When Opera Met Bluegrass: How the Renée Fleming & Béla Fleck Album Actually Came Together

A collaboration between opera soprano Renée Fleming and genre-jumping banjo auteur Béla Fleck may seem, on the surface, like something that came out of nowhere. But truth is their Appalachian-flavored album The Fiddle and the Drum, which comes out Friday (May 29) has been a long time coming.

The pair — which has 23 combined Grammy wins and numerous other honors — has been talking about the project for nearly two decades, since a meeting to discuss it at a restaurant on 57th Street in New York City. “Renée was thinking about making a record like this, and for some reason I don’t understand I was suggested as the producer,” Fleck, who was recommended by Fleming’s associates at Decca Records, tells Billboard. “And I was like, ‘I’d love to do this.’

“I’ve always been a fan of great female vocalists, from Joni Mitchell to Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou (Harris), people like that. I always liked their records even though they didn’t relate so much to what I did in my own music. So I was very excited to work with somebody of (Fleming’s) ability and stature, with creative music.”

The Fiddle and the Drum — which features guest appearances by Dolly Parton, Vince Gill, Jerry Douglas, Aoife O’Donovan, Sierra Hull and Sarah Jarosz — is perhaps more of an eyebrow raiser coming from Fleming than Fleck, who has worked frequently in the album’s bluegrass and folk idioms. The set’s 10 tracks draw from both public domain traditionals (“In the Pines,” “The Cuckoo,” “Blackest Crow”) and more contemporary fare, including the Mitchell-penned title track, Ola Belle Reed’s “My Epitaph,” one of the set’s prerelease singles, and Elvis Costello and T Bone Burnett’s “The Scarlet Tide” from the Cold Mountain film soundtrack. It’s not Mozart, Verdi, Handel or Strauss, in other words.

But Fleming maintains that her interest in Americana music is not at all new.

“I’ve always had eclectic tastes in music,” notes the vocalist, whose grandfather was a fiddler and drummer in rural Pennsylvania. “In junior high and high school and through college I played guitar and dulcimer. I did coffee houses. I was studying classical music but I was also singing with a jazz trio every Sunday night. Up where I went to school (SUNY-Potsdam) there was a band I saw every weekend, and we clogged; I didn’t know what clogging was, but it seemed like a natural response to that music. So I always loved it.”

Fleming says that the soundtrack to the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? helped steer her back to the rootsy path. “It was T Bone Burnett’s work on that film that reminded me how much I loved that music,” she notes, which planted the seed for The Fiddle and the Drum. Fleming and Fleck even made a half-dozen demos back when they first started talking, which he says “turned out pretty good, but they never got acted on. They never got completed. But we would run into each other in all these different situations — including in China with Abigail (Washburn, my wife) — and (Fleming) said, ‘We should do something with that stuff sometime.’”

The two began working in earnest on The Fiddle and the Drum during 2023 in Nashville, with a core band that included Douglas on Dobro, Sam Bush on mandolin, Stuart Duncan on fiddle, Bryan Sutton on guitar and Mike Bub on bass. “We had a really fun time working on the music,” Fleck recalls. “For me, if you can get those guys…they’re just such marvelous musical people who are also very comfortable with that (stylistic) direction and trying unusual ideas and putting their hearts and soul into it. Being in the room with Renée was really fun and interesting and new. And everybody brought their A game.”

Fleming, meanwhile, refers to Fleck as “a secret weapon” in the process. “He did more than a producer normally would, in my experience,” she explains. “He had more artistic kinds of ideas and felt strongly about certain things, and in my recording experience that wasn’t the norm. I felt like we really worked on this together, and (Fleck) did the lion’s share of the work….and he kept coming back to it, like, ‘I found some more things. What do you think about this?’ That’s unheard of in classical music.”

Fleck adds that he was particularly intrigued by the way Fleming sang The Fiddle and the Drum material compared to the classical work that’s earned her a National Medal of the Arts, a Kennedy Center Honor and other international accolades. “I discovered that in her low voice she was like a different singer altogether, which was really interesting, too,” he says. Fleming elaborates, “I learned early on that when I step outside of the classical word I need to stay within a certain range, because when I get to the top of the staff my voice is going to sound like my voice. So we keep the register low for me, and then I could really find another, more spoken sound that seemed to work really well. I did sing some more whoops and hoo-hoos and things like that. People who know my classical singing would never recognize my voice in this.”

To which Fleck quips, “whoops and hoo-hoos — that’s going to be the next album title.”

Fleming was flattered by all of the guests who took part on The Fiddle and the Drum — “I would’ve thought, ‘Bluegrass with an opera singer? Run away!'” she says with a laugh — while an unquestioned standout is the album-closing a cappella rendition of “Pretty Bird” with Hull and Jarosz. “The thing was it had been done a lot,” says Fleck. “But Renée did such an incredible performance of it that it changed my point of view.” Fleming, he adds, brought up the idea of having other singers on the track. “I was like, ‘I think we’re done,’ and Renée said at various times, ‘Hey I think there should be some other singers on it.’ I was like, ‘Oh, how do we match what you did?’ I didn’t want to lose anything…. It had to be singers who were willing to work on it and figure out how to match her. But I knew the people who could do it.”

Fleming and Fleck previewed The Fiddle and the Drum on May 16 at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and also have upcoming performances booked at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Colorado during June, at the Chautauqua Institution in New York during August and on Dec. 3 at Carnegie Hall in New York City. And since Fleck has already identified the “Whoops and Hoo-Hoos” title, what are the prospects for another album together?

“We haven’t had that conversation,” Fleming says. “I’ve been concerned since the beginning that it would find an audience at all, and Béla’s convinced me people will like what they hear, so we’ll see. It is really fun to step outside your genre and do other things — Béla’s a phenomenal example of that.”

Fleck, meanwhile, adds that he and Fleming “have a good trust and a good friendship, so I think the door’s open for other things. We just have to get there. It has to be the right thing at the right time. We both have such busy lives, but I loved working with Renée. It was a really wonderful experience and cool thing to do. I would love to do it again if we can.”