Laurel Premo
Laurel Premo is a Michigan fiddler, guitarist and singer who co-founded the duo Red Tail Ring with Michael Beauchamp-Cohen in 2009 and has since made solo records that join American old-time fiddle and banjo music to Nordic traditions. She plays fiddle, banjo, fingerstyle electric guitar and lap steel.
She grew up in the Upper Midwest with folk music at home: her parents, Bette and Dean Premo, play fiddle and guitar and sing traditional songs in Michigan, and she counts them among her mentors along with the Michigan clawhammer banjo player Joel Mabus, the Finnish fiddler Arto Järvelä, the Norwegian fiddler Ånon Egeland and the Irish guitarist Gerry O’Beirne. She holds a BFA from the Performing Arts Technology Department of the University of Michigan School of Music and spent half-year stints studying traditional music and dance at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and at the University College of Southeast Norway in Telemark.
Red Tail Ring, based in Kalamazoo, released two albums together in April 2011: Middlewest Chant, of the duo’s own songs, and Mountain Shout, recorded live in a wooden house, of traditional pieces such as “Pretty Polly,” “Red Rocking Chair” and “Bowling Green,” with Premo on banjo, fiddle, guitar and jaw harp. The Heart’s Swift Foot (2013), recorded at La Luna Studio in Kalamazoo, was mostly new songs by the pair, with Hazel Dickens’s “My Heart’s Own Love” and the ballad “St. James Hospital” recorded in honor of Dickens and Doc Watson; Premo mixed it and designed its cover, as she did for Fall Away Blues (2016), which set eight originals beside “Wondrous Love,” “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies” and a fiddle tune. The duo has toured the United States and played in Canada, the UK, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Sweden and Australia, at festivals such as Wheatland, Hiawatha and the Indiana Fiddlers’ Gathering and at the Port Fairy Folk Festival in March 2019.
Her own records began with a banjo and nyckelharpa duet album with the Swedish musician Anna Gustavsson in 2016. The Iron Trios, released on 11 October 2019, is a self-produced, fiddle-led instrumental trio record with fingerstyle electric guitar and bowed double bass, setting walking-paced traditional fiddle tunes against guitar and closing with a shape-note hymn. Golden Loam (8 October 2021), arranged, produced and recorded by Premo during the 2020 lockdown, is mostly solo electric guitar and lap steel; it mixes three of her own pieces with arrangements of traditional music learned from players such as the West Virginia fiddler Edden Hammons, a Norwegian wedding march and “I Am a Pilgrim,” and features the percussive dancer Nic Gareiss on two tracks. In 2023 Will Oldham chose her as the opening act on a tour. Her third solo album, Laments, released on 31 October 2025 and recorded in March 2024, is four pieces for solo voice and fiddle rooted in the music of lamentation, three of them her own compositions and one an arrangement of a waulking song from the Outer Hebrides.
