‘Latingrass’ folk duo Larry & Joe discuss collaboration, legacy of folk music …
Interviewed by Julia Weber for WOUB
6.20.25
NELSONVILLE, Ohio (WOUB) – Larry & Joe, composed of folk musicians Larry Bellorín and Joe Troop, are fusing Venezuelan and Appalachian folk music and forging cross-cultural collaboration through their partnership.
In the four years they have spent working together, the two artists have brought their own distinct sonic styles and influences to the table to create ‘latingrass’, a genre coined by the artists for their pan-American influences. They have played approximately 450 shows throughout the duration of their partnership, with the latest being their Friday afternoon set at Southeast Ohio’s Nelsonville Music Festival (NMF).
Ahead of their performance at NMF, Larry & Joe spoke with WOUB’s Julia Weber about cross-cultural collaboration, contemporary folk music and music’s ability to transcend borders and cultures. A transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below. Note that Bellorín’s responses were translated from Spanish to English by Troop.
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JULIA WEBER: Tell me about how the two of you first met.
TROOP: We met in 2021, but it’s kind of a long story. Larry is an asylum seeker from Venezuela who wound up in North Carolina nine and a half-years ago. He is a brilliant musician, but when he got to the United States, he had to work construction for six and a half-years to provide for his family, so music took a back seat. The pandemic ruined my operation — I was going back and forth between Argentina and the States with a band called Che Apalache — I wound up working in the immigrant rights sphere.
I wound up at a migrant shelter in Mexico working with asylum seekers. I was still playing music professionally, but I was coasting around. I had been offered a residency in Durham, NC, where I now live and a mutual friend said ‘Hey, you’re a musician. You work with asylum seekers. You ought to meet this brilliant asylum-seeking musician who is working construction in Raleigh.’ She tipped me off and I invited him to play on the residency, and then sparks flew. It was musical love at first listen. Since that month, we’ve played [about] 450 gigs all over the United States.
You released Manos Panamericanos last September, and I would love to know a little bit about the recording process behind the album and your collaboration in more of a studio setting.
TROOP: That album we recorded over the course of three different sessions over the course of two months. We’d go in for a couple of days, rest for a few weeks, do it in a couple of days. We did it that way and it was wonderful. We determined which tracks could use some featured artists; we got some of our friends from all around the world to record on, I believe, eight of the ten tracks have guests, if I’m not mistaken. Maybe nine of the ten tracks, but anyway, a bunch of them have guest artists. It was really special.
It’s a mix of traditional music from all across the Americas — not just from Venezuela and the United States — but from other places in Latin America. There are several original pieces. The first song is a composition Larry came up with in honor of the Venezuelan Heron, the bird of his town. I wrote three songs that talk about everything from natural disasters to billionaires and climate change and love. We’re really happy with that song. It’s a nice pan-American potpourri.
You mentioned that you had guest artists on many of the songs on the album, and it seems like, at its very core, your partnership is about collaboration. Tell me about the value you see in collaborating and, particularly, of collaborating in folk music, which is traditionally a genre based on collaborating with one another and building things as a group instead of as individuals.
BELLORÍN: Collaborating with someone affords you [an opportunity] to enter into a world of different ideas, but at the same time, you’re going to get to a singular purpose, just with different optics. Our collaboration is something obviously very unique because we have such different musical traditions that we’re bringing together, but it brings something holistically ours. It’s something exciting because it’s not just music, it’s expressing our souls, and that’s what music is all about.
I love that idea.
TROOP: We were just talking about that, how folk music is a vibe and it’s universal. Even though the musical styles are so different, the notion of having these portable instruments and being able to do it pretty much everywhere — most of the time, we’re on stage or we’re rehearsing in one of our houses — we’ve played at big outdoor gatherings around campfires and all of these wonderful situations where [there is] no electricity needed. We can take our instruments to whatever gathering is happening and liven up the party.
This leads right into my next question that I had for you both. Venezuelan and Appalachian music have many differences, but folk music at the same time, as a genre, is founded on some core traits. What similarities do you find between Venezuelan and Appalachian folk music versus any differences that you find?
TROOP: Both the música llanera and all the musical traditions [and] folk traditions of Venezuela, there’s this vibe, how people will abandon real life, their jobs and their domiciles, to congregate for a week at a time for folk music festivals. That’s one similarity; they do that down there just like we do it up here. Another similarity between música llanera, which is the music of the plains region shared between Venezuela and Colombia, a similarity between música llanera and Appalachian music is that it’s all strings. I learned how to play the banjo, the fiddle, the guitar, the mandolin, the instruments you would play in bluegrass, but Larry learned the música llanera instruments: the harp, the quattro, the bass and the maracas. There’s a lot of similarities.
BELLORÍN: Both of these musical traditions are pretty rustic. They come out of the soul. They’re very rural art forms. You play this music in open spaces within nature and it’s similar in both cultures how people get together and make music in the natural world. A lot of music that comes out of those traditions is poetry of the natural world: sunsets and sitting by a river, how the wind reminds you of something in your distant past. Nature is animated and that is what fuels the traditional songs, that imagery.
What do you see the role of contemporary folk music — across languages, cultures and borders — as being?
BELLORÍN: One of the principal things you can do is to maintain the idiosyncrasies and the identities of our places of origin, of our pueblos. It does what folk traditions have always done, but it’s more important when everything is so corporatized. It’s easy for these beautiful musical ideas to be swallowed up, forgotten.
TROOP: It can be very symbolic because you’d associate traditional folk music with rural identity, but it’s also very cosmopolitan and worldly. It can inspire grassroots organizing and regional-focused mindsets, which incorporates all of the traditions which make it in those regions. Contemporary folk music should express the globalized reality that we live in, that’s what we’re saying. The music of North Carolina is Larry & Joe; it’s not just bluegrass because they play joropo in North Carolina. Honestly, it feels just like folk music — that’s all it is — but it is a commentary on how the notion of folk music has to exist within a contemporary lens.
That’s really interesting. What’s your favorite thing about the partnership that the two of you have created?
TROOP: I like that we can learn from each other so much, and as we travel around, expose each other to such beautiful musical traditions that we had no access to if not for this friendship.
BELLORÍN: We created something that can be shared between folk traditions.
TROOP: It opens the possibility for people to share with one another as a result of having heard what we do. Hopefully, other people will do the same thing. We’re basically the result of having listened to people who did it before us, so we’re along that line of musicians from different places who decided to collaborate. We’re not the first or the last, but it’s nice to be a part of that continuum of this ‘music has no borders’ phenomenon, which is so great about art. Especially now, with all the tensions that exist in the world, music can, in some way, challenge the prejudices that are so widespread and bring it down to the Earth for a second.
You’re en route to play Nelsonville Music Festival. Is there anything that you want attendees of the festival to know about you or about your music ahead of the festival?
BELLORÍN: We are a group that shows the power of integration.
TROOP: We can show the joy of cross-cultural collaboration. People that come to see our show can expect a mix of music, storytelling and dance, and that’s a powerful cocktail for healing and for joy.
