A Brilliant Folk Musician Turned the Natural Sounds of the Blue Ridge Mountains Into Powerful Songs

In early 2020, Daniel Bachman stood at the edge of a creek in Falmouth, Virginia, recording the sounds of the insects chittering and buzzing around him. He had come to the creek for the history it held. Nearby, slate-colored markers identified the site as the area where an English naval officer had kidnapped Pocahontas in 1613. The markers flanked a section of U.S. Route 1 still named at the time for Jefferson Davis, the lone president of the Confederate States of America.  

Bachman, then 30 years old, had already won national acclaim, and toured throughout the United States and Europe, with a sprawling collection of vernacular guitar music, spread across more than a dozen releases. Fans in the music press had likened him to the legendary John Fahey, known as one of America’s great guitarists for his avant-garde approach to traditional music. Bachman’s songs—rags, reels and country blues, many named for sites and sounds of Virginia—conjured an easy sense of the past.

But Bachman had grown wary of nostalgia. How could his music communicate a richer, more complicated legacy? He committed himself to studying the history of his home state, digging deep into pre-Colonial narratives and regional customs, befriending librarians and folklorists. He sought out locations like that creek in Falmouth, where he listened for traces of the past, homing in on the animal calls and running waters that recalled previous millennia.

“At some point, it just clicked: I can literally use these sounds,” he says. And so he started recording the noises that so inspired him, from Shenandoah National Park to Assateague Island. On the Blue Ridge Parkway, he recorded the creak of a dead pine, the pitch rising to sound almost like a fiddle as the wind pushed through it. In Southampton County, he recorded static-heavy snippets of radio as he passed Belmont Plantation, where Nat Turner, an enslaved Black preacher, led an armed insurrection in 1831.

These sounds all resurface on Axacan, Bachman’s 2021 album, alongside the songwriter’s own guitar, fiddle and harmonium. Every sound on Axacan, named for a 16th-century Spanish colony near the Chesapeake Bay, Bachman recorded within the geographic boundaries of the failed settlement. The resulting album is a singular musical exploration of Virginia’s colonial history. Bachman’s home provides both subject and soundtrack: Dead trees become instruments, and bygone voices flicker in and out of reception.

With each new album, Bachman seems more obsessed with capturing a world that is slipping away. He has stopped touring, instead committing himself to a small piece of Virginia while digging centuries deep in his research, always seeking new echoes of his home’s ragged, discordant history. Where his songs once held traces of traditional styles and arrangements, they are now experimental and unruly, brimming with the sounds of the world, caught by Bachman as history unfolds in the present.

Local history tugged at Bachman from an early age. He grew up in Fredericksburg, a city hemmed by Civil War battlefields, former plantations and the free-flowing Rappahannock River. His childhood home stands on the site of a Union Army encampment; the land had been part of the plantation where George Washington grew up. His father, Jon, a paleontology hobbyist, once made national headlines after finding fossilized dinosaur tracks nearby. The family home includes a fossil room, its shelves and boxes filled with their discoveries.

“If we put a shovel into the ground, we would find little artifacts,” says Sarah, Bachman’s sister. “It was sort of modeled to us that you must understand the environment that you’re in, in as many dimensions as you can.” That environment included music: Bachman’s father is a guitarist, and the family record collection included bluegrass, Appalachian folk and country blues. 

As children, Bachman and his sister improvised plays about early American history. Sarah portrayed a Union soldier, or a time traveler who would uncover artifacts to marvel at. Bachman directed his sister, designed the sets and documented the performances with the family camcorder. “He was always trying to record everything,” Sarah says. “I feel like he’s always had a preservation mind-set.”

When he was 17, Bachman dropped out of high school and devoted himself to making Appalachian folk music. He released a series of full-length albums, their track lists dotted with the names of small places around Virginia: “Seven Pines,” “White Oak,” “Mount Olive Cohoke.” He made his debut on NPR’s popular Tiny Desk concert series in 2012. Music writers praised Bachman for his knack at breathing new life into older styles. “History,” one critic wrote, “runs through Daniel Bachman’s guitar.” 

Bachman’s engagement with history can be subtle. He doesn’t sing or write lyrics; in Bachman’s music, there is no human voice to guide the song. Instead, he relies on song titles and liner notes to evoke a sense of place and time. River, his 2015 album, pays homage to the Rappahannock by pairing Bachman’s original songs with his arrangements of tunes by Virginia musicians from generations past who knew the same shores.

As Bachman distanced himself from traditional song structures, he sought more direct ways to channel history. Following Axacan, in 2022, Bachman released Almanac Behind, an album focused on the climate crisis and composed using a range of found sounds—among them, weather alerts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration picked up by his weather radio, voicemail messages from the local power utility, the sound of rain whipping his house—to document a year of extreme storms. Almanac Behind is a gripping listen: a year’s worth of destructive weather compressed into a 43-minute tempest, as the sounds of the near-past warn of a perilous future. “Nature is no longer aestheticized” on the album, one critic observed. “It is real, immediate and dangerous.” 

