“A really important thing to understand about music here, maybe the most important thing, is that people come to Alaska because they want to live more deeply,” says Alaskan producer and musician Justin Smith. “Loving music goes hand-in-hand with that.” For some, that call is so intense that it transcends everything else. Smith himself, for example, left a promising career in Chicago blues music to return to Alaska after a short stint there caused him to fall in love with the region. The result is a scrappy community of musicians who’ve honed impressive talents in a fiercely supportive atmosphere.
And though Alaska is massive, it’s sparsely populated—the state’s 665 million square miles are home to just under 750,000 people. Its folk music scene is comprised of a series of small communities dotted across the state in a loosely connected web of towns stretching from Juneau in the southeast to Fairbanks in the north. While a small scene with little formal infrastructure to speak of may sound like a turn off, for the musicians who’ve chosen it, support from each other and the community more than suffice. They share bills and resources, and members freely swap in and out of bands. “Everybody’s helping everybody, and there’s this ‘abundance’ mentality,” says Juneau folk musician Annie Bartholomew. “When you play music in communities like this, you’re accountable to the community, as well. And you learn pretty fast you can’t be mean or catty, because you’re gonna have to work with that venue again, with that person again—or they might save your ass down the line when you have to pull out of a gig.”
The support and connection inherent to Juneau’s music community helps foster creativity and collaboration. “if you can dream something happening, you can make it happen,” says folk musician Josh Fortenbery. Accessible only by plane and boat, Juneau’s scene thrives away from the state’s highway system thanks to four main venues: the Alaskan Hotel, which used to be a brothel; the Imperial, the town’s oldest venue; the tourist-favorite Red Dog Saloon; and the Crystal Saloon. Beyond that, music follows a seasonal pattern, Fortenbery says: cruise ship season (May–October) when the town bustles and tourists might expect to hear nightly music; fall through the new year is local’s time, and good for musical creativity; in the new year, when the state legislature resumes, staffers and legislators look for entertainment. And each spring, Juneau hosts the storied Alaska Folk Festival, which will celebrate its 50th year next year (Bartholomew and Fortenbery are board members). Renowned for its joyful atmosphere and late-night shenanigans, it’s a draw for Alaskans and lower 48-ers alike.
By nature of Alaska’s climate, life and work change seasonally. Subsisting in Alaska is expensive, and booking limited venues every night is impractical. Day jobs are nearly ubiquitous, but they don’t carry the same creativity-crushing weight they do for many musicians in the lower 48. Instead, they’re part of the ebb and flow of Alaska. “The day job gives you more money to invest in your career. But it also gives you the freedom of not having to be dependent on that music income,” Bartholomew says. Bartholomew works for Alaska Fish and Game; Fortenbery for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and Smith is captain of the Glacier Bay National Park research vessel. To help balance music and the rest of their lives by sharing resources and advice, Bartholomew and Fortenbery formed the Muskeg Collective with fellow musicians Erin and Andrew Heist and Taylor Vidic. The group recently started touring together because pooling resources and sharing stages makes it more feasible to travel and play outside of Juneau’s relative isolation.
Much of Alaska’s folk music shows happen in bars where, in winter, musicians fill out marathon, night-long sets. Music, art, joy and togetherness are a means of survival and maintaining mental health during cold, dark winters. “We would play bars all night—we’d be there from 9 p.m. until four in the morning,” Bartholomew says of her time playing in a bar band up north in Fairbanks. “Sometimes you’d share a set or share a bill, but sometimes you wouldn’t; you’d just do the same set over and over again.” That rigor is often tough for lower 48 musicians to comprehend. “They’re like, ‘My set is 45 minutes.’ You’re like, ‘I don’t know if that’s gonna work here,’” she says. Playing for that long, you get good fast, which is something of a superpower for Alaskan musicians.
North of Juneau, most of the state’s other population centers connect via a triangle of highways from Homer and Seward in the south to Fairbanks in the north and smaller, tougher-to-access cities in east (large swaths of Alaska outside those roads are undeveloped and have limited accessibility). It’s along these lines that most musicians tour. Blackwater Railroad Company, a string band with a twist, is perhaps Alaska’s most popular group at the moment, and is one of the few who have managed to make touring a full-time gig. They often play Alaskan standby venues like Alice’s Champagne Palace in Homer and Creek Bend Cafe in Hope. In summer, the band tours festivals and outdoor events like Salmon Festival on the Kenai Peninsula, Chickestock Music Festival in Chicken, and the Great Alaskan Lumberjack Arena in Ketchikan. In the winter, they book more creatively, appearing at such events a the Iditarod, a curling tournament in Talkeetna, an A-frame ski lodge in Hatcher Pass, and a snowmobile gathering in Thompson Pass that’s held under an arctic tent.
Touring regularly in Alaska is tough, but it’s worth it. “This is one of those places where you feel most connected with the Earth, with the planet that you live on,” says Tyson Davis, Blackwater frontman. “You see its power and its destructiveness and its beauty—life played out at the extremes.” Touring outside Alaska is more challenging, but the band is planning a lower 48 tour later this year and will also return to Hawaiʻi, where they’ve toured several times.
