best Bluegrass Album. Her fast-paced set featured a lineup of fan-favorite songs and the tour’s namesake cover of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit. Her expert flatpicking guitar technique was matched by a masterful band including Dominic Leslie on mandolin, Shelby Means on bass, Bronwyn Kieth Haines on fiddle, and Kyle Tuttle on banjo. Every musician on stage was at the top of their craft – nothing compares to watching Golden Highway at work.
On this tour, banjoist, singer, and songwriter Kaia Kater opened for the band, showcasing a different take on traditional music to the crowd. Unlike most bluegrass musicians, Kater uses the folk-influenced clawhammer banjo technique instead of the typical three-finger (or Scruggs-style) technique. Accompanied by Carolyn Kendrick on fiddle and guitar, Kater offered a set grounded in her roots as a Quebec native and a descendant of Grenadian immigrants, weaving in American influences like Ola Belle Reed and Ray Charles.
I’ve been following Kaia Kater’s work for years, and had the pleasure of speaking with her after the show to talk about her Columbus performance and her upcoming album, Strange Medicine, for my AROUSE radio show “Grass is Blue”.
Ella: As a clawhammer player myself, I’m always interested to know: how did you come to find the banjo?
Kaia: Well, I grew up in a folk family. My mom ran a couple of festivals including the Ottawa Folk Festival and then the Winnipeg Folk Festival a little bit later on when I was in high school. She discovered the “O Brother, Where Art Thou” soundtrack in 2001 which had so many musical heavy hitters like Gillian Welch and John Hartford. That pulled her into the world of bluegrass from folk, and so we started going to bluegrass festivals when I was a kid. I think I went to my first one when I was 10: the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival in upstate New York. While I was there, they had a bluegrass academy for kids. It was mostly a summer camp so that the adults could go and see music, and then pick their kid up later on in the day. It’s really exciting because you go to this academy and then at the end of the festival, you get to perform on the main stage where all of your heroes are performing. So it was a safe way to explore bluegrass music with a bunch of other kids. I got into the banjo through that. You could choose an instrument that you wanted to play, and I borrowed a banjo and started learning how to play Scruggs style and three finger. I got pretty far into it, but it just wasn’t really connecting with me. I think at the time, too, there were no women that played Scruggs style banjo–maybe Allison Brown, but she was just coming up. So I didn’t really feel like I belonged in bluegrass. Then I had a mentor, Mitch Batalik–who started the Winnipeg Folk Festival–who saw that I had a banjo and who helped me take the resonator off. He was like: “Let me give you a clawhammer lesson. Let’s try a different approach to this”. And for some reason, that avenue really clicked for me. I went to some camps in North Carolina when I was in middle school and high school. I had just enough great influences and teachers to keep me going at those critical junctures when you could quit. There’s something that pulls you and keeps you going along.
Ella: I’ve also taken resonators off of friends’ banjos!
Kaia: It’s a total rite of passage.
Ella: Yes, absolutely!
So, you’ve been touring with Molly Tuttle, including at Skully’s Music Diner right here in Columbus. How has your experience been on tour?
Kaia: It’s been really good. There was a long time where I wasn’t touring, partly because I was finishing the Grenades record cycle. And then the pandemic hit. So there was this extended time when I was at home. I’ve been progressively over the last couple of years getting back on the road, and feeling that shift between equal parts at home and on the road. I think it’s totally a balance. It’s always great opening for people because you get to see their show every night and be inspired by what they’re doing. And Molly especially, because in bluegrass she’s such a big deal. She’s such an incredible musician. She really opened her tour to me; she was very welcoming. I thought that it was a cool choice for her to have openers who aren’t really bluegrass musicians: more roots musicians, folk, old time. I know she’s having Allison and Tatiana open for her, and Amethyst Kiah. I feel like she has big ears and she wants her audiences to have a few different types of music at her concerts, which I think is really cool.
