Like nearly every cultural phenomenon that has been deemed “American,” traditional American folk was woven from the diverse assortment of cultures that intermingled in the United States. For Miriam Hacksaw, old-time music isn’t merely an old, stagnant genre to be studied (although she’s done plenty of that), but a cultural tradition that can be continued and expanded upon. By combining her lived experience as a trans woman of color with her Malayali heritage, her background in punk rock, and her extensive knowledge of the American songbook, Hacksaw creates music that is timeless and familiar, yet uniquely her own. In the following interview, Hacksaw discusses her musical background, the five-month tour she is currently on, and just about everything in between.

Goody James: How long have you been creating and performing as Miriam Hacksaw?

Miriam Hacksaw: About two years. You know, I was doing other things before that. So my social networks and my experience are much more than that.

GJ: What kind of music did you play before this project?

MH: Well, I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, where there's just kind of a folk music culture. So I grew up playing music and singing songs with old people, for kind of as long as I can remember. And I didn't really think of it as like training or anything, but it was. I got into punk and metal at a pretty young age, and I always wanted to play in bands like that. That was how I was introduced to the folk tradition that eventually led me to old-time music. But, you know, when I got to Seattle for college, I hadn't really gotten it together before that to play in bands. But I played in, like, the high school jazz band, you know, piano or whatever.

And I played bluegrass with old people. As a teenager, I played in a gospel bluegrass band in my family's church and stuff. Things I wasn't really, like, proud of, but, like, definitely were formative. Then, yeah, when I came to Seattle, I wanted to play in a hardcore band, but we didn't have the things to do that, so we started a folk punk band. I was playing mandolin because that's kind of what I grew up most comfortable with, and that had kind of a rotating cast of characters. It would've been 2016 when we formed that band. It was called Geophagia, which is a compulsion to eat dirt.

Geophagia—Antifascist Gardening Collective EP

We were mostly like an anarchist collective, and the band was kind of a hobby/pastime but also a front to organize out of. We were throwing shows and also having zine distros at the shows. We had various groups that we would meet up with at planned actions and participate in larger actions. We were connected to the larger network of anti-pipeline and indigenous solidarity protests. We were focused on the banks, too.

So that band—there are some demos out there. We found this house, and we ran it as a collective house/DIY space and did dozens, if not hundreds, of shows over the course of two and a half years, between 2018 and 2020. Mostly folk punk and as much hardcore as we could get. Again, we were like wannabe hardcore kids. We’d go to all the hardcore shows, but we were brown, and honestly, nobody fucking asked us to play in bands. Looking back, the scene's pretty white up here, and I kind of couldn't help but wonder if the two brown kids were kind of like, People didn't know what to do with us. Sometimes they’d kick us out for moshing too hard or whatever. So I don't know. I don't know if we didn't work in the hardcore scene, but we had our own thing; we ran that collective.

Then, during 2020, I moved back down to Oregon after things went down in Seattle. I couldn't have missed that, you know? So I went back down to Oregon with the intention of going deeper into music. I also had a crust band that was actually based out of Sweden that I did one European tour with. That’s when I saw the squats in Europe and the punk houses in Germany. They look like squats, but they're established, and they feed the bands. They have a system for cooking, they have bunk rooms for everybody to stay, and they have good sound. The crust and hardcore network in Europe is fucking awesome, and it was really inspiring to me. I had some mentors in the Swedish scene who taught me how to play d-beat and taught me the history of crust. So that's part of why I would say my musical background is in the origins of extreme music. Because, you know, d-beat is where everything came from: death metal, black metal, and grindcore all came out of d-beat.

GJ: What instrument were you playing?

MH: Guitar, bass, I play a little drums, scream, you know. Everybody kind of did a little, because it's simple, you know. It's like I honestly see d-beat as a tradition at this point, 'cause it's being passed down, and, at least in Sweden, there were multiple generations teaching this simple rhythm and the intricacies of simplicity. So that's what I found when I moved down to Oregon during COVID. And I had a powerviolence band called Pickaxe, all girls. We were like, “What if we're G.L.O.S.S. but harder?” Years later, I'm like, “Oh fuck, maybe the name I picked for myself, Miriam Hacksaw, that might be a reference to Sadie Switchblade, subconsciously.”

