Joan Shelley is a songwriter and singer who lives near Louisville, Ky., not far from where she grew up. She draws inspiration from traditional and traditionally-minded performers from her native Kentucky, as well as those from Ireland, Scotland, and England, but she’s not a folksinger. Her disposition aligns more closely with that of, say, Roger Miller, Dolly Parton, or her fellow Kentuckian Tom T. Hall, who once explained—simply, succinctly, in a song—“I Witness Life.”

She’s not so much a confessional songwriter, and she sings less of her life and more of her place: of landscapes and watercourses; of flora and fauna; of seasons changing and years departing and the ineluctable attempt of humans to make some small sense of all—or, at best, some—of it. Her perspective and performances both have been described, apparently positively, as “pure,” but there’s no trace of the Pollyanna and there’s little of the pastoral, either: her work instead wrestles with the possibility of reconciling, if only for a moment, the perceived “natural” world with its reflection—sometimes, relatively speaking, clear; other times hopelessly distorted—in the human heart, mind, and footprint.

Since the 2015 release of her album Over and Even, Shelley has crossed the country and toured Europe several times as a headlining artist, typically with guitarist Nathan Salsburg, and sharing shows with the likes of Jake Xerxes Fussell, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, The Other Years, and Michael Hurley. She has opened for Wilco, Chris Smither, Patty Griffin, Andrew Bird and Richard Thompson and has appeared as a guest on WTF with Marc Maron, Fresh Air and Later… with Jools Holland.

An acoustic fingerstyle guitarist of great elegance and craft, Louisville’s Nathan Salsburg has built up an impressive résumé as a collaborator and sideman to artists like Joan Shelley, James Elkington, Bonnie “Prince” Billy (aka Will Oldham), and Jake Xerxes Fussell while quietly amassing his own catalog of solo releases like 2013’s Hard for to Win and Can’t Be Won and 2018’s graceful instrumental guitar collection Third. Salsburg pivoted on Landwerk and Landwerk No. 2 by building new pieces from looped snippets of Yiddish and klezmer music off 78 rpm discs augmented with his own guitar playing. 2021’s Psalms offered ten songs almost entirely based on the Old Testament Tehillim. In 2024, he and Elkington revived their ongoing partnership with All Gist, the duo’s third album of instrumental guitar duets, and in the same year Salsburg and Oldham recorded a pair of extended interpretations of songs by the band Lungfish on Hear the Children Sing the Evidence.

Growing up in Kentucky, Salsburg’s early exposure to the old folk and blues records his parents played him sparked a lifelong passion that would eventually see him not only pursuing his own career as a musician but working as the curator for the archives of legendary American folklorist Alan Lomax. Heading to New York after college, he became involved with the Alan Lomax Archive in the early 2000s, and by 2008 he’d become largely responsible for curating its digital collection, doing editorial work, and helping to compile albums of Lomax recordings for various labels and outlets.

Returning home to Kentucky, he maintained his post as Lomax curator with the Association for Cultural Equity while composing his own largely instrumental guitar pieces, some of which appeared on Tompkins Square’s 2008 Imaginational Anthem, Vol. 3 collection. By 2011, he’d signed with the No Quarter label and completed his first solo album, Affirmed, while also teaming up with British guitarist James Elkington that same year for the guitar duets record Avos. His second solo release, Hard for to Win and Can’t Be Won, appeared in September 2013, featuring a mix of vocal and instrumental pieces that continued to explore American and British folk influences. In 2014, Salsburg made his first recorded appearance backing up labelmate Joan Shelley, beginning a musical partnership that would flourish over the next several years and result in their subsequent marriage. 2015 saw the release of Ambsace, his second collaboration with Elkington, this time on the Paradise of Bachelors label. Over the next few years, Salsburg deepened his musical partnership with Shelley on-stage and in the studio while also guesting on albums by Red River Dialect, the Weather Station, and Jake Xerxes Fussell. Returning in 2018, he delivered the career standout Third, his first-ever entirely solo instrumental guitar album.

For 2020’s Landwerk and Landwerk No. 2 he dug deep into his vast record collection for inspirational source material. He took 78s of Yiddish folk and klezmer music and looped snippets from them, then carefully grafted his own guitar playing onto them. 2021’s Psalms offered ten songs whose lyrics were almost entirely sourced from the Old Testament Tehillim, with music composed by Salsburg and recorded with a band that included Spencer Tweedy on drums, and Will Oldham and Joan Shelley on backing vocals. In early 2024, he and Elkington resumed their longtime collaboration with All Gist, their third collection of instrumental guitar duets and second on Paradise of Bachelors. Among its original and traditional pieces was a surprising cover of Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance.”

As a teenager, Salsburg was a fan of the Baltimore post-punk band Lungfish. One of his favorite songs in their catalog was a simple, circular melody called “The Evidence,” and when his daughter was very young, he would sometimes rock her to sleep while singing and playing the tune, which he could pluck out with one hand while sitting in a rocking chair. Salsburg discovered he could easily extend the melody as long as he pleased, and struck upon the idea of recording a long version of the song with Bonnie “Prince” Billy on vocals and Tyler Trotter on keyboards and electronic percussion. The three also recorded an expanded take of another Lungfish song, “Hear the Children Sing,” and the two tracks, running roughly 20 minutes each, were paired on the album Hear the Children Sing the Evidence, issued by No Quarter Records in June 2024.

Laurel Premo is known for her rhythmically deep and rapt delivery of roots music. Solo performances reveal bloom of underlying harmonic drones, minimalist repetition, and rich polyrhythms. Presenting these sounds on finger style electric guitar, lap steel, fiddle, and voice, Premo fully leans in to the archaic melodies and in-between intonations that connect folk sounds to the mystic and unknown.