Asheville-based Tellico’s first European trip holds special importance for singer, songwriter and guitarist Anya Hinkle. As the band tours the central and southeastern parts of France, Hinkle will be following the footsteps of her grandfather who made the same trip with his jazz band 87 years ago.
Hyde Ruble was born in Blue Earth, Minnesota in 1909, known affectionately as“Rube” throughout his adult life. His father was a fiddler, traveling on foot for miles and miles to play dances and weddings, which might have sparked Rube’s interest in music. While attending the University of Minnesota, he put together a jazz band, “Hyde Ruble & his Musical Layout” — he played an archtop Gibson guitar. In 1932 the band was invited to play on the French luxury liner the S.S. Champlain, which made its debut that summer as the largest, fastest, and most luxurious cabin class liner ever built, transporting businessmen and tourists between New York and France at the height of the Great Depression.
The ship was a bold modern statement in its style and engineering, as France struggled to emerge from World War I and the Depression, and it fostered the need to reclaim a sense of identity, modernity, pride, elegance, and civility.
Once Rube and his band arrived in France, they stayed in a small rooming house in the Cite de Trevise par la Folies Bergere, a district where many North Africans had settled at that time. During the heat of summer, he remarked on the incredible music flowing out of the opened windows into the streets. Similarly, Paris was overflowing with bohemian energy — Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Pable Picasso, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Edith Wharton, Henri Matisse, Jean-Paul Satre, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Baldwin. That summer, Rube and the band performed at jazz clubs and on the street. He met Gertrude Stein (a fellow Minnesotan) and went to the Louvre every day.
Hinkle is making the trip with Julian Pinelli, an Asheville-based fiddler; Jose Mejia, a dobro player from Colombia currently studying music at Holland College in Prince Edward Island, Canada; and Marius Pirabot, French/American multi-genre multi-instrumentalist who will play bass and fiddle.
From Paris to the Alps, Tellico will play a variety of stages with the highlight being the largest bluegrass festival in Europe, the La Roche Bluegrass Festival in La Roche-sur-Foron. There, Mary Lucey Cardine (Biscuit Burners, Uncle Earl) will join them on vocals and banjo.
“I’m excited to bring Tellico to Europe for the first time. I want to learn and absorb as much as I can and lay the groundwork for a return trip in 2020,” says Hinkle. “We have a great band with which to explore and I hope that we all grow and come back with new ideas for our music and for ourselves.”
Follow Tellico’s European trip HERE
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