ALBUM REVIEW: Pony Bradshaw Caps Character-Driven Trilogy With ‘Thus Spoke the Fool’

Pony Bradshaw does more than share stories with his music. Rather, he embodies an entire cosmology of figures from his adopted home of North Georgia. Bradshaw’s latest album, Thus Spoke the Fool, concludes the trilogy he embarked upon with Calico Jim (2021) and North Georgia Rounder (2023).

As he explained to No Depression last year, Bradshaw is taken by the layers of history the region contains, like sediment along the Hiwassee and Coosa rivers. While Bradshaw has populated his album with characters like Calico Jim, Holler Rose, and Ginseng Daddy, there is no fiction in his study of the ways indigenous, Black, and white people have been slammed together and victimized by the ravages of colonization, capitalism, bigotry, and war — all against a backdrop of unparalleled beauty.

Pony Bradshaw (photo by Carley DuMenil)

Bradshaw foregrounds these themes on Thus Spoke the Fool’s majestic “In the Cinnamon Glow,” a capstone to an album that introduces us to a series of characters who do their best to get by, mired in the eddies of historical and environmental currents. “Cinnamon” invokes geology, history, and the peculiar cosmology of the self to ask us how any of us get to where we’ve gotten, the accidents of fate and psychology that lead to our own destruction.

Before we get there, though, Bradshaw introduces us to the charming ne’er-do-well Ginseng Daddy, kin of Calico Jim, who cheerfully absolves himself of a moral code by noting in the song named for him that his family “ain’t all bad, they ain’t all good / Some you can’t comprehend.” While Daddy can’t stand the squalor of factory towns, the narrator of “¡Viva Appalachia!” revels in the party. These extremes are tempered by “The Long Man,” who delights in remote mountain towns, and the American Legion bartender of “By Jeremiah’s Vision,” who is as much a part of the landscape as the Blue Ridge Mountains, whether she likes it or not.

While these songs hint at autobiography, Bradshaw uses these characters more to illustrate the complexities of a part of the world he has come to call his. The music here swirls around Bradshaw’s declamation, making him sound something like a fire-and-brimstone priest himself. That’s likely because Thus Spoke the Fool was recorded in an old church just outside of Athens, Georgia, with Bradshaw and his crackshot band invoking the spirits of yore, just as the lyrics do. There is something ghostly about the way Rachel Baiman’s fiddle spirals around Bradshaw’s voice as it soars higher and louder, filled with a conviction that couldn’t possibly come from a single person. Instead, Bradshaw and his companions do what great artists do: uplift those who came before them and those who will be.

Pony Bradshaw’s Thus Spoke the Fool is out Aug. 16 on Soundly Music.