So I moved out to the country with my partner at the time, and we got into old-time music. I reconnected with some of the old-timers in Eugene and also found some folks out in the mountains to play with. I just started picking up tunes and got kind of brought into the Northwest old-time tradition, which is not very documented, but some great musicians have come out of it. Like Tatiana Hargreaves, I think she is one of the best young fiddlers in the country right now, and she grew up in Corvallis. And there are some young folks in Olympia who grew up in old-time families who play. So there is an old-time tradition here. I just say that because people are like, “Oh, you play Appalachian music.” And like, sort of in a sense, it could be that. But really, the tradition that I was brought into was in Oregon.

I really cut my teeth on fiddle and banjo, just kind of as an alternative to music school. I was like, “I don't want to fucking work. I just want to spread revolutionary ferment. So I was like, “Maybe if I get good enough at music to get paid for it, I can do that.” And there are a lot of political reasons that I've chosen music as sort of a professional career path, quote unquote.

So now I play old-time music, but it's definitely influenced by my background in the tradition of d-beat and crust. My band in Oregon, when I was learning fiddle and banjo, was called Foraging and the Rattling Bones. People categorize it as a folk punk band; fair enough. We were a wannabe old-time band. We just played old-time tunes as fast as we fucking could, and we got mosh pits. We did an album, and some people know me from that band. So I would say that was the band, and that was the platform that I launched my solo career off of.

GJ: You mentioned that you learned a lot of traditional-type music from old-timers. I remember reading that Blackbird Raum did the same thing. They were going to gatherings and jams with older musicians.

MH: Yeah, CPN’s interview about that was part of what shot me back towards old times. I learn “Elk River Blues.”

GJ: Some people might expect old-timers to be socially conservative. Do you feel like they were accepting and willing to pass the tradition on to a queer person of color?

MH: Yeah. I mean, I'm a trans woman of color and a punk and an anarchist pretty openly, and yeah, they're just happy to pass on the tradition. And these are people I grew up with in the community. The community in Eugene is very liberal, if not radical. So yeah, they were old people mostly, but they certainly were not conservative. And now that I travel around the country and interact, I find the traditional music scene to be pretty left-leaning in a lot of its values. And I hear about these people who are conservative in the scene, but I don't really encounter them. Maybe they stay away from me 'cause of my vibe, you know? Because I'm kind of more openly punk than a lot of people who are in the traditional music world.

Here's what I think. I think that conservatism is actually an ideology that's imposed on us by the ruling elite. I think there are low-income and working-class conservative communities in the States for sure. I'm not denying that. But I think they're overblown because of this indoctrination. I think most people are good people. I think the government is where all the bad people are going

GJ: A lot of traditional American folk music is grounded in left-leaning politics. Just look at Woody Guthrie.

MH: He was drawn from the tradition, just like I am. Here's what I'm really finding. I don't really engage in a lot of conversations around political theories like anarchism or communism or anything like that in these spaces. I engage in conversations around social dynamics and patterns, and sociology. I got a degree in sociology. And racism is a big conversation in the traditional music world because there's a respect for culture. The white people in traditional music respect other cultures and where those other cultures come from. So as our American society is developing these deeper understandings around how racism is permeating our culture and the ways that racism perpetuates itself in traditional music, at least from my conversations with old white people, there is a sense of shame and guilt. People are trying to uncover that.

Part of my project is that I have also collected songs from my family from Kerala, India. I'm not tapping in so much to a music tradition there as just like scratching their brains from memories of the motherland. I grew up in the States. My dad mostly grew up in the States, was born in Kerala, and speaks Malayalam but culturally is a lot more American. So I'm just curious how, if we can break through the shackles of white supremacy, culture can evolve and transform through a diasporic community. So I sing tunes in Malayalam and play old-time fiddle to them, and it's kind of a cross-cultural music, but it's also just probably the most authentic music to me that I can come up with. And with that kind of stuff, I'm getting booked at traditional music festivals and getting hired to do workshops on oral tradition and stuff, so I've actually been very respected. I feel like people in that scene have given me a lot of respect, which I appreciate.

GJ: Is your Malayali heritage a big part of your identity?

MH: Yeah, that's the food I cook, and that's my extended family. I'm close to my white family on my mother's side as well, but I'm closer to my Malayali family. We're very tight-knit as an immigrant family and do a lot to support each other and communicate. Down in New Orleans, there aren’t a lot of Malayalis, but we do have a little community group where we meet up and have coffee and chat, you know, every Tuesday.

