Woody Guthrie’s Grandson in Vital Bluegrass/Folk Band
Jalopy Records artists appearing at the Brooklyn Folk Fest, which will be held November 7-9 at St. Anne’s Church, 157 Montague St., Brooklyn, NY:
Saturday – 12:50pm – Main Stage – Cole Quest & The City Pickers
Unlike his grandfather Woody Guthrie, the most dust Cole Quest has encountered has been under his bed and the trains he hops are NYC subways. Like Woody did for over twenty years, the folk and bluegrass group calls NYC home. In fact, Quest didn’t even play folk and bluegrass music until one day when he wandered into a pub in Astoria, Queens, to hear a band playing one of his grandfather’s songs. That led him on a journey to form “a crack team of pickers and voices,” according to Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show, including musicians who were at that initial Astoria jam session.
“You start to realize how fully Quest has made his ancestral musical lineage a part of his own place in folk music history circa 2025. And lord knows we need it.”
–Kyle Petersen, No Depression, July 16, 2025
“Singular.”
–Judy Bass, Wide Open Country, April 21, 2025
Saturday – 5pm – Main Stage – Down Hill Strugglers
Folk trio The Down Hill Strugglers’s first all-original album and first album in seven years, Old Juniper (2024 / Jalopy Records) debuted at #8 on the Billboard Bluegrass Chart. Meanwhile, Songlines Magazine (UK) called the Down Hill Strugglers “old-time resistance music that punches just as it should, with squalling fiddles and plucky banjo servicing wry reflections.”
First single “Valley by the Stream” was added to two Apple Music official playlists: Americana Best New Songs and Americana Coming Soon.
Eli Smith and Jackson Lynch from the band appear in the new film The History of Sound.
Saturday – 5pm – Parish Stage – Tamar Korn & Kyle Morgan
“Sublime… transcendent” (Wall Street Journal) NYC vocal treasure Tamar Korn and “strong writing” (Under the Radar) Brooklyn singer-songwriter Kyle Morgan (aka Starcrossed Losers) have teamed up for Darkening Green, a superb album of acoustic duets, featuring songs by Leonard Cohen, the Carter Family, Gillan Welch and David Rawlings, Iris Dement, the Platters, and two originals from Morgan, that came out on Jalopy Records. Here’s what we’re reading about the duo:
“[Among] the best new albums out Aug. 15”
–Stephen Thompson, Amelia Mason, NPR Music, August 15, 2025
“They harmonize with an almost sublime ease on their new duo LP, Darkening Green.”
–Hobart Rowland, Magnet Magazine, August 7, 2025
“When Tamar Korn and Kyle Morgan blend their gorgeous voices, something very special, even magical, happens.”
–Judy Bass, Wide Open Country, May 12, 2025
Saturday – 7pm – Main Stage – Nora Brown
“If you don’t know Nora Brown, your world is about to change.”
–Robert Plant
Nora Brown was introduced to traditional music by chance as a six year old. What her parents assumed would be routine ukulele lessons were an inconspicuous window to the world of old-time music. From his tiny studio apartment in Brooklyn, the late Shlomo Pestcoe, a historian and old-time musician taught Nora old time tunes on the ukulele and through his continued instruction other traditional instruments– the fiddle, mandolin, guitar and banjo. Nora now plays traditional Appalachian music with a focus on banjo playing from Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. Along with mentors in the northeast like the late John Cohen she also has traveled and learned directly from master musicians including Alice Gerrard, George Gibson and the late Lee Sexton.
She toured across the US, Europe, and Japan, playing renowned festivals including the Newport Folk Festival, Roskilde Festival, and the Trans-Pecos Festival of Love in Marfa, Texas. She has performed on NPR’s Tiny Desk twice, TED Salon, WNYC’s Dolly Parton’s America and an official showcase at the 2022 Americana Fest in Nashville. Nora has been interviewed on NPR’s Weekend Edition, WBUR Here and Now and she’s been included on NPR’s All Songs Considered. Since 2019 she has released four albums on Brooklyn’s own Jalopy Records Label. All records have charted on the Billboard Bluegrass Charts during the first week of release.
