Rachel Sumner and Traveling Light, a trio from the Boston area playing bluegrass and old time music, are the latest entry in our Homegrown Plus series, in which we include a concert video, an interview video, and a set of links to explore. You’ll find it all in this post…along with a bonus song video! Singer, multi-instrumentalist, and Lennon Award-winning songwriter Rachel Sumner is a fixture of the Boston roots and Americana scene. She fronts the trio Traveling Light on vocals, guitar and banjo, with Kat Wallace on fiddle and Mike Siegel on upright bass. Together they specialize in applying their deeply rooted bluegrass know-how to new interpretations of traditional folk songs and tightly crafted original songs written by Sumner. The band has previously participated in our Archive Challenge at Folk Alliance International and contributed a song to our special Labor Day presentation in 2003. In this concert they made a special effort to play some songs that are part of the American Folklife Center archive, making this another entry in the Archive Challenge as well. Watch the concert in the player below!
In the interview, we talked about the band members’ careers and musical influences, how they formed the band, and where they see it all going. We talked about the craft of songwriting, and some of Rachel’s best known songs, including “Radium Girls.” We also spoke about the Boston music scene, the influence of various musical traditions, and the importance of archives. See the interview in the player below!
Collection Connections
This concert was partly an Archive Challenge, with Rachel and the band interpreting some songs from right here in our American Folklife Center archive. With that in mind, we’ll look at collection connections for the individual songs first, then move on to old-time and bluegrass music more generally.
But first of all, find Rachel Sumner and Traveling Light’s online home here.
The Songs from the Archive
Rachel and the band learned “Out on the Western Plains,” which was recorded for our archive by Lead Belly, for the Center’s Archive Challenge at Folk Alliance International back in 2022. Lead Belly, whose given name was Huddie Ledbetter, recorded this song many times in his career, including at least 3 times for the archive we steward at the Center–in 1933, 1934, and 1935. Although it’s common to claim Lead Belly composed this song, the Lomaxes in 1936 identified it as Lead Belly’s fragmentary version of a ballad known to both white and Black cowboys in Texas, and in 1938 identified it more specifically as Lead Belly’s version of ‘The Old Chisolm Trail.’ The archive versions of this song were initially titled “Western Cowboy,” but later recordings sometimes called it “Out on the Western Plains,” probably because Lead Belly sang several cowboy songs with confusingly overlapping titles and first lines. You can hear our archive’s 1934 recording in this licensed YouTube video. See the Archive Challenge video by Rachel Sumner and Traveling Light below.
Rachel learned “Over the Garden Wall” from the Carter Family. Since it’s a commercial recording, we don’t have their version in the AFC archive, but we have one of the earliest versions, which certainly influenced the Carters. It’s in one of the songsters we’ve recently placed online in the Robert Winslow Gordon Songsters collection. See the relevant pages below, and the entire songster at this link!
Rachel’s version of “The Cuckoo” was inspired by Clarence Ashley’s version, which he called “The Coo-Coo Bird.” Ashley, a singer and banjo player who was also a member of the Carolina Tar Heels, first recorded the song in 1929 on a 78 rpm record for Columbia Records. That version was included in the 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, an extemely influential LP (and later CD) compilation, by the collector and producer Harry Smith. In 1960, inspired by the Anthology, the folklorist Ralph Rinzler sought out Clarence Ashley and encouraged him to resume his musical career. Ashley recorded several albums and appeared at important festivals, often singing “The Coo-Coo Bird,” up until his death in 1967. The American Folklife Center has recordings of Clarence Ashley singing “The Coo-Coo Bird” in several collections, inlcuding the Ralph Rinzler Duplication Project. One of those versions was also released on the album Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley’s Part 2, and on later Folkways compilations. You can hear that version in the Folklife Research Center, but Smithsonian Folkways has also put it on YouTube at this link.
There’s a wonderful film of Ashley and his friends performing “The Coo-Coo Bird” in our collections, which includes a great interview by the folklorist D. K. Wilgus. It was shot by George Pickow for the PBS series Lyrics and Legends, and we have original film in the Jean Ritchie and George Pickow Collection. It was also licensed for the video Legends of Old-Time Music, which you can watch in the Library’s Moving Image Research Center (by appointment). But you don’t have to come here to see it: the video’s producer, Guitar Workshop, has also put it on YouTube at this link!
“Radium Girls” is an original by Rachel, but it is technically already in the archive as of last year! Rachel and the band contributed another performance of it to our video concert Singing in Solidarity: Women’s Voices Celebrate Labor Day.
The Other Songs
Even though they’re not directly out of the Archive of Folk Culture, the other songs the band performed have connections to American Folklife Center and other Library of Congress collections. Here are collection connections for the songs I haven’t found in the archive yet. (Note that because some AFC collections don’t have item-level indexes, it’s often not possible to say definitively that we DON’T have a particular song in the archive without listening to or watching every relevant disc, tape, or film. We just can’t always confirm that we do without many hours of research. If your own research requires a definitive answer, you are welcome to visit us at the Library of Congress and listen!)