I sing songs that are from Kerala, and I reinterpret the melodies through fiddle and banjo. So they can sound old-timey sometimes, because that's the music culture that I am trained in, but there's something different about them because the melodies are from elsewhere. But to be honest, that's what old-time music is. It's kind of a modern traditional. To call it traditional music, honestly, is maybe a misnomer, because old-time music is a blend of different cultures that were kind of “folkified” in rural parts of America.

GJ: Are you based in New Orleans now?

MH: Yeah, that's where I live. I moved there to collaborate with my younger sibling, who's been there about six years. So I've been building a relationship with the city, but I'm technically still new to town.

GJ: Does your sibling play music too?

MH: Yeah, my younger sibling, in a different state of diasporic confusion, instead of diving deep into punk and DIY, like I did, they went into jazz and ended up in Latin music. Oh yeah. They play Brazilian music, they lived in Brazil, and they sing in Portuguese. They’re very deep in these other traditions. They’re studying rumba with an elder, and they’re into Cuban music.

GJ: Do they play pandeiro with you?

MH: Yeah. So Rye is my primary, my favorite pandeiro player. And together, since I moved to New Orleans, we started a band called Blowgun. We call it diaspora punk, or whatever. We get different homies to play percussion with us, and we just go as hard as we can.

GJ: You’re playing a lot of DIY spaces on this current tour, including SubRosa in Santa Cruz.

MH: That's the spot. Yeah, this whole West Coast tour is kind of a homecoming, so I've got to stop in all the little infoshops and DIY community spaces. I did this run a lot when I lived out here, so it's nice to see old friends. I'm happy to share my network with other DIY musicians. It's just so nice to roll up into a town and play the community space. It de-commercializes the music in a way that I actually make more money. I'm making my living doing this; for two years I’ve been a full-time performer, but my shows are, by and large, not commercial shows, just based on donations.

The community space is where people just show up because it's the place they like to be, and they feel comfortable being there. Like the Sugarloaf Center in Williams, Oregon, it's the cutest. It's an off-the-grid cabin in the woods. It’s outside of Grant’s Pass, so the Grant’s Pass homies will roll through there, and there are farmers, punks, and Earth Firsters out there in Southern Oregon. That was how I got in touch with that community. But yeah, you wouldn't even know it's there, and you drive through the woods and then suddenly there's the cutest little cabin. Everybody from all around will come when there are shows there.

GJ: On this tour, you’ve been playing with artists from different genres. There was even a black metal artist on the bill a few nights ago. Is that intentional?

MH: Yeah. This is a fun tour. I'm making my living, you know, I'm making some money, but I'm mostly trying to have a good time. I booked 36 solo dates in two months for myself. And I'm managing myself; I’m doing everything, not just DIY, but like, self-representing. So I'm just trying to not burn out, so I need these to be fun, and I need these to be relevant. So I'm trying to match the vibe. Like in Albuquerque, the metal scene's popping off, and it's a lot of indigenous folks and Black and brown homies who are doing metal down there. So I put together a metal show and figured I’d play. The venue I played there that I have a relationship with is a DIY art gallery space that mostly does metal. So we just put together a metal show, and it was funny. A bunch of folkies showed up, and they stood outside for the metal band. We're working on it; we're trying. But in Olympia, it's just like some of the most interesting creative stuff that's happening in that scene is this performance art that's coming out of the pagan, black metal scene. It's all of these different artistic worlds colliding. So I booked this artist who describes themselves as extreme theater of the senses. I thought I was booking a dark ambient project to open the show.

But they showed up, and basically it was that; it was extreme theater senses. There was some sort of noise. They didn’t want to call it music, but it was really dark, abrasive industrial with a strobe light and writhing on the floor in front of a phone camera hooked up to a projector screen, and there was some kind of video distortion. It was this person, Zona, as Enemy Zero, and it's only the second time they've done this performance. The music was as loud as possible, and everybody walked out. There were two people, Zona’s homies, and then Zona thrashing on the floor.

Then we had a solo black art metal artist, Nocturan, who's also a trans woman of color, whom I've done a gig with previously. I honestly enjoy doing those shows, and I had some homies who thought it was weird, but I fuck with it. I understand the aesthetic, and I feel like, as far as what makes the Olympia scene distinctive, I'm not seeing this in the same way in other places. So I felt like the Olympia show, at the Mortuary on Friday the 13th, It was like, “This has gotta be a black metal show,” you know?

Mixed bills, I think, are an opportunity to get creative in a different way. That's why I do my own booking, honestly. It’d be nice to have some help, especially with this large-scale touring, but I do like the artistic aspect of piecing together a show.

