Amy Nelson drapes herself in colourful, old-timey fashions with updated touches, just like her songs, grown from lively old fashioned bluegrass now sowed with modern moments. Nelson’s music is straightforward and open, cradling frequent must-hear lines, shining like a wedding ring thrown into the bottom of a well, surrounded by the darkness from which bluegrass sprouts. Nelson came to her love of mid-1900s bluegrass in a modern way – she discovered, online, the songs of Ola Belle Reed, who learned to sing in the Appalachian tradition from her mother and grandmother in the 1920s. Nelson stays true to the genre, the era, and the sound. She can wryly deliver songs about lovers leaving with hand clapping humour, then in the next song, swirls the dipper into that ancient, universal stream of human heartache and uncertainty and bids us all to take a sip.
Biography by Mary-Lynn Wardle