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describe as “Turning another page of the big book of North Ameri- cana and outsider folk.”
T
Their proud outsider folk assertions put them in the good com- pany of artists like Michael Hurley, and right from the beginning with The Be Good Tanyas there was that element of not fitting the mould. I asked Holland why she wanted to form an all-women band in the first place. “When I started playing in bands in Houston as a teenager, I was very shy, and I had a hard time finding anyone to play with,” she told me. “Most of the musicians I met were total ass- holes, and most of the musicians I met were men. I surmised that maybe if I put together a band that was all women, there would be less bullshit. I am utterly disabused of that fantasy at this point. I’m down for working with great musicians of any gender.”
However, the young Jolie Holland was contending with gender
at home, years before any of this occurred. Her parents “met in a theocratic cult where women have no roles except as housewives”. Indeed the following brief insight into her early days illustrates the drive she had all through her formative years, to pursue and keep music in her life. “I was never given any music lessons as a child, and none of my ambitions were ever fostered or supported. I was writing songs and poetry from the age of six, and I got into orchestra class when I was thirteen, so thereafter I had a school-owned instrument. I didn’t have a violin of my own until my travelling partner bought me one when I was seventeen. A girl I met in school taughtme how to play guitar, and another girl in school gave me a cheap guitar. I was living with friends from the age of seventeen.”
Parton on the other hand came from a musical family. “They were old-world European so music was very much part of the cul- ture.” Her grandmother had had something of a music career during WWII, performing for RAF troops as ‘The Czech Spitfire’. Her brother was a musical prodigy; she herself had taken piano lessons and loved singing with her twin sister. As a teenager she confesses pretty much stealing her sister’s guitar because she “wanted to be more than just the girl who sang harmonies while the dudes played guitar”. From lessons, songbooks, musicians, neighbours, hippies and banjo camp with Mike Seeger, she learnt guitar, mandolin and banjo.
Fast forward a couple of decades and we have Jolie Holland and Samantha Parton collaborating on a new album, despite the fact that they haven’t worked together for nine years. “There are very few people with whom I’ve written songs,” Holland told me simply when I asked why they had joined forces again. “My relationship with Samantha is the most established co-songwriter partnership of my life, and that’s been true since my early 20s.”
Holland is also fully aware of how their vocal harmonies work so
well. “Sam’s an incredible singer, so creative and multi-skilled. She knows how to get to the dead centre of a song, as a performer. She’s at turns like an impressionist, choosing these high, strange har- monies, and then she’s not afraid to do what’s expected with a melody. Our voices do work together in a special way. My tone is hard, and hers is diffuse, so they fit together, not occupying identical space, but filling out different parts of the spectrum alongside each other.”
Parton’s version of events backs this up. “I have to get very tuned into her intention in the moment, as her phrasing is not pre- dictable. But it’s always totally masterful, totally right. So, every sin- gle time I sing with her, whether it’s live or in the studio, I learn something. We have really different tonal qualities to our voices, so it’s fun to play around with that, it’s dynamic.”
When Holland decided to contact Parton, she phoned her out of the blue. “It was kind of miraculous,” Parton told me. “At the time, I knew I needed to find a way forward, but wasn’t sure how that would look. Writing and playing was very difficult. I couldn’t play my instruments for any more than a few minutes at a time, and singing was really painful. When I tried to write, everything seemed com- pletely forced, completely dead on the page. I couldn’t connect to the part of my brain that I had always relied upon – the special, magic part that dreamed up music and lyrics. Being unable to con- nect with my creativity felt devastating. I still struggle with it. So when Jolie came into the picture, she helped me so much – just hav- ing that loving, supportive person there, who knows me as a song- writer, who knows my aesthetic, my style, my instincts – she helped me pull forth the words and images that I couldn’t readily access on my own. And she was willing to work in stops and starts, as I needed to take a lot of breaks.”
he good news is they have put their heads together again, collaborating on their recently released album Wildflower Blues. A mix of original songs and the reworked material of legends such as Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, and Michael Hurley, it’s an album they
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