Joseph Allred — The Rambles & Rags Of Shiloh (Worried Songs)
The Rambles & Rags of Shiloh by Joseph Allred
Some folks talk about how life influences art, and some talk about how art influences life. You don’t have to step back too far to see how they can be in dialogue with each other, exert forces upon one another that cannot be summed up in a neat binary equation. The Rambles & Rags Of Shiloh, Joseph Allred’s solo LP release of 2022, is named for a rural location in Tennessee that has been home to his father’s ancestors for a couple hundred years. At the time that Allred recorded it, they were attending graduate school in Boston; just after the LP was released, they moved back to Tennessee. Might a looming longing for the ancestral sod have shaped these compositions? Might the interaction of compositional processes and memory that formed them set Allred on a course away from that dirty water that the Standells so loved? Or maybe we can blame it all on escalating rents?
The Rambles & Rags Of Shiloh was recorded at the same time as its predecessor, Branches & Leaves. But the two albums sound profoundly different from one another. The first release is an exactingly realized virtual ensemble performance, with prominent singing and a variety of instruments on every track. But Rambles… is a purely instrumental recording. Each piece is devoted to a particular instrument — a six or twelve-string guitar, or banjo — and sometimes to a particular method. Allred’s debt to James Blackshaw has never been clearer than on “The Dervish,” “Dance of the Fair Folk,” and “March of the True Bugs,” which all use tremolo string technique to generate slow-moving clouds of resonance-wrapped melody. The jaunty “Linville Rag,” which shares its name with a tiny burg in North Carolina, is a study in the joyous ends to which one can apply Piedmont-style picking. And the lap steel showcase, “Blues For Terry Turtle,” uses patient swoops up and down the neck to express posthumous regard for the fallen Buck Gooter guitarist.
But to linger too long on methodology is to miss the way that the music’s diverse vectors converge to generate a sonic synergy of memory, imagination and emotion. Allred contains multitudes, but that’s what it takes to be a true standard-bearer of the Takoma School.
