A bluegrass first at Pride Parade
AJ Lee joins music association’s initial float in event
“My friends Helen Foley and Dana Frankel asked if I would sing and play with them. I’m ... showing up and singing a few tunes.” AJ Lee, singer and straight ally of the LGBTQ community
While AJ Lee is only 19 years old, she’s been the new face of bluegrass for more than a decade. Through her work as a solo artist and featured vocalist with the Tuttles, a family band featuring three siblings who like Lee have been nurtured since early childhood by the Northern California Bluegrass Society, the Tracy-raised multi-instrumentalist has earned a national following with her gorgeous voice and winsome stage presence.
Now Lee and the new bluegrass generation are taking the music places it’s never gone before. On Sunday, June 25, she and three longtime longtime friends will make history by serenading the San Francisco Pride Parade audience from a float sponsored by the California Bluegrass Association, the first time such an organization has participated in a gay pride event.
When she heard that the association was going to have a Pride float, “I was shocked,” says Lee, a straight ally of the LGBTQ community. “I didn’t expect that to happen. My friends Helen Foley and Dana Frankel,” on bass and fiddle, respectively, “asked if I would sing and play with them. I’m sort of a freelancer, showing up and singing a few tunes.”
With its rural roots deep in Appalachia, bluegrass is often associated with conservative values, but a progressive thread runs through the music, from union songs and Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard touring in support of the 1960s civil rights movement through Berkeley bluegrass musician Laurie Lewis. Still, the association’s decision to participate in Pride proved to be controversial.
Several longtime members ended up leaving the nonprofit organization, saying they wanted to keep music and politics separate, “but we had so many more people join,” says Frankel, 17, who also performs with Foley and their bluegrass quintet Pacific Drive at the Back Room in Berkeley on July 13. “I was president of the LGBT and minority rights club in my high school, and I was so thrilled to hear this is happening.”
While Lee, Frankel and friends embody the next wave of bluegrass, they’re experiencing some creative growing pains. When Frankel starts UC Santa Cruz in the fall, she’s looking forward to mixing it up with a wide variety of musicians. And Lee, now living in Santa Cruz and contemplating a move to Nashville, just released a six-song EP produced by Berkeley’s Jon Abrams, covering a disparate program of songs, including Gillian Welch’s “Look at Miss Ohio,” Merle Haggard’s “California Cotton Fields” and Doris Troy’s 1963 R&B hit “Just One Look.”
She sees her expanding repertoire as a natural evolution. While wary of alienating fans who have followed her since she was a tyke, she’s “putting my antennae everywhere,” Lee says. “A lot of people want me to continue doing covers of older California bluegrass songs, but I’m kind of in a transitional phase. My housemates and I listen to a lot of old blues. We’ve been getting into Brandi Carlile, John Prine and Jake Bugg, Johnny Cash, Snarky Puppy and lots of Ray Charles.”
Lee never fit central casting’s profile for a bluegrass prodigy. Her father fled Burma in the early 1970s when the government fomented pogroms against ethnic Chinese communities. Her parents met in San Jose, and by the age of 7 she was turning heads at Bluegrass Association events and festivals. Between 2010 and 2017, the Northern California Bluegrass Society named her female vocalist of the year seven times.
But as she prepares to leave her teenage years behind her, Lee is “experimenting with songwriting more, trying to figure out what I’m strongest in, finding myself in what I enjoy,” she says. “People are very interested in youth, young players who can pick really fast. It’s easy to get attention when you’re 5 singing about walking your dog. As an older woman, I have to dig a little deeper and try to figure out what works for me and the listener.”
“I was president of the LGBT and minority rights club in my high school, and I was so thrilled to hear this is happening.” Dana Frankel, on California Bluegrass Association’s sponsoring a float in the S.F. Pride Parade