The first instrument I likely ever heard played live, and I’m talking pre-memory and possibly even in utero, was the harp. Because my Mom played for decades, performing at events, weddings, churches, and sometimes with orchestras. I played a few duets with her as a tiny violinist. In our living room was a six-foot-tall Lyon & Healy concert grand with fancy engraving and gold leaf. (Mom and Dad still have it in their home today.) And I heard its piquant tones and glowing glissandos on almost a daily basis as she practiced for her next gig and for her own enjoyment.
While this set a really good example for me as a lifelong musician, I never fell for the harp as an instrument the way I did for the guitar, the double bass, or the vibraphone (which, to be clear, was not in our house). I found the sound pleasing and pretty enough but it didn’t grab me at the gut level. With time though, I heard harpists who engaged in heavier music than the dainty classical of my youth. Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane brought virtuosic harp to the jazz hothouse of the 60s and 70s. While Joanna Newsom brought the harp to the mainstream in a pop/folk context.
Which brings us to a couple of contemporary songwriters who found their muse in the harp as young people and who came up with personal ways to integrate their instrument into soundscapes that range from graceful folk music to psychedelic country rock. The recording that inspired this harpy episode was the energetic and shimmering Graceland Way, which arrived in the spring from Catskills-based artist Mikaela Davis. The harp stands out in the mix, mingling effectively with the guitars, and I was so taken that when Davis came through town in the summer, I got to spend 30 minutes with her at our WMOT studio and see her full band show at Skinny Dennis.
We had an excellent conversation as you’ll hear, but it wasn’t enough for a full episode of The String, so after some false starts, I landed where I should have started, with the intelligent and passionate folk artistry of Lizzie No. Lizzie, who uses they/them pronouns, writes and performs on both guitar and harp, but a fresh listen to their catalog led me to cuts where the harp had a foundational role in how the songs are set up and received. Since Lizzie has gone back to school for a master’s degree in music and communications, we connected by Zoom from their new home in Dublin, Ireland. Lizzie’s family has an Irish branch, and that’s part of why they wound up playing an Irish-style folk harp in concert.
Together, these conversations offer a joyful, inspiring perspective on an instrument that’s usually off in the back of a symphony or that’s plucked delicately for its heavenly qualities. Episode #376 presents harpists who groove, who surprise, and who rock out when the time is right.
Speaking of in utero, Mikaela Davis opens our conversation with a harp discovery story that’s too good to spoil, and I predict if you get through that charming tale that you’ll be hooked. She took the same path into songwriting and performing that so many guitar players do, but she loved that big concert-sized harp on her shoulder and between her arms so much that she leaned into it, just as it leans into her. (She does play keyboards on some of her songs.) A friend helped her film and release a few performances of cover songs (Elliott Smith, Sufjan Stevens), and from there, Instagram and YouTube exposure proved a catalyst for gigs and forward progress as an artist.
“I have a degree in (classical) harp performance, but when I was in school, I knew that that's not what I wanted to focus on because I had been writing songs as well,” Davis says. “I liked playing in a band. I loved making up my own songs and trying to figure out how to improvise, which is not really a classical thing. So that's been a journey for me too, figuring out how to improvise with no jazz training or any sort of training, other than just playing with my friends and learning like that. So it's been fun.”
The improv factor proved to be another hook for me into Davis’s music, because I discovered that for years now she’s been integrating into the jam band universe and getting writeups from Relix magazine, starting with a 2018 invitation to sit in with Bob Wier and his Wolf Bros. project at a Syracuse performance near where Mikaela lived. She then made a bond with the electronically-enhanced jam band Circles Around The Sun and its second lead guitarist (after founder Neal Casal passed away) John Shannon, whom she’s been dating and who co-wrote and co-produced Graceland Way with her. The Circles/Davis EP Sunrise from 2024 is a heady blend of the harp’s unique timbre with cinematic and grooving jams.
“I think people will look at me and see that I play the harp and think maybe it's just a gimmick or something before they hear it,” Davis says. “But no, it's just my instrument. That's all. It's my instrument, and I'm just fitting it into the band like anyone else. And I'm a songwriter, and I know how to play my instrument well and you'll see that if you come to the show.”
Lizzie No’s harp is smaller, a portable model inspired by the traditional Irish harp. It hangs on a strap so they can move on stage and sing standing up. It’s been part of Lizzie’s sound and image since their debut album Hard Won in 2017. You’ll hear the mesmerizing “Deep Well Song” in the middle of our conversation. Lizzie is a proudly political leftist folk singer from New York and New Jersey. Every release since, up to the 2024 studio album Halfsies and 2025’s live album Commie Country, has been well-received, adding to the artist’s stature. Lizzie has toured with Adia Victoria, River Shook and the Old 97s. They’ve collaborated with the Louisville Orchestra and been written up in Billboard and Rolling Stone. And they’re the co-host of the Basic Folk podcast, an affiliate of the Bluegrass Situation.
No got started on violin - “top down” Suzuki style studies - but they saw the harp in pop culture growing up and asked to give it a try. While Lizzie thrived on harp lessons, they started devouring folk influences, from Bob Dylan to the Indigo Girls.
“It took me a while to merge those two, and maybe I'm still merging it,” Lizzie says. “I spent a lot of hours sitting at the harp, you know, listening to songwriters and trying to pick out some chords on the harp to see, like, can I play along? And that's when I started writing my own songs. I mean, I'd always been coming up with melodies and little tunes, but once I was able to do it together with playing an instrument, that's when the light kind of turned on.”
When I ask about the ancient roots of the harp and its global reach, Lizzie says, “It creates a humility that I'm not going to be doing something necessarily new. Or I never feel the need to impress on the harp. I feel like the harp has its own song to sing. And you take the harp outside on a windy day, and you'll hear a tune that's more beautiful than anything you could have come up with just by it being in nature.”
