Every generation inherits folk music and does something different with it. The question is always the same: how do you honour a tradition that was built before you, in a world that no longer exists, and make it mean something to the world that does? The wrong answers are: ignore the tradition entirely and call it folk because it has acoustic instruments; or reproduce the tradition so faithfully that it becomes a document rather than a living thing. Bonny Light Horseman — Eric D. Johnson, Anaïs Mitchell, Josh Kaufman — are doing something that feels like a third way, and I've been sitting with their music trying to understand exactly what.
The supergroup framing doesn't do them justice, though the individual pedigrees are remarkable. Anaïs Mitchell made Hadestown, which is its own extraordinary thing. Eric D. Johnson has years of Fruit Bats recordings behind him. Josh Kaufman produces and plays with a sensitivity that never announces itself. When the three of them make music together, there's a quality of effortlessness that only comes from people who are genuinely listening to each other — the kind of attentiveness that traditional folk music demands and rewards.
The Old Songs Newly Felt
The debut was traditional songs, mostly, worked through with a care that made them feel discovered rather than covered. The challenge with traditional material is one of emotional authenticity — how do you sing a song written in another century about experiences and concerns that aren't yours and make the emotion feel genuine rather than performed? The Bonny Light Horseman solution, insofar as I can identify it, is to find the universal inside the specific. A song about loss is a song about loss. The seventeenth-century context shapes the form; the experience is accessible.
The second record moved further into original territory, and the originals carry the sensibility of the traditional material without the crutch of it. They sound like songs that could have been written a long time ago and survived to reach us. Which is maybe the highest aspiration of a certain kind of songwriting — to make something that feels like it was always there, waiting to be found.
On the Word "Revival"
I used the word in the headline and I want to pull it back a little. Revival implies that something was dead. Folk music was never dead. It was always being made, by people who loved it, in forms that the mainstream press wasn't covering. What happens periodically is not that folk is revived but that folk becomes visible to a wider audience, because certain artists produce work that is legible enough to cross the threshold. Bonny Light Horseman have crossed that threshold without compromising anything, which is the hard version of crossing it.
The harmony work is what I find most moving. Three voices that understand how to be three voices — not performing unity, not smoothing away the edges where they don't quite match, but existing in genuine counterpoint, each informing and altering the others. Traditional harmony singing has its own logic, its own way of creating meaning through the relationship between voices rather than in any single voice. They understand that logic. You can hear it in the way the music breathes.
I play Bonny Light Horseman when I want to feel connected to something older than my own concerns. That's a need I didn't know I had until I found music that satisfied it.
The thing that keeps me coming back is the trust. There's an enormous amount of trust in the music — trust that the songs are strong enough to carry simple arrangements, trust that the listener will meet the work where it is rather than demanding it move toward them, trust that the long tradition these songs come from is itself a form of meaning rather than merely a source of material. Traditional music carries memory in the way that no other music does — the accumulated experience of every person who has sung a song before you is present in the song, shaping how it sounds and what it means. Bonny Light Horseman understands this. They sing with that weight present and they make it feel like resource rather than burden. That takes real understanding of what they've inherited.
