In Conversation: Rebecca Frazier
With her upcoming performance on May 14th at Songbirds, Rebecca Frazier, a flat picker known for her Doc Watson and Tony Rice style, speaks with WUTC's Paul Jorgensen about her musical journey, which began in Colorado with the band Hit and Run, and she later moved to Tennessee. They also discuss Frazier's love of bluegrass and other music styles, and her upcoming show at Songbirds in Chattanooga, where you can expect high-energy performances, including covers of Madonna's "Borderline." She also showcases her songwriting and collaborations, particularly with banjo player Charles Butler, and talks about her upcoming album, produced by Bill Wolf, as well as her upcoming participation in the IBMA World of Bluegrass convention.
Connect with Rebecca Frazier:
Go see her tonight (5/14/26) at Songbirds!
Full Transcript (generated with the help of AI and spot edited)
Paul Jorgensen: And with me over Zoom is Rebecca Fraser. Hello, Rebecca.
Rebecca Frazier: Hello, Paul. Thanks so much for having me.
Paul Jorgensen: Well, thank you so much for joining me. It's a pleasure to have you here. The one thing that we need to make sure that we get taken care of right off of the top is so you've got a show Thursday at Songbirds right here in Chattanooga, Tennessee, our fair city, doors at six Show is it seven for those of my dear listeners who are not familiar with you? Would you care to give them an introduction
Rebecca Frazier: Yes, actually I've I've met some of you before. We've played at Barking Legs, uh, but it was many moons ago when we were a Colorado band. Our Colorado band was founded and and won the Tellyride and Rocky Grass band contest, and then we kind of became a touring national act and honestly ended up loving Tennessee so much. that I moved here um about twenty years ago and made a life here and have been putting out records now under my own name. The band was Hit and Run that you guys saw at the Barking Legs. I'm Rebecca Frazier. So I'm a flat picker, Doc Watson, Tony Rice style. Love bluegrass, but I also love all styles of music. So in our show you'll find some high energy flat picking and you will find awesome amazing musicians and you will find we even have a cover of Madonna's borderline done on a bluegrass style. So it's really fun.
Paul Jorgensen: Excellent. That sounds like fun In addition to having been at Barking Lakes before, you were here for the IBMA World of Bluegrass?
Rebecca Frazier: Yes, and we we really loved it. I'm glad it changed to your convention center. It's very easy. We couldn't believe it that we could just park. We were like, wait, park out front? Like how is this possible? In Nashville, things have changed so much. And It the convention used to be in Owensboro and then Louisville and then Nashville and which is convenient for me. I can see downtown from my house. But we did love the vibe of Chattanooga. We got a lot of compliments
Paul Jorgensen: Oh, excellent. Excellent. Yeah, it was a lot of fun having it happen and uh WUTC is the official radio partner of IBMA World of Bluegrass.
Rebecca Frazier: Oh, that's exciting.
Paul Jorgensen: Are you coming back in the fall for it?
Rebecca Frazier: Yes, we'll be there for at least one of the days. We don't know which one yet
Paul Jorgensen: Okay, excellent. Excellent. But um putting the cart in front of the horse. So you've got the show at Songbirds tonight in addition to your uh potential Madonna covers and stuff like that. What else can people expect at the show?
Rebecca Frazier: Well we've got so I sing and and I write a lot of songs that are I'd say in the vein of what you'd hear on like a Dan Teminsky, Alison Krauss recording. I love modern bluegrass, but I also play a lot of traditional bluegrass, kind of done in a in a tight um in in a groovy way, I I guess we'd say, as as bluegrass pickers. The the banjo player I play with in he and I both have an affinity for the Grateful Dead. So we always put in lately we've been doing Unbroken Chain in almost every show since Phil Lesh died. And um we recorded that one recently actually for my upcoming album. Um we do Cumberland Blues and he's just a he's big into fish and I grew up on that as well. So we like to have moments where things aren't as expected and get to enjoy improvising And the energy of that is a lot of fun. His name's Charles Butler, and he has his own albums out on Spotify, etc. And by the way, I have two albums out. Under my name on Compass, Rebecca Frazier, and you can check out a lot of the material that we would be, you know, showcasing The album was produced by Bill Wolf, who was best friends with Tony Rice and also worked with The Grateful Dead. So he was kind of the perfect producer to help me put my material together and kind of show off what I like to do. On bass we have Larry Cook, who is amazing. He often tours with Bronwyn Keith Hines. Some of you may be familiar with her band. And Jordan Santiago on Mandolin. He's a shredder. He l also plays classical mandolin and violin. And then Ben Plotnick, um, another shredder on fiddle. He's just off the hook amazing. I just love his improvisation and his style and his energy on stage.
