Elizabeth LaPrelle single-handedly breathes life into century-old folk ballads

Most often, when singer Elizabeth LaPrelle walks on a stage, she does so completely alone. There’s no conductor to establish a tempo, no orchestra to offer the support of a few bars of introduction, not even any bandmembers with whom to make eye contact, their instruments at the ready, poised to provide instantaneous melodic context. No, it is just LaPrelle. She faces her audience, plants her feet and begins to sing.

At 19 years old, LaPrelle has chosen, as her mode of musical expression, to draw not from the tired clutch of top 40 pop songs embraced so feverishly by her peers, but from a repertoire of centuries-old Appalachian folk ballads. These traditional tunes are often sung a cappella or sans accompaniment and hold lyrics that writhe in the catacombs of love’s many frustrations: love unrequited, love gone astray, heartbroken lament and finally love’s most dramatic inducement, death.

“It’s kind of hard to explain what caught my ear from a very young age,” says LaPrelle in her soft Southern drawl, who recalls her parents playing Appalachian folk for her as a child. “I guess a lot of it is the stories and the emotions that come out in the songs. You know those sad, love songs—that sort of story really appealed to me.”

Derived from the music brought to North America by Irish, English and Scottish immigrants, and later heavily influenced by African American spirituals, these songs used to serve as musical heirlooms, passed down orally, from generation to generation via family and members of close-knit communities. But over time, this communication method has faded.

“There aren’t that many ballad singers left,” says LaPrelle. “And the ones that are left, they’re all pretty much getting up there. The singers that I’ve talked to are usually like, ‘Well, I can’t sing as good as I used to.’ And they talk about people who you could hear from ridge to ridge. They could really just blast it out.”

It is honoring the style in which she believes these senescent singers may have sung these ballads in all of their youthful vigor for which LaPrelle strives.

“Well, I’ve never set it up where I’ve put somebody on the other ridge to see if they could hear me,” she says smartly. But she does admit that she can “get to singing pretty loud” on her frequent walks through her family’s rural Virginian farmland when there’s nobody around. “If you’re in the right spot,” LaPrelle confides, “then an echo can come back.”

In performance, LaPrelle’s riveting voice pierces the still air, which in turn begins to hum, creating a starkness between sound and silence that effortlessly recruits the listener’s full attention.

“It’s a vocal style that a lot of the time involves a really forced nasal sound,” she reveals. “There’s a lot of ornamentation, trills and little yips, almost like little yodels, and some bending of notes and things like that.”

Enticed by LaPrelle’s wailful imploration, the lyrics assume prominence, often passionately relaying a story with which any listener in touch with their humanity can empathize.

“From what I’ve heard reading books and speaking to people, the point of ballad singing in the Appalachians was to get emotionally wrapped up in the story of the song, and to get swept away along with it and not hold anything back,” says LaPrelle. “I feel that it’s very expressive. It’s sort of forcing out emotions that usually people aren’t comfortable displaying in front of a big crowd.”

Her performance in Santa Cruz comes as part of the Crooked Road Tour, an ensemble tour group celebrating old-time, bluegrass and mountain gospel music that includes bluegrass banjo player Sammy Shelor, string band The White Top Mountain Band, Appalachian guitarist Wayne Henderson, neograss outfit No Speed Limit and banjo and fiddle virtuosos, Kirk Sutphin and Eddie Bond, respectively. For this, her first tour and also her first time visiting the West Coast, LaPrelle has been billed as the “keeper of ancient mountain ballads.”

“I certainly didn’t set out with the idea of ‘oh, here is a music that should be preserved,’ she says. “It was really that it caught my ear and it sort of arrested me. I think that’s why people listen to it or perform it at all is because it’s still so compelling after such a long time and so powerful that it’s been very, very resilient and it has survived.”

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