I took a long, lonely drive to Asheboro last month, barely cracking 50 mph as I crisscrossed the endless cornfields and cow pastures of Chatham and Randolph Counties.
With the windows down and the summer bugs thrumming, Beehive Cathedral—a new trio record from Americana savants Joseph Decosimo, Luke Richardson, and Cleek Schrey—felt like an appropriate soundtrack. Little did I know how perfect this 15-song slab of old-time exploration would sound.
Hypnotic in some spots, unhinged in others, Beehive Cathedral constructs its droning buzz from standard instrumentation like the fiddle and five- and six-string banjo. But it mixes in more esoteric fare, such as a Hardanger d’amore, a 10-string bowed instrument with resonant, sympathetic strings, and a vintage pump organ.
From the jump, Beehive Cathedral mimicked my drive: Lead single “Betty Baker” rolls and tumbles, while “Pompey Ran Away” approximates the curves and hills of the Piedmont’s back roads. “Blackberry Blossoms” was tender and thorny—perfect for a spot on the side of the road in search of this iconic fruit’s summer brambles. And “Cluck Old Hen” called back to a simpler land-based day and age, in both name and spirit.
That evocative sense of past and present intermingling permeates all 40 minutes of Beehive Cathedral. Sure enough, the Durham-based Decosimo, alongside Richardson and Schrey, recorded the album live together in a Tennessee cabin, foraging and rambling by day and playing music by night.
Most songs are grounded in that Appalachian terra firma, particularly the Cumberland Plateau, where Decosimo learned several firsthand from regional icon Clyde Davenport. Others, meanwhile, were sourced from historical field recordings, vintage 78s, shape note hymnals, and even 18th-century Scottish songbooks.
Yet Beehive Cathedral packs a decidedly modern punch. Given their variegated experiences in the worlds of folk, bluegrass, indie rock, and experimental sound, Decosimo, Richardson, and Schrey slant their songs with sumptuous exploration. Buzzing strings, off-kilter tunings, and droning dirges on deep cuts “Rockingham,” “Chimes,” and “Red Bird” lend corporeal heft to the album. But other interpretations like “Prettiest Girl in the Country” were as pleasant as pie—so breezy they could drift off into the ether.
Perhaps that’s why Beehive Cathedral burrowed its way so deep into my subconscious on that back-road drive. In this part of the state, traditional Americana just sounds right. It’s even better when a thoughtful sense of communal interplay honors the past while moving it adventurously forward. “You can’t step in the same river twice,” Richardson notes in press for the album. How right he is.
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