Paul Jorgensen: Dear listener, if you want to go to Rebecca Fraser. com I e R dot com. Links will be in the show notes But you've got a great website there and you've got a lot of information, including links to some of your videos and stuff. I just want to say that I very much appreciate your website being that old school blogger approach as opposed to the the ones nowadays that just have all of the weird flowing graphics and you cannot figure out where to go and click to actually make things happen I love your website.
Rebecca Frazier: That is awesome. I'm gonna have to tell my manager that because they've been poking me to quote modernize it and I I I think I like the old school better. So I've been kind of procrastinating. Like, oh yeah, I I talked to my website designer. And she is unfortunately in the process of redoing it. But I I know what you mean about the graphics I I think those can take a long time to load.
Paul Jorgensen: Mm-hmm. Yes, yes. But I I like the information density. I think it is very pretty. Of course, one of the things on there too, in addition to the show at Songbirds Here on May the 14th, which is Thursday today. Um you've got your upcoming tour dates on there as well, including your it looks like you're gonna be uh playing in your new hometown here on uh November the 20th as well at the Station Inn?
Rebecca Frazier: Yeah. Well two decades new, yes. We'd love to do a fall homecoming at Station Inn. Sometimes my kids even join me. They both play fiddle.
Paul Jorgensen: Oh.
Rebecca Frazier: Like a trio vocal of angel band. And then all of the uh their friends, parents come. It it's really, really fun and it's always packed And some people, some of my fans across the country will see the show. They'll learn from me on YouTube. I teach guitar on there. And then they'll make a weekend trip out of it just to come to the station in and like and see the show. So I like to promote that one really well in advance so people can make their plans.
Paul Jorgensen: Outstanding. Yeah, that is great. I'm gonna s I'm gonna borrow a interview question from my good friend Clark Gibson, who's another host here on the radio station. And ask you in Bluegrass if you had to come up with your Mount Rushmore. of artists, who would be the four faces?
Rebecca Frazier: Oh, definitely Tony Rice. I don't even have to think about that. I don't I'd say Jerry Garcia, just creativity-wise. What an inspiration. But he allows himself to be loose and just experiment constantly. I really admire that. He's not a perfectionist Um, but just the create creativity is what keeps me going. And you know, because I'm I'm a mom, I'm a single mom, I tour, I record, I mean it's it would it's easy to burnout if if you don't have fun and you don't have creativity. So that's the most important thing for me to foster and take care of for myself. And um and Tony was a genius and each solo was so creative. Tony Rice. And It's weird because I don't listen to her very much anymore, but Joni Mitchell is such an inspiration to me. She's so she is herself. She she was so creative. Um, and again, had her very own voice. All of these people I'm mentioning, I feel like they invented their own language or their own niche within music, you know? And that's I really admire that And then maybe maybe lastly would be Neil Young, same reason. He's himself, you know, he's conveying beautiful emotion in his own way.
Paul Jorgensen: Yeah, I going going back to the um uh the Jerry Garcia one, so the original iteration of my show was a jam-ban show So it was a lot of Grateful Dead, a lot of fish. Uh Country Joe and the Fish. I was really interested in that time in the mid to late uh sixties. where it was so much discovery where you had out of that melding pot you had um psychedelia you had prog rock you had you had folk kind of changing and becoming both more traditional but more modern at the same time. And just how you know if you look at kind of the Venn diagram of all of these things, kind of Jerry Garcia is like one of those central figures in all of this stuff and then it just kind of branched out from there.
Rebecca Frazier: Yeah, and when you said that, because 'cause I've been kind of slowly reading The Grateful Dead book. And I see that, his folky roots and you know, as in California he's getting together with with his friends and learning banjo. But do you remember the movie that recently came out about Bob Dylan? It's a very similar progression, you know, 'cause here he is with Joan Baez being very folky and then s you know, moving into that more psychedelic sound. Not everybody, you know, it's not like I mean Doc Watson was playing folk and didn't Yeah, yeah.
