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When Bol’d Crow first started playing together, they sounded like an old car.
Now, after nearly two years of playing together, Bol’d Crow members agree that they’ve become more like a Chevy with a Mopar cam.
“We’re really good at reading each other now,” says fiddle player and vocalist Terry McGinn. “It’s something much more smooth now.”
But Bol’d Crow doesn’t want to be flawless and clean. As Lincoln’s only six-piece female old-timey band, they say their genre doesn’t call for perfection. They don’t play traditional music, but it’s not bluegrass either, guitarist and vocalist Kerry Eddy says. It’s somewhere in between the two, with a little folk added to the mix.
And rather than making sure they hit every note, Bol’d Crow members are more concerned with portraying the back-to-the-roots feeling that makes their genre its own.
“It’s kind of like bringing the audience into a living room practice with us,” mandolin player Minda Loo says. “It’s organic and it’s rough.”
This organic nature can be heard in banjo player Allison Fritz’s clawhammer playing. Or consider that standup bass player Lindsey Bradley had never played the instrument before meeting the rest of the crew, and Loo had only a couple weeks of mandolin practice under her belt when the ladies met serendipitously.
Fritz had tried numerous times to start an old-timey band in Lincoln and had always failed. But one night, after meeting McGinn at a Kill County show, everything fell into place. With a fair amount of alcohol in her system, Fritz says she left Duffy’s Tavern, stumbled home and loaded her red Radio Flyer wagon up with instruments. Then she drunkenly skipped to McGinn’s house, where the ladies jammed until 4:30 in the morning.
That evening was also serendipitous for Stacy Dieckhaus, who had come over to watch the jam session, not realizing that she would soon play a vital role as the rhythm keeper. She filled a plastic honey container with buckwheat and shook it to create a beat. Eventually, after hours of playing, the buckwheat turned to dust.
“It was one of those things where it all fell into place,” Dieckhaus says. “I just went over there to hang out and watch Lindsey play. A lot of things just don’t come together like that.”
As the music grew, careers developed, relationships shifted and families began. But still the women found time to get together, play a few songs, have drinks, tell stories, take a smoke break and then start the entire process all over again. Sometimes, playing together was their main outlet, their best way to vent frustrations.
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“The music was very therapeutic,” McGinn says. “The non-verbal interaction, the chemistry between people was comforting and uplifting and in some cases healing.”
A lunch hour audience can find healing in Bol’d Crow’s music as they play Hear Lincoln at the northwest corner of 13th and O streets at noon today. Although McGinn is not looking forward to braving the heat — she plans to wear a giant sunhat — she is excited to play in the middle of the day and catch passerby offguard.
“It’s people that would never hear you,” McGinn says. “People coming out of buildings, getting rejected from a loan. They’re not expecting to hear live music and that’s something that is a really positive input to the universe.”
The band members take pride in their all-female composition, too, how Bol'd Crow delves into a male-dominated genre.
“The philosopher and feminist in me thinks that there’s no difference between men and women,” Fritz says. "But after being in so many bands, I see a difference. It’s really communicative because there aren’t huge egos involved.”
And Bol'd Crow says that the music supersedes their gender. Fritz, McGinn and Eddy take the wheel on most of the original songwriting, which varies drastically and changes over time. Songs such as "Whiskey and Water" have aged from slow and melancholy to more upbeat and transformative.
Inspiration comes from everywhere, they say. From musicians such as Dock Boggs or Tommy Jarrell, from Fritz’s hometown in Tennessee, from relationships and poetry.
“It either falls out of you, or it grows out of something else,” Eddy says.
Inspiration for the band’s name has a history, too. One night, as Fritz and a friend discussed her failure to find the perfect band in Lincoln, he says, "You’re gonna have to eat a crow." This reference, which is similar to saying, "Swallow your words," dates back to the medieval era, when peasants ate boiled crow during desperate times.
While Fritz had been bitter that she couldn’t find the band she was looking for, she says meeting these ladies at the time she did was "ridiculously fateful." She had to eat her words, and figuratively eat the boiled crow. However, having grown up in the South made the boiled part especially difficult.
“The spelling of our name came out of the fact that Allison couldn’t say boiled because of her Tennessee accent,” Loo says. “So we came up with a way to spell it phonically so people would have to say it properly. But so many people forget the apostrophe.”
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The ladies shared laughs as they discussed the band name on Bradley’s back porch Wednesday night. Lightning bugs flickered along with the flames of Bic lighters. They drank Coors out of bottles and applied homemade bug repellent made of peppermint, clove, lemongrass oil and vodka.
They shared other memories as well — like the times they fell asleep with instruments in their arms, the time Eddy introduced the band by saying “gather up your dicks, we’re Bol’d Crow,” or the numerous times that Fritz has attempted to perfect her song "Goin’ Home," though McGinn says she likes it better unfinished. They nodded in agreement and slapped their knees when Eddy said something ridiculously obscene.
And when she’s not home, Eddy daydreams about playing her guitar. Fritz has to hide her banjo or give it to a neighbor when she needs to focus on school.
“Music keeps me from killing people,” Fritz says with a laugh.
Cara Wilwerding is a Hear Nebraska intern. She’s just gonna come out and say it: If you skip Bol’d Crow’s show this afternoon, you’re a fool. Reach her at caraw@hearnebraska.org.