Bachman, now 35, lives with his partner, Aldona Dye, a musicologist, in Madison County, Virginia, on the east side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The pair met in 2019 while digging through the archives of the Virginia Folklore Society. Their home is a former mill building, which they rent for $600 a month plus utilities; Bachman has rarely made more than $20,000 a year, he says, mainly from landscaping and odd jobs that support his music and folklore interests.  

I once asked him whether he considers albums like Almanac Behind to be a form of documentary work. By way of an answer, he brought up People Take Warning: Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs, 1913-1938, an anthology in which each song is filed under a broad category heading: “Man v. Man,” “Man v. Machine” or “Man v. Nature.” The songs are vessels for melody and technique, sure, but also for news of real tragedy: Two trains collided in Ingleside, West Virginia, in 1927, killing an engineer who worked on the railroad line (“The Wreck of the Virginian”). The 1929 influenza epidemic claimed thousands of lives as “death went creeping through the air” (“Memphis Flu”). Bachman’s commitment to documentation in his music enables the sounds of climate change to speak for themselves.

“I’m trying to explore how we make art about these things accurately,” Bachman told me. “How to express the emotional and physical realities of the changes that we’re listening to.” We know the past through the fragments, sonic and otherwise, we manage to save from ruin. The rest goes down with the ship.

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On October 24, 2023, Bachman watched from his bedroom window as a column of smoke rose on Double Top Mountain, a few miles from his home. At first, he and Dye made light conversation about how old-time disaster songs might have recorded the sight. But the smoke persisted. The couple heard coyotes howling; by the third or fourth day, Bachman says, the fire “really started to grow.” Fire engines streamed past Bachman’s house toward Quaker Run, an area near Shenandoah National Park. As they did, Bachman recorded the sounds of their sirens.

The Quaker Run Fire quickly became the largest active wildfire in Virginia that year and took weeks to subdue. Firefighters used leaf blowers and bulldozers to clear tinder from the fire’s path, creating boundaries they hoped might contain it. Helicopters dropped thousands of gallons of water to dampen the flames, then refilled their massive buckets from nearby reservoirs. Smoke particles turned the sky red and interfered with local cellular signals. The Madison County Sheriff’s Office urged local residents to evacuate. By the time officials declared the fire contained, it had burned through nearly 4,000 acres.

Bachman spent the duration of the Quaker Run Fire documenting its impacts. Early on, he sat in the woods as smoke filled the air and used his phone to record the sounds of local birds; later, as the fire grew, he drove the backroads wearing a respirator and holding his phone out the open window, catching the sound of the wind as it whipped past. He took digital photographs of the sky—“from the bluest cloudless sky to a completely gray pea soup.” Back home, he fed the image data into a computer program that spit out audio files in a process known as databending, creating a collection of hissing, abstract sounds from the photographs of smoke. They sound like blankets of static, each one crackling at its own rhythm. On the fire’s final night, Bachman recorded the sound of rain as it fell across the area, tapping against his roof. 

Over the month that followed, Bachman built a 25-minute song from the sounds he had gathered, stitched together by motifs on fiddle and guitar. The song moves chronologically, at a rate of one minute for each day of the fire. Bird noise gives way to a low drone, which then multiplies, creating a harmonic buzz—a chorus of leaf blowers, Bachman explains, similar to the models used to clear fire lines and recorded years earlier at a landscaping job. “They sound, to me, like large, bellowing horns,” he says. “When you manipulate the speed and the pitch, you can get some very interesting stuff.” Wind and sirens intrude, followed by helicopter blades. Near the halfway mark, the crackling sounds Bachman generated from his smoke photographs begin to arrive in layers, creating subtle rhythms under his guitar. At times, Bachman’s guitar flickers out altogether, much as the couple’s cellular service did on the smokiest days. A bird call pierces the track, then vanishes. When I first finished the song, I played it again. This time, as I listened, I read the National Park Service’s daily updates about the Quaker Run Fire; as I did, I was awed by the precision with which Bachman’s song recapitulated the life of the blaze. “It’s not too abstract,” he told me later. “It’s literal, you know what I mean?”

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Las February, Bachman and Dye hosted a two-hour community radio show featuring recordings from the Virginia Folklore Society archives, held by the University of Virginia Library. Many of the recordings, embossed on fragile aluminum discs, have now been digitized, securing them for future listeners. Some of the songs they contain are nearly a century old; at the top of the show, Dye said, “This will be the first time a lot of these will be on the radio.”

The pair played a folk ballad sung by a woman named Eunice Yeatts McAlexander and recorded in 1932, before rural electrification. Near the end of the song, a steam whistle sounds; afterward, Bachman explained that the song may have been recorded at a train station, where power outlets were more common and accessible back then. “It gives another sense of place and time to these recordings,” Bachman said.

Later, in the fall, Bachman bought a handheld recorder and rented a cabin in Shenandoah National Park. He planned to spend a few days there, attaching a small contact microphone to trees affected by the Quaker Run Fire. What might such ancient trunks, thick with history, have to say? I thought of the train whistle—nearly a century old, held safe within the body of a song—finally carried across the radio waves like a small revelation.

Brendan Fitzgerald | READ MORE

Brendan Fitzgerald is a freelance writer and former senior editor of the Columbia Journalism Review.