The Down Hill Strugglers are very pleased to announce the release of our new album, "Lone Prairie" - coming out April 28th on Jalopy Records!!
The album will be issued on vinyl, CD and as a digital download. Sadly, because of budget issues we could not afford to have heads on this album cover, but we hope that our fortunes will improve soon!!
Order your copy today: www.downhillstrugglers.bandcamp.com/album/lone-prairie
Or pick one up at one of our upcoming Spring "Mud Season" tour dates...
And see the whole Jalopy Records catalogue at www.JalopyRecords.com
The album features 13
all new recordings from the band and liner notes by Amanda Petrusich,
contributing writer for The New Yorker, Pitchfork and a contributing editor at
The Oxford American. Her music and culture writing has also appeared in
The New York Times, The Atlantic, Spin, BuzzFeed, and she is the author of “Do
Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm
Records”. Petrusich has written that “The Down Hill Strugglers are, to my
ears, the very best interpreters of traditional material presently going.”
From the liner notes:
“Lone Prairie was recorded in the spring of 2016 at the Jalopy Theatre in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The band used two microphones, and played directly into a mono Nagra one-quarter-inch tape machine. They either ducked away from or leaned toward the mic to get their sound levels right. Then they stopped monkeying with the recording altogether, which is surely part of why it feels so pure and urgent. It is energizing in the way that looking at a river is energizing.”
“So what does it mean for a young band to make music like this right now? Our cultural moment certainly allows for (if not encourages) gratuitous elevation of the Self above all – but the Down Hill Strugglers think about their work differently. Each of these tracks takes inspiration from the rural visionaries of the early twentieth century, from the melodies and expressions that once guided and sustained whole communities in the Mountain South, the Deep South, and Way Out West. Lone Prairie is an earnest monument to the rural artists and songs this band loves: the Mississippi Possum Hunters, the Skillet Lickers, Bill Shepherd and Dock Boggs, the Carolina Tar Heels, Frank Blevins, George Pegram, Wilmer Watts, and many others. Using lovingly excavated 78 r.p.m. discs as source material – Walker, Jackson, and Eli disappear inside these tunes. In this way, the Strugglers become part of a continuum. Their performance is less about ardent self-expression and more about empathy, of finding a way in to other people’s anguish and elation: understanding it, bodying it anew, respecting it, and carrying it on. They pay homage to and remake in equal measure, as artists have been doing for centuries. This, I believe, is the best and most useful work a folk musician can hope to do.”
From the liner notes:
“Lone Prairie was recorded in the spring of 2016 at the Jalopy Theatre in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The band used two microphones, and played directly into a mono Nagra one-quarter-inch tape machine. They either ducked away from or leaned toward the mic to get their sound levels right. Then they stopped monkeying with the recording altogether, which is surely part of why it feels so pure and urgent. It is energizing in the way that looking at a river is energizing.”
“So what does it mean for a young band to make music like this right now? Our cultural moment certainly allows for (if not encourages) gratuitous elevation of the Self above all – but the Down Hill Strugglers think about their work differently. Each of these tracks takes inspiration from the rural visionaries of the early twentieth century, from the melodies and expressions that once guided and sustained whole communities in the Mountain South, the Deep South, and Way Out West. Lone Prairie is an earnest monument to the rural artists and songs this band loves: the Mississippi Possum Hunters, the Skillet Lickers, Bill Shepherd and Dock Boggs, the Carolina Tar Heels, Frank Blevins, George Pegram, Wilmer Watts, and many others. Using lovingly excavated 78 r.p.m. discs as source material – Walker, Jackson, and Eli disappear inside these tunes. In this way, the Strugglers become part of a continuum. Their performance is less about ardent self-expression and more about empathy, of finding a way in to other people’s anguish and elation: understanding it, bodying it anew, respecting it, and carrying it on. They pay homage to and remake in equal measure, as artists have been doing for centuries. This, I believe, is the best and most useful work a folk musician can hope to do.”