Q+A: Joe Troop

Interviewed by Saroyan Humphrey for Trailblazer Mag
08.20.2021

Feature | The Grammy-nominated bluegrass musician on his first solo album Borrowed Time and using his music to lift the underdog. 

In 2020, the year of the pandemic shutdown, roots musician-songwriter-composer Joe Troop didn’t hesitate to keep his show on the road. Traveling to rural outposts in his native state of North Carolina, the musician and fledgling activist pushed to “get out the vote” among rural progressives and co-created an enlightened video series called “Pickin’ for Progress” to illuminate liberal voices.

Even in a pandemic Troop didn’t stop there. With a year’s worth of experiencing direct action from left-wing political organizers, the Grammy-nominated bandleader for Che Apalache, redirected that energy to create his first solo album, Borrowed Time [out August 20, 2021] on Free Dirt Records. Featuring acclaimed musicians Béla Fleck, Abigail Washburn, Tim O’Brien, and Charlie Hunter, Troop’s powerful songwriting and compositions stand as the centerpieces and push listeners to reckon with his stories of the downtrodden and oppressed. 

In the conservative landscape of bluegrass music, Troop’s activism is the kind of musical advocation that got Pete Seeger blacklisted from mainstream music. As an openly gay man, Troop’s no stranger to controversy, having been chased off stages and threatened for his “radical” songs. He wears the label of “troublemaker” like a badge of honor. Growing up in rural Forstyth County, NC, Troop feels he never had a choice to not stand up for what he believed in, no matter the consequences.

Passing through the San Francisco Bay Area recently to gig and talk about his new record, Troop happily sat down for some coffee and conversation. A self-described nomad by nature, the musician loves being on the road. “I don't live anywhere,” he says. “I just fly by the seat of my pants. I have a van and good people take care of me.”

There are so many facets of your music and journey, how would you define your role as a so called troublemaker in the bluegrass community?

I’m definitely a provocateur, that’s what they say. Bluegrass is a white, conservative landscape and though I am a white man, I have spent a lot of my life in other countries with people of different ethnicities and cultures. I have tried to analyze my life as a bluegrass musician and as a white person from the South. I’ve tried to look at myself from outside myself and treat myself as an anthropological case study. I know myself better than anyone else. 

I think that bluegrass is a very convoluted genre with a lot of propagation of “the great white myth.” Calling anything traditional music of the Appalachian Mountains is convoluted because bluegrass music is, in many ways, a product of the record industry. So, I don’t think of  Appalachian music as some great heritage. I think of music, in a more broad way, as a heritage for humanity. Things have radically changed since 100 years ago, the world is far more globalized. So, people, even in a rural area, like the one I was raised in, are exposed to world traditions, philosophies, and different schools of thought.

I’ve spent 14 years living outside of the United States and not speaking English everyday, assimilating the best that I could into other cultures, which over the course of years, really changes your person. So, I don’t identify as this Southern white guy that plays bluegrass. But I know that subset of humanity very well and that allows me to unpack it from 25 feet above and get a bird’s eye view and how I relate to the world. 

Fourteen years is a long time to think about that. So, I feel like I’ve now come to some conclusions about what the future could be like. The zeitgeist in America has just shifted profoundly, too. We’re in uncharted territory and the death growl of Dixie is upon us. There’s a huge paradigm shift in rural areas across my region of the country. The people settling there are not white people and often times they’re from indigenous and non-indigenous Latin American cultures. There are a lot of Mexican immigrants in North Carolina. It’s a very interesting thing to watch and what does the white person do? They get angry, of course. They think it’s theirs. The irony is very transparent. 

So, anyway, I’m not a popular guy in the bluegrass world, to say the least. There’s a subtlety that I am trying to articulate with my own complaints about this McPride, this rehashing of a movement that was literally started by black people at Stonewall. It was an uprising in defense of their human dignity. But now, pride has become an industry. 

Is it validation of your message when you receive pushback?

Yes, it’s a validation of my message because I make someone feel uncomfortable about my presence in the world. Navigating the subtleties and complexities of my own identity in the world is hard. It’s all contextual. If I just hung out in some hyper-woke, wealthy bubble, what good does that do? I’m happy to be a thorn in somebody’s side. If you don’t like me, I’ll just sing louder.

