Renee Fleming with Bela Fleck - The Fiddle And The Drum

Renee Fleming with Bela Fleck — The Fiddle And The Drum

A celebration of Appalachian folk music!

The Fiddle and the Drum is a collaborative Americana-bluegrass album by banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck and Grammy-winning soprano Renée Fleming. Produced by Fleck, the project is a sweeping tribute to American roots and Appalachian folk music, featuring star-studded guest appearances.

Collaborators and special guest performers include Dolly Parton, Vince Gill, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Sierra Hull, Sarah Jarosz, and Aoife O'Donovan. Recorded in Nashville, the record honors the roots and emotional power of traditional mountain songs, timeless ballads, and folk hymns.

Flemming is most often seen and heard on the world's greatest opera stages. Fleck is a Grammy Award-winning banjo player, best known for his blend of roots music with other genres. Now they've joined forces for an album of mountain songs, ballads and folk hymns celebrating traditional American music.

Says Flemming: "I learned to play the guitar when I was about 12 years old and then added other instruments to it — badly, by the way — sort of after I had recorded a lot of my standard repertoire, and I thought it would be really fun to examine this music. So the label said, you've got to meet Bela Fleck. So we met in New York and started this project a long time ago.

Fleck recalls Flemming coming to Nashville with a list of "maybe hundreds" of songs she liked "'cause she loves to do a lot of research. ... And so we finally found a space to explore it and we continued it and we completed it.

"I am a big fan of female vocalists of all stripes," Fleck says. "And a huge Joni Mitchell fan as well as Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. So this is someone at the highest level coming up and saying, 'Hey, do you want to do something you've always wanted to do?'"

The album takes its title, The Fiddle And The Drum, from a song that was first recorded by Joni Mitchell in 1969.

 

 

 

Side A

1. He's Gone Away / Storms Are on the Ocean

2. In the Pines - feat. Dolly Parton

3. The Fiddle and the Drum - feat. Jerry Douglas

4. My Epitaph

5. The Scarlet Tide - feat. Vince Gill

Side B

1. The Cuckoo - feat. Jerry Douglas

2. Blackest Crow - feat. Aoife O'Donovan

3. Scarlet Ribbons

4. He's Gone Away (reprise)

4. Pretty Bird - feat. Sierra Hull & Sarah Jarosz

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