In the America of dreams that is a wild, beautiful melting pot of working-class cultures and traditions, it is music that brings people together. The history of American music, from ragtime and rock and roll to and rap and techo, is full of cross-cultural fermentation.
That’s the magic of the Venezuelan-American musical duo Larry & Joe, on tour around the U.S. for the next few months and into next year.
The pair met in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, and spin out stringy, notey tunes with harp, banjo, cuatro, fiddle, maracas, guitar, upright bass, and Anglo-Spanish harmonies, that get feet moving, minds racing, and hearts thumping.
Joe Troop, who I met at West Virginia’s Clifftop music festival in 2017 and have written about before, is an omnivorous bluegrass musical talent from North Carolina. While living in Buenos Aires, he founded and fronted the Grammy-nominated band Che Apalache. In Larry Bellorin, an asylum seeker from Monagras, Venezuela, Troop found a musician as deep and ambitious as he is. They're both virtuosos with a love of folk music and desire to play for ordinary people”
Troop and Bellorin have now played in 37 U.S. states. “There’s something special about this project,” said Troop. “I have an ability to go into spaces where humans are gathering.” In particular, the pair is playing to lift the spirits of the victims of one of the Earth’s great ongoing human tragedies. Over seven million people have fled poverty and authoritarianism in Venezuela.
In Larry and Joe’s 2023 album Nuevo South Train, they combined bluegrass standards like "Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms," traditional Venezuelan songs, and Troop’s own compositions. The song "Caballo Vieja," “Old Horse,” for example, is a song of old men longing for love. “Venezuelan folk music is very rich in its use of language,” said Troop. “You rarely hear a metaphor in a bluegrass song.”
Music in America is “great,” said Troop. “I celebrate the music of the Americas. I love pan-American music. Maybe I’m a continentalist. There’s often a lack of authenticity in the United States, and music fills that gap for us.”
What Troop and Bellorin are doing can be defined as fusion music, but all musical traditions represent some sort of fusion. Bluegrass itself is the inheritor of traditions from, among other areas, Africa (where the banjo originates), Scotland, and Spain. Working-class people came together on farms and factories throughout Appalachia and sang together of their struggles. That’s what Larry & Joe are up to.
As an asylum seeker in America, Bellorin stays out of politics. Troop, however, is a committed protest singer. In another band, Joe Troop’s Truth Machine, he makes good trouble singing about the border wall, Native American rights, and environmental causes.
The coming crackdown on immigrants, especially those who are not in the U.S. legally, animates part of Troop’s activism and singing. “A lot of the migrant experience is they don’t have a choice,” he said. “The existence of this project speaks to the situation people are facing in the world.”
The work is a good reminder that, whatever the circumstances around us, we all have the choice to tap into joy and music. There’s a patriotic optimism in Troop’s songwriting. In "Love Along the Way," for example, he lifts up “good-hearted people doing the best they can” and reminds us that “life on Earth is borrowed time.”
For many people this is a time of despair. It's also a time for singing. “Going into this new era, we’re gonna be ruffling feathers,” said Troop. “If you want to help, get off your couch and go see live music and support musicians.”
For more on Larry and Joe, visit their website. Learn more about Joe Troop here.
