THE BAND
Elara Vance
Elara Vance | Lead Vocals, Fiddle
Elara Vance grew up in Harlan County, Kentucky, in a musical family: her grandfather Dillard Combs had worked the mines for thirty years and come out of them with his lungs compromised and his fiddle intact. He played in the Round Peak style — rhythmic, driving, the kind of bowing that sounds like the earth deciding to dance — and he started Elara on the instrument at four years old with one instruction: never mistake speed for sense. She hasn’t forgotten it. Neither has anyone who has heard her play.
Dillard’s repertoire was vast and largely unrecorded: dance tunes, modal ballads, fragments of songs learned from men now a century dead. He himself died when Elara was nineteen. She kept his fiddle. She still plays it. She calls it the old man, which tells you most of what you need to know about her relationship to the tradition she carries.
She studied folklore at Appalachian State University in Boone, where she also discovered that her half-sister Selah — already deep in archival work at Belk Library — was someone she genuinely liked, the age difference notwithstanding. The two of them in the same room with instruments and a shared vocabulary of old songs became the origin story of Kat’s Sundog, though neither of them knew it yet.
Elara is the band’s primary songwriter and its front person. She has the performer’s gift of making each person in a crowd feel briefly, specifically addressed. Her soprano carries sweetness and melancholy in the same breath, and she does not embellish unnecessarily. Dillard’s lesson took root in her voice as much as her bow arm.
Listen: “Keepin’ It Simple”
Her fiddle style by now is genuinely synthetic: the rhythmic pulse of old-time, the harmonic sophistication of bluegrass, and something underneath both that belongs to Harlan County and to the old man’s memory. She’s been compared to Gillian Welch and early Iris DeMent, which she accepts as compliments while quietly bristling at the implication that women who sing old-time are all doing the same thing.
Her chestnut braid, worn loose over one shoulder, has become recognizable enough on the festival circuit that younger girls sometimes show up at gigs wearing their hair the same way — something Elara finds touching and a little alarming.
Rito Seco Records 