Steve Howell & Fats Kaplin - Know You From Old (2025) Hi-Res

For decades, guitarist and singer Steve Howell has been a devoted interpreter of early American music, known for an understated style and deep reverence for the blues, folk, and jazz traditions
Longtime collaborator Fats Kaplin is a multi-instrumentalist of rare versatility, whose fiddle, mandolin, banjo, and bouzouki have graced stages and studios alongside some of roots music’s most respected artists.
Together, Howell and Kaplin form a duo steeped in tradition yet alive with spontaneity, approaching old songs not like relics from the past but as living, breathing stories still worth telling.

On ‘Know You From Old,’ the pair digs deep into the soil of early American song, unearthing a variety of gems and breathing new life into them, with warmth and wisdom. This lovingly crafted collection traces a path through rural blues, ballads, gospel spirituals, and early jazz – the roots from which modern American music grew.

Recorded with a keen ear by Jason Weinheimer at Fellowship Hall Sound in Little Rock, Arkansas, the album feels like it was captured on a back porch or a parlor many moons ago. Howell’s seasoned vocals and fingerstyle picking recall the lineage that runs from Blind Lemon Jefferson and Mississippi John Hurt to Dave Van Ronk and Doc Watson, while Kaplin’s instrumentation weaves a tapestry of sound steeped in old-world character and grit.