Take Em As They Come: Love Comes Down: Finding Unity at Folk Alliance 2024, Day 2

Mireya Ramos & the Poor Choices

“I break your soul!” Mireya Ramos shouted and smiled as she delivered the translation of the Cuco Sanchez cover she sang with her current Kansas City-based band, The Poor Choices—Beau Bledsoe (acoustic guitar), Trevor Turla (trombone) Jeff Freling (electric guitar), Marco Pascolini (steel guitar), Ezgi Karakus (cello) and John Currey (drums). Ramos and the band delivered a sterling, rousing set rich with both the rancheras she loves and their cousins among rock and country classics such as Roy Orbison’s (always ranchera influenced) “Blue Bayou” and Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.” The brilliant set ended with a cumbia as exciting and joyous as Ramos’ soaring vocals. The night before, Puerto Rican Ramos sang Chilean Victor Jara’s movement defining “Manifesto,” and on this night, Ramos only further underscored the easy unity forged by musical forms that truly have more roots in common than the markets and national divisions that strive to keep them separate. https://mireyaramos.com/sin-fronteras/

Connie Kaldor

One beauty of Folk Alliance is the way it thrives on crossing such lines. Before Ramos’ set, Canadian songwriter Connie Kaldor explained that she’d always loved the kinds of sea shanties artists like Stan Rogers specialized in, but her home in Saskatchewan (“just about straight north [of Kansas City] and a little west”) was about as landlocked as she could get. So, she wrote a rousing “she shanty,” “Come All You Women,” directly inspired by an encounter with a friend at a previous Folk Alliance. It’s not only tempting but useful to connect the prairie origins of that song to the common ground between Kansas City’s Poor Choices and Ramos’s rancheras. https://www.conniekaldor.com/

Rayna Gellert and Joachim Cooder

And it’s not a big stretch to connect Tennessean Uncle Dave Macon’s influence on Ry Cooder’s son Joachim who covered and transformed Macon’s songs in the next set playing his electric mbira, a derivative of thumb pianos played in Zimbabwe. Joachim Cooder has played with musicians from all over, famously including the Cuban Buena Vista Social Club, but you couldn’t miss the excitement in his voice that he was sitting next to the great fiddler Rayna Gellert, who may be known for her work in Ashville and Nashville, but who notably also grew up in landlocked northern Indiana.

https://www.joachimcooder.com/

And the songwriter’s circle in Aoife Scott’s Women of Note room pulled even more of the world together to collaborate. The circle featured Dusky Waters (Jennifer Jeffers), a banjo player from Little Rock, Arkansas who has also migrated to New Orleans; Thea Hopkins, a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe of Martha’s Vineyard; and Grainne Hunt of Kilcock, Ireland. Waters opened the set singing “Pass It On,” the title track of her new album, a powerful song of communal responsibility that soon led to Hunt’s contemplation of intergenerational trauma, “So I Can Leave.” Scott and partner Andy Meany led a sing along including all the vocalists dedicated to a friend who lives half the world away from his old home in Pimlico Dublin, but Hopkins sing along just before served as a sort of spiritual crescendo to the evening. “Love Come Down.” The whole room sang those three words like a prayer, and something holy gathered all around us.