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One Song: What if The Beatles shot a video in the Blue Ridge?

One Song: What if The Beatles shot a video in the Blue Ridge?

brother and sister duo Aila and Elisha Wildman HAIL FROM BLUEGRASS HAVEN FLOYD, VA. PHOTO provided by the wildmans.

This dreamy, retro-tinged clip from The Wildmans feels like Beatlemania with a fiddle.

If the Beatles had wandered into the Blue Ridge Mountains with a handheld 16mm camera and an afternoon to spare, the result might look a lot like The Wildmans’ video for “Sometimes.”


In the clip, Floyd, Virginia sibling duo — Aila and Elisha Wildman — cavort across a grassy hillside, dressed in vintage threads that feel straight out of another era, and with their bandmates, they perform in quirky configurations that are straight out of the movie “A Hard Days Night.” The footage is softly faded, the way old film stock often looks after decades in a shoebox, with washed-out colors and a dreamy haze that make the whole thing feel pleasantly out of time.


That easygoing vibe carries straight into the song itself, where the siblings return again and again to the refrain, “Sometimes when you don’t feel it, just let it pass, let it pass you by.” It’s the sort of plainspoken mountain wisdom that sounds simple but takes a lifetime to practice.

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The Wildmans come by that wisdom honestly. Raised in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town of Floyd, Va., Aila and Elisha grew up immersed in one of Appalachia’s most vibrant traditional music scenes, where Friday night jams at the Floyd Country Store were a regular fixture of their musical upbringing.


These days, the brother-and-sister duo are taking that sound on the road. Upcoming tour stops include Brooklyn, N.Y.'s Main Drag Music, the Mountain Song Festival in Brevard, N.C., and IBMA’s Street Fest in Raleigh, N.C. No matter how far the tour bus rolls, though, their musical compass still points back toward the Blue Ridge.


“Floyd holds an important place in our hearts and in our music,” Aila said on the band’s website.


Lauren Stepp is a lifestyle journalist from the mountains of North Carolina. She writes about everything from fifth-generation apple farmers to mixed-media artists, publishing her work in magazines across the Southeast. In her spare time, Lauren mountain bikes, reads gritty southern fiction, and drops her g's.

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