GJ: You play a kind of pump organ with your foot at your live shows. What instrument is that?

MH: Yeah, it's a shruti box. So it's a pumped reed. It's basically, have you ever seen a harmonium? It's an Indian instrument; I got it from India. It makes drone notes. There are 12 valves, all the tones, so I pick a note, and I have a foot pedal on a bike brake cable hooked up. So that squeezes it. It also helps tie my ethnic cultural influence into my music.

I also play rhythm bones. It's part of the old-time tradition. I think the playing style seems most similar to how they do it in Ireland, but bones as percussion instruments exist in every culture. In the American style of playing, you've got two sets of cow ribs, or some people use wood, but I use bones. I cut my own, I go to the butcher shop, or find them at farms or whatever, because it's more punk rock. It’s such a punk rock instrument.

GJ: You played a set with Sister Wife Sex Strike the other night. Do you perform with them often?

MH: Well, they hired me to do the fiddle for their last two albums. Pigeon and I kind of knew each other from the Seattle DIY scene before, like I think they went to a show I threw at one point. We had some mutual friends, so when they started playing the banjo and their band kind of blew up, we were like, “Oh wait a minute, I remember you!” We had to change our dead names in our phones and stuff because it had been a minute. Then we reconnected, and yeah, they paid me to record.

They're also successful. DIYers, making their living doing the DIY thing. So it's been really nice to connect with other people like that and share resources and give each other a little help. I had a good time playing on their tunes, and I was pleased with how they turned out, honestly. It seemed like they appreciated playing with me, and I certainly appreciated the gig. They wanted me to tour with them, but I've always been busy on other tours, so we haven’t pieced that together yet. But they offered me a guarantee to play this show at Neumos, and that's where I went to my first death metal show when I moved up to Seattle when I was 17. I still have this scar from the mosh pit. So I was like, “I'd love to play Neumos, that'd be nostalgic. And boy was that a good time.

I feel like it's important to let people know that you can make money on the DIY thing. I think what switched for me was realizing, “Shit, if we can support each other materially, we can actually kind of escape the economy.” I don't really function very much in the economy right now, which is a political statement. It’s also a freeing way to live.

GJ: You’re doing a lot of touring this year.

MH: I’m on a five-month tour right now. All my stuff’s in a storage unit. I don’t live nowhere but my two-door hatchback. So I've got about, you know, two months solo tour on this end, two months with the circus. And then another, maybe half a month or so as a duo with Rye, and then I'll be back in New Orleans for the Cajun Festival, Blackpot. It’s the best festival because it’s a cook-off. All the Cajuns are cooking family recipes and handing out samples, so you eat free, and I’ll just play fiddle all weekend. But don’t go if you’re vegan. We fucking eat meat. It’s cultural, you know?

GJ: Tell us about the Flotsam River Circus.

MH: It's the biggest thing I'm involved in. Jason Webley, the accordionist from Everett, Washington, built a boat out of garbage and hired a punk circus about five or six years ago, and they just started floating rivers. It’s DIY, and it’s basically glorified busking, but the kind of busking where we're playing to 3000 people and we're getting guarantees and making good money. Jason guarantees us all. He's one of my mentors, honestly, because he made it. He's an inspiring person because he just plays fucked up songs on the accordion. He got picked up by a weird punk band in Seattle back in the '90s and started touring. Then he made his living just doing these fucked-up accordion songs and hollering his ass off and getting people to mosh to acoustic music. He’s kind of proto-folk punk, but it’s polished up. His later albums are more, maybe kind of like pop folk. Accessible. They're cool-sounding. So he made a good living and wanted to reinvest his success in supporting other edgy artists coming out of political scenes.

So the circus, it's about climate change. It's a dystopian show told through circus arts with a live band and a fiddler. Climate change has havocked the world, and everyone has devolved into mutant fish except for these last humans, the clowns on the boat. So we do this show where we're the evil fish making fun of these fucking humans for dying. It's pretty nihilistic. We took it through the rural Midwest the last two years and just talked about climate change with rural Midwesterners and folks fuck with it. Like I said, I think there are a lot of good people out there in these so-called “red states.”

