But, she says, this is typical for the g’Earls, who all live in separate cities. The band began, in fact, when mandolin player KC Groves started running into its various members at Bluegrass and fiddle festivals around the country. Andreassen met Groves at Clifftop Fiddle Festival in West Virginia. According to Andreassen, she “met this girl, sang some songs, did some dance steps,” and then the two parted ways.
That was seven years ago. Over the years that followed, KC, Kristin, and the other gals continued to run into each other as they began to develop a stronger interest in Old Time Music. For Andreassen, her hobby with OTM seemed like “a natural progression” from her concentration on traditional dance. She had spent some time studying Scottish and American step dancing in Canada. When she returned to the States, she continued her career as a dancer and dance instructor; but over the few years that followed her return, the multi-instrumentalist frequented “fiddle camps and fun festivals.”
As the women of Uncle Earl started to hang out more, jamming at festivals, and swapping tapes through the mail, they got in the habit of flying out to Colorado to play gigs in Groves’ hometown of Lyons. As Andreassen said, “We didn’t have high expectations of taking over the world or something. Our biggest ambition was to maybe cover our airfares so we could go to Colorado.”
But the more Uncle Earl played out, the more they realized that what they’re doing, “seems so foreign to people … it’s not unique in the Old Time or festival world,” but the way the g’Earls were performing the music was just so rare.
This uniqueness is what has driven Uncle Earl since its inception. Despite the fact that Old Time has been around since the early 20th Century, music critics and even many fans don’t know where to categorize it. There are no OTM festivals or music charts, and Andreassen notes, “it amuses us that, in the charts, they put us in the Bluegrass category. There’s no other way to account for Old Time Music.”
But for a gang of women so swiftly becoming lauded for their unique portrayal of traditional Americana and OTM, the ladies of Uncle Earl have done anything but shut their ears to contemporary music. Andreassen quips, “All of us are pretty tuned into the modern world … We were just in a coffee shop in Nashville listening to Arcade Fire … we were on a Wilco kick …” Basically, she says, when the show is over, the gals tune their stereos to “anything but fiddle music … to kind of open up the brain.”
