In her2008 filmic auto-portrait, Beaches of Agnès, artist and filmmaker Agnès Varda says, “if we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.” For Varda, those landscapes were beaches. For singer-songwriter Pony Bradshaw, they’re the hushed hills and deep valleys of North Georgia. And from the first aching thrum of “Ginseng Daddy,” the opening track off his latest record, Thus Spoke the Fool, he’s inviting us back to that beautiful, haunted place, his home place, to visit again.
Similar to his previous two offerings, the tracks on Thus Spoke the Fool feel less like songs you hear, and more like places you go, odes to the land and language of Appalachia, lyrical topographies paying faithful homage to the region where Bradshaw put down roots nearly two decades ago. The songs are lush with mountain laurel and tobacco leaves, taking listeners to mill towns, and American Legions, and Mineral Bluff. They’re flushed with the flood of the Coosa and Hiawassee Rivers, tense with the tenor of a buck dancer’s tapping feet.
Recorded in part in the sanctuary of an old church outside of Athens, Georgia, Thus Spoke the Fool is a taut,10-song collection, and the third and final installment in a trilogy that began with 2021’s critically lauded Calico Jim. What began as a bluegrass record alchemized during recording sessions in Nashville to create a more hybrid, textured sound, heavy on fiddle and pedal steel.
Beyond any strict genre classifications, however, it’s mountain music that bears witness to a maligned and misunderstood region by a songwriter forever contending with the notion of what it means to call a place home.
