I love it when people I love make art that I love. Music in particular grabs me. Listening to live music does for me what I gather church does for other people. There’s something about the connection I feel to the performers, and also the connection among the whole audience, and a general feeling of joy that really does lift me up. I have a similar unspecified feeling of connectedness to everything when I’m out in nature, and especially when I am in a place like the Blue Ridge mountains. I didn’t grow up there but I do have family roots there. I also have ties there to some of my favorite chosen family, the Allen family chief among them.

The first time I heard Holly Renee Allen’s Appalachian Piecemeal, I was driving, and I felt that same heart pull listening to it that I feel when I am driving in the Blue Ridge. I listened my way dreamily through the whole album three times. In the album intro, George Allen describes his fiddle playing as having flavors of bluegrass, country and mountain music. He passed all that along to his daughter, and she adds her own dose of blues and southern rock. Holly can sound red hot momma, and she can also sound like the whispered voice of all the women who wove the fabric of your life. Sometimes, both at once.

I have listened to the album online but I have no liner notes (are liner notes still a thing?) or any other information besides the song names. I don’t know which are covers and which are Holly’s own, and I don’t much care except that whoever wrote Matt’s Candy can write me songs forever, please. My money is on that it is Holly.

I don’t pretend to know anything about music beyond what I like, but that I know without question. Many of the songs here have a familiar ring to them, but I don’t know that I actually know any of them besides the beautifully rendered Ring of Fire. I don’t know who the artists are but I believe and hope that all Allens available had a part in this.

Listening to this music as I drove down the road gave me the feeling of curling up in the corner of a porch swing while listening to people I love play the evening in. The first time through I nearly had to pull over at the start of the last song, which is appropriately titled Last Song. It’s short, it’s a capella, and while I know it is Holly, it sounds just like what I believe it would sound like if, as I lay in bed with my window open on an early spring night with the redbud trees blooming outside, the Blue Ridge herself sang me to sleep. If the Last Song was the last lullaby I ever heard, I would drift away joyfully on its tune.

http://hollyreneeallen.com