Rhymes With Girl and Minnie Pearl
The all-woman old-time string quintet called Uncle Earl don't confine themselves to songs about moonshine, dancing, sex, and death, nope. The most charming moment of their sold-out show last night at Joe's Pub, in the country-craving borough of Manhattan, turned out to be the kid-music ditty "Crayola Doesn't Make a Color For Your Eyes." Written and sung by Kristen Andreassen, it quotes Patsy Cline's "Walking After Midnight," contains an impressive spectrum of colors, and is performed a cappella while the girls play two separate clapping games.
The G-rated portion of their show completed, Uncle Earl dove into old timey meat and potatoes with "D&P Blues" (an ode to Drinking and Promiscuity), the bluegrassy "Drinker Born," and Ola Belle Reed's gloriously morbid carpe diem, "My Epitaph." Banjo picker Abigail Washburn is the group's most emotive singer (even when barking in Mandarin, as on "Streak o' Lean, Streak o' Fat"); fiddler Rayna Gellert its most accomplished instrumentalist; mandolin player KC Groves stood out during Bob Dylan's "Wallflower"; and step dancing lives, with Andreassen the proof.
Uncle Earl sometimes seems the sum of disparate parts, since every member, you may have noticed, works a solo side project or two. But there's a comforting sororal energy to Uncle Earl, especially when they blend their voices into rich four-part harmonies or circle their wagons for instrumentals like this.
Their show's a hoot and they sound even better on their crackling new album, Waterloo, Tennessee, produced by former Led Zeppelin mandolin player John Paul Jones. Tonight Jones joined the group on mandola for "My Little Carpenter," a downbeat yet unusually nonfatal traditional tune from Kentucky, and hung around for the remainder of their set. Look for him at a string jam near you.