Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? Join the mailing list and receive more conversations like this in your inbox.
Tyson Davis and Braden Rollins are two members of Blackwater Railroad, a band out of Seward Alaska, whose goal is not only to create music but to bring people together. Davis is the front man and Rollins plays saxophone, adding some funk to the otherwise bluegrass/country sounding band. I got the opportunity to see Blackwater Railroad live when they came to the Dolores Bike Hostel, a small venue in my county. It was every bit the rollicking good time that they had promised – the two brought a light drizzle from Alaska to my dry Colorado town and we danced until late into the night.
We also invited them to be featured artists on Yonder Radio, our radio show that features a new musician every week. Enjoy this edited version of their interview with Yonder Radio host, Jared Ewy. You can hear more from Blackwater Railroad and listen to some of their music on the most recent episode of Yonder Radio.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Daily Yonder: Do Alaska kids have a reputation? Are you a little weird? Do you feel like you’re different from the rest of the contiguous, or am I just pigeonholing you unnecessarily?
Tyson Davis: Well, I grew up in North Carolina and I moved here in 2007, as a barely turned 21 year old kid, and got a job as a dishwasher at a wilderness lodge, and started to kind of just figure out life once I realized I wanted to do it here. And Braden grew up half in Alaska, half in California. He could speak a little bit about the Alaska kid syndrome.
Braden Rollins: No, you’re kind of on the money. I think Alaska in general is like a very different place. Anyone who has spent a lot of time here knows that this isn’t like the lower 48. You know, we feel a kinship with Hawaii in that way. In that you go and the people are definitely different here.
DY: And I love what you’re doing up there because it’s a real DIY situation in Seward, and you’re building community through that. So before we get into the music, I just got to know what a Hatcher Romp is like.
TD: Alaska doesn’t have a lot of infrastructure for really anything. So if you want something, you kind of have to make it happen yourself or with the help of your community. But if you have a DIY spirit about you, you can make a lot happen. That’s something that resonated with me coming from North Carolina. I grew up on a dairy farm. I’ve always been entrepreneurial in my spirit and in my family history. So I came here and I like that I can work with all of this, and so in the act of doing this band and realizing that there’s not a lot of opportunities to be had for artists to showcase what they have, we realized that we could start these sort of DIY festivals. And the idea of the Romp came to be started with Hatcher Romp [Editor’s Note: Hatcher Romp is a music festival at Hatcher Pass in Alaska]. Now we have two other festivals that we put on around the state as well, but we try to rally around the romp.
DY: It looks like the romp is worth rallying around, even if you’ve got some big round trip airfare. I mean, this is a big event.
TD: Yeah, we try to keep it affordable once you get here, and we try to give you resources on where to stay and where to visit. There’s so much. I mean, [Alaska] is a wonderland, and it’s so vast. You could spend the rest of your life here just hiking and not see it all, you know. It’s a really vibrant, creative scene here right now. The music scene is probably the best it’s ever been in Alaska’s history. So it just seemed like the time to try to rally more opportunities for artists to do their thing.
DY: Why is the Alaska music scene so vibrant right now? Do you have any ideas?
TD: It gives you time and space to, as Braden says, tinker. You have the time, and like it’s just like a perfect incubator for whatever project you’re working on, and you’re usually in a community where, well, it’s underserved and [there’s] not a lot to do. So if you can come up with something that you can come out to the community and people value, then they’re going to want to see that you’re supported in your endeavor. And that’s statewide up here. It seems like each one of these communities rallies around their artisans. Whether you’re making chainsaw art or you’re making songs or you’re making indigenous art or you know whatever it is, there’s people in their homes all winter long working on something. They’re not just sitting looking at their phones.
DY: Well, people are excited to see you. I watched some of your Salmon Fest gig, and Braden, you were going full Clarence Clemens on that Bruce Springsteen song. You were bringing it, and the crowd loved it.
BR: Yeah, we’re a high energy, good vibes band. You know, like you get engaged with the crowd. When you meet Alaskan crowds too, it makes a lot of sense, because boy, are they down for whatever it is you want to do. They’re quite fun. When we played at Denali [National Park], it seems remote and like there’s not a lot going on, but there’s like 6,000 college kids working there in the park for the whole summer. They’re dying for stuff to do. So bands like us are working the [Denali] highway all summer long and entertaining these kids. And what works out well for us is that all these kids go back to wherever they’re going to college, and that’s why we’re going to Colorado because we’ve been doing this for over 10 years, and we built quite a following in the Mountain West and Pacific Northwest, Hawaii, Western Canada, and Alaska. Made a DIY sort of following.
An energetic crowd danced late into the night at Blackwater Railroad’s set at the Dolores Bike Hostel in Dolores, Colorado. (Photo by Ilana Newman)
DY: I see you guys throwing a party and it’s just going off. The music is incredible; it’s upbeat. But then I see a lot of these videos where you’re pretty pensive and you’re standing in the mountains in the snow and you’re telling an incredible story. What do people get when they go to a Blackwater Railroad show?
