Bluegrass is a social music; one that requires musical communication and flexibility. Combine three musicians from the same household, and you're looking at a whole new level of communication. You're listening to Off the Record, with Stephen Philip Harvey, where we sit down and talk to a variety of musicians on today's music scene.
Today we're sitting down with the folk villains. There are folk trio from Tys in Maryland. Play bluegrass music that blends traditions of old and new, but how did they get their start?
Isabel:
We have grown up listening to our father, Robin Cockey, playing with a multitude of bands. He's an amazing Celtic and Irish violinist who dabbles in a little bit of old time and bluegrass.
He's classically trained and he is, I think all three of ours, greatest inspiration when it comes to folk music. When we were just getting on our feet as performing musicians, not even as a band yet, one of his bands called The Folk Heroes would let us come on stage and play with [them]. There's actually some really fun videos of us at some Irish pubs on.
Being thrust on stage at like in elementary school ages to crowds of just such an integral experience to our band formation and all of our connection with folk music. So we decided to become a band that we were going to pay homage in a sense to our dad and the band. Of hits that kind of helped get us on our feet.
The music flows through the family making for an intimate musical connection. But with all three band members coming from the same household, the group must have an interesting dynamic.
Ringgold:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that the three of us have a very deep connection with each other musically. I think growing up in an area that doesn't have a very big bluegrass scene meant to us meant that we really just played with each other mostly.
And we have a very good, we have a very strong improvisational background to the point where most of the arrangements we're playing on stage are completely improvised and are just us using nonverbal, eye contacts, hand signals, things like that to movie move the song along.
So it's definitely something I think that we've really benefit benefited from.
Though they're young (two in high school and one in college), the three are starting to gain ground in the bluegrass community. They recently performed at the International Bluegrass Music Association's Annual Conference and had this to say:
Guinevere:
...and the amount of people that showed up to us playing that like we didn't even know. They just saw our posters, saw that we were playing on Instagram and were like, "oh, we know this band. Let's go see them." It's just crazy to us the support. Like, we met somebody from the eastern shore that was vacationing there and they saw we were playing in Chattanooga and came up and where they were like, we love you guys so much. And I didn't even know that we had that like much variety of [support].
This was Off the Record, hosted by me, Stephen Philip Harvey, a Del Marva public media production. Thanks for listening to our interview with Ringgold Cockey, Isabel Cockey and Guinevere Cockey, AKA, The Folk Villains. To hear more off the record interviews or to listen to other original segments like this, visit delmarvapubticmedia.org
