Black Prairie: Fortune

Michael Verity on May 5, 2014

Drop this handy-dandy little set into your music shuffler and roll Black Prairie tunes every third song, interspersed with Flatt and Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Jamboree and Patti Smith’s Horses. You’ll hear the Grandfathers of Contemporary Bluegrass and the Godmother of Punk floating seamlessly among songs that don’t know any stylistic boundaries: “The 84,” with its woozy vocals and heaving squeezebox; “Let It Out,” a frantic Blondie-meets-Cajun shakedown; “If I Knew You Then,” which could have come from Loretta Lynn as much as from Linda Ronstadt; and the what-hath-Mike-Nesmith-wrought jangle of “Songs to Be Sung.” What you’ll hear, in fact, is how Black Prairie is rewriting ‘50s bluegrass and country, itinerant Southern blues and ‘70s New Wave into a whole new language of American pop music.

Artist: Black Prairie
Album: Fortune
Label: Sugar Hill