TD: We try to hit on the entire wheel of emotion. I know when I’m writing, I have to work my way out of “sad-bastard country,” and then try to be happy. That’s just kind of my nature. But through the act of being in Blackwater and seeing how music can move people. We really do try to craft these like, three-hour experiences where we’ll take a break in the middle, but it’s three hours where you’re on a roller coaster. Sometimes I’m crying on stage. Sometimes it pares it down to just a guitar and a story. But then there’s just times where it’s just absolute jubilation. Braden can speak to it too. He’s quite the songwriter as well, and tells a lot of his story through the process of it.
BR: Yeah, I think like what we hope is that when people show up for shows now, it kind of feels like we’re we’re offering something that is harder to find year after year, where like you come together with your friends and you feel things and you dance and you have joy and you smile with people you never met, and it that I think is like our service really is just to bring people together and and and try to give them an experience of community. Real life is better in real life, as we say.
DY: Well, Tyson, I feel like an uncle who’s known you for a good portion of your life because I’m watching videos of you 12 years ago. You look like you walked off the set of ‘Leave It to Beaver’ with a banjo, and now you’re a little different. You’re a little more rock’n’roll. Like you’ve seen some things. With a different iteration of Blackwater Railroad, are you able to play some of the older stuff?
TD: Yeah, I and I’ve done a lot of thought about the process because of me leaving North Carolina and leaving my family’s heritage – we’ve been farming the same land in North Carolina since the early 1700s. I got brothers and cousins that are loving that life. I just didn’t, so I wanted to take off. But with that came a lot of guilt, and you know, and a lot of weight came with that decision, and being 5,000 miles away from your family, and for now 20 years almost. Before I left North Carolina, this is why I had long hair, and you know, I didn’t want to play bluegrass music. I wanted to be in The Who. I wanted to rock, right? And it was actually the Avett brothers who I knew before I came up here who made me realize that folk music could rock. It could have angst. It could have young people’s feelings in traditional music. So that helped me to bridge that gap. And then through the process of Blackwater – there’s been 30 members of Blackwater since the beginning, I’m the only OG left. Braden has been with me quite a while, but it’s changed, and that’s made it very exciting and very Alaskan to be able to work with what we have and adapt. That’s very Alaskan. And I’ve been known as an individual long enough here in the state that people know who I am, no matter how I’m dressed. You know, they know what I’m going to sound like when I step to the microphone. They know it’s going to be Southern. No matter what I look like, it comes out like that.
DY: You’re the guy walking down the highway with a stringed instrument. You know, they’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s Tyson. He’s going to the next gig.” Caravan is your new album, and I feel and hear some departure there. Also, an arrival. There’s a lot of railroad metaphors we could use here for these tracks. I think a lot of it is due to Braden because he’s added that sax sound. What would you say about Caravan?
TD: Yeah, it is. It’s kind of us dipping our toe into a new world with Braden, because after Covid, our fiddle player that we had left the band. We were kind of reeling, like, what are we going to build the sound around? Because so much of what we do is these improvised sort of solo jams that’ll go, and then we’ll come back to a song. And then Braden came into town, and we realized that he could do the fiddle licks on the saxophone. He could give that spirited sort of performance that we need, and then we were. But we realized that we needed to add drums. So that was the biggest addition, even more so than the saxophone being a string band and having drums. It just changed the dynamics so much, for the better now, I think. But it was an adjustment for us and the crowd.
BR: Yeah, if you listen to A Lovely Place to Die, which is the first album that I’m on, that’s kind of right after I joined the band, trying to figure out what the new sound is, and I think Caravan is a much more truthful depiction of how we sound now. Some of the songs were written months before the album was released, and some of them were written when Tyson was like 18, so it’s a huge range of stuff that we just really wanted to do that never worked until we had drums. We wrote for this version of the band.
DY: And here’s my last question: What is a fjord like? Do you enjoy the fjords? I’ve never seen a fjord, but you’re among the fjords [in Seward].
BR: Dude. Everyone in the world, I think, should ride a boat in these fjords at one point in their life. They are incredible. We’re in this beautiful nest in Seward, but it’s all glacially carved. There’s a reason that we live in Seward at the end of the road, which no one who has any sense in music would ever recommend for us to live here. It makes everything harder, but it’s a rare place. As much as all of us have traveled, there are not very many places more beautiful than this. And like the amount of wildlife and how much this place calls to people, a lot of people come up for a month and never leave, and just figure out how to make it work. Fjords are cool, man. They’re rad, and Norway has them too. But there’s way less people here, which is nice.
You can find Blackwater Railroad wherever you listen to music and find their next tour dates on their website. Their festival, Hatcher Romp, is July 9-10, 2027.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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The post Q&A: Alaskan Music Group Blackwater Railroad appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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