Cristina Vane Covers Mississippi John Hurt’s “Spike Driver Blues” | CONTRARY WESTERN

A couple days before heading out on tour in support of her latest record, “Make Myself Me Again,” Cristina Vane gave us the chance to be a fly on the wall in her living room in Nashville, where she performed a stunning rendition of Mississippi John Hurt’s “Spike Driver Blues” and shared how she was drawn to the song for the first time while studying fingerpicking at McCabe's Guitar Shop in Los Angeles.

“It took me a longer than I’d thought to understand what shared music really means, ‘cause I grew up only listening to music that was ‘original’ or ‘a cover of someone else’s original song’—and I never realized how many traditional songs I knew already, but I never thought about music that way.”

Cristina also shared with us how “Spike Driver Blues” and Mississippi John Hurt’s incredible thumbpicking influenced her approach to her own songs—as well as her understanding of shared songs and folk music. Songs like “Nine Pound Hammer,” which seem to exist outside of any particular genre, helped to inform the ways that Cristina tells her own story as part of something more expansive and all-encompassing than one moment in time captured by a fly on the wall.

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CREDITS

Videographers: Emma Delevante, Emma Kieffer, & Sam Farahmand
Editor: Sam Farahmand
Color by Alex Hochstetler
Mixed by Luke Wiget
Directed & Produced by Contrary Western in Nashville, Tennessee