Donna the Buffalo is on for a great weekend heading through Nashville, Greensboro, and Asheville. There are lots of great interviews for the shows which are posted below. Co-band leader, Tara Nevins, kicked of the day yesterday with a solo studio session on the Lightning 100 with Lt Dan. Then the band went over to the Loveless Barn for a Music City Roots performance with other amazing artist including Catie Curtis, The Cleverlys, The Black Lillies, and Rayland Baxter. Check out some wonderful pics from the night here.
DtB will be playing on Cannery Street tonight in Nashville at the Mercy Lounge with the Roy Jay Band, who is on the road with DtB for several shows this winter. Here’s a nice writeup in the Nashville Scene by Edd Hurt about the show:
Photo by Jim Gavenus
Folkies with a superior sense of rhythm are rare enough, but folkies with a good beat and a healthy disrespect for eclectic clichés are a national treasure. Hailing from the metropolis of Trumansburg, N.Y., Donna the Buffalo began playing their mixture of country, soul, zydeco and folk 20 years ago, and they’ve never sounded better. On their 2008 full-length Silverlined, songwriters Tara Nevins and Jeb Puryear came up with such great songs as “Biggie K,” which may be the finest tune ever written about childbirth: “Though her stomach’s stretched and pulled / She’s never been more beautiful.” The quintet’s easy way with American roots music suggests a fusion of Brinsley Schwarz and The Holy Modal Rounders, and they make music that’s beautiful but never prettified. They say they have a couple of projects in the works, including a full-band effort and a solo record by Nevins. Read the original post at nashvillescene.com.
On Friday, January 28th, they head on over to Greensboro, NC to play at the new Blind Tiger. David McCracken, DtB’s B3 Hammond player, grew up in Greensboro and did this great interview with Eddie Huffman from GoTriad.com:
photo by Jim Gavenus
From the moment Greensboro native Dave McCracken first saw Donna the Buffalo play live, at MerleFest in 1997, he knew he belonged in the band.
“I watched them for the first time, and I remember I saw them move the organ across the stage,” McCracken says, speaking by phone from his mother’s house in Liberty. “I said out loud, ‘Man, that should be me.’ Ten years later — 10 years later! — it’s me. I swear, I don’t even know how that happened. I just knew it should be me for some reason.”
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Donna the Buffalo formed in 1989 in upstate New York but has made many N.C. connections in the years since — McCracken and North Wilkesboro’s MerleFest among them. The group signed with Sugar Hill Records, a fixture in Durham for more than two decades before the label moved its offices to Nashville, and the members of Donna the Buffalo founded the twice-yearly Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance in rural Chatham County, now entering its eighth year.
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Jam band fans already knew McCracken via Folkswaggin’, which started in Greensboro in 1994 and played at the Blind Tiger regularly.
“I really cut my teeth in that place,” he says. “That’s where I learned how to play keyboards. I’ve been playing there since ’97. I’ve gone through a lot of things in that place, and it means a lot to me. I’m looking forward to playing there again. It’s been a long time since I’ve been there.”
In recent years, McCracken has played at the Blind Tiger with Q-Bex, a version of the band Hobex which includes acclaimed drummer Jeff Sipe.
McCracken did a stint in Hobex about 10 years ago, and he played in a metal band called Perpetual Iniquity in Greensboro as a teenager in the late 1980s. But his musical ambitions go all the way back to his early childhood in the 1970s.
“Playing music for a living was seriously a dream I had when I was, like, 3,” McCracken says. “You know how Facebook reunites people so much? I reunited with somebody who was my friend until I was 5. He was like, ‘Wow, you’re playing music for a living.’ He said it wasn’t surprising at all because all I talked about back then was how I wanted to do it.”
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Read the full article at gotriad.news-record.com
Tara Nevins also interviewed for the Blind Tiger show. She spoke with Laura Graff from the Winston-Salem Journal. Here is a bit of the article:
Photo by Lewis Tezak Jr
Donna the Buffalo’s music belongs on the festival circuit — it’s an engaging mix of roots, bluegrass, reggae, country and New Orleans-inspired zydeco. . .
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“We just come from a base of traditional music,” said Tara Nevins, one of the band’s original members. Nevins formed the band with Jeb Puryear, and both play old-time fiddle.
“Over the years of playing fiddle music, we discovered other traditional music,” Nevins said. “We don’t do it on purpose, it’s just that we have a lot of music that we’ve been involved in over the years and that we love.”
Nevins, who started out playing the fiddle, bought an accordion about 20 years ago.
“That gave us a Louisiana flavor to our songs,” she said. “We just have a lot of musical influences, because of some of the different instruments we play, those flavors come out in our music.”
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Nevins just finished work on a solo album, “Wood and Stone,” which will be released on Sugar Hill in April.”Wood and Stone” is her second solo album. The last, “Mule to Ride,” showcased the fiddle and was, Nevins said, more “old-time bluegrass.” This new album, she said, showcases her songwriting.
“I’ve written pretty much everything on the record,” Nevins said. “It’s not all about the fiddle the way the first one was.”
She said the band is planning to return to the studio in late February to work on a new album.
“It’s going to be a collaboration,” Nevins said. “We’re inviting other artists that we’ve played at with festivals over the years — artists we admire.”
Read the full article at www2.journalnow.com
On Saturday, the band jumps on the bus over to Asheville to play the Orange Peel. The Mountain Xpress wrote a nice little blurb about the show and some of DtB’s Asheville connections:
Kyle Spark. Photo by Lewis Tezak Jr.
For years, upstate N.Y.-based, self-desribed “Cajun/ zydeco, rock, folk, reggae and country” band Donna the Buffalo has long had an Asheville connection through it’s bassist. First it was Bill Reynolds (Band of Horses) then Jay Sanders (Acoustic Syndicate). Now DTB has Massachusetts bassist Kyle Spark but the group (who has toured for 21 years) still makes its semi-annual trek South (DTB is likely to pop up at regional warm-weather festivals). . .
Read the original post at: mountainx.com
Great weekend in store. We hope to see lots of the Herd around for these SouthEast shows!
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Imagine opening your front door on a mid-summer morning. Instead of your familiar scene, you walk out onto an old wooden porch facing east as the sun starts to rise. The day’s first light hits your eyes and your ears are filled with the close, warm sound of a mandolin.
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