By John Tredrea, Staff Writer
The Little Brothers, a Hopewell Borough-based musical trio that specializes in early country blues, will play in a blues festival in Romania on Feb. 24.
”It’s the farthest we’ve ever gone to play music, that’s for sure, and we’re pretty excited about it,” said Frank Basile, who sings and plays guitar, banjo and mandola for The Little Brothers.
Mr. Basile and his wife Kim, who plays sings and plays fiddle, live in Hopewell Borough. Mike Hoffman, who plays mandolin, lives in Branchville. The band, which has been together six years, specializes in the kind of country blues popular in the Deep South in the 1930s.
Songs they do include “Sitting on Top of the World” and “Stop and Listen,” which were recorded by the Mississippi Sheiks in the early 1930s, and “Someday Baby Blues,” recorded by Sleepy John Estes during the same time frame.
”The music we play is a little on the rare side,” Mr. Basile said. “It’s fun to be able to spread it around.”
The Little Brothers will perform an 80-minute set in a 500-seat theatre in the Romanian city of Sighisoara. “It’s in Transylvania, right in the Carpathian Mountains,” Mr. Basile said. “It’s about an hour’s drive from the castle that was the last known residence of Vlad the Impaler. The character Dracula is based on him.”
”The people who run the festival contacted us through YouTube,” Ms. Basile said. “At first we thought it was a scam. But it’s the real thing. They usually have two American bands at their festival each year. The other one this year is Davina and The Vagabonds. They’re from Minneapolis. Typically they’ve had electric-style blues instead of acoustic like us. They asked us to do a workshop for them, which of course we’ll do, in addition to performing. And we’ll get to jam with other musicians, that’ll be good, too.
”We’re leaving on the 21st. We’ll be gone about a week. It’s cool that they asked us because the music we play is pretty old. Not a lot of people listen to that sort of stuff. They seem to like it as soon as they hear it, though. We love it and try to play it with a certain seriousness and detail,” Ms. Basile added.
The Little Brothers have a CD out, “Walked All The Way Home,” available through Amazon and iTunes, as will be a forthcoming CD, “Mama’s Angel Child.”
The band’s website is www.donegone.net.
The Little Brothers play regularly in clubs in Brooklyn and Philadelphia.
