Row Craven

As Row Craven sings, his "daddy came down from the hills; so did his daddy and his dad before that." You could say his songs do, too-emerging from a past in which granddaddies spit tobacco in churchyards and strummed homemade dulcimers on front porches hanging steep over Blue Ridge valleys; in which women shuffled feet over dirt floor kitchens, rode mules to town, and blistered their hands picking cotton. Row Craven's music remembers the stories of his past in an effort to make sense of his own experience.

Singing from the conviction that art is to be done honestly and without the constraints of tradition or expectation, Row's upcoming self-titled album delivers folk tunes that are all very personal accounts of heartbreak and death and that would have been written and recorded regardless of whether or not anyone ever heard them. Belonging to the tradition of folk music, the stage is simply set with a guitar, a harmonica, an upright bass, and a fiddle. The tunes and the energy that emerge from that stage make listeners clap, sway, dance, reflect, and sometimes even shout a "Hallelujah!"

Beyond musician, Row Craven is a writer whose lyrics are infused with literary allusions, the heritage of storytelling, and a simple integrity that puts the cliche of heartbreak into honest terms that are refreshing and true. Flannery O'Connor observed that a writer "operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location." Row Craven and the Machine Gun Kelly Accompaniment find that location in grass roots folk melodies and honest lyrics whose self-exposure unites listeners in what is true--that pain begets joy, and community brings comfort. With melodies that catch your ear, Row Craven's songs about his own disappointment make you think about your own as you find yourself humming his tunes, repeating his lyrics, and identifying with his hope that someday joy will come--though it be upon stormy winds.