The master American songwriter and recording artist Robbie Fulks has been called “underrated” so many times and in so many ways that the sentiment might as well attach itself formally, legally, to his name at this point—an honorific, an obligatory Homeric epithet. Like the Right Honourable Gavyn Farr or swift-footed Achilles, I give you “the criminally-underappreciated Robbie Fulks,” who will be performing at Colony in Woodstock—a room you or I might play—on Saturday, March 8.
Let’s be clear. Robbie Fulks has enjoyed a wonderful career, a brilliant career of more than 30 years and 17 records now, most recently 2023’s deep and delightful Bluegrass Vacation in which Fulks sets a mostly traditional set of original songs amidst the filigree and intricate counterpoint of an A-plus-list cast of players including the likes of Bluegrass polymath Stuart Duncan, New Grass Revival mandolinist Sam Bush, and Punch Brothers guitarist Chris Eldridge.
Our underrated man has been on a major (Geffen) for a serious bid at roots-bard stardom, and he’s been a foundational artist on a truly important indie (the alt-roots trendsetter Bloodshot Records). He’s widely covered and often recruited as a kind of modern-day house writer when you know you need the good stuff. His admirers include nearly everyone who has ever tried to write a decent song and who has heard at least one of his.
Raised in various small towns in Pennsylvania and the South and born to a family populated exclusively by pickers and grinners, Fulks’ roots creds and backstory are in order. The surprising part of his resume has more to do with his hipster, alt-world bona-fides, particularly his enduring professional relationship with the underground King of Contentious Abrasion, the late producer Steve Albini, who recorded Fulks’ earliest DIY efforts and who saw his career through to what may or may not turn out to be its commercial/critical peak: a scintillating pair of live-in-studio folk records from the last decade, 2013’s Gone Away Backward, and 2016’s Grammy-nominated Upland Stories.
Yes, he may be the criminally-underappreciated Robbie Fulks, but it is hard to think of another contemporary roots artist who enjoys such elite status among both the hipster cognoscenti (especially those in Fulks’ adoptive hometown of Chicago on America’s center coast) and among the old guard of Americana, bluegrass, and country music, its connoisseurs and its top players, Nashville and elsewhere, who line up and take a number to play with him.
So, whence the underrated? Why the nearly universal critical opinion that there is nothing wrong at all with Robbie Fulks but something terribly, irremediably wrong with a culture that does not reward him with mansions?
Maybe it has something to do with the peculiar self-quarantining properties of virtuosity. Is it possible to be too good? For players—instrumentalists—the dynamic at work here is pretty clear. Virtuoso players typically begin as prodigies and savants. They are thus used to being the center of attention or nothing at all: freak shows. The grounds for their acclaim is the ability to play things others can’t. Passion and intelligence too, sure, but mostly degree of difficulty. Virtuosi thus often find themselves precluded from authentic musical values, extravagantly able to execute but stunted or disadvantaged in the give-and-take conversation among players, which is where, most of us would agree, the real magic happens.
And when you, my reader, finally decide that it is time to lay down those original songs of yours, and to do it right this time no matter the cost, are you going to bring in a virtuoso? Wind him up and set him a-shreddin’ in the middle of your heart song? Of course not. But you will foolishly raid your IRA to hire some really good, interactive, service-oriented players who will elevate your tunes with the common values of taste, tone, and—where appropriate, when requested—imagination and fire.
So you can be too good for your own good. But what would that even mean for a songwriter? Robbie Fulks is not showy. He is not cleverer-than-thou in the way that maybe Elvis Costello or They Might Be Giants could be (wrongly) accused of. But songs can indeed be called virtuosic, perhaps prohibitively so. They are often meaningful to an alarming extent. The ripeness, the bio-availability of meaning in virtually every line of a Fulks song runs afoul of contemporary standards, where a high percentage of platitudinous fiber is part of what makes a good radio song go down so easy and is considered good craft. A Robbie Fulks song gets right after its emotional core with such verbal, imagistic, and musical resources as you may never have encountered before. He almost makes you ask, “is this even allowed?”
Further, he is a truly daring songwriter. Anybody can dare to be transgressive, dare to be offensive. But it takes guts of steel to dare to be sentimental, to dare to be gooey. Consider Bluegrass Vacation’s heart-rending “Momma’s Eyes,” a song that chases the experience of losing a parent to dementia with a directness that can only be called cut-throat in its unprotected, unironic emotionality. If it weren’t so well wrought, you’d have to call it overwrought. Even better, consider the song “Needed” from Upland Stories in which Fulks goes all-in on the least hip song style imaginable: the earnest, secular homily addressed to a child. You cringe at first, but then he wins. Your heart would need to be the hardest hipster anthracite to be unmoved by either of those tunes.
Roots songwriting, particularly country songwriting, can sometimes seem to be about the juggling of old tropes, cliches, and totemic props (such as whisky and trucks and fiddles) in standard song forms until somehow, miraculously, they delight and surprise anew. And in this gamey, referential aspect of classic songcraft, Fulks is, again, alarmingly adept.
A typical Fulks record deals about 50% in standard roots song forms and topics executed to a Mensa level of theme and word-play. It’s in the other half that things get slippery. Bluegrass Vacation, as the title would imply, deals primarily in the old forms and the old ways of sawing and picking. Sitting there at track four however, is one of Fulks’ signature genre-busting anomalies. Directly confessional in tone, artsy and “boutique” in form and harmony, “Angels Carry Me,” is about exactly the same thing as at least half the songs on the record—parents, generations, traditions, and passings—but seems a world apart from the traditional verities of “Molly and the Old Man” or “Longhair Bluegrass.”
He’s always done that, though: breaking out, temporarily, from the inherited personae of roots music to inhabit a modern self in a candid, self-reflective mode. And it isn’t always flattering. Consider, for example, the barely sympathetic modern rake and serial user who sings one of his very best songs, the closing track on Upland Stories, “Fare Thee Well, Carolina Girls.” Robbie Fulks dares even to be ugly and unredeemed, and dares you to care.
Because of the permanence of the recording age, where numb indifference, not availability, is the chief obstacle to success, there is still an outside chance that this cat might someday take his seat at the table with Woody, Hank, Sr., Zimmerman, Gershwin, Porter, et. al., where many of us think he belongs. Go see for yourself. He is a performer as legendary for his stories as for his blazing flatpicking and his insanely deep repertoire of great songs. Perhaps, together, we can make a world where Robbie Fulks is underrated no more.
Robbie Fulks performs at Colony, 22 Rock City Road in Woodstock, on Saturday, March 8 with special guest Max Wareham. For tickets and additional information, visit colonywoodstock.com.
Join the family! 
