The tale of Larry & Joe
Written by Monica Hooper for the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
11.06.25
When Larry & Joe open the third annual Arkansas Country Blues and Stringband Festival Nov. 14 in Springdale’s Luther George Park, their performance will be a visual and sonic representation of the festival’s core: finding connections across cultures through playing songs and sharing stories.
The duo, founded in 2023, features Joe Troop, a renowned Appalachian musician from North Carolina, and Larry Bellorín, a legend of Musica Llanera from Venezuela. Like many performers for the Arkansas Country Blues and Stringband Festival, music is their common language across cultures.
Bellorín’s musical career began when he was discovered at age 6, singing while shining shoes to help support his family in the state of Monagas, Venezuela. A music teacher heard him singing and offered him a spot in a prestigious music school where he learned to play cuatro — a four-stringed guitar with Spanish roots often used in Venezuelan follk music.
According to Larry & Joe’s online biography, Bellorín was supporting himself through music by age 11 and by 13 became proficient at playing other instruments like mandolin, electric bass and maracas. Later he picked up harp after Urbino Ruiz, a major figure in Llanera music, helped him master the instrument with roots in the folk style. Bellorín began making music full- time, touring Venezuela and eventually opening his own music school there.
By 2012, Bellorín’s career was over. Escalating political violence in Venezuela led him to seek asylum in the U.S. for himself and his family. He landed in Durham, N.C., where he found work in construction and occasional gigs playing bass for local salsa bands. By the time he established his own Venezuelan folk group, the covid pandemic lockdown cut their time short.
Prior to 2020, North Carolina musician Joe Troop was living in Argentina and teaching bluegrass music.
There Troop founded a stringband called Che Apalache, which combined Appalachian music with Argentian influences. After self-releasing their first album, the group caught Bé- la Fleck’s attention. Their second album, “Rearrange My Heart,” was produced by Fleck and gained a Grammy nomination, but the group called it quits when the covid pandemic hit in 2020.
That’s when Troop began working with asylum seekers at a migrant shelter on the Mexican side of the wall, he said in a recent interview with the NWA Democrat-Gazette. While working with migrants seeking a better life in the U.S., a friend told him about Larry Bellorín.
“The first time we met, we actually walked right on stage, played some songs together and were very well received by the audience, and the rest is history. Since that time, we’ve played 500 gigs or more nationwide,” said Troop.
In 2022, they began recording an album, “Nuevo South Train.” Since 2023, the duo have worked together and toured fulltime, even playing recently in Fort Smith and Little Rock.
“We’ve had a very positive reception, because I think our music is approachable,” Troop said. “We just want to make it a beautiful experience for audiences, and we take people on on a wild ride through storytelling, the music itself, a little dance, a whole lot of joy and respect for traditional music.”
While Troop speaks Spanish fluently, both he and Bellorín are also steeped in each other’s musical backgrounds, allowing them another common language to delve into the subtleties of each other’s musical traditions while creating a sound unique to the duo.
“Llanera music is a highly specified style, so of course, I’ve learned a lot of stylistic things from him,” Troop said. “A lot of it is an organic process that happens because I lived outside of the United States for 14 years and absorbed a lot of different things. Larry has been here now
a decade, so he’s absorbed a lot of our folk traditions, so both of us have a unique set of tools at our disposal from the get go that helps us navigate some of the fusion difficulties, because we have both traditions in our wheelhouse.”
With all the traditional instruments they can “throw in the van,” the duo represents the cross-cultural dialogue happening through the Arkansas Country Blues and Stringband Festival — two people steeped in the folk traditions of their homelands finding connection and brotherhood through music.
In addition to opening the festival on Friday, Larry & Joe will trade songs during Las Baladas hosted by singer-songwriter Carolina Mendoza of Eureka Springs 3 p.m. Nov. 15 at the Jones Center in Springdale.