Ella: You’re touring, in part, to support your new album: Strange Medicine, coming out May 17. I saw that you produced a podcast for the new album called Track Snacks, where you dive into the meaning of each of the songs and your writing process for them. I really enjoyed the episode on The Witch, which is a single you just released. Could you tell us a little about the inspiration behind The Witch and your collaboration with Aoife O’Donovan?
Kaia: I find a lot of inspiration from films and TV shows. I know a lot of musicians who barely watch TV, and I’ve always found that really admirable for some reason. I don’t know if there’s a moral superiority in not watching TV, but I love TV. I love movies. I did a film composing program throughout the pandemic. I find a lot of inspiration in those narratives. I got really into witchy movies. I watched the Joel Cohen remake of Macbeth, with Denzel Washington and Francis McDormand–just so creepy and amazing and different. And then I watched Hocus Pocus. I was thinking a lot about maligned femininity, and how that’s kind of attractive, especially to cisgender straight men. Witches, sirens. If you think of the Odyssey: I was reading about Cersei, who turns all of Odysseus’s men into swine. Medusa. Even thinking of poets and women who I feel were not very successful in their lives and then after they died became a lot more successful, like Zora Neale Hurston and Sylvia Plath.
I think all of that coalesced into: “What would it be to have these stories of temptresses–these evil, spooky creatures that men can’t understand–what would it feel like to have the story told from the feminist perspective?” That’s what The Witch is about.
While I was writing it, I was thinking a lot about Aoife because she has this very ethereal, really unique voice that I love a lot. I also find that she’s written a lot from a feminist perspective. I just imagined her voice on this. She’s also a prolific collaborator: she’s really good at being the glue that sticks things together. She did well on this song.
Ella: In the podcast episode on The Witch you use the phrase “righteous anger” to describe the emotion of the storyteller. I think that feeling of righteous anger carries through a lot of your work, especially work that tackles themes of colonialism and racial apartheid. Your 2018 album, Grenades, really digs into the history of Granada’s struggle for liberation. On this new album, you’ve also brought that theme to the track Fédon. Can you talk to us a little bit about the meaning behind Fédon?
Kaia: So, very literally, Julien Fédon was his name, and he was a Black man from Martinique. He was mixed race. We’re not really sure what the relationship between his white father and black mother was. Often, plantation owners would sexually assault enslaved women and end up fathering mixed race children. So, we don’t really know how that happened. But he ended up as a free mixed race man from Martinique, and he bought a plantation in Grenada. Grenada, at the time, was under the control of the British. So he came in surreptitiously with some money and had some privilege to be able to buy this property. His ultimate goal was to foment an insurrection or revolution and abolish slavery. This was in the late 1700s, so, if you know your history, it’s around the time of the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution–this stuff was actively in people’s minds.
So that’s what he did. He amassed an army, mostly of enslaved people–enslaved Black Grenadians. On the second of March 1795, he launched his attack. They went to these plantation owners’ mansions, into their bedrooms, took them out into the public square in Granville (which is a city in the north of the island) and executed them. They notably executed the Governor of Grenada, Ninian Home, who was a slave owner, plantation owner and represented the King of England. He was essentially the equivalent of Canada’s Prime Minister.
I thought that it was a really interesting story. The revolution didn’t last very long–I think it lasted a year, total. The British recaptured Grenada and Fédon was never found. They captured his lieutenants, but he was never found and no one gave up his location. We don’t know whether he died, whether he escaped–who knows? But he lived on culturally in the imaginations of Grenadians. And then, hundreds of years later, there’s a Black socialist revolution in Grenada, and now the Prime Minister is calling for a Republic. I just thought that it was an interesting story, and I thought that I could create something that felt hopeful instead of hopeless, and cultivate that revolutionary energy that a lot of us need to keep going in this world full of toil and suffering. I love that song, I think that’s one of my favorites.
