Bluegrass meets folk and roots in fourth album from Leeds-based Lewis Pugh.
Heretics & Heritage is the fourth album from Leeds-based Lewis Pugh, combining both bluegrass and traditional folk/roots influences. Pugh himself plays banjo, guitar, snare drum and double bass, in addition to lead vocals, and all but two songs are self-penned.
The album lineup includes two members of north-east bluegrass band The Often Herd, in Evan Davies on mandolin, and Niles Krieger on fiddle. The opening track, Big Stone Lifter, is an up-tempo bluegrass number, with pedal steel courtesy of Stephen Hicken Jr., an addition to the usual bluegrass lineup including the aforesaid mandolin, fiddle and banjo. Indeed, the pedal steel is a very effective addition to the sonic mix, providing a unifying thread through much of the album.
Lyrically, the album leans towards story songs, with Anna Haslam, a banjo-led song, with a Celtic feel, a lament dedicated to the Irish woman’s suffragist of this name, apparently a relative of Pugh’s, with accordion adding to the atmosphere of the track.
Sometimes the lyrics of the story songs leave the listener hanging; murder ballad The Ballad of Maria Marten tells us that the killer “promised that I would marry her if first we run away/ instead of that I was resolved to take her life that day,” without explaining what brought him to this change of heart.
And Holes, a story of a chance find by two prisoners at a juvenile detention camp of treasure buried by a long-dead female outlaw, tells us that “they unearth the treasure, but the warden wanted it“, after hearing in the previous verse that “the warden left them both to die underneath that desert sun?”
A more straightforward narrative is found in the environmentally focused They Can’t Put ‘Em Back, reminding us that “they can blow the heads off mountains but they sure can’t put them back“. The Ballad of Robert Smalls lies firmly in folk territory, an a cappella sea shanty, telling the story of a slave finding his freedom by disguising himself as a captain at the age of 23, and stealing a ship, with nine other slave families.
My personal favourite, though, is album closer Shotgun Billy, with strong leanings to the repertoire of Jimmie Rodgers, but updated to the “mean young man” preying on youthful drug dealers, coming all too close to a sad end, in a bouncy arrangement featuring kazoo.
It’s a pleasure to hear homegrown talent combining influences from both sides of the pond in a well-produced and varied collection.
