When Opera Met Bluegrass: How the Renée Fleming & Béla Fleck Album Actually Came Together
Categoria: Musica
The Fiddle and the Drum has been decades in the making.
Por Billboard | 29/05/2026
A collaboration between opera soprano Renée Fleming and genre-jumping banjo auteur Béla Fleck may seem, on the surface, like something that came out of nowhere. But truth is their Appalachian-flavored album The Fiddle and the Drum , which comes out Friday (May 29) has been a long time coming. The pair — which has 23 combined Grammy wins and numerous other honors — has been talking about the project for nearly two decades, since a meeting to discuss it at a restaurant on 57th Street in New York City. “Renée was thinking about making a record like this, and for some reason I don’t understand I was suggested as the producer,” Fleck, who was recommended by Fleming’s associates at Decca Records, tells Billboard . “And I was like, ‘I’d love to do this.’ “I’ve always been a fan of great female vocalists, from Joni Mitchell to Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou (Harris), people like that. I always liked their records even though they didn’t relate so much to what I did in my own music. So I was very excited to work with somebody of (Fleming’s) ability and stature, with creative music.” The Fiddle and the Drum — which features guest appearances by Dolly Parton, Vince Gill, Jerry Douglas, Aoife O’Donovan, Sierra Hull and Sarah Jarosz — is perhaps more of an eyebrow raiser coming from Fleming than Fleck, who has worked frequently in the album’s bluegrass and folk idioms. The set’s 10 tracks draw from both public domain traditionals (“In the Pines,” “The Cuckoo,” “Blackest Crow”) and more contemporary fare, including the Mitchell-penned title track, Ola Belle Reed’s “My Epitaph,” one of the set’s prerelease singles, and Elvis Costello and T Bone Burnett’s “The Scarlet Tide” from the Cold Mountain film soundtrack. It’s not Mozart, Verdi, Handel or Strauss, in other words. But Fleming maintains that her interest in Americana music is not at all new. “I’ve always had eclectic tastes in music,” notes the vocalist, whose grandfather was a fiddler and drummer in rural Pennsylvania. “In junior high and high school and through college I played guitar and dulcimer. I did coffee houses. I was studying classical music but I was also singing with a jazz trio every Sunday night. Up where I went to school (SUNY-Potsdam) there was a band I saw every weekend, and we clogged; I didn’t know what clogging was, but it seemed like a natural response to that music. So I always loved it.” Fleming says that the soundtrack to the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? helped steer her back to the rootsy path. “It was T Bone Burnett’s work on that film that reminded me how much I loved that music,” she notes, which planted the seed for The Fiddle and the Drum . Fleming and Fleck even made a half-dozen demos back when they first started talking