Ella: On college campuses around the country right now, including here at Ohio State, protesters advocating against settler-colonial violence in Palestine have been met with tremendous state repression and retaliation for making their voices heard. Music seems to be something that student protesters are organizing around to build a culture of solidarity within the movement. What place do you think your work–and the work of artists more generally–occupies in the struggle against colonialism around the world today?
Kaia: I think a lot about the last song that I wrote on Grenades, because Grenades more directly addressed fighting against Western oppression, and the oppression of large and powerful states like the United States. When I was writing it I was like: “Damn, so much of this feels so large”. You know, like Morris Bishop with the Black socialist revolution attempting to correct some of the harms and get the literacy rate up–just do very basic things. The Black Panthers did the same thing. I think they’re maligned as this terrorist Black group but literally they were starting lunch programs and trying to get literacy rates up.
The song that I wrote at the end of Grenades is called Poets Be Buried. I think that’s where I would love my work to stand: to be a comfort or a place that you can go to recharge and feel like: “I can do this; I can get back into the street”. In Poets Be Buried, the chorus goes: “Poets be buried and tender marching feet / buried as seeds and watered in the street”. I’m under no illusion that poets are going to be the thing that helps us overcome state oppression and colonial violence, but I think it’s a tool in the toolbox. When I’m feeling like shit, if I read something that Zora Neale Hurston wrote or Toni Morrison wrote – or I listen to an interview – I feel a little bit better, and I feel a little bit more able to go the 100 feet more that I need.
I have so much respect and admiration for the students right now all over the United States who are standing up for what they believe in. I think if you have the cops on your campus and you have the university telling you that you’re not behaving well, that means that you’re on the right side of history. My friend Jake Blount brought up the fact that if you feel like people protesting on private property is immoral then you wouldn’t have been on the right side of the Civil Rights Movement, because they had sit-ins at lunch counters and on city buses. I feel allied so completely with the student movement. I don’t want to wag my finger and say that young people are going to be the ones that change the world because older people with power–millennials especially–we have responsibility, but I I think that it’s amazing and I’m in full and complete support.
Ella: I want to say one more thing about Fédon: Taj Mahal is the feature. That’s so cool! What was it like to work with an absolute legend?
Kaia: It was a dream. There’s a feeling sometimes that: “This person’s music has had such an influence on my life”. It’s kind of the “don’t meet your heroes” fear. I definitely got that. Originally, Taj invited me to play at his 80th birthday concert. He invited a bunch of, what he calls “young people”, but I feel like he sees anyone under 60 as being young. So, he got a bunch of artists together and we all played songs with him. When I got up to play, he had heard that I was from Canada and Quebec, and he just started speaking French to me. We talked about Caribbean music. He’s 82 now, but the way that he animates when he plays music, when he thinks about music, when he talks about music–it’s like he’s a kid again in the music. I really admire that quality. So when I reached out to his management and said: “Hey, would you be interested in singing on the song? Here’s the history of it. Here’s why I think it would be amazing,” he just said ‘yes’ right away. And he didn’t even charge me! He’s a really great person. I tell everyone that I can. Taj randomly sent my friend Jake [Blount] a bunch of books about Black American history when he put out his record Spider Tales. I think Taj is here for the culture, and especially for young people. He did an amazing job. It’s a total dream.
Ella: That’s fabulous. Speaking of Taj, on this album you really lean into blues and jazz influences as well as traditional old time, folk, and country sounds. In this current cultural moment of recognition for voices of color in folk and country music, artists like Rhiannon Giddens–and even now Beyonce–have championed the cause of ‘genre abolitionism’, or have called into question the utility and truth of genre categories in defining music. Do you agree with the movement away from genre labels? If not, what value do you draw from the idea of genre?
