Q+A: Larry & Joe
Interviewed by Saroyan Humphrey for Trailblazer Magazine
06.01.2026
Feature | Making music without walls, Larry Bellorín and Joe Troop on fusing the gap between Latin American and old-time American music.
For Larry Bellorín and Joe Troop—performing together as Larry & Joe—making music isn’t only a job, a craft and an emotional outlet. It’s also an opportunity to bridge the gap between Latin American and old-time American music, bringing people together in a melting pot of working-class cultures and traditions.
While touring California in May, Larry & Joe talked about their music as they were driving across the state, on their way to the next gig.
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How did you and Larry meet and start the duo?
Joe: Prior to the pandemic, I lived in Buenos Aires, and was bouncing back and forth between Argentina and the US with a band called Che Apalache. I was having a really good run with that band and I sort of established myself in the US as a folk music enthusiast from North Carolina. I played bluegrass and old time, but I lived in Latin America and was really involved in Latin American music. I made a name for myself as a Latingrass musician, fusing Latin American and Appalachian folk music. Then the pandemic shut down my operation.
I sort of wound up pivoting into advocacy in 2020 and 2021, and I started using my musical platform to raise awareness for what migrants were going through. I eventually got invited down into the borderlands to a shelter in Nogales, Mexico, catering to asylum seekers to offer counseling. I was a career musician working with asylum seekers and in late 2021, one of my friends back in North Carolina said, ‘Hey, you should meet this other dude who’s a career musician. He’s an asylum seeker from Venezuela, who’s living in North Carolina and working construction.’
She sent me videos of Larry. I was floored. I was like, ‘Wow, this, this is amazing. I gotta meet this guy.’
So, I rushed back to North Carolina, and in December 2021, I had a residency at this art space called The Fruit [in Durham]. It was a concert series that I was curating and I was looking for collaborators. I asked Larry to come and collaborate and then I got Covid during the week we were gonna rehearse. We had to hit the stage without much of a rehearsal. We rehearsed like an hour before the show and we barely got the stuff together, but it was immediate alchemy-synergy and the audience loved us. They gave us a standing ovation. It was pretty clear that we had a lot of connection.
Within 13 months of that musical convergence, we got an album [Nuevo South Train] together, produced by Charlie Hunter. We dotted around regionally, played a slew of gigs, and sort of primed the pump for what happened in January of 2023, when we went full time and full throttle into this project. Larry left construction and I put all my other projects on the sideline and we went for it. Over the last four-and-a-half years we played almost 500 gigs in 39 states.
Larry Bellorín and Joe Troop in San Francisco, May 2026.
Larry is an asylum seeker from Venezuela. He had a prominent musical career back home. He was the director of a music school with hundreds of enrolled students. He toured internationally, was a recording artist, and had a very cushy middle-class life.
But then his country started spiraling into disarray, and a decade ago, his family was forced into migration for their own safety. By the grace of the universe, they became asylum seekers. They enrolled into the asylum program and wound up in Raleigh, North Carolina. He had to hang up his true vocation, which was music, and lift cinder blocks for a retaining wall company. It was noble work that he was glad to have, but it was a far cry from being a professional musician back home. He persevered, through a lot of job-related injuries, and like I said, he’s been able to get back to music full time in the United States.
Larry: [translated] This has been the most enjoyable adventure ever. I feel blessed to have seen so many things that most people are never gonna get to see. Every state in the nation that we go to has a different horizon and different culture. It has been very gratifying.
You and Larry collaborate, arrange and write original songs.
Joe: Right, arranging new versions of traditional songs from the Pan-American songbook, which is a term we like to use. We’ve got two albums and we’re already working on our third. It’s classic music from all over the Americas. We do a lot of stuff from North America, a lot of stuff from South America, and things from in between, the Caribbean, and Central America.
We do a lot of songwriting as well. Some of our original numbers, like the title track off of our first album, are a fusion of a lot of our respective traditions all thrown together. You’ll definitely notice bluegrass and country, but you’ll also notice Cumbia, salsa, Mexican folk music, and a lot of bilingual compositions.
Our music speaks to this larger community of people who are at the intersection of cultures. There are tens of millions of people in the United States who are between Latin American and North American identities, you know, and when you travel around as a duo like ours, you come in contact with a lot of those people and it’s really cool.
Talk about the themes and subjects you bridge between Latin American and bluegrass and folk music
Joe: There’s a universal theme of belonging, migration and longing for home that you hear in bluegrass because a lot of Appalachians had to go to the cities. Like that old song “Dark Hollow,” [singing]
I’d rather be in some dark hollow
where the sun don't ever shine
than to be in some big city
In a small room with your love on my mind
So blow your whistle freight train
take me farther on down the track
I’m going away, I’m leaving today
I’m going and I ain’t coming back
It’s a longing for home. You’ll find that in all traditions across the Americas. It’s rejoicing in the idiosyncrasies of one’s own culture. They’re different places but they have similarities. Appalachian music comes out of oak trees and blue jays and a lot of Venezuelan folk music comes out of mango trees and parrots. Nature and the natural world produces very different expressions, and forms of expression, but the things that the music, the folk music genres have in common are being enveloped by the natural world.
How would you define your sound, the mixing of the instrumentation, and native instruments?
Joe: The name of our second album is Manos Paramericanos, which manos can mean hands. But in Venezuela, hermanos is shortened to manos, so it means both. Hands and brothers like Pan American brothers and our sound is like a Pan American quilt, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. We’re trying to bring these traditions closer together.
