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Magic Tuber Stringband Creates an Experimental Old-Time Music Inspired by Place [1]
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Date: 2025-07-25
In March of 2025, at the annual Big Ears Music Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, I was one of hundreds of festival-goers entranced by a group of up-and-coming musicians exploring a storied American musical tradition: old-time string band music.
The performance by the Magic Tuber Stringband opened my imagination to the star-studded mountain skies that sprawled above stages where the band’s young players first fell in love with old-time music.
Across dozens of presidential administrations, through periods of economic depression and abundance and everything in between, old-time string band music has endured as a way of connecting people to a common land.
Magic Tuber Stringband continues this legacy by making experimental old-time music inspired by their personal relationships to place, and by reckoning with the ways in which commercial industry interrupts our human relationships to art, the environment, and one another.
Folk music is made in a deep relationship with place. Folk songs draw on the material conditions, community traditions, and natural environments experienced by the musicians. These players are itinerant magicians who pack entire geographies into a fiddle case, and conjure up a distinct sense of place for listeners wherever they may land.
Courtney Werner, Evan Morgan, and Mike DeVito first connected around old-time string band music while attending college in Durham, North Carolina. Although none of them are from Appalachia (Werner is a Georgian, Morgan a Texan, and DeVito grew up in Connecticut), they’ve each had their lives changed by the region’s rich, social tradition of music-making.
“You have this intergenerational transmission,” Morgan told me in an interview. “It’s been like this forever… [Back during the 1970s folk revival], that was kind of when a lot of young people started going to try to record and play with source fiddlers. And a lot of them were from cities, you know. But I think that trend really never died. And I don’t really foresee it dying because there continue to be weird young kids that really get into this music.”
In addition to connecting with the vibrant Appalachian music scene in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, Werner, Morgan, and DeVito also attended historic string band gatherings like West Virginia’s Clifftop Appalachian String Band festival and the Hoppin’ John Fiddler’s Convention in Pittsboro, North Carolina.
Steeped in this grassroots musical education, Morgan and Werner emerged to form a string band project that combined their experimental tastes with the central tenets of the old-time tradition. Multi-instrumentalist DeVito has often sat in with them for studio sessions and on tour.
Now belonging to an intergenerational legacy of song, the trio has encountered numerous mentors and sources of inspiration along the way. Mike Gangloff, a stalwart of the Virginia old-time scene, has been a central guiding figure for both Werner and Morgan. DeVito has developed as a player busking on Durham street corners with David Bass, a longstanding steward of the town’s old-time tradition.
And while Appalachia is home to particularly rich old-time tradition, the band has connected with other players all over the country, from the Ozarks up to Oregon, the Upper Midwest down to West Texas. In all corners, the genre is typically fiddle-driven and relies on the guitar to provide the rhythm section, while also frequently featuring the banjo and upright bass. Although often encountered in a similar context to bluegrass music, old-time differs in that it focuses less on breakaway soloing and more on repetition and subtle variation.
The cyclical, percussive nature of old time gives the music a trance-inducing quality, especially when played around the fire at string band gatherings that stretch into the long hours of the night.
“There’s something hypnotic about it,” said Morgan. “I think that one of the things that really drew me in at first was the fact that it’s really music that’s played for no one and nothing except for yourself and the other people that are playing with you for this experience.
“It’s more about this kind of social experience than it is about making a product,” Morgan said.
When they began to play together, Magic Tuber Stringband was drawn to old time’s ability to induce a meditative, “trance” state. This aspect of the music resonated with their existing interests in other genres like classical minimalism, noise rock, and drone. As experimental instrumentalists, the group draws inspiration from a genre-bending assortment of artists, ranging from the minimalist composer Terry Riley, to the alt-Americana band Black Twig Pickers, led by the Asheville-based fiddler Sally Ann Morgan.
Looming large in the group’s pantheon of influences is the North Carolinian musician and musical philosopher Henry Flynt. Playing what he calls “avante garde hillbilly music”, Flynt fuses Appalachian fiddle stylings with the boundary-breaking influences of free jazz players like Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. He also expands upon traditional American musical forms by taking cues from international artists like the Hindustani classical musician Ali Akbar Khan.
In addition to following in Flynt’s musical footsteps, Magic Tuber Stringband resonates with his critiques of commercialism, and how commercial industry severs human relationships to land and art.
“I see the privatization of natural resources as… something that’s anti-human,” DeVito explained to me after the band’s Big Ears debut. “ I feel like culturally there’s a lot of trends that kind of reproduce a similar kind of privatization – exploiting or extracting a cultural thing. I’ve found a lot of solace in a more DIY or punk or experimental or far-reaching scene… [where] you kind of have this human spirit of searching for more authentic, healing ways to express and connect.”
Cycling through moments of uneasy dissonance and harmonic release, Magic Tuber Stringband conveys the complexity of natural soundscapes, as well as the nature of humanity’s connection to wild places.
An ecologist by trade, Werner, the band’s fiddle player, has incorporated naturalist field recordings into the group’s music-making process. Some of these recordings show up in the songs themselves. On “July 4 (Mourning Chorus)”, Werner’s fiddle and Morgan’s pump organ converse with croaking toads.
Another palette of nighttime drones – the calls of frogs, insects, and other wild things – creates the sonic backdrop for “Water Dripped Upwards”, off the group’s latest release, “Needlefall.”
Other field recordings provide inspiration for original compositions. The song “Ghost Pipe”, from the band’s album “Tarantism,” is named for a flowering plant found growing on Shewbird Mountain in Clay County, North Carolina. The textures and trading melodies of the fiddle and Weissenborn guitar were composed in response to the sounds of spring unfolding on the mountainside.
