Tiehackers

The Tiehackers are four traditional American musicians who hail from parts of the United States most heavily influenced by waves of Scots-Irish immigrants, their culture and their music. Zan McLeod and Paddy League hail from the Blueridge Mountains of North Carolina and Virginia while Dan and Chris Grotewohl are from the western frontier, Kansas.

Scots-Irish immigrants were some of the first people to move the frontier west through Missouri prior to the Civil War. What few people know is that whole groups of Irish immigrants were deposited directly in the "west" just after the Civil War. These itinerant bands of laborers cut railroad ties out of the white oak woods of Missouri. The tiehackers shared their lively music while living and working together. Many of the immigrants moved west with the railroad, but their music stayed in the midwest. Old-time Missouri fiddle music is a living tradition with heroes like Lyman Enloe and tunes that sound impeccably Irish or Scottish, yet hauntingly Appalachian and unmistakably American.

As if they'd all spent months in camp, these four musicians join their sometimes-cross-tuned, 4- and 5-stringed instruments, clean rhythm, and virtuoso breaks into sets of new traditional music. It's greengrass music - a little Irish, a bit Bluegrass, a pinch Old-time, and whole lot American. The Grotewohl brothers are known for writing "monster" tunes, favorites in sessons from west to east, Irish to Bluegrass, and recorded by other musicians. Bear in the Greengrass (2000) - Dan Grotewohl's solo CD - offers a sample of the Tiehackers' greengrass

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Last updated on June 11, 2001
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