By Lindsay Street
Husband and wife team Simon and Sara Spaulding will release their second album this week and throw an album release concert next Friday at Trent River Coffee Co. in New Bern.
The Spauldings perform under the name Tuppence and play folk music. They sing and play fiddle, guitar, mandolin, octar, autoharp and bodhran (Irish drum). Next Friday's program will feature Irish and Scottish songs from the album, as well as traditional and contemporary ballads, Ragtime, sea songs, fiddle tunes and more.
Tickets are $5, the concert starts at 7 p.m., and the album "Give Me Your Hand" is $15.
"Give Me Your Hand" features folk songs from Scotland and Ireland.
"We talked about what repertoire we wanted to focus on and we couldn't really decide between Scottish and Irish," Mr. Spaulding said.
The songs are primarily longer ballads.
"They're really long and they're almost always really, really sad," Mr. Spaulding said. "We're pretty traditional in this."
The group performed three songs with Irish immigrant Sean MacMahon, who plays the traditional button accordion.
The Spauldings met in Texas in 1996. Both were playing at a festival called Cavalier Days.
"We met and discovered we were both really interested in history as well as music," Mr. Spaulding said.
At the following year's festival, they met again. By 1998, Mrs. Spaulding moved to New Bern with Mr. Spaulding. In 1999, they formed Tuppence.
"Friends make music ... (and) we started looking at what the possibility would be of performing together," Mr. Spaulding said. "It really didn't take long before we were playing festivals."
Tuppence released its first album, "Small Change," in 2001.
Unlike "Give Me Your Hand," which is rich in British Isles folk music, "Small Change" is a compilation of musical genres with a heavy focus on ragtime.
"We thought for the second it should be more specialized," Mr. Spaulding said.
The Spauldings pick up genres that interest them and rely on one another's strengths.
"We've gone through phases together and separately," Mr. Spaulding said. "Sara has a more polished voice than I do and that's something that can come out of a collaboration."
The Spauldings' musical endeavors sparked their relationship, and now Tuppence is testimony.
"Music is not really competitive. Music is essentially cooperative," Mr. Spaulding said. Like in marriage, you have to listen to each other and give each other space, he added. "So much about music is inherently cooperative."
For more information, call (252) 514-2030 or visit www.tuppencefolk.com.
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