We're doing the Erie Canal and the Hudson River this year. We're starting in Buffalo on August 1, and we'll end in Manhattan on September 14. We float it and it goes like six miles an hour, so we just have to play every little town. You can only get as far as you can with a little outboard motor. It's kind of old-fashioned. These folks are mostly like, circus and vaudeville, like that kind of artistic side. It has an intersection with punk, but it wasn't mine. Like I was country punk and I got into crust. But it's old-timey. It's how back in the day, ringleaders like Jason were just trying to like get weirdos and outsiders paid. Some of these people who were in circuses, either their artistic pursuit was so niche or something about them was so weird that they couldn’t get regular jobs. The circus is an opportunity, and Jason's really made an opportunity for me to do my weird diaspora punk experimentations.

GJ: What role do your politics play in your music?

MH: They’re inseparable. “Fox and the Crow” is just about mischief, and I wrote it at the beginning of the Palestine uprising. You know, we're still all thinking about that every day. It's really fucked up that our, you know, the government is just getting fashier and fashier, and I just don't think anybody in this country wants this to be happening. So I talk about Palestine every show, and it was nice when we played Neumos, in front of 300, 400 people with Bridge City Sinners, and every single band talked about Palestine. We need to keep reminding each other that we're all on the same page about this and that we need to fucking shut the shit down.

“Fleas Infest” is the song that went viral on TikTok a couple of summers ago, and that song is just making fun of capitalists.

GJ: You seem to carry a sense of optimism, even as you’re calling attention to these issues.

MH: I think I have a healthy dose of nihilism. I think nihilism has some interesting artistic potential. I think digging into the darkness, there’s a lot that comes from that. So artistically, that's important to me. My lived experience is pretty- I just know a lot of good people in a lot of places, and my day-to-day life is just spending time with good people, talking about based projects. So honestly, yeah, my life is pretty optimistic, even as we exist in the apocalypse. That's the message to my music. We're in the apocalypse. The title track on “The Lupine” is a ballad about different social movements I've been adjacent to over the years, mostly through metaphor, you know, because I don't need to be explicit. But I’m trying to evoke some of those memories because I think we need to be documenting the struggle for the next generation so they know where we're coming from and what we're working with.

GJ: Before we started the interview, you mentioned that you mostly listen to hip hop these days. What are some artists or releases you have in rotation?

MH: Oh, hard trap. Bad bitch music. That's the only thing I can listen to. Everything else sounds like shit to me now. Cardi B was the one who got me into it, and then Megan Thee Stallion. But I really like Tierra Whack and Leikeli47. As a teenager, I remember hearing older punks say that rap is what punk is. That’s where the punk energy is. When I was a teenager, I felt like a lot of the rap that was popular was really polished, and it wasn't super angry. I was like, “I listen to grindcore, like Cattle Decapitation. I don't understand that stuff at all.”

But then when I heard Cardi B, I was like, “Oh, okay. Oh shit.” And there's a lot of Brazilian trap and drill, a lot of these names that I can't pronounce that Rye got me into. The Brazilian scene is like, they're drawing on rhythms from samba and Afro diasporic drum and music dance traditions, but then also punk, and it's also hard shit. And revolutionary. I think the Brazilian drill scene is an influence for our band Blowgun. I would say we're pretty directly influenced by the Brazilian drill scene and, and we plan to collaborate with rappers.

GJ: Do you have any rappers in mind that you would like to collaborate with?

MH: Yeah, I'm kind of scouting. A lot of the rappers I listen to are pretty professional musicians. It'd be fun to get whatever shit we're doing off the ground enough that people take it seriously, or we can make enough money to hire somebody. Or just get somebody's attention. Like I said, all the bad bitch rappers, I fucking love. I've seen this group from San Diego, The Neighborhood Kids. They’re pretty radical, and they’re doing a lot of political stuff down there. And they’ve got a lot of energy, and I'd love to jam with those folks. So I'm kind of keeping my eye out. There are some homies in New Orleans who rap. Rye went to school with NCognita, who did “Clap Clap.” That’s a fucking cool song. I'm still pretty deep in the old-time scene right now, and I'd like to build more networks outside of this.

Miriam Hacksaw will be touring the Erie Canal and the Hudson River with the Flotsam River Circus until September 14. She will then be touring the Southwest with Blowgun until October 10. If she isn’t performing near you on this run, chances are she will soon!

Miriam Hacksaw's upcoming tour dates

From D-Beat to Old-Time Music: Miriam Hacksaw Is a Vessel of Sonic Tradition

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From D-Beat to Old-Time Music: Miriam Hacksaw Is a Vessel of Sonic Tradition

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