Where does that fire inside come from?

It comes from many personal experiences and from the way and the environment that I was raised in. I had to stand up for my self as an adolescent in North Carolina, I realized early that if I didn't stand up for myself, no one would. I cultivated my strategy from a young age. I realized that my society was ass backwards in many ways. I had that realization years earlier, even before I realized that I was gay. I already knew that I was from a place that wasn’t okay in a lot of ways, but in other ways, fantastic. So, there was always this dichotomy of, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. But, always address the elephant in the room. Navigating that stuff is a life’s work. You never stop. 

In 2020, you were involved in political rallies in the South and worked on a political video series, can you tell me about that?

Over the course of the election cycle, I played at a lot of political rallies. After the election, too, I was actively playing protests and stuff. At the time, I was working on a get out the vote initiative with a Guatemalan film director. It’s a video series called Pickin for Progress, where we illuminated progressive voices from the state and I curated music to go along with each episode. It’s what brought me into the activists sphere in North Carolina. I don’t mean activism as political posturing. For me, it’s more about meeting people, networking and problem solving. I have a minuscule platform, but it’s what I like to do. 

Tell me about your background in teaching music and living abroad.

Well, I did two years of my under grad study in Spain. I majored in Spanish. I also studied Japanese in college and I went to Japan for two years and worked as an English teacher. After coming back in the States for a couple of years, I moved to [Buenos Aries] Argentina, and taught banjo. I got enough students to get by and gradually I started playing gigs. I played a lot of Gypsy jazz violin—French jazz.

I lived there for 10 years. I’d come back to the States only to tour, or do an odd music festival here and there, and to visit my family and friends. 

You started your band, Che Apalache while in Buenos Aries, right?

Yes, Che Apalache is a band I started with my banjo students in Argentina. They became my bandmates, which is a very different relationship than being a student. We worked on fusing techniques from Appalachian string band music with techniques from bluegrass and string band with different Latin American music and notably Argentinian folk traditions and some Caribbean folk traditions and some Central American and Mexican music. 

So, we’d sing in Spanish and English. I composed and wrote songs in both Spanish and English and even Japanese. It was fun. I’m using the past tense because I haven't seen those guys since March 17th, [2020] and the pandemic has virtually killed international bands and touring the United States. 

Do you find lyrical parallels in Latin and Appalachian folk music?

Yes and no. I would say the poetry of the lyrics in the Southern Cone [of South America] is much greater. A lot of songs in bluegrass are horrifyingly awful. The subject matter has no universal relevance because it’s so regional. It’s ridiculous to sing about a little cabin home on a hill if you’ve never lived in one. In Argentinian folk music, some people are more conscious of why they are singing certain songs because they resonate and because they resonate more from within. I think a lot of people in the United States, in the folk traditions, sing songs that have no relevance to their lives and that to me seems kind of stupid.

But musically they are pretty disparate. I think there are more similarities between European music and Argentinian folk music because there’s not a huge blues influence in their folk traditions. Andean folk music is much more reminiscent of bluegrass and Mexican music, to me, feels like home. It feels like basically, I’m playing bluegrass. 

Is it accurate to say that you’re blending all of these styles on your new record, Borrowed Time?

Yes, I fuse a lot of different stuff on the record. Some songs on the record are pure bluegrass. There are two songs, “Red, White & Blues” and “Love Along the Way” that are straightforward bluegrass songs.

On “Horizon,” it uses Argentinian percussion. I worked with a great Argentinian percussionist and a great upright bassist to make this weird fusion music. I use a banjo instead of a nylon string guitar. There are other tracks on the record that are straight up tango, but it’s played on the banjo and compositionally it’s not at all bluegrass. 

There’s a lot of jazz influence on the record. Charlie Hunter and Sam Fribush and Brevan Hampden masterfully leant their prowess. There's 16-17 musicians on it, there’s a chorus that got together for one of the songs. There are 27 people that make cameos on my album.

Do you have a musical philosophy in the way that you distill the different strains of music?

