Vol. 3 by Hog-Eyed Man (featuring Beverly Smith & John Grimm)

"Powerful tunes... Great music, and particularly, great fiddling, is a seamless fusion of rhythm and melody, which has the power to reach deep inside us and inspire strong emotional responses. Cade's fiddling does that to full effect, and the other players deftly enhance it.

It's a masterpiece."

--Steve Goldfield, Bluegrass Unlimited

"Well, so here we are, present at the third coming of Hog-Eyed Man ... and the quality has yet to stumble on a single (metaphorical) stubbed toe. To the contrary, it continues to feel rather intimidating, in the way extraordinarily conceived and executed music can creep up and scare you. It's penetrating places of the heart to which mere ordinarily good music doesn't get close.

Fiddler/banjoist Jason Cade and multi-stringed instrumentalist Rob McMaken are at once immensely informed students of traditional Appalachian music and supremely able carriers of that tradition. Theirs are what some call the ancient tones.... Not even the novice listener is likely to mistake what emerges from their instruments as bluegrass or country. To the contrary, this is the mountain music of a century ago and decades more, from an electricity-free era when no phonograph records preserved the sound.

These tunes and playing styles can only be recovered from old fiddlers who learned from older fiddlers who learned ... well, melodies and interpretations carried hand to hand, voice to voice, surviving under their own power and living on because those who knew them believed they were worth keeping around. That they continue to speak to us seems, in an era when virtually everything is designed to be disposable, something akin to a miracle. There is indeed something sacred about traditional music, as if it dwells in some separate, invisible sphere untouched by time and age, allowing us to enter it if we have the wisdom to seek it out. It's hard to conceive, though it's perfectly true, that if you were born in a certain geography and in another generation, that music would have been all around you. You could even have taken it for granted.

On 3 the Hog-Eyes are joined here and there by two highly regarded oldtime masters, John Grimm and Beverly Smith.... A few titles will be known to those who follow these things: "Shady Grove," "Bile Them Cabbage Down," "Old Hen She Cackled" and -- yes -- "Hog-Eyed Man," but not in the standard versions. Not everything is solely instrumental. Some of the tunes feature singing, if not in the ballad sense; voices, rather -- even with lyrics as opposed to vocal effects -- as yet another instrument. The tunes come mostly from the Blue Ridge region (western North Carolina, north Georgia, east Tennessee) and eastern Kentucky.

The music is infused with an atmospheric and emotional richness of the sort that happens only when art and artist are in perfect alignment. There are other, entirely legitimate ways to present this music, of course. Still, something transcendent happens when Cade and McMaken get together to channel the ghosts of another age."

— Jerome Clark, Rambles

"The music here is full of strong playing and great taste, not only in the tunes selected but in how they are performed. Jason Cade and Rob McMaken, with help from friends John Grimm and Beverly Smith, treat us to 16 traditional tunes. They play a Manco Sneed tune, "Wiley Laws," with a third part gleaned from a field recording of J. Laurel Johnson, Sneed's son-in-law. There are even familiar tunes in unusual versions. They tap into the repertoire of the late [Byard] Ray, who processed tunes so much between hearing them and playing them, they can be strikingly different.... As with their previous recordings, we are treated to fine versions of a wide range of great old tunes from the South."

— Bob Buckingham, Fiddler Magazine

Hog-eyed Man is an acoustic oldtime duo comprised of Jason Cade (fiddle) & Rob McMaken (lap dulcimer, mando, guitar). Drawing primarily on the archaic tunes and pre-radio aesthetics of Southern Appalachia, the duo has forged a compelling and authentic style of traditional music, both reflecting deep respect for the past masters and carrying the musical conversation forward to the present era.

hogeyedman.com