Paul Jorgensen: Not everybody took the same path. And so many different ones came out of that kind of Explosion of creativity, I guess, is just kind of fascinating.
Rebecca Frazier: That's a really good way to put it. It was an explosion. I mean What an era. I don't and I've said this to other people. I've there's no repeat of that. There's no way It could go I mean, just I mean if you if you have serious satellite radio and you put it on the forties station or the thirties station and then How in 40 years did music change so much? I mean it's been 40 years since the 80s. Music hasn't changed that.
Paul Jorgensen: Don't don't say words like that.
Rebecca Frazier: But it's like that whole progression from the forties to the eighties. And then for you, the more microcosm of like I guess the sixties and seventies, that is that is the peak. I mean, we had Led Zeppelin and Steely Dan and just It was an explosion.
Paul Jorgensen: Yeah, yeah, it really was. Uh uh a couple of station colleagues and I went up to Big Ears this year in Knoxville. And we went to the documentary about the um Newport Jazz Festival. The they found the discovered film that they put together into this documentary. And One of them, of course, is is one of the main people in there is Bob Dylan. What's interesting is it's Right at that point where he's starting to make that transition, he's just about to go electric, and then he does go electric, and then you kind of see that going off, but then you see that intersection with like Joan Baez and and some of the blues musicians that were there. And again, there's that generational switchover that was happening at the same time. So what made me think about that was the fact that, you know, you had that one explosion that was happening very much on the West Coast, one explosion that was happening very much on the East Coast, but then also over in the UK, in London primarily, and how they were all happening at the same time and they were all parts of that same transition, but they were all unique in and of themselves Kind of fascinating.
Rebecca Frazier: Right. And in an a age of AI, don't you love how I mean that's what we want, that that soul, that seed of creativity within A real soul.
Paul Jorgensen: Yeah.
Rebecca Frazier: So it's amazing to me how much of an I AI takeover there threatens to be, especially with, you know, like even just down to people doing demos these days. Like any songwriter here is just gonna pop it into the AI and there's just like a fake voice singing it.
Paul Jorgensen: Yeah. So are so are you using AI at all in not not necessarily the on the creative side, but like in kind of your organizing your life and stuff like that? Or are you just purely eschewing uh AI.
Rebecca Frazier: No, I'm not eschewing it. Um one way I'll use it is just like graphics, for example. It's made life so much easier for me and in like, for example All artists these days are required to be social media experts, which I'm not, but I'm trying there's so many different sizes that you have to put up there a banner for YouTube or a banner for your website So there's just little tricks like popping a photo in and then you can say magic expand and it'll make the sea, you know, the ocean in the background a little bit wider. You know, it's like, you know, that to me doesn't feel so much like cheating because it's just a background that no one's really looking at anyway.
Paul Jorgensen: Yeah, and it's it's an amazing tool. What, you know, one of the things that I'm as a DJ that I'm constantly keeping track of is the new music that's coming out. Is this coming from a real artist? Are these real people performing it? Or is it something that somebody's generated and just put up on Spotify? you know, with no human interaction beyond the original, you know, prompt to the the robot. It's an interesting time.
Rebecca Frazier: Yeah. Where I mean I think we'll we'll see what happens. People are very addicted to their phones. Um attention spans are shorter. People don't watch movies much anymore. When's the last time you sat down and watched an entire movie?
Paul Jorgensen: Well, how are you about uh physical media and stuff like that? Do you have a lot of that or or do are you mostly digital?
Rebecca Frazier: For your your personal oh I'm I'm old school. I still um well I have a lot of paintings around the house um that I've done. Um I love art. Um, I still write down my to-do list in a notebook. And I I can't, well I won't remember otherwise. I'm not gonna remember to go look at a digital calendar and stuff. Um I like to write thank you notes on letters and mail it. I do not like to write a thank you text. Um So yeah, I guess just growing up being super creative, oh, and keeping a journal, you know how to write it on paper, on a little notebook. I was for songwriting it it took me a while to convert to the more digital style. I used to write, you know, handwrite my lyrics. Yeah, one of the issues is when you're co-writing a lot and after COVID, everybody was n now co-writing on um You know, FaceTime or Zoom or whatever. And then people keep Google documents of their songs together because then they can each check in and update it and stuff. That took me a while because it felt so quote uncreative. It's not, it's the same process, but you're not gonna see the scratch marks or you're not you're not you're it's not gonna be in the country music hall of fame behind a glass thing that the torn-out paper of the original lyrics, you know.
