An Evening with Abigail Washburn

“Appalachia and folk-pop, with tinges of Asia and Bruce Springsteen.” — The New York Times

If American old-time music is about taking earlier, simpler ways of life and music-making as one’s model, Abigail Washburn has proven herself to be a bracing revelation to that tradition. She — a singing, songwriting, Nashville-based clawhammer banjo player — is every bit as interested in the present and the future as she is in the past, and every bit as attuned to the global as she is to the local. She pairs venerable folk elements with far-flung sounds, and the results feel both strangely familiar and unlike anything ever heard before. She changes what seems possible.

She first appeared at Merrimack Hall in 2008 with the Sparrow Quartet — featuring Ben Sollee, Casey Driessen and Béla Fleck. Prior to that performance, and at the request of the U.S. government, the Sparrow Quartet toured Tibet in 2006, and performed in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics. Abigail’s latest album, City of Refuge, is something completely different. The album “incorporates what would’ve in the beginning of my career seemed like an unexpected move, but now feels like a really natural progression of working with people that reach into other genres and other spaces musically.”