Day 2: Abigail Washburn plays as hot as Sichuan tofu

[Guest blogger August Brown has lived in China, but was not the subject of any naughty local folk songs.]

As jingoistic as country artists can seem sometimes (word, Darryl Worley), it's easy to forget that it's essentially acoustic folk music, which comes from a long line of music from other far-flung ethnicities. Abigail Washburn is out to right that wrong, trekking all the way to the Sichuan province of China and the feminist mythologies of Tori Amos to make a wholly unique folk music of her own.

The short version of Washburn's biography is that she plays hill-country music while writing and singing lyrics in, oh, fluent Mandarin Chinese. It's not as crazy as it sounds; Asian instruments like the pipa and koto are distant cousins of her preferred banjo, and the sing-songy phonetics of Mandarin are an unlikely but apt fit for the melodies and cadences of bluegrass.

With backing band the Sparrow Quartet (banjo god Bela Fleck was her sideman), Washburn stomped and skipped through firey Appalachian takes on the local songs of Sichuan. Her bilingualism's no gimmick; she nails the dips and peaks of pitch while leading her band in scorching variations on simple, repetitive traditional melodies.

But anyone who stops at the gosh-wow factor of a pretty white banjo player singing in Chinese misses the nuance of her English tunes. "Red & Blazing" and "Eve Stole The Apple" are slow-burning torch songs, steeped in subtle but powerful feminism that only deepens the folkloric and storytelling qualities of her songs. But she knows from bluesy 'sugar-in-my-bowl' double entendres as well; she ended one Chinese song about the pan-ethnic subject of baby-making by saying "That's some hot stuff from the Sichuan province there." Her album "Song of the Traveling Daughter" is just as hot, and you'd do well to search it out.