About the Artist
On Among The Oak & Ash, Pennsylvania-born New Yorker Josh Joplin and the Mississippi-bred, Nashville-based Garrison Starr lend their distinctive voices to a dozen traditional folk songs drawn from rural Appalachian and Anglo-American musical idioms. Although much of the material is centuries old, the songs' eloquently simple melodies, and their universal themes of love, loss, longing, cruelty and death, give them a timeless resonance into which Joplin and Starr tap effortlessly. With the duo's evocative harmonies complemented by spare, stripped-down arrangements, Among The Oak & Ash is a powerful testament to Joplin and Starr's interpretive abilities, and to the ageless appeal of these ancient tunes. "These songs are about the human condition, and that's something that doesn't change," Joplin asserts. Indeed, the album's 12 songs span a broad range of human experience, encompassing themes of injustice ("Hiram Hubbard"), longing ("The Water Is Wide"), doomed romance ("Pretty Peggy-O"), spirituality ("Angel Gabriel") and death ("All the Pretty Little Horses"). "A lot of people think of folk music as something that's sweet and gentle, but so many of these songs are raunchy and brutal," Joplin notes. "They cover everything from God to the devil, from unrequited love to murder." The seeds of Among The Oak & Ash--the name is borrowed from ...