Paul Jorgensen: Yeah, they're not gonna they're not gonna mount a keyboard. This is this is what where the lyrics were typed for this fantastic song.
Rebecca Frazier: Yeah.
Paul Jorgensen: Talking about your art, I s is that one of yours that I see over your shoulder right there?
Rebecca Frazier: Oh, this is my mom. She my mom did that one. of a backdrop in Colorado where I moved from it's kind of one of my retirement goals someday when my hand won't let me flat pick anymore. I was like, okay, well I have my art, right? Always got my songwriting and my singing and my piano. I don't know if you can see my piano back there.
Paul Jorgensen: Oh yes, yes, yes, I do. Yes.
Rebecca Frazier: There's a Bill Bill Wolf's um Grateful Dead platinum record He gave it to me. To him to him this was junk and to me it was a treasure. Oh my gosh. His work on um Presented to Bill Wolf to commemorate the sale of more than one million copies of Skeletons from the Closet. Wow. So yeah, he's he's um He's just a genius and a pre just a creative, smart, amazing person Um still lives in Alexandria, Virginia, but he was worked at the the Birchmir for years of if you've heard of that in Alexandria, he was their sound person and He made it a well-known place for people like Alison Krause would just love to play there, even if they are too big for it, because the sound is so amazing.
Paul Jorgensen: Oh man, that's fantastic. You were you were saying about, you know, uh when you retire and someday you're not going to be able to do the the flat picking. What kinds of exercises do you do to keep your your hands and your your fingers and everything working?
Rebecca Frazier: The main thing for me is overall health and exercise I try to eat a ton of vegetables, drink a ton of water, and I try to do some sort of workout every single day because guitar is so physical. I mean, I do it for myself, my mental health. I enjoy it. In terms of guitar playing It it's so physical that you can't just at least I can't just be weak and the arms and shoulders. And I I tend to get really tense if I do too much playing. So you have to do some kind of some sort of personal meditation while you warm up to stay in a relaxed frame of mind and keep your shoulders relaxed as you're kind of increasing the the speed and the dexterity of uh your practice session. And then I don't do a ton of stretching. Like I I used to do some of this tendon stretching, but I'll d I just like I've lucked out. I only had one bout of tendon issues uh in like 2002 where I had to stop playing for a month and that just It upset me so much, you know, to not be able to play. Yeah, I just I I guess I'm really conscious of it. I'm I have a lot of self-awareness. Uh-huh. And I think meditation helps just kind of meditation helps to have self-awareness of what's going on in your body. Connecting with your kind of staying centered. Right. Staying grounded.
Paul Jorgensen: Uh your show at Songbirds Thursday tonight. We determine doors are at six and the show starts at seven-ish. I guess is this your first time at Songbirds?
Rebecca Frazier: Yes.
Paul Jorgensen: Ah, okay. But I have not been to their new one. And I say their new one, but it's kind of like you being new to Nashville. They moved like a couple of years ago And I keep calling it the new place. I just I need to go and then it'll stop doing that, I'm sure.
Rebecca Frazier: Okay, well, magically, I actually have seen it because my son had a lacrosse game down there at Baylor And I was like, hey, the guys really the guy's all sweaty got in the car after the game. I was like, hey, we need to stop by this place Songbirds. I want to see it. So so I got to stop by. I did a little reel of me talking in front of it.
Paul Jorgensen: Uh-huh.
Rebecca Frazier: It was a nice nice area. It looked lovely.
Paul Jorgensen: I didn't get to go in, but From everything that I've heard, it is is beautiful inside like it was before, so. It should be a treat. So if you don't have your tickets, get your tickets now. Go to songbirds. org to get the tickets straight from the site. We'll also have a link in the show notes so that you can get there. And again, we're going to have uh links to uh Rebecca's uh homepage and socials and stuff like that so you'll be able to keep abreast of everything that she's got going on. Rebecca Frazier, thank you so much for joining me today.
Rebecca Frazier: Thank you so much for having me. Thank you, radio listeners, for listening.
This transcript was done with the help of AI and spot edited. Email wutc@utc.edu with any corrections.
