Jody Stecher & Kate Brislin

"Our favorite music is from the time when old-time music was becoming bluegrass." When he wrote those words for the liner notes of A Song That Will Linger, the 1989 debut Rounder release by him and his wife and duet partner, Kate Brislin, Jody Stecher probably didn't expect that the next decade would see four more albums that would establish them as the preeminent old-time country duet singers on the scene, but that's pretty much how it turned out. Although both Stecher and Brislin would likely disagree with that assessment, preferring to point in the direction of friends and colleagues like Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, or Kay Justice and Ginny Hawker, the '90s saw them carrying the beauty and simplicity of vintage old country music to a wider variety of folk music stages and audiences than probably anyone else. To some, it seemed as if they appeared on the scene out of nowhere, but both had been involved in folk music for several years prior to their meeting in the mid-'70s. To paraphrase the old one-liner, if there's a dictionary with the term "music junkie" in it, look it up and you'll find Jody Stecher's picture next to it. Like many of his fellow New Yorkers born in the '40s and raised in the '50s, Brooklyn native Stecher was caught up as a teenager in the so-called Great Folk Music Scare of the '50s and '60s. After getting his first guitar at age 11, and a banjo at 12 (after hearing Dock Boggs on record), he signed on with his first bluegrass band, the New York Ramblers, in 1963, while still in his teenage years. (That band also included Winnie Winston and David Grisman). From bluegrass, he progressed to blues, Irish, Bahamian music, and whatever else caught his fancy -- even an ongoing fascination with Indian sitar music under the tutelage of Krishna Bhatt. Along the way he made a number of albums, both solo and with others, and in 1974 he found himself playing in a Seattle-area band called Houseboat Music, while working in the Folklife department of the World's Fair in Tacoma. Also employed at the fair was California native Kate Brislin, who was familiar with Stecher's recently recorded first album of old-time music, and trying out a few songs together off-stage one evening, they found they clicked right away, beginning a musical association and friendship that eventually led to their marriage, but not right away. As Stecher would later write, "We circled each other for years." During those years, Stecher continued to tour as a solo act, as well as with people like Bhatt and fiddler Hank Bradley. Brislin joined the Any Old Time String Band, moving on later to join the Blue Flame String Band. Stecher did ask Brislin to sing on his next two albums, along with notables such as Peter Rowan, Mary Black, Jerry Garcia, and the Watersons. In 1985, they began getting serious about singing old-time duets of the classic songs that were the bedrock of bluegrass and country music -- "Lover's Return," by the Carter Family, for example, and Stephen Foster's "Hard Times." As one album led to another during the Rounder years, they also delved into interpretations of material that wasn't quite so old, such as Jean Ritchie's "Blue Diamond Mine," or the title track of their third Rounder release, Iris DeMent's "Our Town." Instrumentally, both Stecher and Brislin were classic examples of the advantages of timing and tone over sheer speed. Whether on guitar, banjo or mandolin, both were always tasteful and careful to never allow the instruments to overshadow or diminish the fragile beauty of a mountain ballad. It was a trick they were also able to pull off nicely with the vocals. The delicate and direct quality of Brislin's voice was a near-perfect match to the plaintive yearning of Stecher's. It has been said by some that the old country and mountain music of the American south (and points beyond) is as worthy of the description "soul music" as anything that's come out of Motown over the decades, and there's precious little better evidence of that than the music of Jody Stecher and Kate Brislin.
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