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP
Light on infrastructure and rich in moxie, ingenuity, and musical expertise, musicians across Alaska are forging their own paths. In spite of its limitations, Alaska boasts enough opportunities that musicians who can put on an entertaining set don’t necessarily need to record albums. But for those who are interested, Alaska offers a surprising amount of arts funding at the state, city, and even federal level. Smith, who produced albums for Barthlomew and Fortenbery and Blackwater’s forthcoming LP, has become a go-to, carving out a niche as one-man traveling studio. With an ever-growing menagerie of equipment, he records in borrowed spaces, including TV studios, churches, and cabins, setting up wherever fits the music and artist best.
From raucous string bands to mellow acoustic tracks here are a few of the Alaskan folk musicians who’ve taken the leap to record.
Josh Fortenbery
No Such Thing as Forever
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Josh Fortenbery lived many different places—Thailand, Mexico, Wisconsin, and North Carolina—before settling in Juneau, Alaska. A short stint working for the NOAA turned into a growing connection to Alaska’s dramatic landscapes and collaborative culture. He wrote his first LP, No Such Thing as Forever, during the early Covid-19 pandemic, feeling cut off from the world both by Juneau’s geographical isolation as well as lockdown. Musically, the album, which was released this past March, is a deft study of country, folk, and bluegrass, while lyrically it offers an intimate portrait of Fortenbery’s emotional life, probing everything from undesirable hereditary traits to lessons he learned from his grandmother with candor and nuance.
Emma Hill
Park Songs
When she’s not making folk music, Emma Hill is selling vintage clothing at Rage City Vintage, which she co-owns, in Anchorage, Alaska. Acoustic and sweet, built on guitar and nothing much more, her latest album, Park Songs, was inspired by the beauty and connection she found during an eight-month, 30,000-mile journey to visit the country’s national parks. Writing the album, Hill challenged herself to create specifically from a place of inspiration from natural beauty. Hill also runs the successful monthly Spenard Song Circle in Anchorage.
Annie Bartholomew
Sisters of White Chapel
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP
Inspired by the women of the Klondike Gold Rush, Bartholomew wrote an entire album, 2023’s Sisters of the White Chapel, about the dark demimonde—a name commonly given to sex workers, but which also encompassed any number of disreputable characters, including writers—during the gold rush. In these songs, Bartholomew relays the stories of the women who sought freedom and bodily autonomy away from patriarchal society in the brief lawless splendor of gold rush boomtowns. For this record record, she pulled together a saloon string band of mandolin, banjo, fiddle, piano, guitar who accompanied Bartholomew into the underworld where the women established power and carved out risky but ultimately triumphant lives for themselves. Catchy and intoxicating, the album’s 10 tracks conjure the DIY spirit that thrives in Alaska today while also considering the troubled relationship between money and survival. This summer Bartholomew will take her new all-woman string band, The Sitka Roses, to the Rotterdam Blues Festival.
Ava Earl
Too Much
Compact Disc (CD)
Americana/folk singer Ava Earl released four albums before she turned 18. Now a junior at Northwestern University, she finds time to make new music between classes and track meets. Her latest studio album, 2023’s Too Much, riffs on a phrase that was often repeated to her when she was growing up in Girdwood, Alaska: “You’re a lot.” Claiming the phrase as part of her identity, she finds the value in the title, flipping an insult into an asset in breathy, poppy music that recalls Olivia Rodrigo and Phoebe Bridgers more than the string bands of her native Alaska.
Blackwater Railroad Company
A Lovely Place to Die
Seward, Alaska-based band Blackwater Railroad Company has been touring Alaska for a little over a decade. Their latest album, A Lovely Place to Die, features a revived and reconfigured version of the band after lineup changes during the beginning of the Covid pandemic, adding saxophone and drums to their raucous string band sound. “We all choose this life, right?” Frontman Tyson Davis says of the album’s title. “This is the life that we choose to live by being Alaskan—which is not necessarily easy. But it’s the only one that makes sense for us. For us, this is where we choose to live. And where we choose to live is where we inevitably choose to die.” Though its title may seem dark, the album is, in fact, a joyous celebration of life.
Roland Roberts
So It Goes
Like so many Alaskans, Roland Roberts hails from elsewhere, coming to Palmer, Alaska by way of Tennessee, Alabama, and Colorado. Combining country music’s twang with American folk’s rhythm—and just a flash of blues—the Hetcher Pass singer-songwriter writes a steel-tinged folk music reminiscent of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s funky jams and Bob Dylan’s ballads.
Erin Heist
From the Land of Rusted Dreams
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP
Erin Heist grew up in South East Alaska’s fishing communities, and eventually settled in the Juneau folk music scene. Her debut LP, From the Land of Rusted Dreams, blends folk, Americana, and bluegrass for a set of songs that are both personal and hyper-local. Growing up in tiny, isolated communities, Heist is acutely aware of the need for community survival, which become a thematic throughline in her music. Like so many Alaskan artists, she’s a member of many musical groups, including the Muskeg Collective, and a bluegrass duo with her husband, Andrew Heist.
