Red Tail Ring’s old-time folk revival with a gorgeous spin: The Local Spins Artist Spotlight

The Kalamazoo duo of Michael Beauchamp and Laurel Premo has wowed audiences across the country and in Europe with its ‘tight sound.’ They play Wheatland for the first time this weekend.

 

For Red Tail Ring, folk music is as much about community as anything else.

And that means the Kalamazoo duo’s debut at the community-oriented, 41st Wheatland Music Festival this weekend will likely add considerably to the growing family of musicians and fans who’ve connected with Red Tail Ring’s contemporary take on old-timey traditional music.

“We just love the community. It’s really fun to sit down with people in all kinds of different settings, whether you’re around the traditional campfire or just kind of hanging out and getting to share tunes,” says guitarist and singer Michael Beauchamp, who formed Red Tail Ring with violinist and banjo player Laurel Premo in 2009.

“It’s fun to share a song that you just wrote and fun to share a new version of an old traditional song. Michigan has a great community, of course. We’re part of the Earthwork Music collective and we really love all those people. … I think that is the core of what we enjoy about it.”

Also at the core of the duo’s haunting, old-time folk revival milieu is a deep appreciation and understanding of the roots and traditions of that music: Beauchamp holds joint degrees in ethnomusicology and English from the University of Michigan, where Premo earned a degree in performing arts technology. (She mixes all of the duo’s sound recordings.)

Premo, who grew up with traditional music in the Upper Peninsula, also studied traditional Finnish music in Finland in 2008 before meeting up with Beauchamp.

“We were both solo songwriters,” Premo says. “We were both just looking at that time to play with other people repetitively in a formal relationship with a band and play more traditional-related music. We had the opportunity to sit down one night together and we really liked how it sounded.”

GIVING TRADITIONAL MUSIC THEIR OWN SPIN AND EARNING HIGH PRAISE

Since then, Red Tail Ring has released three full-length albums, with its most recent duo recording, “The Heart’s Swift Foot,” deservedly earning high praise from a host of national publications and winning a WYCE Jammie Award earlier this year for best Americana album. The duo, which plays contra and square dances regularly, also recently teamed up with fiddler Sam Cooper and banjo player Sam Herman as the group Bowhunter to create an album of that music, “The Right Hands ’Round.”

“It’s definitely a side project, but a continuous love in our lives,” Premo says of playing dances and the Bowhunter venture. “People kept asking, ‘Can I take some of that home with me?’ ”

In recent years, the duo has performed across Michigan and crisscrossed the United States, with a 2013 overseas tour to Germany and the Czech Republic.

Earlier this week, Premo and Beauchamp visited the studios of News Talk 1340 AM (WJRW) for Local Spins Live to talk about their music and perform a traditional tune, “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies.” Listen to a podcast of the show here and check out a video of that exclusive performance below.

In typical Red Tail Ring fashion, the duo’s twist on the traditional adds a freshness to the music while respecting the roots of the original song.

“It’s important to give it your own spin because otherwise, ‘Why are you doing it?’ We really enjoy taking something that people might have heard a lot in a different context and … maybe slowing it down and giving it more harmony or dissonant harmonies,” Beauchamp says.

“It’s cool when people get what we’re trying to do, because I don’t think everybody does always all the time. People who appreciate Doc Watson and other folks from the folk revival, I think they understand we’re trying to honor that and that we love that, but that we’re trying to change it just a little bit, much like they did in the ’60s era. They weren’t verbatim just doing things. They were modifying them and making them their own too.”

Premo and Beauchamp also are committed to the duo format, and the way fans embrace that stripped-down approach.

“It’s been so fun to just be the two of us,” Beauchamp insists. “There’s no backing band; there’s no pyrotechnics or anything like that. It’s just the music. I think people really respond to the tight sound that we’re making and how much fun we have making it.”

Red Tail Ring plays the Centennial Stage at Wheatland in Remus at 2:45 p.m. Sunday; read more about Wheatland and see the full schedule in this Local Spins story.

For more information about the band and its performance schedule, visit redtailring.com.

Copyright 2014, Spins on Music