ANAIS MITCHELL and JEFFERSON HAMER are each hugely respected artists in their own right, but together they create a chemistry that is lush and alluring and mysterious all at once.

Their recent collaboration, the critically acclaimed CHILD BALLADS, is a re-imagining of the song collection of Francis James Child, a 19th century Harvard professor who gathered traditional versions of folk ballads from across the British Isles.

Prior to their upcoming west coast appearances, Jefferson explained the story behind the project, and his artistic connection with Anais…

Why Child Ballads?  It’s not what people think…. Who was this guy?

When Anais and I started singing together we discovered we both loved a lot of old traditional music… found ourselves singing a lot of country songs and English folk music.  We both have copies of the Francis James Childs collection.  He was a Harvard professor who decided to collect his history of folk music from England and Scotland, and published several volumes of his work in the late 19^th century.  The music he researched and documented covered a lot of the traditional music in the last few centuries and even came over to America and continued to evolve.

We got really excited about working with the actual text.  We’re both writers and like to get our hands dirty with words as well as arranging music.  Our project was going through these different versions and putting together something we created, not just singing some derivative version from some field recordings.  …