Larry & Joe: Songs of deliverance

Every day, the edges of America are crossed by thousands of desperate people from every corner of the Earth. It’s not just the shallow muddy river crossings at Del Rio, Texas. It happens in the deep snow along Lake Champlain in Vermont. It happens in the swamps in Florida, on the beaches of Oregon, and along the deserted stretches of NC-12 on the Outer Banks. It happens in Alabama, in Arizona, and even in Alaska.

“Because I rescued the poor who cried for help

And the fatherless who had none to assist them,

The one who was dying blessed me.

I made the widow’s heart sing.” _ Job 29: 12-13

The poor crying for help, the fatherless, the dying, widows, teenage girls, naked toddlers, rowdy young men, indigenous peoples, urbanites, gang bangers, saints, sinners, whole families, YouTubers, you name it. It is likened to a tsunami, and it’s hard to wrap your head around when you see it up close.

Every family, every tribal group, every individual has a different reason for making the perilous journey. The reasons are almost immaterial. It’s enough that they’re compelled to begin the journey, and enough that they persist, whether or not they succeed. They come, and as a nation we do little more than scratch our heads, argue over walls, and turn the channel. Migrants are prayed over, and preyed upon.

But there are artists who make the journey, too. And they come to show us that the systems of existence and the culture that for generations have kept Anglos and Latinos locked in antagonism no longer determine our life on this continent. “Remember the Alamo” has been recast as a question, and no one can answer with a “no.”

So the times have brought us Larry & Joe. And they sing together because they know there is another way to live in this crazy world.

Larry & Joe

Larry Bellorin, from the oil-rich coastal state of Monagas in Venezuela, is a renowned Llanera musician, which is roughly comparable to a singing cowboy, but instead of cattle trail ballads and Texas swing, he’s versed in the distinctive Venezuelan national folk traditions called joropo. It’s kick-ass music played on Venezuelan harp, mandolin, guitar, fiddle - pretty much anything with strings. We know Larry Bellorin because of El Sistema, the Venezuelan national talent development effort, much like the National Endowment for the Arts here or the old Soviet system that developed ballet in a world long passed.

El Sistema also produced Gustavo Dudamel, the ingenious conductor of the Paris Opera and the L.A. Philharmonic, as well as the newly appointed conductor of the Oak Ridge Symphony Orchestra, Régulo Stabilito, who just made quite an impression at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, conducting a jazz suite by saxophonist Greg Tardy.

With Stabilito and Dudamel, Larry Bellorin is in very heady company. In his homeland, he is something of a national treasure. But in North Carolina, where he took refuge after becoming part of the mass exodus from Venezuela, Larry was just cheap labor laying cinder block, until music set him free.

In the last seven or eight years, the number of human beings who have fled Venezuela equals the entire population of the state of Tennessee. Every man, woman, and child.

You might know Joe Troop already. From Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he was the founder of Che Apalache in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a string band that attracted the interest of a certain banjo player named Bela Fleck, who produced Che Apalache’s Grammy-nominated album, “Rearrange My Heart” in 2021. Troop had lived more than a decade in South America, but when panic set in over COVID-19, he was chased back to Piedmont Country. With Merle Watson’s flatpicking and Ralph Stanley’s high lonesome ringing in his ears, Joe Troop introduced himself to Larry Bellorin. And they’ve been on a roller coaster ever since.

I caught them at St. John’s Cathedral in Knoxville, at the Big Ears Festival a few weeks ago, on the last day of March, between Antonio Sanchez and Bad Hombre at The Standard and Arooj Aftab’s Love in Exile at The Tennessee Theatre. The hour with Larry & Joe was sort of like being in the eye of a hurricane. Beauty and order in the midst of chaos.

The most ardent fans of the Big Ears Festival, which just celebrated 10 years of history-making, are the musicians who wait so eagerly for an invitation. Nobody goes to Knoxville to make record deals, inflate their egos, or get rich. Ask performers like Christian McBride, Adeem the Artist, Bill Frisell, Allison Russell, Shara Nova, Vijay Iyer, Son Lux, John Zorn, or Tessa Lark, all of whom were in Knoxville two weeks ago. They were there to be part of something that just doesn’t happen anywhere else, in a town that isn’t even the live music capital of Tennessee.

Big Ears and Knoxville have a magic all their own. And this time, Larry & Joe helped weave it. They lucked out with a Friday afternoon slot (March 31) at what has become many Festival-goers’ favorite venue, the 130-year-old St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral. There was considerable buzz about these guys, but I don’t think anyone anticipated their true impact, and the huge gathering at St. John’s had an explosive response.

It’s easy to assume that Larry & Joe might be a novelty act of some sort. Maybe it’s the Three Stooges echo in their name. Maybe it’s the corn pone expectation of a bluegrass mash-up of two countries’ country music. It didn’t matter, because Bellorin and Troop blew any low expectations out of the water the minute they picked up their guitar and harp. The effect was pure magic.

Drawing on their just-released record “Nuevo South Train” and Troop’s previous albums with Che Apalache, Larry & Joe wove original tunes and their own takes on classics by Venezuelan national heroes like Simón Díaz and Carolina national heroes like Doc Watson into a plea for sanity with breath-taking immediacy. The power of this team runs as high as Troop’s incredible Romano falsetto, and as deep as Bellorin’s sadness at having to escape from his homeland to save his family’s life. The result of the mix isn’t a spot on “Hee Haw.” It ain’t Tarheel tortillas or Monagas moonshine. It’s a new way of looking at the familiar, so you see the darkness of a tune like Box Car Willie’s “Rollin’ in my Sweet Baby’s Arms,” and a possible reference to a certain US President in Diaz’s “Caballo Viejo.”

Larry & Joe would be whistling in the wind but for the fact that they’re both world-class instrumentalists and singers. There’s no way you can ignore them or fail to pay attention. It’s easy to imagine the two of them sitting on a porch somewhere in the hills around Boone, Brevard, or Black Mountain, where their strings can be heard for a hundred miles.

You can experience Larry & Joe for yourself on Sunday, April 30 . They’re the featured guests of Carrie Rodriquez for Laboratorio #21 in Austin, Texas. You can stream it live online.

Woody Guthrie wrote “Tom Joad” in 1960, and it ends with this promise: “Wherever little children are hungry and cry / wherever people ain’t free / Wherever men are fightin’ for their rights / That’s where I’m a-gonna be.” Two generations later, people by the millions between the Amazon and the Mississippi still yearn for food, freedom, and natural rights, while we drink the wine of the grapes of wrath.

Don’t miss Laboratorio. Carrie Rodriguez is a gem, an indispensible liaison to Latin music and culture. And Larry & Joe will infuse the live stream with an amperage that will melt the wires. Find it at carrieroriguez.com/laboratorio, and spread the word.

John Job is a longtime Oak Ridge resident and frequent contributor to The Oak Ridger.

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Larry & Joe: Songs of deliverance