[The internet has a habit of making friends of strangers and I guess I would have to describe Campfires & Battlefields as my best friend-I've-never-met.  He is one of the longest standing readers and commenters of this blog, and has written another two fine Sunday Supplement posts for us this week.  Cheers C&B.]

This lot first caught my attention because they take their name from a character in the “Port William Fellowship” novels of the American novelist and poet Wendell Berry, one of my favorites.  At its best, Berry’s writing is thrifty and deeply rooted in a sense of community, like his characters.   It’s an example that Jayber Crow the band has taken to heart.

Jayber Crow is two guys, Pete Nelson and Zach Hawkins.  Apparently they became friends in Tanzania during their university days but they come from Minnesota or thereabouts, and their songs evoke the prairies, rivers, and big skies of the rural American Midwest.  It’s a simple formula.  Fiercely strummed guitars, mandolin, banjo, some harmonica, stomping feet, clapping hands, a pair of good pipes, and melodies melodies melodies.  I picked up their full-length record called Two Short Stories back in the Spring (they have an EP too, called The Farmer and the Nomad), and I enjoyed it straight away, but for some reason it got a bit lost in the shuffle for a while.  I rediscovered it a few weeks back, though, and now that autumn is upon us it’s taken a firm hold.  To everything there is a season.  This is woody music, with plenty of dirt under its nails.  Anyhow, my descriptive powers fail, so I’ll just say that I really really like it and then drop the names of some groups they remind me of.  Neutral Milk Hotel.  The Rural Alberta Advantage.  The Avett Brothers.  There.

Now listen, and then go buy their CDs, which are available on their website.

Jayber Crow – St. Anthony

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Jayber Crow – The Limited Voice of the American Crow

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