The Brooklyn Rail

“We’re here from Brooklyn, New York,” Nora Brown said softly to a sold-out audience while tuning a banjo, her voice trailing off into plucking strings and bending notes. In San Francisco, Brown is joined on stage by two banjos, a guitar, a borrowed Irish bouzouki, and the genial fiddle player Stephanie Coleman. The first lilting tune begins, and Brown’s voice soon steadies itself against Coleman’s dancing fiddle, quivering then lengthening all in one breath. Brown’s banjo picking is bold and precise, yet the collective notes are liminal: the song a redolent musing. Her narrow fingers narrate the margins of a misty picture, beckoning onlookers to close their eyes and see the mountains where old-time music first echoed.

“I wouldn’t describe myself as a traditional musician,” Brown said in November, before her set at the Brooklyn Folk Festival. Leaning against the stone wall of St. Ann’s Church, Brown pulled her sweater over her chin to hide a yawn—she had driven from New Haven, where she attends Yale, earlier that morning. Seated by the sidewalk, Brown pardoned the incongruous urban setting for music that has long been traced to Southern Appalachia and other pockets of rural America. “I didn’t engage in [traditional] music in the way that it implies,” she said. “This wasn’t something passed down to me based on the place that I lived.” Instead, Brown is tinkering with the frayed ends of the New York folk revival, the obsolescence of regional specification in a digital age, and riding on what she calls “another type of tradition”: an approach to old time and folk music that leads with observation and modesty, but soon surges with temper and individuality. At twenty-one, she’s recorded five albums, appeared twice on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert Series, and received praise from legends like Robert Plant. A “wunderkind” in the eyes of The New Yorker, Brown is giving old-time music a portal to the present.

Born in Crown Heights, Brown’s first tunes sputtered out on a ukulele under the instruction of the late music teacher and old-time and folk music historian Shlomo Pestcoe. Although her father is from Tennessee, Brown said that her family lineage in the South was external to her discovery of old-time music. “I was sort of indoctrinated accidentally by this random guy, not really knowing that he was interested in traditional music,” she laughed. “So I ended up getting introduced to the music by chance.”

According to Brown, Pestcoe was an obsessive scholar of folk and old-time music and a persistent defender of quantity. “We learned so many songs, and he had this insanely cluttered space where there were instruments everywhere. There were records and CDs stacked up against the walls,” she said. “You couldn’t really walk in without turning sideways.” The joys of accumulating experience and knowledge—along with their material souvenirs—were prolific in Pestcoe’s lessons. Perfection seemed to be the one thing he had no room for.

Brown’s earliest performances were recitals with Pestcoe’s other students, held at the Jalopy Theater and Music School in Red Hook. Wedged in a corner carved by the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel, Jalopy is the cracker-barrel home of the New York City folk scene. The theater is tucked behind a cabernet-colored curtain and lined with wooden pews, except for when it doubles as a recording room for artists signed with Jalopy’s record label. Next door, Eli Smith, the director of Jalopy Records and founder of the Brooklyn Folk Festival, has an office up a creaking staircase—even the floor makes music. Smith met Brown when she was nine. “She just loved old time music, and banjo music, which is very rare for a kid,” he said.

After several performances at Jalopy, Brown’s father took her down to West Virginia to play at the Appalachian String Band Festival, nicknamed “Clifftop” after the unincorporated community which hosts the annual five-day spree of strings. When she played a song by banjo master Lee Sexton, an emcee recognized the tune and urged her to visit the Kentucky-born legend. Her father drove her right to his front door. “It was all incredibly formative and contextual for me,” Brown said of the time she spent with Sexton, and other elders she met in Eastern Kentucky. “Nora was probably the last generation to get to do that,” Smith said. “The last of the real old timers from a previous era are dying.”

