Much like Don Flemons of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the California born Frank Fairfield is startlingly adept at evoking the instrumental and vocal styles of country and blues artists of the pre-war era. What Flemons has accomplished with his uncanny musical resurrection of the elaborate and arcane singing and playing styles of near-forgotten artists like Richard “Rabbit” Brown and Henry Thomas, Fairfield has done in his own performances, which capture the frantic-picking and high lonesome whine of Buell Kazee and Dock Boggs so perfectly that the listener could be forgiven for imagining that the twenty-something Fairfield had studied at the feet of these old-time legends. Out On the Open West is Fairfield’s second full length for the Tompkins Square label, and finds him applying his considerable skills at the fiddle, banjo and guitar to a set of original tunes that sound as though they could easily have been written and performed by a depression era string band. With Out On the Open West Fairfield has accomplished more than just an impressive feat of musical scholarship; he has conjured a bygone world.