In addition to communing with the ambient sounds of wild places, the group’s music also grapples with tensions in rural landscapes ravaged by industrial mining and chemical manufacturing. For instance, “Tarantism” was recorded while Werner and Morgan were living on Shewbird Mountain, within earshot of an active gravel strip mine.
“We just had this big chunk of land that we were exploring,” Werner remembers of their time on Shewbird Mountain. “The one side that was really beautiful, it’s just a bunch of mushrooms and flowers and salamanders and birds. And then the other side was just a quarry. [It was] kind of ridiculous how direct of a juxtaposition [that was]. Beauty and bounty and an intact ecosystem and the human relationship to that, and then on the other side: degradation.”
Morgan and Werner found themselves on the mountain in 2020, during the pandemic, holing up with some other artists in the family home of their friend Hunter Stark. At the time, the property was still owned by Stark’s grandmother, whose husband had battled for years with the mining company over concerns about their operation’s environmental impact.
Pictured left to right: Alice Dai, Austin Smith, Rae Hsu, Hunter Stark, Aaron Van Steinberg, Kamal Deterville, Courtney Werner, Miles the dog, Evan Morgan. (Photo courtesy of Hunter Stark)
Informed by Hunter’s family history, as well as conversations with local mine workers, recording “Tarantism” ignited Morgan and Werner’s interest in using sound to explore these complex relationships among land, people, and for-profit industry. Materially and musically, the record was made in close connection with place and community. Using wasp galls he collected on the property, Stark made the ink used for the credits on the back of the record, which were penned in calligraphy by another friend, the poet Aaron VanSteinberg
Not long after Morgan and Werner spent time at Stark’s family home, his grandmother sold the property so she could move into an assisted living facility. Since the sale, the Shewbird Mountain mining company has expanded its reach. The land at the top of the mountain, where Stark and Courtney used to forage mushrooms, has since been shorn away.
“What we found in these places that we’ve lived in and when we’re connecting with people over music is that at a regional level and at a smaller, local level, people love and have really deep connections to their environment.” Courtney Werner
Appalachia and the greater southeast have a long, fraught history with extractive economies and industrial waste. 70 miles northwest of Clifftop – the legendary string band gathering where Magic Tuber Stringband has learned tunes from longtime players – is one of the country’s highest concentrations of chemical plants, lined up along the rivers of West Virginia’s Kanawha Valley.
Colloquially known as “Chemical Valley,” this area has suffered from numerous chemical disasters over the years, including a 2014 spill that contaminated the water supply of more than 300,000 West Virginians. Led by the Kanawha Valley community group People Concerned About Chemical Safety, grassroots organizers spent a decade pushing for a new EPA rule designed to prevent these kinds of “worst-case spill” incidents.
Through Werner’s ecology work, she and Morgan have been able to spend extended periods of time in many rural southeastern communities with deep ties to coal, chemical, and other extractive industries. By playing with local musicians, they’ve learned a lot about the complexities of life in places where these industries have disrupted people’s relationships with the land, while also providing the only stable source of income.
“What we found in these places that we’ve lived and when we’re connecting with people over music is that at a regional level and at a smaller, local level, people love and have really deep connections to their environment,” Werner said. “It’s the same thing with the cultural and musical heritage of those places. And all of that is in serious danger.”
Magic Tuber Stringband performing at the Big Ears WDVX Blue Plate Special (Photo by Phillip Norman / Daily Yonder)
Magic Tuber Stringband played their most recent shows at Knoxville’s Annual Big Ears Festival. Although it’s a far-cry from the rural string band gatherings where they fell in love with old time music, Big Ears was a fitting stage for the group’s “experimental traditional” sound. Knoxville is the gateway to Appalachia, and the festival has made a point to include regional musicians on their lineup, including Magic Tuber Stringband.
At one point, the group split their stage time with the Tennessee-based Gladson Family Band, who play a more traditional old-time sound than Magic Tuber Stringband’s experimental take on the genre. Having the two bands perform back-to-back was a clever stroke of programming by the festival and WDVX, as it offered listeners a taste of Appalachian music old and new.
The Gladson Family Band performing at the Big Ears WDVX Blue Plate Special (Photo by Phillip Norman / Daily Yonder)
In the end, though, the two groups found more in common than they might have initially anticipated.
“They really liked, specifically, the aspects of the set where we were referencing natural sounds and sort of the sound of the rural landscape,” Werner said of the conversation they had with the Gladsons after the show. “And they said that they had kind of done a similar process before. [Gladson patriarch and bass player] Todd specifically said [he] had this experience one time of being down by the creek, and trying to figure out what key the creek was in, and then trying to play music with it.”
Though Magic Tuber’s sound can ring darker and more dissonant than most straight-on old-time music, sharing the stage with the Gladsons exemplified how tradition and experimentation often go hand-in-hand, and that good folk music always finds its way back to the rural landscapes that inspired its earliest players.
Aaron Fellhoelter performing with the band. (Photo courtesy of Aaron Fellhoelter)
After hearing them play at Big Ears, I asked Werner about how Magic Tuber Stringband’s sound speaks to a moment in which so much of our environment is under threat.
“It’s obviously a really discouraging time right now,” she said. “There’s a lot of division among communities, but even that division is not due to some fundamental flaws among the people living in these communities. It’s just exploitation coming from the top down and sowing division and creating conflict.”
While documenting and critiquing ecological tragedies, Magic Tuber Stringband’s music also celebrates the resilience of life that continues to thrive under adverse conditions. “Through our music we’re kind of tapping into and celebrating love and connection to both musical and natural heritage,” Werner said.
In times of scarcity and uncertainty, the band’s take on the old time genre reminds us of our collective and creative power. For this is not music made only by three musicians, but by a rich set of enduring relationships to people, place, and art, cultivated over long stretches of time.
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