"Our favorite music is from the time when old-time music was becoming bluegrass." Jody Stecher included that remark in the liner notes for A Song That Will Linger, the couple's 1989 Rounder debut alongside duet partner and wife Kate Brislin. He could scarcely have foreseen that the following ten years would bring four additional albums positioning the pair as the foremost interpreters of old-time country duets, yet that outcome materialized. Stecher and Brislin would almost certainly reject such a designation, instead directing attention toward associates including Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard or Kay Justice and Ginny Hawker. Throughout the '90s the duo nevertheless conveyed the elegance and directness of classic rural American song to broader folk audiences and venues than most contemporaries managed. Listeners often assumed the pair had surfaced abruptly, yet each had already participated in folk circles for years before they first encountered one another in the mid-'70s.
Stecher, a Brooklyn native born in the '40s and raised in the '50s, embodied the archetype of the devoted music collector. After receiving his initial guitar at age eleven and a banjo the following year upon encountering Dock Boggs on disc, he joined the New York Ramblers bluegrass ensemble in 1963 while still a teenager, alongside Winnie Winston and David Grisman. His explorations soon expanded into blues, Irish and Bahamian traditions, and an enduring engagement with Indian sitar repertoire under Krishna Bhatt. Numerous solo and collaborative recordings appeared during this period. In 1974 he performed with the Seattle-area group Houseboat Music and contributed to the Folklife programming at the World's Fair in Tacoma. California-born Kate Brislin also worked at the fair and already knew Stecher's recent solo collection of old-time material. An impromptu session of songs away from the stage that evening revealed an immediate rapport, initiating a musical partnership and personal bond that would culminate in marriage after an extended interval. As Stecher later observed, "We circled each other for years."
He maintained an active solo touring schedule and performed with Bhatt as well as fiddler Hank Bradley. Brislin became a member of the Any Old Time String Band before later joining the Blue Flame String Band. Stecher invited her to contribute vocals to his subsequent two albums, which also featured Peter Rowan, Mary Black, Jerry Garcia, and the Watersons. By 1985 the pair had begun concentrating on classic old-time duets such as the Carter Family's "Lover's Return" and Stephen Foster's "Hard Times." Over the course of their Rounder discography they additionally interpreted later compositions, among them Jean Ritchie's "Blue Diamond Mine" and the Iris DeMent title song "Our Town" from their third release on the label. On guitar, banjo, or mandolin both musicians favored measured timing and tonal clarity rather than velocity, ensuring instrumental parts supported rather than eclipsed the songs' inherent delicacy. Their vocal approach achieved the same equilibrium: Brislin's clear, unadorned timbre complemented the wistful intensity of Stecher's delivery. The southern mountain repertoire has often been likened to soul music in its emotional depth, and few recordings illustrate that parallel more convincingly than the work of Jody Stecher and Kate Brislin.
