Party down at Four Corners Folk Festival this weekend

Americana-soul duo Freddy & Francine – Bianca Caruso, left, and Lee Ferris – will be performing at this year’s Four Corners Folk Festival running today through Sunday in Pagosa Springs.

Courtesy of Freddy & Francine

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Americana-soul duo Freddy & Francine – Bianca Caruso, left, and Lee Ferris – will be performing at this year’s Four Corners Folk Festival running today through Sunday in Pagosa Springs.

Courtesy of Freddy & Francine

Four Corners Folk Festival offers musical acts, workshops and children’s activities.

Courtesy of Michael Pierce Photography

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Four Corners Folk Festival offers musical acts, workshops and children’s activities.

Courtesy of Michael Pierce Photography

Bianca Caruso and Lee Ferris, duo behind the Americana-soul group Freddy & Francine, have been working on the band for the better part of a decade. Their songs have a cool, almost retro, feel about them, and yet they’re totally modern.

This weekend, the two will join the likes of Los Lobos and Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn for the 22nd annual Four Corners Folk Festival in Pagosa Springs, which starts today and runs through Sunday.

I had the pleasure of talking – actually, mostly laughing because these two are pretty funny – with Caruso and Ferris about where their name came from, are they an actual couple and why they think music festivals are so important.

Q: Tell me a little about you guys: First of all, your name – where did that come from?

Bianca: We’ve been a band and we’ve been writing songs together for about 10 years. And when we first started writing songs, we wrote a song and we deemed the genre of the song that we wrote “1950s prom rock” – a very successful genre, as you probably know. We called it that, and we performed it for the first time at a kosher Jewish Chinese restaurant called Genghis Cohen in Los Angeles – great Chinese food. We performed it for the first time, and we said, “OK, everyone, this is our 1950s prom rock ballad, so grab a partner, get on the dance floor and come up with a really cheesy ’50s name.” And Lee said, “I’ll be Freddy.” And I said, “I’ll be Francine.” And by the end of the song, everyone was like, “Freddy and Francine!” And it stuck.

Q: Because you have been together relatively long for the music business, what’s your secret?

Bianca: That’s a great question. So, we’ve been together, but we’ve had some hiatuses where – we had one big hiatus where during that period, (Lee) went and toured a Broadway show called “Million Dollar Quartet” all over the world, did over 500 performances. He was doing that while I was writing a comedy show. I think absence makes the heart grow fonder, that would be a nice motto for us. And also, we just love doing it.

Lee: You know, if you ask the secret at this point, we have no other skills. (Laughs)

Q: So I take it this is your day job, too?

Bianca: This is our day job. This is our life. We have a week off right now before we go back to it, and we’re doing a lot of sleeping, a lot of unpacking bags just to repack them – that’s my favorite thing to do.

Q: Are you guys a couple, too? Is that an inappropriate question?

Lee: How could you ask that? It’s so personal! How long have we known you? (Laughs)

Bianca: We are a couple. For a long time, we weren’t really talking about it because we liked the mystique. But now, we’re talking about it more because it’s just tiring to not talk about it.

Q: Music festivals. I noticed that you’re playing a couple of them besides (Four Corners Folk Festival). Why do you think they’re important?

Bianca: We just got back from a music festival in Canada. I have never performed as Freddy & Francine in Canada, and neither had Lee before this festival. It was in a very small town, which we got dropped in the middle of and we didn’t really know, we didn’t really have any context for this area and why there was a musical festival there. But it ended up being probably one of my favorite weekends we’ve had this year.

They do this thing in Canada called “workshop performances” – and it’s not like they do in the U.S. where it’s like a workshop would be teaching a skill to people. They put three or four artists together on a stage and you play your individual songs, whether it’s covers or your own song, and the whole gist of the workshop performance is everyone plays along with you. And you just kind of create this vibe and this thing, whatever it is. Often, people will do cover tunes because other people know them, or you play your own song and you yell out the chord progression and the feel and people just get on board. And it ended up being so much fun.

The first one, we were like, “What are we supposed to do? They don’t know our songs.” We were kind of weirded out by it. And by the third one we did, it was so magical; it’s like you get to connect on this intimate level with all these other musicians and it forms this bond that you have where it’s different ... there’s something about being on stage with these people, and it really helps you grow your community.

I think festivals, to go back to your question, my community is expanding more and more for every festival I’ve played. And that’s why I think they’re important. And to perform for a big audience, but it’s more for me about the community of artists.

Lee: I just want to add ... for us, just meeting other artists is really fun, but if I think back to the dreams I had of being a musician when I was a kid, the whole idea of a bunch of people taking time out of their lives that they live on a weekly basis, to come and celebrate and listen to music – it seems in today’s world like a revolutionary act. It’s like, “Yeah, sure, you spend money and all that stuff, but you’re specifically saying that this is important.”

Music all together in one place, you get so much great energy with audiences who are interested enough to come to especially a folk festival, where it’s not the most mainstream stuff and therefore, it is sort of a stance to say, “That stuff doesn’t matter to us. Commercialism isn’t the most important thing. It’s about music.”

I’m just grateful that it’s celebrated like that. And I think not a lot of people know that unless they’re in the community that music lives in these places in our country and festivals – whether huge or small – it’s just a great way to celebrate what we all do.

katie@durangoherald.com