The Fife & Drum Blues

He's a towering, be-hatted, bearded presence, all gruff voice and growling pre-WWII swamp blues guitar. She's a petite blonde Irish lass with a sparkle in her eye, a surprisingly soulful voice, a flair for tin whistle and a love of the drums. Originally meeting when he was touring Ireland, Hat Fitz & Cara have become quite the fixture at folk, roots and blues festivals and pubs across the country, and it's out there, on the road, that the pair have found the meeting point in their respective musical paths that's been distilled in their second album together, Wiley Ways.

“It's more of a meld, rather than Fitzy as a separate identity and myself as a separate identity,” Cara Robinson explains of the difference compared to their first album together, 2010's Beauty N' The Beast. “I was a lot in the background of our musical journey, but now that I've sort of found my feet with the drums being my first instrument, I think we've found our feet together as one sound. But I don't think we'll ever make a 'modern' album,” she laughs.

“From what I'm hearing, there's a lot more soul in what we're doing now, and there's a bit of Celtic influence there. [Title track] Wiley Ways is strongly both of us, in our sound together, with the drivin' trance-ing guitar and the washboard and sort of percussive vocals, and we both sing throughout it. A lot of the songs come to us while we're on the road and his lyrics come from experiences – it has to be something that means something to him – and I love his style of writing; it's very gentle and also could be quite ferocious as well. And I'm really getting into stories from the past – [events] that are really important to me, interesting quite unique stories.”

One of the meeting points where their respective musical paths have crossed is the 'fife and drum' music of America's Deep South. Fitz has of course built his whole career on the early blues stompers but, for Robinson, the roots of the fife and drum were there, present, in the Ireland of her childhood.

“On the 12th of July, that's when they come out,” she recalls the annual celebration of the defeat of the ousted Catholic King James II by the forces of the Protestant William of Orange in 1690, supporters trooping through the streets of Belfast under orange banners. “The fife and drums is very blood-stirring music but very war-like. When the Deep South black American population took up the fife and drum, they would play for life, love, death, birth – it was also a party atmosphere, and I just love the energy of it.”

This time around, the pair also scored the services of one Jeff Lang to record and produce the album with them.

“We were sittin' 'round the kitchen table really and he was askin' who we were gettin' to engineer our album, and produce it, and we said we had a couple of names and a couple of studios around the place that would like to do it, and he said, 'Oh well, I'd like to do it, you know. What about here?' [his home studio The Enclave Recording Facility] And we both instantly – and it wasn't even a matter of thinkin' about this, it was, like, 'Yep, definitely!' He's known Fitzy for years and I think it's something where you feel so comfortable and so secure in putting your music in his hands, with his genius ears that he has. He really knew where we were coming from, both of us.”