Fiddler and vocalist April Verch grew up in Canada's Ottawa Valley, which lies along the border between Ontario and Quebec. These days she and her husband Cody Walters, a native Kansan and like-minded musician, live in rural North Carolina, from which they issue the occasional recording. Passages & Partings is the latest.

A mix of traditionals, originals and covers, Passage boasts a sound that reflects Verch's north-of-the-border sensibility as shaped by a rural musical culture to which few of us have been exposed -- prominently, a distinctive melodic but almost arch fiddling style not much like the less formal approach one associates with the American South. There is also Verch's singing, which will not be confused with anyone else's, and her intense, unvarnished, homeward-looking songwriting (e.g., the title song and "Dear Brother," both with Jon Weisberger, and "Up in the Ottawa Valley," with Si Kahn).

Most of all, a sweet sincerity abides in all that Verch passes on or creates, though it never tastes as if dipped in sentimental goo. One has the impression of a kind human being whose songs emerge unfiltered from her heart. Though he possesses a more limited vocal range than his wife, the listener suspects that Walters shares Verch's compassionate embrace of the world. If not exactly fancy, his reading of the Hank Williams/Fred Foster classic "Mansion on the Hill" is charmingly earnest and curiously moving, as if the heartbreak of the original story could be traced to the very guy who's now confiding this plaintive testimony. But Walters's most striking contribution to the operation is to be found in his mastery of the clawhammer banjo.

With the exception of "Jawbone" (originally from the minstrel stage, with lyrics, not heard here, characterizable as comic or just plain weird), none of the oldtime fiddle tunes are known to me. Verch's own compositions, moreover, are hard to distinguish from their traditional models. It may be a cliche -- well, it is a cliche -- to remark that Verch gives the impression of being something of an old soul. (As the father of a daughter who is herself one, I think I recognize the species.) This, I might add, in spite of a voice that one might expect to be attached to someone with fewer years on her than Verch's. In any event, nothing about her feels native to the current century. Rather, if someone told you she'd arrived intact from rural Canada as it existed in a 1950s lost world, you'd be hard-pressed to argue the contrary.

Finally, Verch & Walters's spare vocal arrangement of "Throw Out the Lifeline" (published in 1890) will inform you, in case you didn't know it already, that some old hymns are some of the most stirring songs ever composed by human hand. That's true, incidentally, even if your faith is only in music.

[ visit April Verch's website ]