Black Twig Pickers

The Black Twig Pickers are Mike Gangloff, Isak Howell and Nathan Bowles, three men from the hills of Southwest Virginia, just between Roanoke and Jefferson National Forest. They play antique tunes—gathered from the hills around their homes like a season’s firewood—with a panoply of foregone and unexpected instruments: There’s the guitar, fiddle and banjo, of course, but there’s also the sets of bones, fiddlesticks, jaw and mouth harps, washboards and feet. They’ve studied this music, considered it, dissected it and offered it again. 

But they’re not a simple legacy act, working on a mission to educate about the past, or really to preserve it. Rather, the Pickers play with tremendous verve and spirit, making very old songs that are sometimes funny, other times tragic and always human very new again by playing them with an enthusiasm that understands just how true these words and these tunes remain. The Pickers deliver these songs like today’s news, not yesterday’s history. Like Carolina Chocolate Drops and Frank Fairfield, the Pickers shake the mold and dust away from antediluvian music. 

The Pickers have been manically prolific these last few years, making music at a clip that appropriately suggests it’s more of a natural extension of themselves, not a career or an after-work time killer. In 2009, they collaborated with the late maestro Jack Rose for Jack Rose & The Black Twig Pickers, an exuberant reinvention of some of Rose’s tunes, like “Kensington Blues,” and numbers from their more traditional repertoire, including “Little Sadie.” They also worked on Rose’s final album, the astounding Luck in the Valley. In 2010, the Pickers not only issued two works with Midwest great Charlie Parr but also their own Thrill Jockey debut, Ironto Special. A mix of old songs and Pickers originals, Special is an essential collection, a testament to the idea that songs and sounds are infinite, no matter the origin or age. —Grayson Currin