Sophie Wellington Makes Old Songs New at Club Passim

Some homecomings are geographic. Sophie Wellington's is spiritual. The Virginia-born, Berklee-trained old-time musician takes the stage at Club Passim tonight — the little Harvard Square basement that has been the beating heart of New England folk since before most of tonight's crowd was born — to celebrate "Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still," her new album co-produced by folk royalty Cathy Fink. Doors at 7, show at 8, and if the room does what it usually does, it'll feel less like a concert than a very good kitchen party with excellent acoustics.

Wellington is not your average revivalist. She's a fiddler, a flatpicking guitarist, a jazz vocalist and — the detail everyone remembers — a percussive dancer, meaning she can lay down her own rhythm section with her feet. She grew up steeped in Virginia's contra-and-square-dance world, then landed in Boston to study at Berklee, where she graduated in 2022 after working under old-time master Bruce Molsky and blues greats Paul Rishell and Annie Raines. That combination — traditional repertoire filtered through a jazz musician's ear for harmony — is the engine of the new record.

Released July 10 on the artist-friendly Adhyâropa label, "Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still" takes early-20th-century ballads and fiddle tunes and reroutes them through alternate tunings, droning open strings and a "different harmonic space," in Wellington's own words. WBUR, naming it among their favorite local records of July, put it plainly: she "found some remarkably original and fresh-sounding ways of making some very old songs sound brand new." The lead single, "Scolding Wife," is a good preview of the trick — a tune old as the hills that somehow arrives sounding like it was written yesterday morning.

Having Cathy Fink in the producer's chair is its own kind of endorsement. Fink is a multi-Grammy-winning fixture of American roots music who, with her longtime partner Marcy Marxer, has spent decades both making records and championing the next generation of traditional players. When someone with that résumé signs on to shape your debut-era statement, the folk world takes note.

So does Passim. There may be no more fitting room in America for this record. The venue — which grew out of the legendary Club 47 — is where Joan Baez, Tom Rush and a young Bob Dylan cut their teeth in the 1960s, and it has never stopped being a place where tradition and reinvention argue happily over the same table. A percussive dancer reworking old ballads for a listening crowd of maybe a hundred people is exactly the kind of thing Passim exists to host.

Tonight's bill pairs Wellington with The Asheville Mountain Boys, a bluegrass outfit operating under the gloriously stubborn motto "No plugs, no pedals, only bluegrass." It's a smart double bill: her jazz-informed old-time set and their purist string-band drive are two different answers to the same question of how you keep century-old music alive without embalming it.

For Wellington, the connection to community runs deep. "I feel like when you grow up in a community like that," she has said of her musical upbringing, "it's a real privilege to get to know people through your parents and their existing friendships and connections." That's the folk tradition in a sentence — music as a way of belonging to people — and it's the tradition Passim has protected in its basement for six decades.

Old-time music survives because every generation finds someone willing to pick the tunes up and turn them slightly, so the light catches a new facet. Tonight, in a Cambridge basement, Sophie Wellington is that someone. Get there early. The good seats go fast, and this is a room where you'll want to hear her feet.

Sources: Our favorite local music we heard in July — WBUR; Sophie Mae Wellington & The Asheville Mountain Boys — Passim; Sophie Wellington announces new album — The Line of Best Fit