The instrumentation is unique. There’s never really been a banjo-cuatro exploration or a banjo-maracas or banjo-harp exploration or steel-string American guitar and harp or fiddle and cuatro. Well, that’s been done, but not with a bluegrass fiddler and a Venezuelan cuatrista, guitar and cuatro.
We play a bunch of different instruments. We’re able to do different permutations within and explore a lot of different textures and that’s a unique opportunity. We take people on a wild ride through a lot of different textures. It’s a variety show.
Larry: [translated] Our sound is unique because we are playing instruments that have never been played together. Yes, and as the years have gone by, we’ve really landed on our own unique style. I think our third album is gonna be a testament to that. We’ve definitely got something very uniquely ours. We’re pioneers in bringing these rhythms together so that they might dance together.
And educational.
Joe: Yes, often times we’ll pair educational outreach with public performance. We work with a lot of children and tailor-fit programming for K through college. We do fully bilingual programming and our overarching message is one of how cool it is to bring our cultures together and how much of a joy explosion it can be. Kids really understand. It’s just this magical cocktail of music, storytelling, and dance.
The last time I talked you was in 2021, the pandemic was waning, and meeting you this time, you seem a lot more enthusiastic about music and life.
Joe: It was a terrible time to be a musician. So yeah, it was really, really hard. I was hustling and looking for a way to get my life back, honestly. I’m in a good place right now. I feel like I was sort of like a phoenix rising from the ashes. I’ve been able to settle down and feel rooted again in North Carolina. Things started falling into place. I was living an itinerant lifestyle and it’s exhausting living out of a van. I was in a dark moment, but you can’t walk into the light unless you walk through the darkness.
The duo seems to have inspired you.
Joe: Oh God, yes. The duo project with Larry has been an amazing source of inspiration. It brings together a lot of different aspects of what I had explored as an artist and as a person, different folk music genres from across the Americas, but also advocacy and immigrant rights, migrant rights. These things are all part of the framework of my project with Larry. Given the fact that Larry is an asylum seeker, it’s like it was meant to be.
We would love to take this operation on the road but we can’t leave the continental United States. Larry is protected by TPS [temporary protective status] but he can’t travel outside of the US.
What do you have planned for the near future?
Joe: We’re getting a bunch of new material together for another album and we’re touring extensively. We had a great showing at the Strawberry Music Festival [in Grass Valley, California]. It was one of the best gigs we’ve ever played. There were people from all over California. It was awesome.
We’re just gonna continue to tour far and wide, share our message, make fans one gig at a time and put new music out into the world. It’s kind of a continuation of what we already do, but, you know, as the years go by, we have more experience behind us, and I think our music is getting more mature, it’s ripening.
We pull from our own previous influences and it’s just kind of like we’re explaining something abstract. So, it’s only an analogy, but it’s kind of like we’re able to interweave our pasts a little bit more into something more organic, more mature, it’s just getting better and better. That’s how it works. It’s getting more unique to us.
Larry: [translated] We’ve taken our respective, individual bag of tricks and we’ve brought them into more communion together.
Joe: We’re going to release a song, “Where Would I Go Running,” thats emblematic of where we are right now on World Refugee Day [June 20, 2026].
Are audiences generally responsive to your politically charged songs?
Joe: Yeah, a fairly large percentage of the audience at Strawberry gave us a standing ovation and it was mostly a white audience.
Sometimes it’s different. There are people who don’t have any contact with migrant people or Latinos in the United States and they probably don’t care. They don’t want to get down because they just think it has nothing to do with their lives. Some of them might resent it, I don’t know.
There was this one snaggle-puss in Ohio, who came up after the gig and she said, ‘I just wish you would let us fall in love with Larry and not share your opinions so much.’
I was thinking, ‘I’ll say whatever I want. Who are you to tell me what I can and can’t say?
Sounds like the song made her feel uncomfortable.
Joe: Right, I did my job as an artist. It made her take a good look in the mirror. I just put a big mirror up in her face and she didn’t like it because she knows she’s a hypocrite.
You’re still making good trouble.
Joe: Yeah, gotta make good trouble. It is not fun to get approached by snaggle-people. But sometimes you play a show and there’s a person who just needs, for some reason, to communicate something negative to you. I would say it’s relatively rare but it happens frequently enough to where you start getting thicker skin. But for the most part, man, it’s all love. We share a message of joy to people. Some people are so miserable, they reject joy. Can you imagine?
Do you have a favorite region to perform?
Joe: We love to play all over the country but there is something special about doing this music in North Carolina because that’s where we live and that’s our community. That’s the natural world that we see most of the time. We’re connected to friends and family members that are there and it’s nice to have them in the audience.
We love playing in New England. We love playing in the Midwest. We love the Deep South. We love the West Coast. We love playing out in the Rockies. We love the Southwest.
Larry: [translated] Yesterday, at Strawberry, they made us feel so good, at home.
Joe: Sometimes we will have these gigs that are mostly Latino people and then we’ll have gigs where it’s mostly white people then we’ll have gigs where it’s, you know, every color of the rainbow.
Larry: [translated] I love to play in the place where we initiated this duo, Durham, North Carolina. That’s where we played most of our first gigs, at this cool, hip, art space, The Fruit. That’s where this duo was born.
Joe: Yeah, that was our womb.
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