When Joseph Decosimo was 16, his dad drove him from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Warren Wilson College’s famed Swannanoa Gathering and dropped him off.  

The annual folk music and arts conference wasn’t his first rodeo—Decosimo had been toying with the banjo since seventh grade. But he stood out in a room of adults. A Greensboro musician, Steve Terrell, saw him and asked where he’d rolled in from. 

“There are a few people around where you live that you could just go and hang out with,” Decosimo recalls Terrell saying, pulling out a Rolodex and jotting down the names of a few old-time musicians in Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau area. One of them—Charlie Acuff, an octogenarian fiddler and, incidentally, cousin to Roy Acuff, aka the “King of Country Music”—became somewhat of a mentor to the high schooler. 

“My dad had got me a tape recorder,” Decosimo says, recalling his visits to learn from and document Acuff’s music. “I was stumbling into being like a folklorist, just by sheer interest in music in East Tennessee.” 

“The first time I visited him, he gave me a tape,” he continues. “It was called Left Handed Fiddler, because he was a left-handed fiddler, and I went home and just like, learned every tune on it.” 

On August 15, Decosimo’s latest album, Fiery Gizzard, releases via Philadelphia-based label Dear Life Records. As with previous albums, this release draws on a deep catalog of fiddle and banjo standards from throughout the Appalachian South, sieving old sounds through playful new input and a generative community sensibility. 

We’re talking on Decosimo’s screened-in front porch, surrounded by the ever-present pitch of summer bugs. Not surprisingly, it’s a space he and his banjo have spent plenty of time in.

“In order for our kid to sleep at night, this is where you end up sweating it out,” he says. “Sitting and messing with stuff and coming up with new ideas.” 

“I was stumbling into being like a folklorist, just by sheer interest in music in East Tennessee,” says Joseph Decosimo. Photo by Robert Birnbach.

Years after his trip to Swannanoa, a few things have changed: Decosimo, 43, is now a longtime resident of Durham with a family and a trifecta of degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill, including a folklore PhD.

But he’s still a musician tangling with the sounds of the past. The long-ago moment of Rolodex kismet led not just to a friendship with Acuff but, down the road, to years of study with old-time virtuoso Clyde Davenport, a fellow native of the Cumberland Plateau.

Davenport, who died in 2020, is responsible for preserving a vast repertoire of regional music that Decosimo, in kind, now passes on to students and fellow musicians. 

Fiery Gizzard follows two solo albums and several collaborative projects. This album, as Decosimo tells it, was largely inspired by the musicians he regularly jams with, about half of whom are local. On the album, that bill rounds out out with the much sought-after fiddler Steph Coleman (Nora Brown), guitarist Jay Hammond, multi-instrumentalist Matthew O’Connell, bassist and producer Andy Stack (Wye Oak), horn player Kelly Pratt (Beirut, David Byrne), Libby Rodenbough (Mipso, Fust), Joseph O’Connell (Elephant Micah), and the experimental artist Cleek Schrey. 

“[The process came] out of playing with people and seeing what old tunes make sense in these different configurations,” says Decosimo. “What was the material that we could sink our teeth into and jam in a way that was responsive and not thoughtless?” 

That attunement comes through on Fiery Gizzard like a live wire, as the album shifts comfortably between tracks anchored by vocals (“I Had a Good Father and Mother,” “Billy Button”) and others that descend into a hypnotic, superlunar swarm of instrumentals (“Glory in the Meetinghouse,” “Shady Grove”). The winsome, meandering “Puncheon Camps” is a tune that Decosimo learned from Davenport. 

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From the outside, old-time music—cerebral, layered, specialized—can sometimes feel intimidating. But in the same way that the jam format is hospitably responsive, those layers of history have the capacity to call even the most uninformed layperson in.

Music that has history is a gift. It’s nearly impossible, for instance, to listen to an album like this without being sent down discursive rabbit holes. Throw on Fiery Gizzard, and next thing you’ll know, it’s two a.m. and you’ve got 17 Angelfire tabs pulled up that spell out, in some shaky Papyrus font, the legends of the past. 

Take the influence the album draws from the bluesman Abner Jay, an outsider musician born in 1921 who preached the percussive gospel of cow and chicken bones and other musical traditions inherited from his grandfather—Louis W Jay, born enslaved in Washington County, Georgia—that he made singular through a fearlessly funky consciousness. The “Abner Jay aesthetic,” as Decosimo puts it, comes through on tracks like “Flowery Girls,” which were recorded with the assistance of a pickup rigged inside a fretless banjo and transmitted through a tube amp. 

“If you listen to the record, you can hear a conversation that is living and breathing in a way. We’re not working from a score; we were working from, maybe, a sense of energy—the build and release of something.” 

“If you listen to the record, you can hear a conversation that is living and breathing in a way,” Decosimo says. “We’re not working from a score; we were working from, maybe, a sense of energy—the build and release of something.” 

Then there’s “Shady Grove,” one of the album’s more well-known Appalachain standards—you can find popular Doc Watson and Billy Strings versions of it online—though the Fiery Gizzard rendition is closer kin to the droning vernacular of Southwest Virginian fiddler Luther Davis (who, for his part, was born in 1887 and passed on many of his songs through Durham’s Alice Gerrard). 

The album steps into the current century with the gently loping “The Queen of Rocky Ripple,” which Durham’s Joseph O’Connell released many years ago as part of his Elephant Micah project. It’s the only contemporary song that Decosimo has ever recorded, but you’d be forgiven for not noticing—like the other material on Fiery Gizzard, it seems to occupy the hinterlands where past and present converge. 

“A lot of times, people think of [traditional music] as museum set pieces, you know—a cosplay of the past. I don’t think that that’s what the nature of the music is,” Decosimo says. “It’s exploratory. There is a form that you’re working with, but you’re exploring taking different turns and seeing where it takes you.”

Follow Culture Editor Sarah Edwards on Bluesky or email [email protected].

Sarah Edwards is culture editor of the INDY, covering cultural institutions and the arts in the Triangle. She joined the staff in 2019 and assumed her current role in 2020.