Even in late August, the oceanic hills of central Kentucky were a pulsing green that reminded me of Ireland. Likewise, the stacked stone walls that lined the roads. I was just a few miles from Lexington but the scene, with its woods and horse barns and miles of black fencing, felt out of time, romantic, Middle Earth-like. I was on this field trip because I’d fallen for the self-titled third album by a duo called The Local Honeys, and its sense of place was so strong I wanted to see that place. Musicians Linda Jean Stokley and Montana Hobbs extended a kind invitation to visit.
“My grandaddy and great uncle owned that orchard,” said Linda, gesturing to a set of low barns just uphill from where we were, which was standing outside the house where she grew up. “My Grandaddy gifted my mom four acres to put a house on and to have horses when she was real young. When he passed away, he had all daughters, and he split up the farm. My aunt Barbara’s on that side. Aunt Mary on that side. They’re twins.”
The multi-generational connection to this land shows up in the Local Honeys’ music, intertwined with an allegiance to the folk traditions of the region. In the album closing song “Throw Me In The Thicket (When I Die),” Stokley sings, “My daddy said he'd die up on his farm/For to tie him even closer/To the Lord's foreclosure,” making a beautiful half rhyme. Patriarchs and beloved equines pass on, leave legends, and return to the Earth in several songs, including the heart-piercing “Dead Horses.” That’s in truth the song that unlocked the album for me, involving me emotionally and empathically in an experience that I’ve never been close to.
“Their death is monumental,” said Linda in an exchange that didn’t make it into Episode 222 of The String. “Everything about their death is big. You can’t move a horse easily. To bury them is a big ordeal. You’ve got to have a neighbor who’s got something that can dig. Or you’ve got to send them on a dead wagon. That’s what a lot of people do around here. But we’ve always buried our horses. So, we lost Buckwheat at the beginning of 2020 and I lost Bear in May of 2021, right before we got in the studio and recorded that song.” The grief over those horses, conveyed with a novelist’s eye for detail, suffuses the track, whose music strides like a living, healthy animal even as its lonesome story unfolds.
The eponymous album, out in July from La Honda Records is the duo’s third release and their first to use drums and electric instruments. It’s also the first one where they wrote nearly all of the material, nine of the ten songs. On their debut Little Girls Actin’ Like Men (2017) and the all-sacred The Gospel in 2019, the artists kept the music acoustic with plenty of focus on Linda’s fiddle and Montana’s clawhammer banjo, mixing originals and traditional songs. On The Local Honeys, the fusion is more between the old-time and contemporary country rock. Its deft chemistry was assisted by their producer, friend and mentor Jesse Wells, the assistant director at the Kentucky Center for Traditional Music (KCTM) at Morehead State University, where Stokley and Hobbs first met and made music.
While they started as freshmen in the same year, Linda was first to discover the deep regional music archive at the KCTM and first to take the instrumental lessons the school’s music program offered. She even got a job at the center. “So I had a key to the archives,” she said. “And Montana would come over every night and sit with me, and we’d find old songs. That’s how we discovered our love for the home music of the bluegrass and Appalachian regions of our state.”
Hobbs says she took her first banjo lessons on something of a lark, unsure of what lay beyond. Though she had little background in music and none in singing, the faculty encouraged her enough that when she met Linda, they could dive into playing fiddle/banjo tunes together and then a bit later the challenging realm of harmony singing. It was an ideal environment to discover the music and its roots, Hobbs says. “All of the instructors there were great musicians. Most of them had been steeped in tradition. We didn't learn from sheet music. We didn't learn from a book. You know, we learned from recordings and somebody sitting down and showing it to us.”
That first meeting was around 2011, and by the time college was over, they were the Local Honeys, playing around the area. “A lot of different places,” said Montana. “Bars, clubs, barn parties, trail rides, benefits, country clubs, anywhere that would have us. We did a lot of restaurant gigs in the early days. (And) I should credit Willie’s Locally Known, where we first started gigging. It was a bar and a barbecue joint. They had live music all through the week which was awesome. We would drive from our college town in Morehead to Lexington to play for a burger basically. But they were very kind to us.”
Now the Local Honeys are part of the latest Kentucky country music renaissance, including Kelsey Waldon, Leah Blevins, Chris Stapleton, Angaleena Presley, S.G. Goodman and Tyler Childers, who directly inspired Stokley and Hobbs to commit to their art full time and tour. Unlike most of those others, however, they’ve chosen to stay near the heart of the music that inspires them. “I hope that resonates with people who choose to live here, because we live in places that are kind of forgotten about in a lot of ways,” Montana says. “Where I grew up, there weren't any good jobs, people had to travel up here, you know, almost two hours away to have a decent job. So it's a deliberate choice for us to live here. And that's, I think, what ultimately the songs are about, you know? That's what I take away from it.”
The Local Honeys are touring the eastern US with the Lost Dog Street Band. Find their dates here.
