Sisterhood of the slide: Larkin Poe
By: Mark Mcdermott
Tags: Blues, Larkin Poe, Music, Women, Rock

Larkin Poe play BeachLife September 10. Photo courtesy Red Light Management

Usually great ideas are those that seem inevitable but only in retrospect. Like electricity and running water, say, which humans went a long time without, even though the forces necessary to produce both were here all along.

The sisters Lovell, Rebecca and Megan, feel this way about the sound of a lap steel slide guitar. It’s been with us for a century but is only rarely used in popular music. The sisters find it a bit strange that not everyone is playing slide.

“Amen,” says Megan. “I don’t know why lap steel isn’t a more commonly played instrument because it is so versatile. It can do the screaming rock n’ roll stuff, it can do the bluesy stripped-back porch pickin’. You can really do bluegrass if you want. I am just so blown away by the instrument.”

Rebecca abandoned her banjo- and mandolin-playing ways to plug in a Jazz Master electric guitar to better accompany her sister´s slide and Larkin Poe was born.

“Slide guitar is such an iconic thing,” Rebecca says. “So much of what we do as Larkin Poe has really been in response to the fact that Megan is such a fantastic slide player. That slide has led us into expressing a lot of Southern roots rock.”

Larkin Poe has deep Southern roots, almost gothically so. The sisters are descendants of Edgar Allan Poe and their band is named after their great, great, great grandfather, Larkin Poe, a Civil War wagon driver.

“We grew up hearing about him and visiting the Chickamauga battlefield,” Megan says. “We would see the Poe family cabin…and it was just really cool to see the Larkin Poe name. We always loved his name and loved that he was the cousin of Edgar Allen.”

The band grew out of an earlier sisters’ act, the Lovell Sisters, a bluegrass ensemble that also featured their sister Jessica and in the mid-aughts rose to some acclaim, playing the Grand Ole Opry and Bonnaroo. When Jessica left to start a family, Rebecca and Megan reformed electrically as Larkin Poe. By 2014, the band’s blazing sound — beautiful harmonies, big guitars, and starkly original songs that fused blues, rock, and bluegrass in an utterly new and soaring way — took England’s famed Glastonbury Festival by storm. That same year they were tapped to play on legendary producer T-Bone Burnett’s The New Basement Tapes alongside Mumford and Sons, My Morning Jacket, Dawes, and Elvis Costello. They would later tour as Costello’s backing band, but all the while they built upon their very own sound, and eventually started their own record label, Twicky Woo Records.

Over the last few years, they have emerged as a force to be reckoned with, a music industry unto themselves — both 2018’s Venom & Faith and 2020’s Self Made Man debuted at #1 on the Billboard Blues charts, and the latter was nominated for a Grammy. American Songwriter reviewed the title track with a description which also aptly describes Larkin Poe: “..the swaggering ‘She’s A Self Made Man,’ a sky-thumper about women taking and making their own luck, future, fun and fortune. Unrepentant, it balances furnace-blast intensity with a certain ‘don’t give a f***’ attitude that transcends gender and returns a hard slamming kind of rock to the blues roots that spawned it.”

In other words, the Lovell sisters are not notable because they are women who play loud guitars extremely well. They are notable because they kick ass, gender be damned. It’s not lost on them, however, that plenty of female guitarists have helped shape American music but were rarely recognized as such.

“We have had great musicians in the rock and blues world from the very beginning through to those carrying the torch, like Bonnie Raitt, Joan Jett, and Susan Tedeschi, female players who have not been placed at the forefront and haven’t been equally represented,” Megan says. “And I think the fact that people are finally catching on, having a little bit of resistance to the fact that there aren’t women represented as much — it feels dangerous in a really great way. And we feel really, really pleased to be a drop in the ocean wave that is women as we come crashing down on the blues and rock.”

Larkin Poe play BeachLife Festival September 10.