Raised in Tennessee and now based in Durham, North Carolina, Joseph Decosimo is a fiddler, banjo player and singer whose work celebrates and preserves the musical traditions of the Appalachian south. Learning from the last traditional masters of his home state, Decosimo is dedicated to preserving the region’s rich musical and social history and introducing contemporary audiences to its timeless beauty. He does this in multiple ways—as a teacher (he has taught on East Tennessee State University’s Bluegrass, Old-time, and Country Music Studies course, and offers lessons in banjo and fiddle), a collaborator (playing with the likes of Hiss Golden Messenger, Jake Xerxes Fussell, Wye Oak, and Elephant Micah) and recording and releasing under his own name, most often interpretations of traditional ballads and playing styles.
His latest album While You Were Sleeping, released last month on Sleepy Cat Records, draws on a lifetime spent listening to old field recordings and getting to know the region’s elders, capturing the small gestures and idiosyncrasies of the old styles and, ultimately, continuing their legacy. “I’m exploring the power and experimental possibilities of an older, weirder America,” Decosimo describes. “A site of profound, less regulated creativity and expression.”
The record opens with ‘The Fox Chase’, originally by Tennessee ballad singer Dee Hicks, who along with his wife contributed over 400 songs to the folk archives at the Library of Congress. As the title suggests, it’s a song about a fox hunt, the singer listing his dogs affectionately as they chase the fox “from old England to old Kentucky.” Like almost every song on the album, it’s shot through with an almost intangible sense of melancholy, a document of the loss of not just treasured hounds but of families, as well as a sense of belonging and a way of life.
‘The Fox Chase’ tumbles beautifully into the instrumental ‘Lost Gander’, another Dee Hicks song that was intended to evoke the sound of wild geese flying overhead at night. The two tracks come complete with a video directed and edited by Gabe Anderson//Strange Bug, with character animation and watercolors by Larissa Wood, which captures the imagery perfectly:
Decosimo approaches these songs with the innate feel of a native and the expert knowledge of a folklorist, expanding and updating them with a careful hand. There’s no pale imitation here, no wannabe folksinger posturing. The record’s authenticity is apparent in every pluck and thump and pump organ wheeze. The result feels almost mystical in the way it conjures traditions and communities, transporting the listener to a quiet porch in a secluded holler, away from the bustle of conventional twenty-first century living.
“When the old ballad singers sang, they believed in the worlds that they sang about. You can feel it,” says Decosimo, inadvertently describing the very effect he captures with his own music. “When I hear a field recording of the great Tennessee ballad singer Dee Hicks calling up the foxhounds on ‘The Fox Chase’ or recounting Napoleon’s son’s demise on ‘Young Rapoleon’, I feel like he’s inviting me into a new world—one filled with a different set of possibilities.”
Another standout is ‘Trouble’, a take on a recording by Virgil Anderson, a player from the Tennessee mountains where Decosimo grew up. Decosimo picks at the banjo and is joined by Stephanie Coleman on fiddle and Joe O’Connell on pump organ, all three coming together to sing the chorus in unison. It’s a song rich with a sense of unwavering faith, though stands relevant not just for believers but secular folks too. A mantra to hold on to as we move through this chaotic world, one suffused with a quiet joy in the knowledge that even the worst of times won’t last, that better things lie ahead.
It’s trouble, trouble. There’s trouble everywhere.
Trouble, trouble. There’s trouble everywhere.
Trouble, trouble, there’s trouble all around.
But Lord, Lord, trouble can’t last always.
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The album’s title is taken from the final lines of ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’, as sung in a field recording of Retta Spradlin. “Oh while you were sleeping,” Decosimo sings, “while you were slumbering, I was sleeping in the clay.” The version harks back to the song’s earlier iterations, and the imagery of that final line lingered with Decosimo. “As we slumber our minds construct new worlds from fragments of experience,” he explains. “These dream worlds can be familiar or unfamiliar. Sometimes they’re both at once. Slumbering is a time of inactivity: We rest in oblivion as the world moves ahead in its way, inflicting fresh wounds and generating new sources of wonder.”
This quote is a poignant one, capturing the essence of what makes While You Were Slumbering such a special record. The album itself is like one of the dreams Decosimo speaks of, a place where the past is resurrected and reimagined, where people never really die, and we can find refuge and solace from the worries and woes of the waking world. Which is not to say the album is some folly or exercise in diversion. It’s a deeply serious piece of art, a collage of memories, histories and traditions overlaid like the double exposure photograph on the cover art—perhaps not quite as it was but still evocative, still beautiful.
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This is the ultimate triumph of While You Were Slumbering. Joseph Decosimo has made a record that’s not derivative of traditional folk music, nor even simply inspired by it. It’s a genuine addition to the lineage, complete with the peculiarities, the eccentricities and the sense of genuine feeling. And with this authenticity comes something deeper, an intersection of art and history that is both moving and sustaining. “This music is about nourishment,” as Decosimo puts it in his liner notes. “It’s about the idea that good old things—not the burdensome stuff—can still sustain us and fill us. Maybe, in the best of circumstances, it can even help us to heal or at least connect with a healing impulse. Or maybe it just opens a clearing where we can rest a bit.”
While You Were Slumbering is out now on Sleepy Cat Records and available via their webstore or the Joseph Decosimo Bandcamp page.
