Larry & Joe - Love Along the Way (Live)

“Even as a wave of incensed xenophobia ravages middle America,” writes Joe Troop about Larry & Joe’s new single, “Love Along the Way (Live),” “even as the propaganda machine assures us we’re inconsolably different, my buddy Larry and I have peacefully come together to make sweet music. We learn from each other, interpreting one another’s musical traditions with our own folk tradition’s instruments.

“When I wrote this bluegrass anthem for unity in 2020, I never imagined a Venezuelan llanera harp could lend itself so perfectly to my Appalachian music. But at that point I hadn’t met Larry Bellorín. After a few hundred gigs together across much of this country, we filmed this rendition last summer in a beautiful church in the mountains of eastern Kentucky for the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF5OxTrAM9g). I see it as proof that music has no borders, just like the human hearts that make it.

Larry & Joe’s album Manos Panamericanos is currently #8 on the FAI Top Albums Chart. Recently featured on PBS’ The Express Way With Dulé Hill and “Here and Now” on NPR, Larry Bellorín and Joe Troop are versatile multi-instrumentalists, singers, and songwriters on a mission to show that music has no borders. Currently based in the Triangle region of North Carolina, as a duo they perform a fusion of Venezuelan and Appalachian folk music on harp, banjo, cuatro, fiddle, maracas, guitar, upright bass, and whatever else they decide to throw in the van. Their debut album, Nuevo South Train, released in May 2023, reached #12 on both the NACC Folk Chart and the FAI Top Folk Albums.