Bonny Light Horseman formed casually, like a front-porch jam. Fruit Bats singer Eric D. Johnson heard that his friends—veteran multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman and singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell—were getting together to revisit ancient folk songs. He asked to sit in on the experiment, and the chemistry was instant. On their self-titled debut, the trio reimagines centuries of standards for our fractious political climate, making old chestnuts feel new.
On first listen, these 10 performances may sound traditional, even staid, three dovetailing voices floating above bright acoustic guitars and ringing pianos. There are references to bygone wars and the bounty of a father’s garden, to the Biblical parable of prisoners Paul and Silas and the folk heroism of John Henry. If you’ve listened at all to English, Irish, or Appalachian folk music or any of their many revivals, you’ll spot familiar archetypes and icons. But Bonny Light Horseman gently cut these songs free from aging roots, transplanting them to the present.
The trio has more reverence for the flexibility of the oral tradition than the songs it has produced. They splice together bits of old numbers into new ones, drop or add verses, and relocate antediluvian sagas into Stateside settings. The tune that gave the trio their name, for instance, is a lover’s lament for a dead soldier, killed during the Napoleonic Wars. Mitchell spent years recontextualizing folk tropes before her myth-plundering Hadestown became a Broadway hit, and here, she sings a version that lambastes Napoleon by name but scrubs other historic details. This version excoriates all-powerful leaders who dispatch the powerless to their death; as strongmen worldwide foment new nationalism, her rendition feels as much like a warning as a plea.
“Mountain Rain” exquisitely recasts the ballad of John Henry—a steel driver who battled his mechanized rival to victory and death—as the unionized lament of his coworkers. “West Virginians, hammer in the morning/Hammer in the mountain rain,” Johnson sings, giving voice to workers who didn’t want to die just to prove their worth. You can imagine artificial intelligence and the threat of automation, coming around the Great Bend into a new millennium.
The settings meet these lyrical revisions halfway. Bonny Light Horseman reimagine the gospel song “Children, Go Where I Send Thee” under the name “Jane Jane,” making the tedious structure of the “counting song” feel miraculously breezy. Cock your head just right, and the layered acoustic and electric guitars even sparkle like Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint for Pat Metheny. At the surface, “Magpie’s Nest” is a pastoral beauty, Johnson crooning of idealized love over graceful guitars. But listen to the furtive cymbals, brooding saxophones, and moaning organ—they infuse the song with the same sophisticated blues that drifts through Johnson's yearning voice.