Brown signed to Jalopy Records in 2019, and recorded her first album, Cinnamon Tree, with another elder—and one of folk’s matriarchs—Alice Gerrard, when she was just thirteen. Two years later, Brown spun Sidetrack My Engine out of her canonical repertoire, including “The Very Day I’m Gone,” originally scratched onto paper by masterful Appalachian old-time musician Addie Graham. “I think a lot of the records I’ve made have been attuned to documentation,” Brown said of her earlier vinyls. Barely a teenager, her artistry was contained to what she knew. “I didn’t have really developed ideas about what I wanted to see in music. I just did it, and I liked how it felt.” Her third release, Long Time Gone, was recorded in the capacious St. Ann’s Church, also home to her first solo performance.

All of Brown’s recorded music is borrowed from far-away origins. This is not uncommon for traditional old-time and folk musicians. “We tend to call something a folk song when everybody forgot who wrote it,” Smith explained. “It’s all about depicting things through your own eyes. In art, you draw from life or you draw from a photo, and that’s the same for me. I’m drawing,” Brown said of interpreting bygone melodies on her banjo. “I feel like I’m rendering.”

Brown’s most recent depictions can be found on the EP, Lady of the Lake, released in summer of 2023 as a collaboration with fiddler Coleman. After playing on several of Brown’s earlier records, Coleman noted that this time around the record’s inception was more curatorial, and cradled with intention. “Nora is really growing into her own as a musician,” Coleman said. They recorded the album in producer Peter Siegel’s two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, putting pillows on the ground to muffle any good-natured stomping. Unlike the quiet country of Appalachia, they had downstairs New York City neighbors to contend with.

Coleman and Brown met during a jam at Sunny’s Bar, a century-old tavern central to Red Hook’s community. “Nora was in the middle of the circle singing a song and playing banjo,” Coleman remembered with a grin. “I was like, wait, what’s going on here? I was really surprised to hear a kid singing old Kentucky songs in this way that really resonated with me.” Coleman is a seasoned participant in the folk and old-time music scene in New York and Chicago, where she studied and lived previously. She’s played with the all-woman string band Uncle Earl, and shared the stage with numerous acclaimed musicians, but “with Nora, I feel like our friendship is so deep, and the musical connection is right there with it. I think it’s probably the most connected I’ve felt to another musician,” Coleman said.

Back on stage in San Francisco, the friendship between Coleman and Brown is palpable yet unchained: it’s as if the audience isn’t watching and waiting. In the lulls of their set, thin swirls of conversation reach the microphone as they tune, but when they start playing the dialogue really begins. Ditties frolic between the two instruments, like sisters holding hands as they run through a field of tall grass. Coleman’s fiddle skips ahead, leading the melody, while Brown’s banjo gallops around a deeper tone. Their music is empathetic to time, moving backwards into story while inducting listeners into an atmosphere growing from their mythical strings. They play Albert Frank Beddoe’s “Copper Kettle,” a timeless folk song, and San Francisco falls away to reveal a rocky skyline, the stage becomes a front porch.

When or whether Brown will record another album is unknown, but in between college semesters she has a few gigs set up. She has already played six shows in 2026, and will travel to Ireland and the United Kingdom with Coleman for twelve shows in May. At school, she interacts with different—though still very old—kinds of music; she is the director of a Slavic choir where she teaches unaccompanied folk songs from Eastern Europe to an assembly that sings in a three or four part harmony. In New York, she also cross-pollinates with other traditional music communities. She recently picked up the Irish bouzouki from a friend of Coleman’s who is in the Irish folk scene, learning it fast enough to bring the instrument west with her on tour.

Onstage, the ethos of folk and old-time music prevail over showmanship. Few words are spoken, and when she plays, her eyes close and her head bows. The only words consistently said, not sung, are of gratitude, which roll off the stage and out to all the spokes of the venue: the staff, the crew in the sound booth, and the listeners. The age of old-time music imbues Brown with an assured disposition, a warm maturity. She and her banjo have a certain wisdom, and a timeless message of remembering ones’ roots in practice. “It’s a long history,” said Smith, of Jalopy Records, “Nora’s a link in the chain.”