It’s about the song. When I was envisioning what I heard for each song, I quickly realized all 12 tracks were going to be different ensembles. There's just an amazing mix of people on all of the tracks. I play on every track, of course. I play two songs on the guitar and on one of the songs, I also play fiddle. But it’s very much my five-string banjo—it is what I play most. 

The only other five-string banjo player on the album is Béla Fleck, who plays on “Mercy for Migrants.” I was willing to make an exception for Béla to come in and play a song [laughs]. It was cool that he and Abigail Washburn leant their platform to that song because the migrant crisis is a very important issue. 

When was the album recorded?

We cranked this out fast—between late March and early April of 2021. I have another album I want to get out next. I want to live my life fast, like a burning comet. When the creativity is gone maybe I’ll do something else, I don’t know. [laughs]

Everything is an original song. Nothing on the record is a traditional song. I composed all the music and I wrote all the lyrics, except for the one song [“Horizon”] that is cowritten with Abigail Browning. She’s the other half of my poetic heartbeat. There was a lot of writing done during the pandemic and a lot of these songs also came out of the activism-artivism that I was doing as part of the “Pickin’ For Progress” video series. 

Was there music in your family growing up?

Yeah, my older brother is a musician. He played the piano and is eight years older than me. I grew up singing along with him and he was highly influential. He introduced me to bluegrass and made me a mix tape when he was in college and I was in middle school. I was immediately captivated.

“This machine collapses tyranny”

I’m from a musical area, with vibrant folk traditions. I feel privileged to come from a place that still does have a lot of people interested in music. North Carolina is particularly diverse in its musical inclinations. 

And, when you talk about American music and the American music industry, you’re talking about African American music and North Carolina has a tremendous legacy of profoundly gifted African American musicians, poets and writers.

Particularly where I’m from, there’s a lot of German and Scots-Irish musical influence. Now, North Carolina has one of the highest immigration rates from Latin America. You can hear a lot of traditional music from Mexico. There are a ton of Latinos in North Carolina. Charlotte is one of the principal immigration hubs. It’s kind of like the LA of the East. There’s a lot of immigration in North Carolina.

I know you traveled to the US-Mexican border last year. What did you take from that experience?

I spent three weeks at La Casa de la Divina Misericordia y de Todas la Naciones [The House of Divine Mercy and of All Nations] in Nogales, Mexico. It’s a shelter for people seeking asylum in the United States. I was there teaching guitar and music in English and just hanging out, hearing people’s stories and talking with people, helping them connect to people and organizations in the United States. 

Do you find inspiration being immersed in that hardened environment?

Yes, I’m unabashedly not ashamed of the fact that I’m inspired by traumatic experiences. Clearly that is not my place, but when you sit down at a table of brotherhood with another human being and you hear their story it will change your life course. That’s why they are opening up the center to potential visitors because it’s important to have communication with people who are the victims of this situation because they are just like me and you. 

The migrant shelter had about 130 people during the time that I was there. The only thing they had in common was they were an asylum-seeking migrant. They’d been through hell to get where they are and they’re fleeing from a hell that we can’t even imagine. But beyond all that, they are about as diverse as any 130 people on the face of the planet. They’re not just migrants, they’re 130 individuals. They have names and stories. 

I have to ask of course, about Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie; where do they stand in your line up of influences?

Well, they and Joe Hill, who is often forgotten about as the real deal. They’ve had a lot of influence. What can I say? They tried to use music to help the underdogs of the world and that’s what I want to do. 

I think you can use your musical platform to help and I admire how they did that. I’ve been studying the way they did it and I have some inside information because I know some of the activists that they worked with. I would like to feel like I am a part of that legacy with folk music. 

I don’t want that to be convoluted and I’m not posturing. It takes commitment, you have to work and there are a lot of poseurs these days in folk music and they don’t really care about anyone other than themselves. They are a symptom of American society, it’s a very selfish place. Folk music is sort of a convoluted genre, I guess. It’s not really even a genre of music, it’s just singer-songwriters, or whatever, and they call it folk. It’s the biggest catch all of them all. I like the notion of folk music, because I like folks. I’m for the people. •