A Mississippi music duo meets in the middle with an organic mix of rock, folk and love
Taylor and Valley Hildebrand have chemistry — and it shows every time they perform, she with her banjo and stand-up bass and he with his guitar and soulful voice. It also shows when they talk about each other.
The musical duo has been married for about 18 months, but Taylor and Valley have been soul mates since they sparked their musical chemistry.
“There’s a spiritual connection that happens when you play music with somebody that you connect with,” Valley said. “It’s making love with our clothes on.”
The duo’s love for music and their even more apparent love for one another is as real and raw as the poetic melodies that effortlessly flow from their stringed instruments. That on-stage spark makes these veterans of the Jackson music scene quite a musical power couple.
The Hildebrands have cultivated a blend of Valley’s old-time bluegrass and Taylor’s rootsy rock-n-roll, an organic combination of two old souls.
The two began playing music together about six years ago when Taylor asked Valley to play bass on his first solo record.
“Taylor’s stuff was more, to me, rock-n-roll,” Valley said. “I had to turn up my instrument way louder. Everything I had done was acoustic and just porch music. For him, it was downscaled. We were coming from two different levels and styles.”
“We met in the middle pretty good, I thought,” Taylor said. “It was good. I learned a lot form Valley about where she was coming from musically, and I think she probably learned some stuff from me.”
Valley, deeply rooted in traditional, old-timey music, said it was the “feel” Taylor put into his songs that she learned.
“Traditional music is like stories. It’s like storytelling. It’s a song that’s like a poem. It’s predictable. It has its rhythm and it never really leaves that,” she said. “Taylor plays these very melodic songs with feel, and it’s not like math. You have to just feel it and that’s where you play, which is a real different thing.”
Taylor, a Jackson native, began playing music in high school, when a friend sold him a guitar for $50.
“I found out I could kind of sing a little bit maybe,” he said. “And, I just fell in love with doing it.”
He spent endless hours honing his songwriting craft until it started to come naturally. While he worked full-time as an elementary school teacher, he played in bands with friends — first, one called Slim’s Kitchen, followed by Passenger Jones, a band he played with for eight years. Then the time came when he believed music could be a full-time gig.
“I just kept doing it and being in bands. By the time I got past 25, I felt like I could really do something, so I started taking it seriously — like quit-my-job taking it seriously,” Taylor said.
Ready to set out on a new path and record a solo album, he was introduced to Valley, a single mom with a nursing career and two bands that played throughout the Jackson area.
Valley grew up in Brandon and started travel-nursing after completing nursing school. While on a job in Asheville, N.C., she picked up a banjo. It was Mike Seeger, half-brother of folk legend Pete Seeger, who taught her to play.
“I met him at a square dance at this little-bitty college during the cake walk, and he had this extra banjo,” Valley said. “He basically gave me a banjo and said, ‘You can borrow this as long as you want to.’”
While travel-nursing, Valley followed the music and found fiddles and banjos wherever she went.
“I would look up old-time circles, and I would find these groups of people that just met and played these traditional songs,” she said. “You immediately have a circle of friends and this community. You’re immediately family because you play traditional music.”
Valley moved back to Jackson in 2004 and started a high-energy, old-time string band called The Scramblers. Soon after, she joined The Hot Tamales, an all-girls bluegrass band, and a country blues group, The Dixie Nationals.
Taylor and Valley’s meeting and subsequent musical partnership blossomed into a full-on relationship with a realness that resembled the music they were creating.
“It connects and swirls up like, I don’t know, like tie-dye — like a recipe,” Valley said. “It just makes something. And, you can’t predict who that’s going to be with and you can’t force that. It just happens.”
Shortly after the two joined forces, they teamed up with a few other musicians — three other songwriters, a mandolin player and a drummer — to create a project called Horse Trailer.
“We had four songwriters in the group, and we just started learning each other’s songs, basically. And we played, and it went over really well. We played Thacker Mountain in Oxford, the Oxford Rhythm & Blues Festival. We opened for the Drive-By Truckers,” Taylor said. “We had a blast doing it. It was just a really great time in the Jackson music scene. It was a magic summer.”
Over time, band members either moved or had babies and Taylor and Valley got married, so Horse Trailer came to a slow halt. Now, the couple performs mostly as a duo, either performing Taylor’s solo set or songs from Valley’s folksy Little Miss So and So, a batch of songs she put together to play at farmers’ markets and festivals.
The once a week performances have turned into once or twice a month shows now that the couple stays busy co-parenting Valley’s girls, 8-year-old Ruby and 6-year-old Pearl. Taylor has returned to teaching and Valley is in graduate school to be a woman’s health nurse practitioner. Even though the performances aren’t as frequent, when Taylor and Valley hit the stage, the crowds still come to experience the organic song-stylings of Jackson’s favorite married musical duo.
“I think, definitely, we’ll record another record in the future. Now, things are different. I kind of had to grow up and be normal. I find it challenging to find time to sit down and be creative. I love where I am in my life. It’s the best time in my life ever. I’m married to this awesome girl. I got two great kids, you know. What else could I ask for,” Taylor said. “But, I still love music. So, I do a lot more listening now than I do writing. I think all that listening will help me write another record, because you know, you draw from all that stuff.”
Taylor seems to have a knack for drawing on life and love through the lyrics he pens. His album, Nena, named for his grandmother, was inspired by a box of letters exchanged between his grandparents when his grandfather was overseas during World War II.
“They did not have a perfect marriage, but they definitely loved one another. The way they spoke to each other in these letters, I feel like is kind of a lost art,” Taylor said. “People don’t talk to each other like that anymore. So, I decided to write a record based around that — about these two characters.”
Nena recounts a powerful love story that is no far cry from the passion that explodes on stage with each passing glance between Taylor and Valley as they sing and play their hearts out. It’s that connection between each other that makes what they do as musicians a somewhat magical experience.
“We fell in love with each other. We’re very attracted to each other — physically and emotionally,” Valley said. “It makes something. It made something that — I don’t know what it really sounds like, because I don’t know that we really listen to it a whole lot, but it definitely feels amazing to do together. It’s a language that we have together. It’s good stuff.”