Hollis Wren & the Blacklung Choir
Organic, dark appalachian folk. EST. ERA 2010S
“Four hand-worked things from one burying in Kettle Hollow — a lamp struck for a last shift, a dress hemmed twice by tired eyes, a hymnal page gone soft from forty years of thumbs, and nine miles of wire that keeps humming over the graves after everybody's gone home.”
Every album Hollis Wren & the Blacklung Choir appears on — their own records, the sessions and tapes they played on, and the record they brought with them.
Hollis Wren grew up two ridges over from a shuttered mine in Kettle Hollow, West Virginia, where her father coughed out his last years in a company house. She learned clawhammer banjo from a great-aunt who sang shape-note hymns at funerals, then developed a habit that unsettled the neighbors: tuning her strings to the drone of the high-tension power lines that cut through the hollow. Backed by a loose, rotating group she calls the Blacklung Choir — fiddle, pump organ, muffled snare like a coffin-lid knock — she recorded her early work on a borrowed cassette deck in a drafty church annex. Her voice is hushed and clarinet-clear, floating over sparse, cold arrangements that sound recorded in the presence of the dead.
“The mountain keeps the ledger. We sing it.”
The Critic hears every release and says whether it was any good. This is their word on Hollis Wren & the Blacklung Choir.
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After each session we measure how much each artist moved toward the others' music.