Ernie Palmer is a retired schoolteacher whose lifelong love of music have resulted in the album, A Teacher, A Preacher and A Bad Farmer. The 76-year-old worked with two much younger friends, Jay Rudd (Swamptooth) and Aaron Zimmer (City Hotell), who are both accomplished Bluegrass musicians, on this collection of songs. Aaron Zimmer, who is also Ernie’s son-in-law and former student, came up with the idea and suggested the album title based on a story that Ernie told him about his own paternal grandfather.
Joining for the album are Vito Gutilla of the Ploughboys on fiddle, and pedal steel player Taylor Swan. The new album will arrive on June 6th, 2025, and “recount events in timeless, rural lives that break the normal cycles: sudden death, going to war, journeys, feuds, and, of course, love.”
Today, we’re very pleased to premier a song from the new album, titled “How Gently”, that will arrive digitally this Friday, March 28th, 2025.
This charming track is a heart-on-the-sleeve love song that’s couched in real-world detail of a narrative situation where the speaker is setting off driving on a long journey home, long enough that it leads through the night, on snowy roads. It follows the speaker’s thoughts and feelings on this journey as they turn towards his life-partner and accompanies them, finally, home to their destination in their partner’s arms. The texture of the song is a grounding elements, drawing in the chatter on the radio, the love songs it plays, and the snowplows of the highway. But simple and poetic lyrics equally lift the song to touching heights when the speaker has an almost visionary sense of the importance of their partner in their life, their “compass”, “northern star”, and more.
The music of the song does indeed feel like it could have been written many decades earlier, and that’s in keeping with the very spare production methods capturing a live performance feel for the vocals while making sure that the instruments have room to breathe. The lovely rhythmic picking, with a Western feel, is complemented by harmonica and a sense of restraint that relies on the emotive quality of the music rather than on intensity of sound. This makes for a classic love song, but one that is anchored in a sense of real-world loneliness and isolation, physical as well as emotional, but the reassuring conclusion of returning to union in a world that is otherwise not so “gentle”.
Ernie Palmer says about the song:
A love song to my wife, Gale. I wrote it, anticipating a long grueling drive home from Yellowstone where I was working.
The album was Produced by Jay Rudd and Aaron Zimmer, engineered and mixed by Jay Rudd, mastered by Philip Marsden.
Ernie Palmer grew up around children of the Great Depression and veterans of World War II, and so it was natural that ballads, especially Appalachian and Western songs, would appeal to him. He incorporated “parts of family stories into his songs, including the subjects of bootlegging and mountain feuds.”
When Aaron Zimmer told Ernie, “Let’s do an album of your songs!”, he called his friend Jay Rudd, who has a small recording studio, and the game was on. The album was recorded “in two long days with ideas being bounced around and a fair amount of laughter.”