Saturday – 9pm – Parish Stage – Jackson & The Janks
Jackson and the Janks are a rock and roll and rhythm and blues garage gospel band. They’re known to light up the floor with old fashioned good dancin’ music. Bass sax holding it down and sacred steel lifting you up.
“With their New Orleans-inspired take on the protogenic power of rhythm & blues, the band uses early rock & roll as a loose template and turns it on its head, adding bass sax and pedal steel instead of bass and lead guitar into a unique melting pot of raucous, ramshackle rock & roll and old timey jugband country folk.”
-–Jof Owen, Holler, May 27, 2025
“Inspired as much by his Crescent City contemporaries as NOLA institutions”
-–Hobart Rowland, Magnet Mag, April 29, 2025
“Have you been looking for a good ol’ country record to spin this summer on all of your adventures? Look no further than the new one by Jackson & the Janks, Write It Down. There’s a certain amount of whimsy that goes along with modern bands intentionally leaning into more traditional sounds that often doesn’t click—i.e. the production sounds too modern, the instrumentation is too maximalist, the vocals are too clean, etc. None of this is a problem on Write It Down—the sound is tinny yet warm, they have a bass saxophone player, and Jackson’s croons are somewhere between southern gospel and twangy honky tonk, heartbreak and world-weary hope.”
–Nolan Parker, Portland Mercury (OR), July 15, 2025
Sunday – 2:50pm – Main Stage – Jim Kweskin
Mentioned by Bob Dylan in the Martin Scorsese-directed film Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (Netflix) and in the new Timothee Chalamet movie A Complete Unknown (Searchlight Pictures), the “vibrant” (Folk Alley) Jim Kweskin has built a legendary, influential decades-long career. Now 84-years old, Kweskin’s new album with The Berlin Hall Saturday Night — featuring five-time GRAMMY Award-winner Cindy Cashdollar, producer/bassist/frequent-Kweskin-collaborator Matthew Berlin, and a number of other musicians with whom Kweskin has played for decades, melding together pre-war Jazz, jug band music, folk, blues, western swing and hokum — is out now.
NPR’s World Cafe rans its career-spanning interview with Kweskin.
“Jim’s gems… A potpourri of Americana by one of its creators working with killer musicians. Everything from Western Swing to a New Orleans mambo to the Great American Songbook to a reefer anthem.”
–-Michael Simmons, MOJO Magazine, May, 2025
“Music with a relentlessly infectious spirit and swing that defies time… bursting with joy and vitality.”
–-Nick Cristiano, No Depression, April 23, 2025
Sunday – 4:30pm – Main Stage – Peter Stampfel
The new album Song Shards marries two concepts, part one made up of stoic aphorisms set to music: prayers and observations of wit and wisdom; while part two sees Stampfel revisiting radio advertising jingles from his youth in the 1940s in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As with all things Stampfel, the result is penetrating, deeply strange, funny at times, contains more than a little observed truth, and sounds like no one and nothing else.
“[Among] the best new albums out Sept. 19.”
–Stephen Thompson, NPR Music
“Absolutely iconic NYC underground figure Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders & the Fugs serves up more wonderfully oddball goodness.”
–Bandcamp
Grade A
–Bob Christgau, And It Don’t Stop
“If measured insanity delivered with well-orchestrated brevity is your thing, Song Shards won’t disappoint.”
–Hobart Rowland, Magnet Mag
“The strength of the record lies in the contemplative numbers, such as ‘The Road,’ which will make you weep, and weep some more. Don’t worry, though, Stampfel has not created a brooding album about mortality. Instead, his off-kilter sensibilities are on full display… This is not a conventional record.”
–Jack Walters, PopMatters
Sunday – 5:20pm Workshop Room – Jim Kweskin workshop: Bringing Old Songs To Life (and making them your own)
