For those who don’t know Elena Skye well, her turn towards honky tonk music over the last two years may well seem a shock, especially to those who came to know her during the late 1980s and early 1990s when she played as part of the punk duo Belle-Skye.
For these people, Skye’s 1999 emergence into the public scene as Elena Skye & The Demolition String Band, with its debut CD One Dog Town, was a total reversal of musical trend. The band’s more recent release, a bluegrass version of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” may even have puzzled these people more, especially considering the reception the band has received, not just on the local scene, but in the deep South where honky tonk music isn’t a novelty, but a way of life.Twang music – as honky tonk is sometimes called – has often been an umbrella term for country music or music influenced by country, Skye said recently. Yet it is a kind of country music that has avoided being influenced by pop trends and therefore has had little or no exposure on commercial radio.
The rural areas of New Jersey, the ones that have country and western tastes and a pickup truck mentality, seem to have missed the movement, and oddly enough, the resurgence of the music in the area has not come from some back woods bar in Sussex, but from the heart of a more progressive musical scene: Hoboken and Manhattan.
Yet in the New York City area – which has often lacked a country radio station for decades at a time – honky tonk music has survived, and indeed, thrived as an underground movement, and Skye has been credited partly with its survival.
Influences
Skye said she was turned onto Bluegrass music by a high school teacher with whom she played in the clubs, then later studied mandolin with Kenneth “Jethro” Burns, a legend on the Chicago club circuit. At college in Vermont, she discovered punk music and started a band with Caren Belle. Belle-Skye became one of the more popular bands in Hoboken but never got the break they needed to make it commercially.
In 1993, she met Boo Reiner, the son of a North Carolina minister, who had similar roots in county music and a similar bad experience with the commercial music industry. When he ran into Skye, she wasn’t performing; she was waitressing. They discovered they both liked bluegrass. While Skye had not played mandolin in a while, she never lost her taste for country music. So, when Bo started to come around to the Hoboken bookstore Skye owned, Blackwater Books, he would sit down a play a little old fashioned honky tonk, stirring up again the feeling for a music that first inspired her.
“Meeting Boo Reiner also changed things for me,” Skye said. “He was the first person I met in this area who could really play bluegrass and country, and who had a deep knowledge of this kind of music. We used to meet at the bookstore after hours and play. I was so excited by it.”
At night, when the store closed for business, passers-by could likely hear the banjo and mandolin combining to make music that was for the most part native to the South, not north Hudson. Oddly enough, Skye and Bo began to attract other bluegrass musicians, local people who suddenly created a local movement.
Then Skye and Reiner took their act out, with John Abbey playing the bass fiddle and Phil Cimino playing the snare drum. They played Maxwell’s as well as numerous other venues, eventually becoming the Thursday night regulars at the Elysian Caf