Kaia: That’s a great question. I know that the artists that I admire the most make records just based on what sounds they’re interested in. So they’ll say: “I want to try something orchestral,” or: “I saw this drummer play the other day, and I would really love to work with them.” They go about it in terms of splashes and palates, rather than: “I think I’m going to make an Americana record now.” Or, if they do decide to make a country record, I think they’re doing it from a place of: “These are the players that I want, this is the sound that I want.” It’s from a place of musical inspiration. Those are the records that I identify the most with.
And then you get the record mixed and mastered, and you get it sent off to the label. Then you have a publicist and a manager who say: “Let’s write the press release for this; What is this album going to sound like? What does it mean? What does everything mean?” And there’s a text to go with everything. I find that sometimes that’s really difficult because you’re asked to provide references to other artists. Journalists need to do their job and they need to ask: “Okay, is this an Americana record? Great, we’ll put it in our Americana round up. Is this a bluegrass record? Great. Is this New Grass?” I don’t begrudge them any of that. But genre to me does feel like a secondary categorization that you have to file the art through.
If people ask me what kind of artist I think I am, I will always say I’m a folk musician, because that feels the truest to me. I identify with (the very probably problematic aspects, some of it) but the folk tradition of anti imperialism, political songs, ‘let me sing something that will calm down my nervous system’–all these things that I feel like happen within the folk idiom. And then people can pile on other things on top of that, if they want. I’ve been called a bluegrass artist, a country artist, an Americana artist. I just sort of look at it like, if it’s gonna help me get into more people’s ears, then great.
The place where I have a serious issue is, I don’t love the Americana music industry. I think that they have been very exclusionary to artists of color and queer people–queer artists of color. I think they have tokenized a lot of our work and not dealt with it at face value, like you are, and not really delved into the concepts that we’re trying to bring up. I think that a lot of us right now are making amazing music. Lizzie No has a great record out called Halfsies. I feel like we’re not getting engaged with with the same kind of seriousness. Maybe I’m throwing shade, but we’re not singing about flowers, and we’re not wearing wide brimmed hats. So I think that contributes to the Americana music industry being like: “I don’t really know what to do with you all. We need you so that we can say that we’re diverse, but also we’re not really going to let you in.”
Ella: Speaking of Americana, I would love it if you would talk to me a little bit about New Dangerfield, which is your stringband supergroup. You’ve got Jake Blount, Trey Wellington, and Nelson Williams, which is a stacked lineup of the most exciting and talented players working right now. You guys released a single this week–how did this group come to be, and what does New Dangerfield have in store?
Kaia: New Dangerfield was started by Trey Wellington, who has a great record called Black Banjo out. He is a three finger, Scruggs-style player. You know, he plays a lot of jazz and is interested in jazz. He has really varied influences, but often because he’s a bluegrass banjo player just gets lumped in with bluegrass. For the IBMA (International Bluegrass Musicians Association) Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina last year, they asked him to put together a group of ‘top pickers’. And he was like: “Ha! Yeah, I’m gonna take your money, and I’m gonna hire all my friends whose music I’m inspired by. And I’m going to do something very different than what you think ‘top pickers’ is,” which is keeping it pretty white and straight-ahead and non-political. So he called all of us and said: “Do you guys want to do a show together? We could just work up some material and see where we go.” So we said ‘yes’, and at our first show in Raleigh, in October, we were playing and we felt like we have tons of chemistry, and we’re so inspired by each other and challenged by each other’s strengths. We just felt like we should keep doing this. Jake was the one who suggested the name New Dangerfield, which is based on Dangerfield Newby, who was a Black man who was part of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. We released a track called Dangerfield Newby–which is also called Old Sport. We have another track coming in July, which is an original song that I wrote. At the end of August, we have a band retreat, and we’ll be writing some new music to put out as soon as we can for a new album.
Ella: That’s so exciting! I can’t wait, and I hope that I see you guys on the bluegrass circuit at some point over these next couple of summers. Thank you again for joining me today!
Kaia: Thank you for having me, it’s so nice to meet you!
Strange Medicine by Kaia Kater releases May 17th.
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