Knucs review in the

Old~Time Herald

Vol 12 #8, Dec 2010 Jan 2011

This is a fine CD, made by three people from the San Francisco area who obviously love making old-time music and have spent lots of time digging into the traditions that go into making it. Along the way they have also clearly spent much time learning to play together and weld themselves into a band that is more than the sum of three good musicians.

Most three-person string bands use fiddle, banjo, and guitar. The Knuckle Knockers do only a few numbers like that; more often Karen Celia Heil plays fiddle, Bill Foss doubles the melody on mandolin, and Martha Hawthorne provides solid guitar backup.  Of the forty old-time musicians honored in R. Crumb’s trading cards, the only two bands that play this way are the wonderfully named Mumford Bean and his Itawambians, and the Doc Roberts Trio. When they are singing, Karen often plays “lead guitar” while Martha is described as playing “rhythm guitar” and Bill is on mandolin, which is a nice way to do Carter Family songs.

Not only does the band blend instruments well, their voices blend well. In fact, there is some fine singing here. Start with the Carter Family songs: “Cannonball Blues,” “I Can’t Feel at Home,” “Rye Cove,” and “Little Black Train.” (Their liner notes, available from their website, credit the last song to Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie, but I feel certain where they got it.) Since the Knuckle Knockers are two women and one man, they can and do adopt the Carter Family’s vocal approach, adeptly avoiding the pitfalls of re-enactors by sounding like themselves. Instrumentally, their liner notes indicate some of the work that has gone into sounding like this; on “Rye Cove” they say “Bill tries to imitate the sound of Sara’s autoharp with his sweeping mandolin chords,” while on “Can’t Feel at Home” you see that “Karen uses the old time boom chuck chuck chuck” which produces a very different sound than the usual boom-chuck. Interestingly, the liner notes spend much more time discussing how the instrumental sounds are achieved than the vocal blend. However, the singing is executed with such down-home grace that the listener will well appreciate the attention the Knuckle Knockers have given to their vocal work.

Some other songs that I enjoyed were Martha’s original “Soldier Girl,” “All Night Long” from Burnett and Rutherford, and Samantha Bumgarner’s “Georgia Blues,” which is a version of “Going Down this Road Feeling Bad.” A real gem is the band’s rearrangement of Ed Haley’s “Stacker Lee” into a string band piece. In addition, there are some good instrumentals played here: a couple of John Salyer tunes, the Ray Brothers’ “Hometown Waltz,” and Martin and Hobbs’ “Wildcat Rag.” (Martin and Hobbs, by the way, are the source for festival favorite “Hot Corn, Cold Corn.”)

This appears to be the band’s first CD.  Lots of wonderful singing, excellent tunes, and musicians who blend together in that good old-time way.

Pete Peterson