Rachel adapted her version of “Willie’s Lady” from the one by Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer, and from Anais and Jefferson’s source, Martin Carthy. Martin in turn learned it from the great Scottish folksinger Ray Fisher, who set it to the melody all these performers use, originally from the Breton-language song “Son ar Chistr.” We have some very early recordings of Ray Fisher in some smaller collections such as the Dunfermline Howff Folksong Club recordings, and Ray is also in some of our larger collections documenting folk clubs, including the Cherry Tree Music Co-Op collection, the Folklore Society of Greater Washington collection, and the New York Pinewoods Folk Music Club collection. It’s quite possible she performs “Willie’s Lady” on some of those tapes. Martin Carthy, too, is in many of our collections, including the last three named above, and it’s likely that a version of Martin singing “Willie’s Lady” is in the archive too. Anais Mitchell came to the Library to participate in a performance of her musical Hadestown, and there are videos at this link. We also had a Homegrown Concert with the Murphy Beds, featuring Jefferson Hamer, and we did a Homegrown Plus blog on that here. Neither Anais nor Jefferson sang “Willie’s Lady,” though!
“Bank Man Blues” is another of Rachel’s originals, inspired by Bill Monroe. We have lots of Bill Monroe recordings, including the Neil V Rosenberg Bluegrass Music collection, the John Cohen Collection, and several collections each donated by Mike Seeger and Ralph Rinzler. Find information on these collections here.
“I’m Gonna Be an Engineer” was written by Peggy Seeger in 1971 for the Festival of Fools, a satirical revue created by The Critics Group, of which she was a member. Peggy’s papers are in the Music Division’s Seeger Family Collection, including manuscripts of this song that shed light on its development. Peggy also appeared in our 2007 Seeger Family Tribute concert and symposium, and videos are available here.
“Wallflower” is an original by Rachel about the Boston music scene. Betsy Siggins spoke about an earlier phase of that scene at our symposium Coffeehouses: Folk Music, Culture & Counterculture.
“Wineapple Rind” is a song Rachel wrote based on contemporary issues–but also inspired by Hildegarde von Bingen. Did you know you could marvel at the illumninated manuscript of Hildegard’s Liber Divinorum Operum right here on the Library of Congress website?
“Head East” is an original song about Rachel’s experience of moving from California. In some ways it’s a response to old songs like “Go West, Young Man, Go West.”
“High on a Mountain” was written by the great old-time and bluegrass musician Ola Belle Reed. It’s possible Ola Belle played this song when she performed a Neptune Plaza concert in 1977. Most of our other Ola Belle collections come from before she wrote this song. See videos of an Ola Belle Reed tribute concert and oral history, an essay about Ola Belle, and a list of our Ola Belle Reed collections, in this Folklife Today post!
Blogs Featuring Bluegrass, Old Time, and Cowboy Music
Here at Folklife Today, we’ve been featuring video, audio, and research into these genres of music for over a decade, so there is a lot to explore. Try the searches below to start:
- Find blogs featuring video, audio, and discussion of old time music here.
- Find blogs featuring video, audio, and discussion of bluegrass music here.
- Find blogs featuring video, audio, and discussion of cowboy and western music here.
Extensive Field Collection Online
AFC’s Alan Lomax collection contains music collected from many traditional performers in many genres. Over at the association for Cultural Equity, you can explore the collection in a number of ways. They don’t include “old-time” as a genre, but these searches should be of interest if you enjoyed Rachel’s concert:
- This link will return a list of all materials in the Lomax Digital Archive labeled as bluegrass.
- This link will return a list of all materials in the Lomax Digital Archive labeled as Anglo-American culture.
- This link will return a list of all materials in the Lomax Digital Archive labeled as African-American culture.
- This link will return a list of all materials in the Lomax Digital Archive labeled as Appalachian culture.
- This link will return a list of all materials in the Lomax Digital Archive labeled as Southern U.S. culture.
- This link will return a list of all items in the Lomax Digital Archive labeled as cowboy songs.
Other Field Collections
Many of the online field collections from the American Folklife Center have substantial content relevant to old-time and bluegrass. You can find a list of all our digital collections on the Library’s website here. You can get started by looking for these in particular:
- The Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project includes old time and bluegrass music
- The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection includes old time songs and tunes
- The Coal River Folklife Project includes old time and bluegrass music)
- The Henry Reed Collection includes old time fiddle tunes)
- The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip includes old time and cowboy music
- The South-Central Georgia Folklife Project Collection (Include bluegrass and old time music)
Event Videos
AFC’s event videos include concerts, lectures, and symposia. If you enjoyed this concert, the following searches might be of interest too!
- American Folklife Center event videos that mention bluegrass.
- American Folklife Center event videos that mention old time music.
- American Folklife Center event videos that mention cowboy songs.
Thanks!
As always, thanks for watching, listening, and reading! The American Folklife Center’s Homegrown Concert Series brings music, dance, and spoken arts from across the country, and some from further afield, to the Library of Congress. The idea of the Homegrown Plus series is to gather concert videos, video interviews with the musicians, and connections to Library of Congress collections together in one place for our subscribers. (Find the whole Homegrown Plus series here!) For information on current concerts, visit the Folklife Concerts page at Concerts from the Library of Congress. For past concerts videos, visit the Homegrown Concerts and Interviews Online Archive.