Banjo royals do their thing at Walk Hall – JH News&Guide

The pair (Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn) will present their duo show Thursday at Walk Festival Hall, the final installment of the Grand Teton Music Festival’s 2024 “Gateway” concert series. 

A performance typically includes folk standards as well as originals, although it’s sometimes hard to tell them apart. They reshape old favorites to bring a 21st-century sensibility to them, and imbue their own songs — Washburn handles the vocals and also sometimes adds some soft-shoe percussion — with a timeless quality, even when they are about contemporary issues like Syrian refugees or the Lakota Nation’s oil pipeline protests at Standing Rock.

“Abby was very excited that Juno” — their first son, now 11; their second, Theo, was born in 2018 — “was pounding along in time to [‘I’ve Been Working on the Railroad’] and didn’t even quite realize she was singing in a minor key,” Fleck said. “I said, hey you’re onto something there! And we grew an arrangement out of the idea. Generally we want to find a way to make the older music our own in order for us to feel comfortable adding it to our rep.”

A single banjo is capable of producing a lot of sound, so you can imagine what two can do.

“Sometimes we blend intentionally,” he said, “and sometimes we try to keep our separate identities. But … each arrangement is based on what appears to us to serve the song best.”

Their GTMF appearance is just one of two summer dates they have scheduled.