Songs We Love: Rachel Baiman, 'Shame'
There's a presumption among some people who have little contact with old-time, string band, bluegrass and folk music that those are mostly stagnant traditions, stuck in some sort of distant, Arcadian past and locked into so-called primitive patterns. The truth of the matter is that those traditions can be strikingly elastic, and they continue to attract new generations of keen musical minds, like Chicago-bred banjo and fiddle player Rachel Baiman.
After moving to Nashville, she spent several years exploring the possibilities of instrumental interplay, frequenting an old-time jam at a small bar, forming the inventively spare, rhythmically honed duo 10 String Symphony with fellow fiddle player Christian Sedelmyer and taking occasional side gigs, including a pair of Kacey Musgraves shows at the Ryman Auditorium.
Recently, though, 27-year-old Baiman has been reckoning with other aspects of her roots and testing her music's potential to carry a timely message, raised as she was by social-worker and radical-economist parents who hauled her to the Ethical Humanist Society of Greater Chicago on Sundays. Following last fall's presidential election, she teamed up with picker pals in Nashville and New York City.
