Bonny Light Horseman @ Songbyrd Music House [DC] - 2/4/2020
Anaïs Mitchell performing with Bonny Light Horseman at Songbyrd Music House in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Mauricio Castro)
Folk "supergroup" Bonny Light Horseman, born out of a chance collaboration at the 2015 Eau Claire festival, is a fascinating standalone project of three musicians — Anaïs Mitchell (Hadestown), Eric Johnson (Fruit Bats), and Josh Kaufman (Bob Weir, Hiss Golden Messenger) — each with a distinguished track record, uniting over a shared love of folk music in the Anglo-American traditions.
Of the three, singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell offers the deepest credentials in folk music, from her 2013 record of the Child Ballads, the anthology of Scots-English traditional folksongs, and her Tony Award-winning adaptation of mythology in Hadestown. Johnson provides his extraordinary facility with banjo and guitar and his effortless tenor. In contrast, Kaufman, the quietest member of the trio, provides much of the texture of Bonny Light Horseman's refracted folk songs, on steel guitar and other instrumentation.
The three, with a talented rhythm section backing them, packed the basement of the Songbyrd Music House on February 4, with one of the most fascinatingly diverse show-going audiences in recent DC memory: indie types, genuine folkies, and theater nerds, drawn in by Mitchell's Tony Award-winning musical. With a setlist pulled from hundreds of years of British and American folk storytelling, It was a stellar display of undying songs, inventive arrangements, and casually brilliant playing.
With Anaïs Mitchell tattooed and radiantly pregnant, and Eric Johnson lean and handsome in a jean jacket, the show opened with "10,000 Miles," the closing track on their self-titled 2020 debut, a showcase of their elegant harmonizing. Like most of the Bonny Light Horseman material, "10,000 Miles" is traditional material that has been tugged, gently but firmly, into the 21st century. Some songs in the Bonny Light Horseman repertoire have entered the popular canon, none more so than "Blackwaterside," known to millions from a Led Zeppelin interpretation.
On their version, Mitchell and Johnson alternate lead vocals on a cruel tale of heartbreak and deceit, alternating between the innocent victim and the teller of the tale. On record, the Staves provide harmony vocals, but in concert, the two are more than capable of delivering the song with the emotional heft it needs. In "The Roving" (sometimes recorded as "Loving Hannah"), Anaïs Mitchell put down the guitar and pantomimed the wild roving of the character's eyes, unable to commit and desperate for escape. "In Jane Jane," Bonny Light Horseman interpolated the children's hymn "Go Where I Send Thee" with alternating lead vocals and Kaufman's steel guitar propelling the song forward.
Referencing the Anglo-Scots folk tradition, Johnson wryly noted, "Most of these songs are hundred and hundreds of years old... but the next songs are like 50 years old. Tiny little baby songs". Those were the newer American pieces, like "Go Your Way," an Anne Briggs cover that took Bonny Light Horseman into rare jam band territory with extra guitar soloing and drumming, and Tim Buckley's "Buzzin' Fly." For their encore, the three leads of Bonny Light Horseman gathered around a single microphone Carter-Family-style for "Bright Morning Stars," a haunted Appalachian ballad about the impermanence of our lives and the certainty that the world will continue, after we're gone.
Bonny Light Horseman was preceded by the country/folk singer-songwriter Erin Rae, performing her first shows of the decade outside her neighborhood of west Nashville. From icons like Nanci Griffith, Erin Rae has inherited the songwriter's DNA of affection for the obscure idiosyncrasies of small-town Southern life. She shares a skill at writing in perfect miniatures, finding subtlety in character studies and sketches of the tiny moments on which significant lifelong changes may pivot. In "Bad Mind," Rae explores a Southern sense of religious shame and the pressure to conform; in others, like "Love That Before," she celebrates the small joys of life in the intimate settings where music and family and friendships intersect.
